Another ten minutes passed, by which time Yancie had gone from feeling completely at ease to feeling just a shade uncomfortable. Okay, so he was a busy man, but… Be patient, he's paying you, and you need this job. Hang it all, she loved her job. It wasn't taxing on the brain-but who needed taxing? The freedom the job allowed was limitless. Indeed, it didn't seem like a job of work at all.

Even so, having cautioned herself to be patient, when another few minutes of her having absolutely nothing to do went by, Yancie was considering telling Veronica Taylor to ring down to the garage and let her know when the old man surfaced. Then Yancie heard sounds on the other side of the door she'd assumed connected the two offices-and that reassured her that the old boy hadn't expired while she waited.

She pinned a `Yes, sir' look on her faceit cost nothing-and the door opened. So too did her mouth. More-her jaw dropped. Oh, no! It couldn't be! She didn't believe it! She just didn't believe it.

Horrified, Yancie saw at once that `old' Mr Thomson Wakefield, for this surely must be he, was not old at all! He was tall, dark-haired, had hard grey eyes-and was somewhere in his mid-thirties. She had thought she had never clapped eyes on him before-but she had! Even minus his Aston Martin-she recognised him.

Oh, mother! Yancie stared, wanting to die, at the grim, unsmiling countenance of the man standing there coldly surveying her-a man who clearly had no intention of making things easy for her. She tried hard to sort her brain patterns out, to think up some kind of defence. But what defence was there?

So much for her hiding the firm's logo on her shirt yesterday-a fact he hadn't missed, she was suddenly positive. This man-this man, who'd made it to the top of his treewas, she all at once knew, a man from which little escaped. What he didn't know, she just knew, he troubled to find out.