Boot Camp Bride

by Lizzie Lamb

  ‘Hmm,’ Ffinch returned to staring moodily out of the window. ‘Girly things?’ he persisted, jangling loose change in his jeans pocket.

  ‘Yes, like she’d wanted to book into a boot camp nearer London for the weekend, but her fiancé insisted on booking her into one in Norfolk … near Brancaster, or Thornham; somewhere like that.’

  ‘Norfolk?’ He whipped round, looking suddenly very interested. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ Charlee snapped back. ‘Anastasia pronounced it Nor-fol-k. I thought it was rather sweet at the time and … What is it?’ Her antennae had started to twitch. Judging from Ffinch’s expression he was onto something, although why a boot camp on the edge of the Norfolk marshes should interest him wasn’t clear.

  ‘Nothing, it doesn’t matter,’ he responded, the shutters coming down. Charlee felt the bonds of their partnership straining before they’d been tested under fire. ‘You look disappointed - did you think there was more to it? That you’d be working undercover like a latter-day Miss Marple?’ he asked with unwarranted harshness.

  ‘Yes, only sixty years younger and with better clothes,’ Charlee snapped back to cover her disappointment. That’s exactly what she had thought; now all her hopes and dreams had turned to dust. Story of her life …

  ‘This was a simple mission and you’ve fulfilled the brief - there’s no need for me to monopolise any more of your valuable time.’ Ffinch put the iPhone in his messenger bag and then slung it across his body. ‘Thanks, Montague, you’ve been a great help - see, I remembered to thank you properly this time. And look on the positive side, you’ve proved to your family - and Sam - that you’ve got what it takes to make it as a journalist.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about me or my family, so spare me the amateur psychology. And as for Sam, I think he already knows my worth otherwise he wouldn’t have chosen me for this investigation. So don’t patronise me - you, you …’ Charlee couldn’t bring herself to use an expletive on Christmas morning and settled instead for pointing towards the door like a gothic heroine dismissing an unworthy suitor. ‘There’s the door - I suggest you use it. Partner.’

  He crossed the study and paused briefly with his hand on the doorknob. His eloquent look made it clear he wanted to say more but was deterred by her uncompromising expression.

  ‘Go back to your family and wish them Merry Christmas from me, Montague. I’ll see myself out.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  I Didn’t Know You Cared

  Momentarily, Charlee was rooted to the spot. But once the front door closed, she unglued her feet from the carpet and ran across the hall to watch Ffinch’s camper van spin the gravel and zoom off down the lane.

  Just who did he think he was? Some second-rate cognitive behavioural therapist dishing out strategies to help her deal with her family and move herself forward? Maybe he should concentrate on confronting whatever demons haunted him instead of giving her advice and tossing platitudes around. Demons! With a flash of insight, she wondered if his sudden interest in brides, boot camps and Norfolk was in some way connected to what had happened in Colombia.

  Damn! Now she’d never know; she’d given him everything without gaining any guarantees she’d have further involvement in the story.

  ‘Charlotte Montague, Ffinch has played you for a fool,’ she berated herself.

  Instead of returning to the kitchen, she went back into the study, flicked on the iPad and logged onto Google Earth. Typing Thornham, Norfolk, in the search bar, she waited as the app loaded and then zoomed in on the topography. Thornham appeared as a village divided by a road and surrounded for the most part by cultivated fields. The larger portion of the village lay to the right of the road and beyond that there was the blue-green expanse of the sea. Pinching the image between her thumb and fingers Charlee rotated the view through one hundred and eighty degrees and homed in on Thornham Beach. In front of the beach lay marshes, mudflats and sandbanks. The satellite had obviously taken the photograph at low tide and in high summer because tiny boats leaned against the bank of the creek waiting for the tide to turn and take them out to sea.

  The whole place looked wild, abandoned and yet at the same time, unremarkable.

  Unremarkable?

  Charlee moved the image around and located Thornham Boot Camp for Brides. To the unpractised eye, it looked like any other large manor house set back from the road and surrounded on three sides by trees. The marshes butted right up to the other side of the property and a couple of small boats, moored by a large boathouse, were visible.

  Charlee frowned. What wasn’t she seeing?

