Hawthorn Close (Larch Tree Lane) by Anna Jacobs

Author:Anna Jacobs [Jacobs, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2023-11-22T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

As Corin turned in to his drive, his mobile phone warbled at him and he sighed. He’d been looking forward to a peaceful evening with his wife. For a moment he was tempted to ignore whoever it was but as he came to a halt, he made the fatal error of glancing at it to see who the caller was. Deanna. He’d better take this.

He switched off the car and clicked on his phone to answer the call. ‘Corin here.’

‘It’s me, Deanna. Have you checked the Essington council rules about permits and parking yet?’

Just like her to dive straight into business without the politeness of a greeting. ‘No. I’ve had some urgent business of my own to attend to.’

‘Ah. Well, Didier wants to continue our investigations so we need to know what sort of paperwork will have to be gone through to obtain the right permissions. If you can’t do it straight away, shall I ring the council for you?’

‘No, don’t do anything in my name. If you need to find out anything more general, that’s up to you, but I prefer to make contact myself for queries about my land so I’ll only be paying attention to what the council tell me. Anyway, I know a couple of the councillors and understand their ways better than you do, so I’ll probably get a more useful response. But there are only twenty-four hours in a day and I’m in the middle of something so I’ll come back to you within a day or two.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Sorry, Deanna, but not now. I’ve had a long, hard day and I need to tell Lucia about something else that’s cropped up and then deal with it as a matter of urgency.’

He disconnected before she could answer, not bothering to say goodbye. Well, too bad. He had bothered to give her a brief explanation at least. Trouble was, he was already having second thoughts about working with her, and about the project too, come to that.

And someone he knew slightly had asked him why he was allowing people to put a development on his land.

A development? It was one café and so he’d told his acquaintance. Had Belkin’s arrival in town made some people paranoid?

What was Didier up to, sending Deanna to scope out the bunker for a café? That puzzled Corin. The more he heard about the man, the less he was inclined to do business with him. And he simply couldn’t see a man of Didier’s obvious intelligence in love romantically with a woman like Deanna. She wasn’t the brightest brain on the planet, as everyone in the family knew.

Anyway, far more importantly at the moment, a couple of people he knew had texted him urgently to say that the situation in Hawthorn Close was worrying and it was looking as if the survival of the two very special trees at the end of the street was seriously threatened by the new and unscrupulous builder. Locals were going to mount an all-night guard on them for a while.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.