I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day - Milly Johnson Page 0,56

of the stairs, waving a sock. One of a striped Paul Smith pair. She recognised them because she had bought them for him last Christmas, part of a set of three designs.

‘I’d better not lose it,’ Jack said, ‘it’s one of my lucky pair. Every time I put these on, something good happens. I was going to wear them for my meeting with Chikafuji.’

Mary wondered if he remembered who had bought them for him. Probably not, but at least she hit the bullseye with her present, unlike he had with his Christmas presents for her. Not even a single ‘1’ on the dartboard of suitability.

Charlie’s sock had a red, blue and green argyle pattern on it, Robin’s was a white cushioned sports sock. Bridge had a long black one, Luke’s – not unsurprisingly – was covered in pictures of lumps of cheese with whiff marks coming out of them.

‘How very mature,’ said Bridge, playing straight into his hands.

‘Mature… cheese… like it,’ he said and played another drum riff.

‘What are we having on the baked potatoes?’ asked Charlie after his stomach gave a plaintive keen of hunger.

‘How about plain old butter and salt,’ said Mary. ‘Nice and simple. We can eat them out of the tin foil and pretend we’re camping.’

‘That sounds delicious, Mary,’ said Bridge. ‘Sometimes the simple things are the best.’

‘Aw cheers, Bridge.’

‘Shut up, Luke.’

‘So how are we going to organise the filling of the socks ceremony?’ asked Jack, aware that everyone then looked to Mary for direction.

She pondered for a moment before she answered him. ‘Well… we have to be in bed before midnight or Santa won’t come,’ she said, setting off ripples of ‘of course’ and ‘quite right’ in response. ‘So if we all go up at the same time, we can sneak down at five-minute intervals. We’ll draw lots to determine when that is. That work?’

‘I think, Mary, you are missing your way in life,’ said Charlie. ‘You should be in charge of something multi-national that needs your most excellent skills.’

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘I’m ready for a change.’

It was a slip of the tongue, but she went with it, forced herself not to look at Jack in case she saw him nod in encouragement.

* * *

‘Want me to tell you what you missed earlier on, Mary?’ said Bridge with quiet relish, as they were preparing the baked spuds in the kitchen. ‘You’d gone up for your sock and we were talking about being picked off by a murderer and Jack said that you wouldn’t be picked off first as you were too… and then he shut up. But he was obviously going to say something nice.’

Mary didn’t miss a beat, but carried on slashing crosses in the tops of the potatoes.

Bridge huffed loudly. ‘Well I am disappointed, Mary. I thought you’d be delighted to hear that.’

‘The missing word was probably industrious or indispensable, or most likely efficient – that’s one of Jack’s words. He wouldn’t have said I was too gorgeous or too stunning to be picked off.’

‘He might have,’ said Bridge.

‘He meant that any killer among us would want me to hang around and make the coffees or take down a dictated account of how he murdered people for posterity.’

‘Now you’re being silly. But…’ Bridge took a breath, ‘…if you ever do feel like a change, as you said out there, I think you’d fit into my company like a size three hand in a size three glove. My PA is going on maternity leave in the next couple of months and I have a feeling that she won’t be back. So… I’ll just park that with you.’

‘In Derbyshire?’ asked Mary, which wasn’t an out and out refusal, Bridge noted.

‘The Hope Valley. It’s very pretty. You’d relocate from Yorkshire, I expect but I’d throw in a place to stay. I’ve got plenty of rental properties on my books; one beautiful little cottage comes to mind that would suit you down to the ground. And it’s not that far from Yorkshire, for when you wanted to drive back and see your family.’

‘Thank you, Bridge,’ said Mary. ‘I’ll consider it.’

‘These potatoes smell divine.’ Bridge swapped the subject back to food, not wanting to over-egg the job offer pudding, and dropped a knob of butter into each of the slits that Mary had made, but she could sense the cogs turning in the younger woman’s brain. At least she hoped they were.

* * *

They all enjoyed more carols from the radio and buttery baked potatoes in front of