  There had to be something more; something that had made Ffinch light up with excitement when she’d mentioned Norfolk. On impulse, she typed Boot Camp for Brides + Thornham into the browser bar and a website opened up. One shot showed Amazonian women in fatigues and baseball caps trudging through the wooded area that led to the marshes. In another, a blushing bride gazed dewily at her hand tied bouquet of lilies and roses.

  ‘Get rid of bloated tum, fat arms and chubby back,’ it read. ‘Enhance your pelvic floor muscles in anticipation of THE BIG DAY - Learn how to cope with the mother-in- law.’ Charlee’d settle for learning how to cope with her mother! She read on and learned that the bride-to-be and her bridesmaids could also participate in aqua-aerobics, morning PT, Fartlek Training and stretcher runs.

  Stretcher runs?

  ‘Sounds like they’re preparing for war - not their wedding day,’ she remarked as she scanned further down the web page. ‘And what the hell is Fartlek Training?’ Refraining from making the obvious joke, she typed Fartlek Training into the browser bar and discovered that it was Swedish for ‘Speed Play’.

  ‘Fartlek,’ she read aloud in an accent that was pure Sara Lund from The Killing, ‘allows you to run whatever distance and speed you wish, varying the pace and occasionally running at high intensity levels.’ Sounded like her idea of torture. As far as she was concerned, Fartlek Training, Boot Camps for Brides and everything they entailed, could feck off.

  When it was her turn to get married, she’d take off on a long girly weekend with Poppy and a couple of other good mates to some gorgeous spa in Italy - Positano or Portofino, for choice. Relaxation, rude jokes about the wedding night and promises never to let anything break their friendship were more up her strasse. Boot camp brides, Russian models and secretive journos could all go hang, she decided, flipping the protective cover over the iPad.

  It was Christmas Day, after all.

  And yet, she couldn’t let it go.

  Why was stick thin Anastasia Markova and her skeletal BFFs so keen to attend the boot camp? They needed to lose weight about as much as a fish needed a bicycle. What was there about this seemingly non-story that made every journalistic instinct she possessed stand to attention? She’d read how divvies in the art and antique world could tell if a painting or object was a fake simply by looking at it. Just imagining what Ffinch was keeping from her sent a shot of adrenalin coursing through her veins, leaving an unsettling echo behind.

  The scrunch of tyres on gravel drew her back to the window and her stomach gave an excited lurch; maybe Ffinch had had second thoughts and was returning to renew their partnership. She’d make sure that she pinned him down this time.

  She smoothed down her shirt and raked her fingers through her hair. Not that she cared what she looked like; she simply didn’t want Ffinch to think for one moment that he’d bested her. She’d play it cool and let him do the running, she decided as she went back in to the hall. Her whole body slumped when she discovered that, instead of Ffinch, it was the other three Montague brothers Jack, Tom and Wills arriving for Christmas lunch.

  Damn Christmas Day and all it entailed. She longed to be back at work snooping around the offices, finding out what was behind Sam and Ffinch’s sudden interest in boot camps in Norfolk. However, the next edition of What’cha! had been put to bed and was ready to print at the press of a button on January 2nd. Un
til then, a skeleton staff would man the offices and she had no legitimate reason for calling in without arousing suspicion.

  Frowning, she walked back into the kitchen. Something was going down, the divvy in her was sure of it. She deserved to be in on it after everything she’d done. And if Ffinch thought he’d shaken her off, then he’d seriously underestimated her.

  After Christmas lunch, the four Montague brothers cleared up and loaded the dishwasher before joining the rest of their family in the sitting room by a roaring log fire. They entered, pushing and jostling for position on the large squashy sofa just as they had done as teenagers. Charlee, relegated to sitting on the padded needlework fender as usual, noted her mother’s indulgent expression as she half-heartedly remonstrated with them for their boisterous behaviour.

  ‘Boys. Boys! You’ll break something. Henry, tell them,’ she commanded her husband who was happily cracking Brazil nuts with an ancient wooden nutcracker.

  ‘Boys, you’ll break something. Do you have to revert to childhood every time you come home? You’re getting the dogs overexcited; stop before your mother’s prophesy comes true.’ Barbara Montague cast her eyes up to the heavens as George, Wills and Jack squashed onto the sofa and Tom sat on the other end of the fender to Charlee - rocking it like a seesaw and trying to unseat her.

