A week had passed since Ellis first arrived, and Grace had managed to go to the café again with him twice more before he had left to travel to Berlin for the next step of his business trip. She had really enjoyed those visits to the café. The normality of them. And his great company too, of course. It was nice to spend time with someone who didn’t know anything about her real life caring for Cora, or how she had broken apart after finding Matthew in bed with the Perky Yoga One. It meant she was free to be whoever she wanted to be, if only for the short slice of time that it took to chat and for her to drink hot chocolate with a tower of whipped cream on top. And Grace was harbouring a secret, in that she had eked out that cream, spooning in really tiny mouthfuls so as to have as long as possible in the café with Ellis, because who knew when she would get to do that again? She’d made an effort to go to the café by herself too, but it really wasn’t the same, with Cheryl, the waitress, pumping her for titbits about Ellis and his fabulous life in New York. And if, by any chance, he had dumped his girlfriend yet?

When Ellis had properly catalogued unit 28, he had been in awe of Connie’s jewels and had carefully photographed a selection of the key pieces before he left, to email on to his contact in the Fine and Antique Jewel department. He had also examined and confirmed that the paintings in Connie’s unit were genuine, and that she was the probable owner of them too. It was a tenuous link, but Grace had stumbled across a packet of old photos in one of the suitcases, and there was a photo of Connie standing in the doorway of a veranda at the powder pink villa, with the wonderful Venice Salute painting visible on the wall behind her. So, after consulting with another art expert at the auction house to double-check the paintings’ veracity, Ellis had notified the legal people in the Bona Vacantia government department, where the proceeds of Connie’s unclaimed estate were held, and organised for the paintings to be securely transported to the vaults of a private bank in London for safekeeping. Because Larry had nearly had a coronary on being told they could be worth upwards of fifty thousand pounds each. And there were ten of them in unit 28!