Friends and Rivals by Tilly Bagshawe

Author:Tilly Bagshawe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, Fiction, Contemporary, General
ISBN: 9780007326532
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2012-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

‘Oh my God. Oh my GOD. Oh my actual GOD!’

Hector Charles turned fully around to stare at the gold hot-pants-wearing blonde twins rollerblading past him on the Santa Monica bike path. Unfortunately he himself was on a bike at the time and came within a hair’s breadth of ploughing into a young mother jogging with her stroller.

‘Moron!’ yelled the mother. ‘Look where you’re going!’

Jack Messenger pulled his godson aside. ‘They’re not worth getting killed for, you know,’ he grinned.

‘You wouldn’t say that if you lived in Burford,’ sighed Hector. ‘This place is amazing. I’m never going home.’

The relief Jack felt when Hector had turned up on his doorstep six days ago was hard to describe. He’d spoken to Catriona almost every day since the boy had gone missing, and though he’d always been supportive and encouraging, privately he’d begun to think that perhaps the worst really had happened. So when the familiar freckled, dirty, mischiev-ous face appeared on his front porch, a little older than when Jack had last seen him but otherwise not much changed, he’d been too overjoyed even to be angry.

He had, however, insisted that Hector call his parents immediately. ‘You do realize they’ve been out of their minds with worry?’

‘Mum has, you mean,’ said Hector bitterly.

‘They both have,’ said Jack firmly. Much as he hated Ivan, he knew from Cat just how torn up he was about Hector’s disappearance. ‘And Rosie. You’ve had half the British police force out looking for you, you know. Your face is on an Interpol alert.’

‘Cool,’ said Hector. It struck Jack what a young thirteen-year-old he was. Almost as if his development had been arrested at age eleven, the year his father walked out.

‘It’s not “cool”,’ said Jack. ‘You paid for that plane ticket with Ned Williams’s credit card, which you stole.’

‘I didn’t steal it. I borrowed it,’ said Hector breezily. ‘Anyway, Ned won’t mind. He’s famous, he’s got loads of money. He didn’t even notice I’d used the card, did he?’

This was true, although Jack suspected it owed more to Ned Williams’s scatterbrained lifestyle than his groaning bank balance.

‘Call it what you like,’ he said firmly, ‘it’s still fraud. And what about the cash you nicked from your mother’s purse?’

‘What about it?’ said Hector defiantly.

His conversation with Catriona was emotional. When Ivan came on the line, Hector vehemently refused to talk to him, then ended up screaming that he refused to come back to England while his father was still living with ‘that bitch’ and stormed off into Jack’s garden to roll a cigarette.

‘Give him time,’ Jack told Catriona when she came back on the line. ‘He’s welcome to stay with me for a while until he gets his head together. I’ll put him to work at JSM, making the tea or something.’

Ivan had been all for dragging the boy onto the next plane by the scruff of his neck to begin his long round of apologies: to his family, to the police who’d wasted valuable time looking for him, to his school.

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