Loe raamatut: «A Christmas Cracker: The only festive romance to curl up with this Christmas!»

Chapter 1: Bottled

‘You mean you’ve known for ages that your boss at Champers&Chocs was passing off bottles of cheap fizz as vintage champagne, and you haven’t done a single thing about it?’ Kate exclaimed incredulously, her pale blue eyes wide and a cup of herbal tea the exact colour of cat pee suspended halfway to her rose-tinted lips.

Kate was my opposite in looks, being small, fair and cute, though she wasn’t as cute as she thought she was, unless you were really fond of rabbits. And speaking of rabbits, she should long since have put her penchant for pale pink fluffy jumpers behind her, even if the angora had been ethically sourced, which I doubted.

I sighed and stirred my Americano, starting to wish I hadn’t said anything about it because, after all, she and her husband were Jeremy’s old friends, not mine, and she’d been less than welcoming when we’d first got engaged. But sometimes Kate and I would meet up for coffee and, that day being one of those occasions, my worries had spilled out of me the moment we’d sat down.

It wouldn’t have happened if I’d been able to tell my best friend, Emma, but since she’d remarried she’d increasingly been having problems of her own with her husband, Desmond, so I hadn’t wanted to burden her with mine.

Still, at least she wouldn’t have gazed at me in the sad, accusing way Kate was, when I looked up.

‘The idea that anything fraudulent was going on never crossed my mind until I found out by accident,’ I explained. ‘I mean, I don’t think I’d even seen a real bottle of champagne, other than on the TV, until I got engaged to Jeremy.’

‘No, I don’t suppose there are champagne bars on every corner of council estates,’ she said snidely. ‘Just cheap booze shops.’

For the last years of her life, Mum and I had shared a specially adapted council bungalow on a very nice estate, but Kate always talked as if I was dragged up in a slum and had made some giant social leap by getting engaged to a member of the teaching profession.

‘Oh, forget it,’ I snapped.

‘No, you can’t just leave it there without telling me how you found out and why you didn’t report it to the police,’ she insisted.

‘Because I thought it had stopped. It was before last Christmas, when I was packing special orders one evening and my boss and I were the only people there. There was a phone call and I walked into his office to tell him—’

‘I have wondered about those late nights, just the two of you …’ she said suggestively.

I stared at her in astonishment. ‘You don’t mean you thought I was having a fling with Harry Briggs? I mean, apart from his being twenty years older than me and not my type, I’m in love with Jeremy and wouldn’t dream of cheating on him.’

‘Well, you have to admit it looked a bit odd.’

‘I don’t see why. Harry said I had the nicest handwriting for the personal messages that went in the box with the champagne and chocolates, and I was the most careful packer for the expensive orders.’

It was a pity, I thought, that those had turned out to be the fraudulent ones.

‘Jeremy said you started doing casual evening packing work there while your mother was still alive,’ she said. ‘Harry paid you cash in hand.’

‘Yes, because luckily our lovely neighbour was always happy to sit with Mum in the evenings for a couple of hours and the money was useful. A carer’s allowance doesn’t go very far.’

‘I suppose not,’ she said disinterestedly. ‘But go on, you walked into Harry’s office and then …?’

‘He was sticking labels onto bottles, which seemed odd, but he explained that sometimes they got damaged and then he had to replace them.’

‘And you believed that?’ she asked pityingly. ‘You think it’s that easy to get hold of extra labels?’

‘Not when I’d thought about it a bit, especially since it was the most expensive champagne we stocked. Most of what we sell isn’t actually champagne, it’s Prosecco, but that’s made clear on the website.’

‘So, did you say anything to him at the time?’

I nodded. ‘When I was going home and he came out to lock up after me, I told him I’d realised he was fraudulently passing off cheap booze as expensive stuff. He said his supplier had forgotten to label one batch and he’d had to do it himself, but he was very sorry I’d seen it—’

‘I bet he was!’ she interrupted.

‘And he’d only started the scam when the firm was going through a rocky patch,’ I finished.

‘Yeah, right.’

‘Well, call me naïve, but when he swore he was going to stop that very night, I believed him,’ I said defensively. ‘He was very contrite so in the end I said I wouldn’t tell anyone if he really did mean it.’

‘That was so wrong of you,’ Kate said censoriously. ‘I would have got my coat and gone straight to the police the moment I realised what was happening. Not that I’d have been doing a packing job at a factory anyway,’ she added, unable to refrain from another dig.

‘There’s nothing to sneer at in doing any honest job,’ I said.

‘It didn’t exactly turn out to be an honest job, though, did it? And I assume he didn’t keep his word about stopping the fraud, either. You were very credulous to think he would.’

‘I wanted to believe him. In the last couple of years when Mum was so ill, he was really good to me, letting me work as and when I could, then offering me a permanent job on the afternoon shift after she died. It wasn’t like I was qualified for anything else.’

As Mum fell further and further into the grip of aggressive multiple sclerosis I’d missed a lot of school and though I’d started a graphic design degree course, I’d had to drop out of it after only a year. Of course, I didn’t begrudge a moment of the time I spent with Mum, but after she’d gone I was left with no money, qualifications or even a home, since the specially adapted council bungalow was urgently needed for someone else.

