The Love Letter Read online

  Fiona Walker lives in Worcestershire with her partner and two children plus an assortment of horses and dogs. Visit Fiona’s website at www.fionawalker.com.

  Also by Fiona Walker

  French Relations

  Kiss Chase

  Well Groomed

  Snap Happy

  Between Males

  Lucy Talk

  Lots of Love

  Tongue in Cheek

  Four Play

  Love Hunt

  Kiss and Tell

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-0-748-12045-1

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 Fiona Walker

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Fiona Walker

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Epilogue

  For the Boddington Bon Vivant, the flame-haired Freudian and the High Peaks academic, whose kinship and company is such a joy, and who enjoyed the ‘real’ Spywood; with love and gratitude.

  Prologue

  From: Kelly

  To: Allegra North

  Re: PFEF Finland

  Dear Allegra,

  Thank you for forwarding the Finnish edition of Ptolemy Finch and the Emerald Falcon for Gordon; I will mark one for his attention.

  Kind regards,

  Kelly

  From: Gordon Lapis

  To: Allegra North

  Re: PFEF Finland

  Allegra,

  Kelly has just put this in front of me and once again I am astonished by the liberties taken in translation. I have been working my way through it with the aid of BabelFish and a Finnish dictionary and see that in Chapter 5 when Ptolemy suffers a reaction to the sting from the dune wasp, Purple tells him ‘your dick is swollen’. Later, in Chapter 18, when Rushlore asks Ptolemy where his sidekick is, he replies ‘I had sex with Purple yesterday’. I know the Finnish are liberal sorts, but I will remind you that this is a children’s book.

  GL

  From: Allegra North

  To: Gordon Lapis

  Cc: Kelly

  Re: PFEP Finland

  Dear Gordon,

  I believe that in Finnish the phrase for ‘swollen tongue’ is very close to ‘swollen dick’ and there may be a small typo, which we trust will not affect the reading pleasure of your many Finnish fans. Similarly, I am told that ‘I saw her yesterday’ only requires a missing umlaut to become a far more intimate statement. Again, I’m certain it won’t affect readers’ enjoyment.

  Regards,

  Allegra

  From: Gordon Lapis

  To: Allegra North

  Re: PFEF Finland

  Allegra,

  It’s essential that Ptolemy remains asexual. Perhaps this is why in Chapter 21 of the Finnish version, when he and Purple are sitting on the clifftop above the Sea of Sand, he says ‘I am a parasite’? Parasites reproduce asexually, so no doubt you will reply assuring me that I should be grateful to my Finnish translator.

  GL

  P.s. I cannot get through to Conrad. Where is he?

  From: Allegra North

  To: Gordon Lapis

  Cc: Kelly

  Re: PFEF Finland

  Dear Gordon,

  I gather ‘iloinen’ (happy) and ‘loinen’ (parasite) are easily muddled, but of course I will take this up with your Finnish publisher as a matter of urgency.

  May I take this opportunity to apologise profusely on behalf of Conrad, myself and all at Fellows Howlett for any distress this is causing you.

  Conrad is out of the office all day, I’m afraid, and not contactable on his BlackBerry. I haven’t seen him since yesterday, but I will make sure he’s apprised of this.

  Regards,

  Allegra

  Allegra,

  Is that ‘seen him’ with or without an umlaut?

  GL

  P.s. Please do not always cc our correspondence to Kelly; displacement activities like re-translating translations are an author’s secret vice, and my assistant is my guilty conscience.

  Gordon,

  Nothing umlautish about Conrad, as you know.

  As secret vices go, I believe teaching yourself Finnish is deeply noble. I have heard back from your publisher in Helsinki who reassures me that the translation is perfect and that BabelFish is leading us both astray. I trust that makes you feel parasitic.

  Allegra

  Indeed, my tongue is swollen with delight. I think Conrad has a great deal of the lout about his accent. In diacritic terms, I am regrettably grave.

  With apologies for antagonism,

  GL

  No apology needed.

  A

  P.s. I’m acute.

  Fellows Howlett has an imposter in its midst; a sense of humour is surely against company policy. I believe you are also a fan of detective fiction?

  GL

  It’s my dream to discover a bestselling crime writer from the agency’s slush pile.

  A

  What future would you suggest for a Finnish detective named Iloinen Loinen?

  GL

  A name change. While you were quite right to insist ‘Ptolemy with a silent P’ could be loved and understood by the public, Iloinen Loinen is never likely to be big in Japan.

  A

  P.s. Scandinavian detectives are very last year.

  And what do you predict will be big in Japan, Allegra?

  A young, gutsy female detective from west London; you can feature popular tourist attractions interspersed with violence, murder and Knightsbridge department stores. Think rumpled, blonde, big smile, kind heart. Incredibly sharp, witty and courageous.

  I take it the grizzled, hard-drinking man with a br
oken marriage is also ‘last year’, along with monochrome landscape of high rises, dingy pubs, back alleys and sex workers … ?

