I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day - Milly Johnson Page 0,5

for a full twenty-four hours. One of her dad’s many sayings was that if a thing looked too good to be true, then that’s because it probably was and once again he was right. Mary sighed audibly then quickly checked the mirror to see if Jack had heard her, but he was too busy hunting for something in his briefcase to have noticed.

Mary carried on down the road, steadily. Her dad had taught her and her siblings to drive when they were fifteen on a patch of nearby farmland. By the age of sixteen, she could throw cars around corners and handle any motor with the skill of a copper chasing a drug dealer up the wrong side of the motorway. She drove much better than Fred did, who tended to press down on the pedals as if he was stamping on a cockroach with a lead boot. He’d been Jack’s father’s chauffeur, employed more for being on the old boys’ network rather than for his abilities, which was par for the course with Reg Butterly. Mary’s eyes flicked towards the satnav when it gave her an instruction to leave the motorway at the next junction and follow the A379 to Exeter. On the screen was a map of the south-west. Even brand-new Maseratis had their glitches, she thought. Luckily she knew she was heading in roughly the right direction, back to South Yorkshire, not Devon. Sadly.

Less than a mile along the way, Mary could see there was a problem in the shape of a rockfall ahead. The weight of snow on the hillside must have dislodged stones and boulders at the inconvenient point where the road narrowed to a single track. There was no way around the obstruction, she could tell that even from a long distance away. Jack’s attention was dragged to the scene framed by the windscreen when he felt the car slowing.

‘Oh, please tell me this isn’t happening,’ he said.

‘I’ll have to turn back,’ said Mary, stating the obvious. What else could they do? The road was completely blocked.

‘Goodness, the snow really is bad isn’t it,’ said Jack. He’d raised his head at various points and glanced at the weather but his mind was more on the presentation to Chikafuji; now he was seeing the white-out. ‘I think it would be sensible to pull in at the first place we can, Mary.’

Mary did another about-turn and headed for Tynehall yet again, even though they had no chance of making it that far. There had to be somewhere nearby. They were in Yorkshire, not an Arctic tundra, even if it did look like it. Then, in the midst of all the white in front of her, she spotted a wooden arrow-shaped sign coming up on the left, pointing across to a turning that wasn’t showing up on the satnav, with crude black lettering: Figgy Hollow 3/4 mile. She couldn’t remember seeing it on either of the two times she’d passed this spot before, but she hadn’t been looking for shelter then.

She hadn’t a clue what Figgy Hollow was: a local beauty spot, a farm; a hamlet with a welcoming hotel and a cosy log fire, she hoped, but in case there was nothing else around for miles, she took the risk and swung a right. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Another gem from her father’s book of sayings.

Chapter 3

Luke Palfreyman wished he was travelling in his trusty four-by-four instead of his boy-toy vintage DB5 Aston Martin, which didn’t perform at its best in snow, especially super-freak snow like this, which seemed to be heralding the birth of a new Ice Age. He, alas, was no James Bond, so the car didn’t suddenly project wings – or better still skis – to get him smoothly to his destination; instead he was stuck with driving it manually and praying it got him safely to where he needed to be. He’d spent the last couple of years trying to acquire the art of being reasonable and sensible – give or take buying a 1960s dream car – only to agree to head for a place in the arse end of nowhere just because his wife clicked her fingers. Or soon to be ex-wife, to give her the proper title. It wouldn’t be beyond credibility that Bridge had engineered this weather to inconvenience him further. Few things had ever run well for him where she was concerned; she was a walking jinx, quite the opposite to his present fiancée. Everything was so