I grinned at him. I couldn’t help it. I was just so pleased that this was working out. ‘Told you,’ I said with a cocky little flick of my head. ‘And can she cope with the punters all right?’

This was the one bit of the job that I’d been slightly less confident about. Clio seemed to have led such a sheltered life, mixing mainly with people who occupied her privileged slice of the world, that I wasn’t sure how she’d deal with the working men of the north-east.

‘They adore her,’ Eddie replied. ‘She just smiles that belting smile of hers, and they all roll over to have their bellies scratched. I tell you, she’s the best thing to happen to this place in ages. How long did you say she was staying?’

I hadn’t, and it wasn’t something that I’d discussed with Clio, either. It was hardly practical for her to keep driving over to the coast for such a measly little job, especially now that Eddie had upped her shifts to most days. It would make far more sense for her to find herself something nearer the Hall, or at the very least in Newcastle.

‘You’ll have to ask her that,’ I said.

I asked Clio myself, though, when I rang for a chat later that day. The pair of us had slipped into speaking most days, sometimes more than once. I enjoyed it and I found myself making a note of things to tell her, stuff that would amuse her or make her feel outraged on my behalf.

‘Eddie wants to know how long you’ll be staying,’ I said. ‘He seems to think you’re the best thing since sliced bread.’

Clio squealed at the other end of the phone, and I got that lovely warm fuzzy feeling again at having done something that made her so obviously happy.

‘I’ll stay as long as he’ll have me,’ she replied. ‘I absolutely adore working there. Oh, Leah, thank you so much for sorting it all out. This is the best thing to happen to me in forever.’

It looked like she and Eddie were a match made in heaven.

‘What do your mum and Hector think?’ I asked.

Now that I was getting to know Clio so well, I was growing ever more curious about the rest of her family, and from what I’d heard so far I couldn’t imagine her new job had gone down all that well with her brother.

‘God, I haven’t told them! Mummy would probably be fine about it, but Hector would have a fit. His sister, the Honourable Clio Montgomery Smith, serving pints and pork scratchings . . .’

I heard her giggling down the line and it made me laugh too. ‘Where do they think you keep disappearing to, then?’