  That’s still a good formula. How about a double act? She = rumpled and feisty; he = grizzled and boozy. Mismatches are always a hit; readers will love the sexual chemistry.

  I’ll remind you that sexual chemistry is not within my literary canon.

  Untrue! Ptolemy Finch always makes me v hot under the collar when chatting to Purple on clifftops. You totally understand the secret of building sexual tension over soooo long it makes your readers ache.

  You must moderate these urges if you are to remain as my research assistant. You must also stop discussing our communications with Conrad, in or out of work.

  I shall call my detective duo Julie Ocean and Jimmy Jimee. Their relationship will be entirely professional, a concept you will need to use your undeniably vivid imagination to grasp.

  GL

  P.s. Please forward IM+ name and keep an open line at all times.

  Is IM+ name like porn star name (first pet and street name)?

  Gopher Kew.

  A

  From: Kelly

  To: Allegra North

  Cc: Gordon Lapis; Conrad Knight

  Re: From Gordon Lapis

  Dear Allegra,

  Gordon asks that you stop sending emails direct to him because he is working on a new project entitled The Girl with the Parasite Ache all afternoon. You can direct any further emails via my address as usual.

  Kind regards

  Kelly

  From: Conrad Knight

  To: Allegra

  Re: Gordon

  Legs,

  DO NOT encourage Gordon to write detective fiction; we have enough problems keeping him focused on Ptolemy. You must remain professional. Think ‘Reveal’.

  It has been brought to my attention by Human Resources that your personal mobile phone is inadequate for your enhanced professional role. Fellows Howlett are therefore providing you with a company cell-phone which will be carefully monitored for use. Do not play games on it.

  Conrad

  P.s. Book our usual table for dinner.

  Booked! A xxx

  P.s. We don’t have an HR department, do we … ?

  Chapter 1

  ‘Breathe in, Legs!’

  Allegra North breathed in deeply as her sister hauled at the corset laces in the satin bodice. As her waist narrowed, her chest expanded and her white bra rose out of the square Elizabethan cleavage and burst through the delicate lace bib like airbags popping through a car windscreen.

  ‘I knew you should have put on the whalebone basque.’ Ros’s reddened face appeared over her sister’s shoulder as Legs crammed the offending spheres back in and peered down at the broken stitching.

  ‘I can’t believe you thought this would fit me. You were only a size eight when you married. We all remember the raw fish diet; you were sucking Smints all the way up the aisle.’

  ‘But it was worth it,’ Ros sighed, glancing down to her size fourteen curves before gazing wistfully at her sister’s reflection in the mirror ahead of them. ‘I love this dress.’

  Legs also regarded the huge meringue that she was now uncomfortably sporting, modelled on the Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth I. It had never been to her taste, especially the high lace ruff and wired collar which she’d secretly thought made her sister look like Cruella de Vil posing as a butterfly when Ros had married Will twelve years earlier. But it was undoubtedly a spectacular creation, meticulously hand-embroidered. Now, carefully released from the plastic cocoon in which it had been resting on the back of the spare room door for over a decade, it had just been lowered onto Allegra with the reverie of a queen’s coronation robes being fitted to a maid to enable a royal escape from treachery. She was at least a dress size too large and six inches too tall for the made-to-measure creation, and her familiar pink-cheeked outdoors complexion looked faintly ridiculous peering into the mirror above such delicate stitch-work and intricate detail. She fingered one of the embroidered flowers, seeded with pearls, which had been a labour of love for the designers who’d attached two hundred of them ready for The Big Day.

  Ros swatted her hand away from the precious little four-petal motif and then reached behind her sister to tuck the corset laces into the skirt waist.

  ‘I so love this dress.’ She sighed again as she began buttoning up the lace panel over the stays. ‘I’d always hoped you might want to wear it when you and Francis …’ She stopped herself, face ducking out of sight behind the huge ruff. ‘You do look beautiful in it.’

  Rosalind’s wedding day had been a no-holds-Bard Elizabethan extravaganza. Despite marrying into one of London’s oldest Catholic families whose heritage dated back to before the Reformation, she’d somehow pulled it off. If they could have feasted on roast swan, Legs knew her sister would have ordered it. The occasion had been spectacular, theatrical and fun, as so much surrounding Ros had been in those days. A vivacious, clever musician still studying at the Royal Academy, Ros had been playing harpsichord in the foyer of the Barbican when Will Herbert first spotted her, her energy and passion causing him to miss the play he was supposed to be reviewing for Time Out and ask her for a drink instead. A year later, they were married at Brompton Oratory and Allegra and Ros’s father Dorian had literally sold the family furniture to pay for it, some of the best pieces he’d collected over the years suddenly finding themselves relocated from the family’s tall, Victorian Kew townhouse to his Richmond antiques shop in what he had tactfully referred to at the time as a ‘much-needed declutter’.

