‘You’re looking at an apartment on the Locks?’ Adam repeated slowly, visibly surprised. ‘You?’
‘Yes, me.’
‘Aw, shit, man,’ Adam groaned. ‘Do you know how bad I want one of those places? I’d die to get my foot through the door, but you can’t even get a viewing without a platinum card.’
‘Oh, well . . .’ Nigel gave a modest shrug. ‘So, do you think you’ll be up to it? Only I’d really appreciate it if you could be there, because I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be looking out for.’
‘Man, I have got to get myself qualified,’ Adam moaned. ‘Soon as I am, I’ll be moving in next door to you – parking the Alfa next to your crappy old Saab,’ he added, grinning now.
‘Yeah, well, stop partying and get your head into the books and you might actually do it,’ Nigel said, feeling really good about himself all of a sudden. Adam envied him – how great was that? ‘And get yourself back here by five.’
Maria reached the station at four and used the extra hour to mooch about in the concourse shops, looking for a thank-you gift for Beth. Finding a gorgeous turquoise silk scarf in the sale at Knickerbox, she reached into her bag for her credit-card pouch.
There wasn’t much left of the money Beth had lent her and she wanted to save that for a taxi back from the station when she got home, because she really didn’t fancy walking all that way. Her card was pretty much maxed out, but there might be just enough left on it for this one last little purchase – fingers crossed.
Flipping the pouch open, Maria was confused to see that the sleeve was empty. Putting her bag down on the counter, she rifled through it like a madwoman, hoping that the card had somehow fallen out, even though she knew that it couldn’t have.
Feeling sick as it hit home that it was gone, she gabbled that she’d changed her mind about the scarf and fled from the shop.
Rushing into a quiet corner, she took her phone out of her bag with shaking hands. She had to report the card missing, but who to? She didn’t know the hotline number, and she didn’t have enough credit on her phone to start ringing around at random. But if she waited till she got home whoever had stolen the card might have already run up a massive bill, ordering goods off the internet or over the phone. She couldn’t afford to take the risk.
But never mind whoever had stolen it. It was perfectly obvious that it must have been Joel. He was the only one who’d had access to her bags. He must have gone through them when she was sleeping, then taken off like the proverbial thief in the night. And he’d even been devious enough to leave the cash alone, knowing that she would have discovered the theft a whole lot sooner if he’d totally cleaned her out – the sneaky bastard.
Phoning the police, Maria reported the card as lost. Well, there was no way she was admitting that she’d had a seedy one-night stand and been ripped off at the end of it. She still had some pride.
A policewoman took her details and said they would keep a record of the call for verification purposes, in case somebody found and used the card before Maria had had a chance to cancel it. She followed that with the warning that almost every store in Manchester had active CCTV these days – something that Maria would be ‘wise to keep in mind’.
Maria knew full well what the woman was saying: that she thought Maria was lying about losing the card, and was letting her know that she wouldn’t get away with it if she intended to try and buy something and then claim that it wasn’t her who’d made the purchase.
Now she felt guilty, as well as used and abused.
Walking to the cold, dark end of the platform, away from the other passengers, she sat on a bench and chain-smoked to hold the self-pitying tears at bay until the train pulled in.
She just couldn’t believe she’d fallen for a con merchant. Everybody thought she was so streetwise, coming from a ghetto like Moss Side, but they’d kill themselves laughing if it ever got out just how stupid she really was.
But they wouldn’t get the pleasure, because Maria had no intention of telling anyone about this – ever. Not even Beth.
Especially not Beth.
9
Maria moped about for days after she got home. She just couldn’t stop thinking about Joel, and that made her mad, because she knew he’d ripped her off. But he’d been so gorgeous and seemed so nice that she just wanted to pretend that it wasn’t true. That he had only left without saying goodbye because an emergency had come up.