So I’d gratefully accepted Harry’s offer and found a tiny but cheap flat over the garage attached to Jeremy’s house, which was how we’d met.

At first he hadn’t been that keen on Pyewacket, my cat, but after a while he became very keen on me, so they learned to tolerate each other … just as I learned to accept Jeremy’s long-standing close friendship with Kate and her husband, Luke, who not only seemed joined at the hip, but all taught at the same huge, sprawling comprehensive school. Well, I say friendship, but it was more a trio of two adorers and Kate, who they think is wonderful, though I have no idea why …

‘When did you realise he hadn’t stopped the fraud?’ asked Kate, jerking me out of my reverie.

‘Only recently. He’d made sure I’d seen him carrying crates of what looked like the real thing into the storeroom, but one day when I was in a smart wine merchant’s shop with Jeremy they had a bottle of it – and it looked nothing at all like the ones I’d been packing. Last night I told Harry I knew.’

I shivered slightly because I’d seen a side to jovial, easy-going Harry that I hadn’t even suspected existed.

‘He threatened me and said if I went to the police he’d tell them it had all been my idea – and since I was the one who worked the extra shifts packing the special orders, I was implicated anyway.’

‘It certainly wouldn’t look good,’ Kate agreed helpfully.

‘But it’s his company and I’m just a warehouse packer, doing a bit of overtime. I told him they wouldn’t believe him but he said they would when he explained that we’d been having an affair and I’d reported the fraud out of spite because he’d ended it.’

‘Gosh, it’s like some low-life soap series! But it serves you right for not having gone to the police as soon as you found out,’ she said righteously. ‘That’s what I would have done.’

‘Hindsight is a wonderful thing,’ I said. ‘In the end I told him I wouldn’t shop him, but gave him a month’s notice and said I wasn’t doing any more overtime. He said he didn’t care, so long as I kept my mouth shut.’

‘Which you haven’t, because you’ve told me,’ she pointed out.

‘Only because I was so upset that I was desperate to talk it through with someone and, if you remember, you promised to keep what I was going to say secret.’

‘I hadn’t realised it would be something criminal, though,’ she objected.

‘But you will keep it secret, won’t you?’ I asked.

‘I suppose so, but more because it would hurt Jeremy immensely if all this came out,’ Kate agreed. ‘I know you haven’t told him anything, or he’d have confided in me and Luke.’

That was true, and it was what had stopped me confiding in Jeremy in the first place, but now I suddenly seemed to have blabbed it out to Kate, cutting out the middleman.

‘Now you’ll have to find another job,’ she said.

‘Well … maybe not. I know Jeremy doesn’t think my artwork is anything other than a hobby, but I’ve been regularly selling designs to greetings card companies, and now I’ve got my first one-woman exhibition in Liverpool I really think I might be able to earn a living out of it.’

In fact, I’d have left Champers&Chocs long before, had it not been for Jeremy’s insistence that I not only continue to pay rent on the flat, which I mostly used to store my things and as a studio, but also my share of the expensive meals out that he, Kate and Luke enjoyed so much.

‘But you know what Jeremy’s like – he thinks I should pay an equal share of everything, even though he’s earning a lot more than I am.’

‘Well, teachers aren’t that well paid, you know,’ Kate said defensively.

‘They get a lot more than my minimum wages, that’s for sure,’ I said. ‘And more holidays – plus the three of you are always going off abroad on school trips.’

‘Being responsible for a coach full of adolescents is not exactly a fun holiday,’ she said, tossing her smooth blond hair back in a Miss Piggy kind of way. She often streaked her hair with a bright pink when she was out of school, but I can’t say it really did anything for her.

‘You’d be better off training for a proper career,’ she added, ‘but I’ll be at the exhibition, rooting for you, anyway. Luke can’t come; he’s off on a training course that day and won’t be back till too late.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, surprised, because when I’d initially invited them, she’d said they couldn’t make it. ‘My friend Emma doesn’t think she can come either, so I could do with some support. I do hope it’s a success … and then just after that I’ll have worked out my notice at Champers&Chocs and it won’t be my fault if Harry gets found out.’

‘Turning a blind eye doesn’t exactly qualify you for sainthood, you know,’ she said. ‘Still, I suppose you can’t do anything else now. Have you told Jeremy you’ve handed in your notice?’

‘No, I thought I’d wait until after the Papercuts and Beyond exhibition, because if I sell lots of pictures, he’ll be able to see that I could make a living from it.’

The owners of the small gallery had been really enthusiastic about my pictures, which had been like a light at the end of a dark tunnel after Harry’s threats to implicate me. I’d been carrying a heavy burden for months, but soon I would be free and earning my living by doing work I loved …

‘Come on,’ said Kate, putting down her teacup decisively. ‘Let’s go and find you something to wear for this exhibition. You can’t go through life dressed in black jeans and tops.’

‘I don’t see why not,’ I said mutinously, following her out, but I did end up buying a jazzy silk tunic at her insistence, even if I did intend wearing it with narrow black trousers and flat pumps rather than the leggings and high heels she considered appropriate.