Page 80 of Cooking Up a Christmas Storm
‘Just checking in. Fiona wanted to make sure you’ve got everything you need.’ She gestured to the roadway behind them. ‘Access is OK?’
‘Aye. If you could guarantee the weather for us we’d be golden.’
‘In Scotland? In November?’
He grinned. ‘Worth asking at least.’
A van pulled up alongside them. Jodie recognised that van. Stone and Son. Pavel jumped out. ‘All right, Tom.’ And then he stopped. ‘Ge—’
‘Pavel, hi.’ Jodie spoke quickly to cover his mistake. She was getting too adept at this.
‘You guys know each other?’
Pavel nodded. ‘Er, Jodie is…’
‘I’m his mum’s lodger.’
‘Yeah. That’s right. Lodger. So we know each other. Really well. Well, not really well.’
Jodie tried to shoot him a look that said ‘shut up, Pavel’. It didn’t work.
‘As well as you’d expect. She’s in the house with my mum. I’ve got the flat so we see each other but, I mean, we’re not seeing each other. We don’t. We haven’t. I…’
Jodie turned back to Tom. ‘So you’re fine here?’
He glanced at Pavel. ‘I’m fine. I’m not sure about him.’
‘What can I say? I send men loopy.’
‘I’m not. I didn’t…’
‘If you’re working here, you should car share,’ Tom suggested. ‘Isn’t the McKenzie way all about minimising environmental impact?’
That was what their website said, certainly. ‘That would be, I mean, depending what time you finish, that would be…’
‘He’ll finish about half five. We got the lights up yesterday and the generator running so we can keep going a bit after it gets dark,’ Tom explained. ‘You’ll give Jodie a ride, won’t you? In your big old van?’
Pavel was glaring at Tom now. ‘You can have a lift back. Of course you can.’
‘Thanks.’ Forty minutes in the van with Pavel twice a day for however long this took. They’d have to talk in the van, wouldn’t they? She’d been fine seeing him in the coach house while they both got on with their own work. That was sort of comforting. In the van it would just be him and her and the silence, and in the silence next to Pavel she already knew there would only be one thing she could think about.
Back in the office Saira was leaning over the printer muttering under her breath.
‘What’s up?’
‘It reckons it’s got a paper jam. It lies.’ She shook her head. ‘If Miss Thing in there could send things to the right printer I wouldn’t have to deal with this anyway. She’s got one in her office.’
Jodie smiled her brightest Gemma-pretending-to-be-Jodie smile. ‘I can sort it.’
‘Fine.’ No ‘thank you’. Just ‘fine’.
Jodie had no relevant special skills with printers, so she did what she always did with any and all recalcitrant technology and turned it off and back on again. The printer offered her a hopeful whirring noise in response and a moment later a single half-printed sheet of A4 slid out of the machine. It was a printout from a spreadsheet, but it looked as though there were supposed to be more lines that the printer had refused to share. Jodie read through what she could see.Hogmanay Ticket Sales. Interesting. And then just a list of names. Only eight rows before the technology let them down, but of those eight, two had been highlighted in yellow. Jodie read along the rows. The only thing that seemed to set those two apart was the entry under ‘How did you hear about the event?’Direct Sales Call.
Jodie folded the sheet of paper and slid it into her pocket, before she headed back to the office. Fiona was at her desk. ‘The printer out there’s playing up. Saira said to tell you your file didn’t print.’
Fiona nodded curtly. ‘That’s fine. It wasn’t anything important.’
By half past five Pavel had thought of a hundred and one topics of casual conversation for the drive back to Lowbridge. Gemma or Jodie or whatever he was supposed to call her now shut them all down. She agreed that the weather wasn’t bad for the time of year, that the McKenzie estate was a bit too corporate for her tastes and that Lowbridge was beautiful. Pavel gave up. If she wanted to chat, let her think of something to say.