She was overjoyed when she got a call from the bank a few days later, telling her that her card had been recovered in an electrical goods store in Manchester – from a woman who had been trying to buy an expensive sound system with it. The woman had escaped, so there would be no prosecution, but at least no harm had come of it.
It took Maria a while to figure out how a woman had got hold of her card, but she came to the conclusion that it must have been someone who worked at the hotel. Someone with access to a master pass, who had known that she was alone and that it was safe to rifle her room when they saw her going down to the bar that night. Someone who would have assumed that she had money, because she was staying there in the first place.
Well, she’d make damn sure she didn’t leave herself open to anything like that again.
Happy now that she knew Joel wasn’t the thief, the next few weeks flew by, and Maria spent the time planning what she would do with the money when it arrived. Now that she had got over the shock of the inheritance, she became excited at the prospect of being able to do whatever she wanted to do. It was the first time she’d ever had two pennies to rub together, and she intended to have the time of her life.
Beth got a bit twitchy when Maria quit her job and gave two months’ notice on her flat. Beth thought Maria should wait until the money was safely in her account before doing something so rash. But Maria was on a roll, and nothing was going to get in her way.
Still trying to inject a bit of sense into the proceedings, Beth suggested that she buy a cheap, low-maintenance property in the older part of town, and invest the rest in a high-interest account. Maria could live there for a couple of years, using the accumulated interest from the account to modernise. Then, when it had appreciated in value, she could let it out, or sell it, and move somewhere more upmarket.
But Maria was having none of that. She was way too impatient to work her way up the property ladder. She wanted the instant Wow! factor.
Thinking like a millionaire, despite still not having a penny of the money in her hands, she set up a load of viewings in a seafront estate of new-builds in the next Bay, and dragged Beth along for the ride.
They had great fun, but by the time they had seen just about everything that was available, Maria had changed her mind. Nothing felt right, and the ‘Designer Apartments’ tag just didn’t fit with the reality of what were, in actuality, little more than poky, flimsily built, odd-shaped flats. But it was the prices they were asking that really turned her off. They weren’t going for too much less than she’d been told she could expect for The Grange when she sold it, and that was an enormous, solidly built old house. Scandalous.
‘So, what are you ging to do?’ Beth asked, concerned that Maria had burned her bridges by giving notice on the flat before finding somewhere else. At this rate, she’d be on the street with her landlord’s foot up her backside.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Maria said, trying not to let Beth see how worried she was actually becoming, now that she’d realised that buying a house wasn’t going to be quite as easy as she’d imagined. Not a decent one, anyway.
The cheque arrived five weeks later. It was for almost a quarter of a million, and Maria had to count the noughts several times because she couldn’t get her head around it. Seeing it in black and white should have made it more real, but it actually had the opposite effect. Now it felt positively unreal, as if the last few weeks had been a crazy, vivid dream. The alarm would go off in a minute, and she would wake up to find herself back at the dawn of her twenty-first birthday, as poverty-stricke
n as ever.
There was a polite letter from Nigel in the envelope, reminding her that as the house was now hers, it was her responsibility to make arrangements for selling, letting, or whatever she decided to do with it. He’d be more than happy to pass by and check that everything was okay while she was out of the area, if she liked, but now that he no longer represented her, he strongly advised that she got another solicitor to look over the paperwork, because there were rates and taxes that needed to be kept on top of.
Maria was a little ashamed about the way she’d given him the brush-off at their last meeting. But everything had been crashing down on her head that day, and he’d got the short end of the stick when she’d called in at his office to sign the papers.
Already fed up about Joel, and bumping into scruffy Lin Stokes, followed by that awkward reunion with Vicky, she’d just wanted to get the hell out of there. But Nigel had annoyed her by trying to show her the accounts for that other house in the hopes of persuading her to reconsider selling, and she’d snapped, telling him that she wouldn’t be needing his services any more – thank you very much!
But after all that, he was still offering to help her out in a non-professional capacity. Some people were just too nice for this world.
