Holly grinned to herself as she put her mind to the kind of massage that would best suit Harriet the Harridan and found she was quite looking forward to trying out some of her firmer techniques.

6

At around eleven o’clock the next day, Charlie decided he’d had enough of unpacking, both in his new home, which was a charming town house a stone’s throw from the High Street, and in his new office, which he’d virtually had to gut to make it more to his tastes. When he’d walked into the door of what had been Hugo Fitzgerald’s erstwhile office, he’d imagined, for one terrible moment, that he’d be confronted with the corpse of the MP, still face down in the scones. Cursing himself for his childishness, he’d been only slightly less horrified when he’d realised the MP and his constituency agent, who’d retired when his boss had died, hadn’t exactly been experts at filing. He’d spent the next eight hours sorting out the box files and papers on subjects as diverse as the much-disputed Willowbury bypass (thirty-five years at least in the discussion) and a complaint from a resident of the High Street that one of the shop owners was sunbathing nude on the flat roof of their establishment during their lunch hour. Given Willowbury’s long tradition of embracing all things alternative in terms of lifestyle, religion, spirituality and music, Charlie wasn’t as surprised by this complaint as he could have been.

When nine-tenths of the paperwork had gone the way of his brand new office shredder, and he’d relocated the rest into relabelled box files, he decided it was time for a break before his constituency agent came in for a meeting. Assured by the chairman of his local branch of the party when he gained the seat that Tom Fielding would be an excellent candidate to fill the role of party liaison and constituency agent, especially for a rookie MP, Charlie hoped that Tom would be able to brief him on what the really important issues were in Willowbury and Stavenham. He’d met Tom briefly after he’d moved in and had already established a good working relationship with the man, who, being in his late fifties, was the kind of authority figure it was useful to have on your team.

Charlie could have made a coffee from the jar of instant he’d found stashed away in the kitchen area of the office, but when he’d opened the lid, a moth had flown out, so he decided to get some fresh air before his morning meeting with Tom and head over to one of the cafes on the High Street he’d spotted when he’d dropped in on ComIncense. Locking the door, he pocketed the key and headed up the road.