I almost dragged him back inside Rannoch House, glancing around for reporters lurking in the bushes inside the gardens. I know the gardens are private and require a resident’s key to enter, but reporters are notoriously resourceful and can leap iron railings when required.

“What’s this all about, my love?” he asked as I shut the front door behind us with a sigh of relief. “Are you in some kind of trouble? I suspected as much when that bloke told me you’d been to my house—the one day I was away, of course. Went on the annual outing to Clacton.”

“How was it?” I asked.

“Smashing. All that fresh sea air did a power of good to these old lungs. I felt like a new man by the time we came home.”

I looked at him critically. I knew his health hadn’t been good for some time and he didn’t look well. A stab of worry shot through me that I might lose the one rock in my life, coupled with a pang of regret that I wasn’t in a position to do more for him. I wished I could send him to the seaside for the summer.

“So what’s up, ducks?” he asked me. “Come and make a cup of tea and you can tell your old granddad all about it.”

We went down to the kitchen and put on the kettle while I told him the whole story. “Blimey,” he said, trying not to grin, “you do get yourself into a right pickle, don’t you? Escort service? High-class girls?”

“How was I to know?” I demanded hotly.

“You weren’t. Brought up too sheltered, that’s your trouble. But next time you have any bright ideas, you run them past your old granddad first.”

“All right.” I had to smile.

“Anyway, no harm done,” he said. “You’re lucky you got out of it as easily as you did.”

“I wouldn’t have if Darcy hadn’t been at the nightclub,” I confessed. “He stepped in and rescued me. And the bad thing is that somehow Scotland Yard got wind of this and they are shipping me off to Scotland posthaste, just in case any reporters stumble upon it.”

“That’s going overboard, isn’t it? What if a reporter did stumble upon it? You’d just say it was a poorly worded advertisement.”

“Scotland Yard is getting the Times to say the telephone number was an error. They think I’d be embarrassing the Crown.”

“No more than their own son is embarrassing them,” Granddad said. “Has he still got that married American woman in tow?”

“As far as I know. I must say the press is being wonderfully discreet about it. It hasn’t made the papers at all.”

“Because Their Majesties have requested it be kept hush-hush.”