Beth came round a short while later. They were supposed to be going shopping, but when she saw the cheque she hustled Maria straight down to the bank to deposit it. Then Beth made her sit through a meeting with a financial adviser who plied them with coffee and biscuits and spoke to Maria as if they were old mates, telling her that she could do this, that, or the other with her new-found fortune.
Maria didn’t listen to a word of it. She wasn’t ready to start thinking about options, and shares, and investment schemes. And she wasn’t impressed with the bank’s sudden eagerness to accommodate her. They hadn’t been so keen to help when she’d needed a tiny loan to tide her over the holidays before she got her job last year. They had made her feel like a beggar for daring to ask, and she’d been forced to eat Netto noodles for two solid weeks – in the dark, to avoid the landlord. Now she’d bet this sycophant would rush out to get her a Chinese takeaway if she asked him to – with all the trimmings.
‘What are you doing?’ Beth asked when they left the bank and Maria promptly dumped all the leaflets she’d been given into the bin. ‘You need them. You weren’t even listening in there, and I can’t explain it all to you.’
‘I don’t want you to,’ Maria assured her. ‘I’ve got no intention of doing anything he suggests, because it’s bound to be in the bank’s best interests, not mine.’
‘Yeah, but you need to do something to make it work for you.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’ Maria smiled. ‘I’ve decided to get some impartial advice. Anyway, thanks for coming with me, but I hope you don’t mind if I don’t come shopping. I need to sort something out.’
‘Like what?’ Beth looked at the leaflets in the bin and shook her head.
‘Just stuff,’ Maria said evasively. ‘I’ll tell you later.’
‘Go on, then.’ Beth sighed. ‘I’ll come round when I’ve finished. Just do me one favour, though: promise you won’t do anything stupid and blow all the money on rubbish before you get it sorted?’
‘As if.’ Maria scoffed.
Back at the flat, Maria was nervous as she waited for Nigel to answer the phone. He’d offered to keep an eye on the house, but that didn’t mean he’d want to have anything else to do with her. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more likely it was that the offer of help had been lip service. That he’d only said it because he thought she would refuse.
She needn’t have worried. Nigel was genuinely pleased to hear from her.
‘How are you? Did you get the cheque? Oh, good. I was so worried it might not reach you. Not that it shouldn’t have, given that it was sent by courier. But I hadn’t heard anything, so I was just contemplating ringing the company to ask if it had got there all right.’
‘It did,’ Maria assured him, jumping in quickly when he took a break for breath. ‘First thing this morning. Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks. And, er, to ask if you’d consider picking up where you left off.’
‘Sorry, I’m not sure . . . ?’ Nigel sounded confused.
‘Being my solicitor,’ Maria explained, sure that he would tell her to get lost. ‘You said there were things I needed to sort out with the house – legal things. And I was hoping you’d agree to deal with it.’
‘I’d be delighted,’ Nigel said readily.
‘Great.’ Maria gave a sigh of relief. ‘I’m afraid I still want to sell it, though. Will that be a problem?’
‘No, that’s your privilege entirely,’ Nigel reassured her. ‘I can’t actually put it on the market for you, but I’ll certainly liaise with an estate agent on your behalf. And advise you during the process, obviously.’
‘Thanks. I appreciate that.’
‘No problem. But you’ll, er, probably have to come up here again at some point, I’m afraid, because there’ll be more paperwork to sign. I have some on my desk as we speak, as it happens. I was planning to send it on so that you could take it to another solicitor, but if you’re retaining my services, I suppose I should keep it until we can arrange a meeting.’
‘How does next week sound?’ Maria asked, following Beth’s example and being decisive for once in her life.
Meeting arranged, she phoned the train-ticket office and booked two weekend returns – knowing that Beth wouldn’t be able to refuse to go this time, especially not if it was already paid for. Then she booked a double room at the Britannia, although she had to battle with herself over that one.
