‘And don’t think we haven’t done just that,’ said Naomi with a laugh.

About thirty minutes later, and with a small wave of her hand, Rose said, ‘It’s been lovely having you both here, but now I’m tired and should like to sleep. Do come again, Naomi.’

‘I will. I promise.’

‘I’ve enjoyed having somebody new to talk to.’

‘Thanks for that vote of confidence, Mum,’ said Ellis, going over to kiss her goodbye.

‘Take Naomi somewhere nice for lunch,’ she said, her head already tilting to the side as exhaustion overtook her. ‘And get on with planning the rest of your lives.’

‘We’ll try,’ he said, kissing her once more.

Chapter Sixteen

‘Everything all right, Martha?’

At Jason’s question, and his appearance in the doorway of her office, Martha gave a small start, which she tried to conceal by clearing her throat, and then coughing. How long had he been standing there? Probably long enough to know that she hadn’t been working, that she had been staring out of the window watching a pigeon building a nest on the ledge of the office building directly opposite. The gap between the two buildings was no more than a couple of yards and Martha had often wondered how difficult it would be to lay a plank of wood from one window to the other and use it as a secret escape route. If one felt so inclined.

With Jason now stepping inside her office and plainly in the mood for one of his ‘chats’, she wished wholeheartedly that she could escape. Or be like her sister when she’d been little. Willow had gone through a phase of believing that if she closed her eyes, she was invisible. It had driven Martha mad because no matter how much she told Willow that she could see her, her sister refused to believe her. Even if Martha resorted to pinching her, she would somehow force herself not to react. That ability of Willow’s as a young child to deny truth in favour of make-believe was an early sign that she was destined always to stick her head in the sand and refuse to face anything she found unpleasant.

A hardened realist, Martha smiled back at Jason as he sat down and waited for him to state the reason he had wandered into her office. As if she couldn’t guess.

‘How’s the pitch going for Topolino?’ he asked.

Yep, there it was.

‘I don’t have anything concrete right now,’ she said, ‘I’m just tossing a few ideas around at the moment.’

‘Care to share them?’

‘Well, the good thing as far as I can see is that by acting as quickly as they did, they’ve minimised the damage to their reputation. So that’s the angle I want to pursue, the speed with which they moved to put their house in order. I’m thinking that we should definitely make a big thing about their efforts to monitor all aspects of their supply and production chain. No stone unturned, that kind of thing.’