  The dress Legs was now sporting had cost Dorian a matching pair of George III Sheraton armchairs and a marble-topped Louis XV bombé and had been just as awkward to fit in the back of a vintage Rolls Royce.

  Still only nineteen at the time, Ros had been a radiantly happy bride, her conversion to Catholicism as all-consuming as her love for Will. That day, bursting with joy, the new Mrs Herbert performed in public for the last time. As a personal gift bestowed from wife to husband alongside the wedding list dinner service, silverware and crystal from their guests, Ros insisted that she must give up her musical training and dedicate herself to becoming a home-maker.

  To bridesmaid Legs, poised to begin studying for her A levels amid dreams of globe-trotting and career-building, such devotion to domesticity had been anathema and she’d dived out of the way when the skilfully tossed pomander bouquet had flown in her direction. But Ros firmly believed that the holy trinity of happiness lay between the altar, the kitchen sink and the font.

  Within weeks, she’d fallen pregnant amid frantic nesting in the Fulham flat the newlyweds shared. When Nico was two, the family moved to a Regency villa in Ealing, meaning that Will forfeited his dreams of freelancing while writing a novel, and instead let the Herbert family pull one of their many old school ties to secure him a well-paid editorship of a worthy but dull financial journal which bored him rigid but paid the monthly mortgage interest. Once Nico started school, Ros took on private piano tuition to help ends meet, but the money and the marriage wore increasingly thin, and that Elizabethan feast which had united writer and musician seemed a world apart as husband and wife slowly became affection-starved enemies under the same roof.

  The cherished wedding dress had remained in the house long after Will’s tenancy ended. Five years earlier, he’d run away with the part-time nanny (and tenant of their ground floor flat), struggling scriptwriter Daisy, this betrayal made more awkward still by the fact that Daisy was a family friend who had been thick as thieves with Allegra since childhood. After a brief spell of utter disbelief followed by inconsolable fury, Ros had retreated into martyrdom, a state in which she still existed, refusing to acknowledge the second life her son now had with his father and his half-siblings.

  These days, Will and Daisy lived in glorious chaos in Somerset with two more children and a third on the way, their rural idyll funded by Daisy’s runaway sitcom success Slap Dash. Although Wil
l picked up occasional freelance work in between cooking, childcare and chicken rearing, this house-husband role was a cause of much criticism from Ros, who thought he’d ‘wimped out’. His income barely covered the maintenance, and finances remained the biggest clash-point between the sparring ex-spouses – and they were the reason Ros had decided to clamp her younger sister in the dream dress today.

  ‘I knew it would suit you perfectly,’ she sighed, on tiptoes again and looking over Legs’ shoulder, their matching dark grey eyes lined up, Ros’s features sharper and framed with hair the colour of cinnamon roast coffee beans cut into a neat urchin bob like a principal boy, making Legs resemble a rather blousy Cinderella by contrast, with smudges of last night’s mascara beneath her wide eyes and her cloud of wild blonde hair on end, showing too much dark root.

  ‘It’s a bit short.’ Legs peered at her flip-flopped feet poking out, complete with the three star tattoos on the left ankle she now regretted getting during her first term at university. Francis had made such a fuss when he saw them. At the time she’d been rebelliously unapologetic, but now she hated them, their zig-zag blue permanence a perpetual reminder of her unofficial catchphrase, that if you live for the moment, you also have to live with the consequence.

  She’d been determined not to think about Francis, but now that she did, his face appeared beside hers in the mirror, seeing her in a wedding dress, blue eyes softening with pride, blonde hair swept back from that fallen-angel face. He’d make the most debonair of bridegrooms, so tall and handsome and charming. Ever since they’d first got together as two dare-playing teenagers who’d agreed to practise their kissing techniques on each other, she’d been fantasising about their wedding, remodelling it in her mind as the years passed. At first, it had been a sparkling Cinderella dress and a horse-drawn carriage; in her later teens the plan had changed to rock and roll Chelsea Registry Office and clubbing around London all night; then when they travelled together after university, she’d fallen for exotic white sand beaches, sarongs, sandals and simplicity. A decade after their first kiss, Francis had made the fantasy real by popping the question in the tiny Ladbroke Grove flat they shared together, both by then carving careers in publishing. Together, they had planned a simple ceremony in the chapel at Farcombe within earshot of the Celtic Sea off the North Devon coast in which they had swum together since childhood, the gulls calling above the cliff walks they’d known all their lives and the coves they’d spent so long exploring. In the evening, they planned to host a huge party in the main hall, Francis’s childhood holiday home, with his father playing the bassoon and Ros the piano, other musician friends joining in, the arts-festival crowd adding eccentricity and colour, their school and university friends, the families that knew one another so well, village pub the Book Inn running the bar and the locals from Eascombe and Fargoe invited, all hell-bent on enjoying the celebration of the decade. It would be a party never to forget, and it was several years in the planning, with the couple’s families eagerly adding their input, including the offer of the dreaded Ditchley dress.