It was a beautiful hotel, but it held bad memories for her now. Joel running out on her, for one; and the card-thief chambermaid. But, given how much she’d gushed about the place, Beth would want to know why she hadn’t booked them in there. And what could she say? That she’d decided not to stay at the best hotel in town now that she could afford to really enjoy it . . . That she really fancied roughing it instead.
Biting the bullet, Maria booked the room and waited for Beth to come back from the shops.
10
Beth had never been to Manchester before, so she was on a total high when their train pulled into the station a week later. Maria was amused by her friend’s excitement, but the city held no wonders for her now. This trip was purely to tie up the loose ends and get proper advice from Nigel about the money – nothing more, nothing less.
That was the intention, anyway.
Leaving Beth to unpack, Maria nipped across to Nigel’s office to pick up the keys to the house. He was so welcoming that she found herself inviting him to dinner that evening – as a thank-you for agreeing to help her through the financial maze. That done, she went back for Beth and took her to see The Grange.
Beth’s face was a picture when she got out of the taxi and walked up the path; her mouth was hanging open, and her wide eyes were darting every which way.
‘Oh, my God, it’s fantastic,’ she said breathily. ‘And it’s yours. Can you believe it?’
‘Not really,’ Maria admitted, unlocking the door and rushing to turn the alarm off, using the number that Nigel had given her.
It still smelled musty inside, but at least it was dry – unlike her Teignmouth flat, which was getting damper by the day.
Having spent the last few weeks dreaming about moving out of that dump, she had no emotional attachment to it. But at The Grange, she found that she was getting that same strange sense of belonging that she had felt the first time she came. And possibly even stronger, given that she was so relaxed with Beth along for company.
Walking into the centre of the hall, Beth did what Maria had done and turned in a slow circle, taking everything in. Her parents were fairly well-to-do and their house was quite large, but their place was modern and bland compared to this grand old place.
‘You are so lucky,’ she said, wandering from room to room. ‘I would die to live
somewhere like this. Why on Earth do you want to sell it?’
‘Because it’s in Manchester,’ Maria reminded her, following her around. ‘And I don’t live here any more.’
‘Yeah, but you could,’ Beth said, as if it were the obvious thing to do. ‘You’ve already packed in your job, and you’ll be moving out of your flat as soon as you’ve found somewhere else to live. What’s so great about Tinny that it’s got to be there?’
‘Friends.’
‘Oh, we’ll come and see you,’ Beth said, flapping her hand as if that were too ridiculous a reason to be taken seriously. ‘Hell, I’ll move in with you, if you want – as long as I get the master bedroom.’
‘In your dreams,’ Maria said, grinning. ‘If I stay, that’s mine.’
‘You’ve always been a selfish cow,’ Beth teased. ‘Ugh!’ she said then, her mouth arcing down in distaste when she lifted a corner of a dust sheet and saw the couch beneath. ‘That’s hideous.’
‘Nigel reckons it’s really valuable,’ Maria told her primly. ‘But don’t panic – I’m not planning to keep it. There was a list of contents drawn up for the insurance, and it’s all supposed to be worth a fair bit, so I’m thinking about putting it into an auction.’
‘Mmmm,’ Beth murmured thoughtfully, putting the sheet back in place and smoothing the edge down. ‘They are family heirlooms, though. Don’t you think you should keep something?’
‘It wasn’t my family, so what’s the point?’ Shrugging, Maria led her friend up the stairs. ‘Anyway, I’m getting a flat, so there won’t be any room for all this bulky rubbish.’
‘I actually think you should hang fire on selling up,’ Beth told her. ‘There’s something about this place that I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s like— Oh, my God, they’re gorgeous!’ Cutting herself off mid-sentence, she gaped at the stained-glass windows.
‘Aren’t they?’ Maria smiled fondly. ‘First time I came it was sunny outside, and I just loved the way the colours met in the middle and kind of bounced off each other, like a kaleidoscope.’
The Charmer Page 10
