Flora briefly thought she might sleep standing up. She found herself eyeing a spare wheelchair in the corner of the room and wondering if anyone would mind if she borrowed it for half an hour.

But to Isla and Konstantin, young and full of energy, and merry, and excited, and wildly, possibly on the brink of, well, who knew what, the evening flew in an exciting rush of suds and assembling food and washing up and dancing to music and giggling with each other, and when you were with the person you wanted to be with more than anyone in the world, work didn’t really feel like work at all.

Chapter 58

W hat do you mean?!”

Candace banged her hand down on the top of the desk, which wobbled, as it wasn’t a real desk, just a table set up in a small room.

Billy, who staffed the airport, looked up at her kindly. He was used to having to give this kind of news, but normally people were either accepting, if they were local, or genuinely quite pleased, if they were tourists, that they were going to have to take another day or two of holiday.

“I’m afraid the plane can’t land tonight. Crosswinds.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well. We have a wind from the north, aye, and a wind from the west, and they’ve kind of got themselves in quite the tizzy.”

“No, I mean, how can I get back to Britain?”

“This is Britain, you know, even though it’s actually closer to—”

“No, I mean, is there another plane tonight?”

Billy laughed. “Well, no, there would be but because of—”

“Crosswinds. When’s the next plane?”

Billy shrugged. “Well, the weather forecast is not ideal, so it isn’t.”

“Can I get back on the ferry?”

“Well, you can ask them.”

“When?”

“In the morning. They leave pretty early, you know.”

“I don’t care,” said Candace furiously. She had a big Christmas planned, at her new boyfriend’s mother’s house in Fulham. His mother was absolutely terrifying, really a horrible scrawny old bat, and Candace had a lot of shopping to do to make a good impression. And she needed her nails fixed and her roots done, and she ought to have had plenty of time for this if she hadn’t been chasing this stupid story . . . She’d like to tell herself that Dan loved her for her, he wouldn’t care two shits if she had her nails done or not—nobody on this island, she’d noticed, cared about that kind of thing; nobody had their nails done—but she couldn’t be entirely 100 percent sure that Dan didn’t put quite a lot of store by his mother’s opinion, and she had a reasonable suspicion as to what Dan’s mother thought nails should be like, and it wasn’t being chipped, standing in a ridiculous blizzard, banging a wobbly desk in the middle of absolutely bloody nowhere.

“Now, you have a place to stay?” said Billy kindly. More than a few people had slept on his sofa after an unfortunate mix-up or other. It was very much part of the job.