  ‘So, Charlotte,’ Tom began, using her Sunday name. ‘Who was that driving down the lane in a classic VW camper van?’ He reached across and ruffled her hair. ‘Don’t tell me young Charlee’s got a boyfriend,’ he raised an eyebrow and the others laughed.

  ‘Actually,’ Charlee said, moving beyond his reach and smoothing her hair. ‘It was my partner - in the non-boyfriend sense of the word - if you must know.’

  ‘Non-boyfriend sense of the word?’

  ‘Oo - Charlee’s got a partner,’ Wills and Jack chorused in camp voices, elbowing each other in the ribs. ‘Get ’er.’

  ‘He’s Rafael Fonseca-Ffinch,’ Miranda put in, seemingly not enjoying Charlee being the focus of the brothers’ attention. ‘Charlotte has given his bestseller The Ten Most Dangerous Destinations on the Planet to George as a Christmas present. Signed, too.’ She held the book out so Tom could inspect it.

  ‘Signed?’ Tom left his place on the fender to examine the book more closely. ‘Do you really know him, Charlee?’ he asked, giving his sister a serious, and very uncharacteristic, respectful look.

  ‘Noo-oh. He was lost, drove up to the house to ask for directions and dropped a signed copy of his book - ready-wrapped in Christmas paper and with George’s name on the flyleaf - onto the kitchen table. Of course I know him you idiot. Didn’t I say we’re partners?’ Surreptitiously, Charlee crossed her fingers behind her back to counter the lie.

  ‘Ouch, you’ve grown teeth since you left home, Charlee. Hard-bitten hack these days is it? God, I wish we’d arrived earlier,’ Wills, a green activist, said to Tom. ‘I would give anything to discuss his journey along the Amazon with him.’ Wills spent most of his life trying to conserve the rainforest and prevent governments from clearing it for logging or to raise cattle to provide beefburgers for food chains around the world.

  ‘Wouldn’t have done you much good,’ Charlee replied, fondling the black lab’s ears. ‘He refuses to talk about it. I expect he wants you to buy his book instead.’

  ‘Cynical as well as waspish,’ Tom put in. ‘I’m with Wills on this one. If I remember the story correctly he contracted dengue fever after his team were kidnapped and held to ransom.’

  ‘Yes; I remember now,’ trainee vet Jack added. ‘Trouble is, the story was in the headlines, briefly, and then sank without a trace - overshadowed by the Queen’s Jubilee and then the Olympics.’

  ‘I wonder if he’d consent to giving me some blood samples,’ Tom added. A registrar at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London, he hoped to become a consultant specialising in parasitic diseases acquired in the tropics. Perhaps an armful of Ffinch’s blood would clinch it for him. ‘I believe he was treated by an indigenous tribe and hidden from the drug smugglers who patrol the area, before being transferred to a hospital boat. Just thinking about the homeopathic remedies they’ve tried and tested over the years and which the west knows nothing about, makes me long to go there.’

  ‘They took a great risk helping him,’ Wills observed. Charlee was reminded of her crass remarks on the night of the book launch and hoped they’d put her burning face down to the heat of the fire - not shame and mortification.

  ‘It says on the dust jacket that all royalties from the book are being donated to raising funds to help the people who helped him,’ Miranda said, clearly not wishing to be excluded from the discussion.

  ‘The Cat People,’ Charlee said. ‘The Cat People found him on the banks of the Amazon and nursed him back to health.’ She vowed to take the iPad upstairs and get up to speed on Ffinch’s lucky escape in Darien. She’d always left revising for her exams until the last minute. Now she was in the real world that attitude would have to change … thoroughness would become her watchword.

  ‘Oh,’ Miranda sat bolt upright. ‘You don’t think he’s still infectious, do you? George and I are trying for a family.’

  Barbara Montague patted Miranda’s arm while the other Montagues rolled their eyes. Miranda had been like a broken record all through Christmas lunch, banging on about George’s parliamentary ambitions, or their reproductive trials and tribulations.

  ‘The disease is transmitted by mosquito, Miranda, so I think it’s safe to assume that you’re not in any danger,’ Henry Montague said dryly. ‘Although, naturally, I bow to Tom’s superior knowledge in this matter. Charlotte?’

