and a harassed expression.
“That’s no way to treat champers of that quality,” he murmured in his English public school accent, twitching the glass from her hand.
“Oy!” she protested, snatching it back.
“Are you pissed?” Jack asked under his breath.
“I hope to be very soon.”
“Can we do the job first, Sera?”
“Spoilsport,” she grumbled, although she did start to walk toward the french doors, where Jilly, displaying a sexy expanse of thigh, was halfway up a ladder, rehanging a fallen string of garlic while guests squeezed past her to make the most of the surprisingly warm late summer evening in Ferdy Bell’s beautiful garden.
“Is this stuff meant to be on the outside or the inside?” Jilly demanded.
“Both,” Sera said vaguely. It was definitely dusk, and in another few minutes, there would probably be enough darkness to carry out her plan.
Jilly lifted one eyebrow. “Then you’d better give me a hand, hadn’t you?”
“Fair play,” Sera allowed. She turned to Jack, murmuring, “Make sure Tam’s all set. I’ll be along soon to give you the nod. And Jack,” she added, picking another string of garlic bulbs from the basket under Jilly’s ladder. “Try to look as if you’re having fun?”
Whatever retort he’d been about to make vanished into a smile as someone he knew paused to speak to him amid much back slapping.
“He’s in his element,” Jilly muttered, clambering back down the ladder. Sera shifted it through the doorway with her foot, politely excusing herself to Jack and his friend, who stood in the way.
“Good thing too,” Sera replied, arranging the ladder outside with one hand while the other held valiantly on to her glass of champagne. “Plan wouldn’t work, otherwise, would it?”
Jilly grunted, a sound spectacularly at odds with her angelically beautiful appearance. She was Sera’s best friend as well as her first employee, and fierce intelligence lurked behind her baby-blue eyes, stylish, golden-blonde bob, and perfect makeup. Brought up in one of Edinburgh’s roughest housing schemes, which she’d worked damned hard to escape, Jilly refused to forgive Jack his privileged background, even when having him here as a guest made their own job easier.
“What is all this?” Jack’s friend asked, riveting his gaze to Jilly’s long, slender leg halfway up the ladder as she stretched above the french door. “Seems an odd theme for a party.”
Jilly and Sera made brief, sparkling eye contact.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Jack said, turning his friend toward the garden before he could catch sight of the women’s inappropriate mirth. “It wouldn’t be the first time the term ‘bloodsucker’ has been applied to bankers.”
“Still the socialist, Jack?” his friend mocked.
“Nothing to do with politics,” Jack argued, moving farther away as Jilly came back down the ladder. Reluctantly, Sera placed her glass on the table just inside the french door.
“What’s this?” Jilly demanded. “Guilt?”
“No. Jack’s right.”
“Nah,” Jilly said with conviction.
“Unfortunately, yes. I’ve got to be capable of taking on the real stalker if he shows up.”
“You really expect him to, with all these people around?”
“Well, Ferdy clearly does.”
“He expects a vampire,” Jilly said dryly, “which is why we’re here.”
Sera sighed. “Ferdy, bless his old banker’s heart, is not telling us the whole truth.”
“That why we’re trashing his party?”
“Yup,” said Sera, hefting the ladder over one shoulder. “That and the fact it’s bloody funny.” She carried the ladder round the side of the house to the shed where they’d found it some hours before. Then, having stashed it, she dusted herself off and walked across the lawn at the back of the house, where little clumps of people stood and chatted, or walked, glasses in hand, around the well-kept grounds. Their features were growing fuzzy in the darkening evening, despite the atmospheric lighting shining down from the walls of the house.
Underneath the garlic hanging from the french doors, Jilly appeared to have been cornered by their attention-seeking host. All to the good. Sera raised her hand in what might have been misinterpreted as a wave. Jilly’s nod told her the true meaning was clear. Five minutes until she’d bring Ferdy.
Sera went in search of Jack and Tam, who should be ready now to play their parts. The Bells had a good, large garden surrounded by a high wall. There was a small, ornamental maze in the middle and a grove of apple and pear trees some yards to the side of it, running along the high boundary wall. Tam’s instructions were to skulk among the trees until it was time to come to the edge of the wood and “attack” Jack,