  ‘Yes, Dad?’

  ‘Partners? You haven’t mentioned Fonseca-Ffinch before.’

  ‘It’s a recent development,’ Charlee prevaricated, sensing her father’s unease and not wanting to reveal just how recent it was. Or how he’d terminated their partnership earlier in Henry’s study.

  ‘Do you think we ought to ask him for dinner? Get to know him better?’ Barbara suggested, her look of concentration suggesting that she was already planning menus in her head.

  ‘For goodness sake, Mum! He’s a work colleague, that’s all - not a potential boyfriend. I really can’t say any more at the risk of ruining our scoop.’

  The four brothers exchanged another look, one that conveyed Charlee was living in cloud cuckoo land. A rookie and someone as experienced as Rafa Ffinch working together - how likely was that? Catching their look, Charlee stood up and the two Labradors looked at her expectantly.

  ‘Think I’ll take the dogs for a W-A-L-K.’ Hiding her bruised feelings beneath a bright smile she spelled out the word so the dogs didn’t go ballistic. It rankled that her family treated her like she was still in primary school and in danger of losing her sweets to sharper kids in the playground.

  ‘Sit down a minute, Charlotte,’ her father forestalled her. ‘I’m a little concerned, to be honest. If what Wills says is true, Mr Fonseca-Ffinch ignored Foreign Office advice to give Darien a wide berth due to the risk of kidnap by drugs gangs plying the Amazon.’

  ‘Maybe it was his casual regard for safety which put his team at risk. Weren’t two of them thrown overboard when they became too ill to travel and only Mr Fonseca-Ffinch made it to the shore?’ Barbara Montague actually looked concerned for Charlee’s welfare. ‘Charlotte?’

  ‘Rest assured I - we - won’t be travelling the length of the Amazon any time soon.’ Charlee looked round at their anxious faces and wondered what was going on. They’d always made her feel the runt of the litter, treating her enthusiasms and projects with: ‘Oh, Charlee’s chasing rainbows, again,’ accompanied by condescending, exasperated smiles. This was the first time in her life she’d been taken seriously, so perhaps she had something to thank Ffinch for after all.

  ‘Sam Walker seems to think he’s kosher,’ Charlee put in, standing her ground.

  ‘Sam would sell his own grandmother for an exclusive,’ Tom said. ‘I think
we all know that.’ He looked to the others for corroboration.

  ‘None of it has anything to do with you, so I’ll thank you all to butt out of my life.’

  ‘Charlotte, really, manners. Henry, reason with her,’ her mother cut in. Charlee folded her arms across her chest. As far as she was concerned, their concern for her welfare stemmed more from a desire to interfere and control rather than from love. At almost twenty-four years of age she was too old for playing this game, and it was time they knew it.

  ‘Teal, Marley - walkies.’ Upon hearing the magic word, the two black labs headed for the kitchen where their leads hung on a hook behind the door.

  ‘You’re not going out now, are you Charlotte? You’ll miss the Queen’s Speech,’ her mother protested. ‘We always watch it together; it’s in 3D this year,’ she added, indicating a basket of 3D glasses by way of a clincher.

  ‘I’m going out, because if I stay I’ll only end up arguing with you all and spoiling Christmas. This discussion is closed.’ She crossed the hall, took down a Barbour from the bentwood coat stand and pushed her feet into a pair of wellingtons. Retrieving their leads from the kitchen, she whistled to the dogs and left the house, heading for Poppy’s home, two fields away.

  Much to their delight, the labs put up a couple of pheasants and went chasing after them as Charlee trudged across the ridges and furrows of the ploughed field. She could see lights on at the Walkers’ and she knew she’d receive a good welcome and a glass of something warming if she turned up uninvited on Christmas Day. She began to relax for the first time that day.

  The Walkers and the Montagues had been friends for years and Poppy and Charlee inseparable since nursery school. That was the main reason Charlee hadn’t approached Sam, initially, to ask for an internship. She wanted to make her own way and not have everyone say she’d won her position because of family connections. However, after offering to work for no wages at various newspapers and still unable to land a job, Charlee had been glad of Poppy’s suggestion that she speak to her father.