Husband Material (London Calling #2)(60)

silence that persisted until Oliver, in his best peacemaker’s voice, said, “What if we try ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’ instead?”

Two hours into a four-hour journey we stopped at a service station so that Rhys could have, in his own words “a slash and a sarnie.” I took the opportunity to stretch my legs and grabbed one of the family-sized bags of Skittles that they were, for some unfathomable reason, selling at a discount in W.H. Smith. Once we’d taken our welcome break at the Welcome Break, we piled back into the minibus for the second and, as it turned out, more complicated part of the journey.

Coombecamden,

the

technically-a-city-because-it-had-a—

cathedral-even-though-it-was-actually-tiny of which Miffy’s father was apparently Earl, was situated a little way south of Liverpool, right by the Welsh border, but Rhys’s mate’s house was a little way west of that and a fair distance into the countryside. Which meant that we spent the next very long time on narrow, windy roads occasionally blocked by sheep, trying to navigate by a bickering consensus of low-resolution satnav, poorly understood maps, and guesswork.

The rain didn’t help. It had started drizzling as we passed Birmingham. By the time we hit Stoke-on-Trent, that had upgraded to pissing down. And, once we left the M40 and were into the bit of the country where there were hedges instead of pavements and everywhere was called something like Muclestone or Wetwood, it was raining so hard that the windscreen wipers were just making ripples on a pond.

Eventually, Rhys pulled over on a stretch of grass that I wasn’t totally sure he should have been pulling over on, but was too much of a city boy to challenge, and announced, “Here we are,” with thoroughly unearned cheerfulness.

“Where is here, exactly?” I asked.

“Charlie’s house.”

I peered out of the window, but between the rain and the fact that the sun had set an hour ago, I couldn’t make out anything except wet and bush. “Are you absolutely certain?”

Rhys tapped his phone, which was showing a little blue circle inside a big blue circle. “Google Maps never lies.”

“No,” I admitted, “but it’s sometimes very economical with the truth.”

Oliver patted me gently on the leg. “Perhaps one of us should get out and take a look?”

One of us, we all knew, meant Oliver. I certainly wasn’t about to go, and Rhys didn’t seem to be up for it either. Besides, getting your bearings after a long minibus journey seemed far more like Oliver’s skill set than mine in that it was a useful life skill, rather than the brand of occasionally helpful bullshit that I preferred to trade in.

Clambering past me and out through the front of the bus, Oliver vanished into the night, only to return a few moments later with his hair plastered to his head, his jacket wet through, and his trousers damp to the shins. “There is a house there,” he confirmed. “But it’s on the other side of a rather large field.”

“Ah, that’ll be it.” Rhys’s aura of cheeriness had never really gone away, but it had ebbed slightly when it had looked like we might be stuck in the dark and houseless. Now it was flowing back with a vengeance. “The Google Maps do that sometimes in the countryside. They put you in the right general place, but they can’t work out where the roads go. I suppose it’s because they’re hard to see from space.”

Ana with one n reached out an affectionate hand. “I’m not sure that’s quite how satnav works, sweetheart.”

“Either way, it seems to be our best option,” said Oliver. “So I suppose we should all grab our things and get going.”

At the back of the bus, Barbara Clench glowered. “This was not a well-planned excursion.”

Rhys was still grinning. “No, but it’s been an adventure, hasn’t it?”

“I’m not sure ‘got wet walking across a field’ counts as an adventure,” I pointed out.

“You know the difference between you and me, Luc?” asked Rhys. And before I could reply, he said, “Attitude. If I want to have an adventure, I’ll bloody well have an adventure.”

While everyone was disembarking and Rhys was locking up the minibus, I checked our surroundings. We’d pulled into a sort of dip in the hedgerow next to a gate that was very firmly chained shut. Up and down the road I could see precisely nothing except water and darkness. On the other side of the gate I could see… I mean, I assumed it was a field. But the way the moonlight was gleaming off the surface made it look almost like a lake. A big, square lake with a cottage on the other side of it.

“The plan,” I yelled over the increasingly insistent sound of the rain, “absolutely can’t be to wade across that”—I pointed at the aqua field—“to get to that.” I pointed at the cottage.

“I agree with Luc,” said Barbara Clench. She’d agree with me on something about once a year. I think she just did it to throw me off.

“We’d be better off in the bus.”

Ana with one n shrugged. “The absolute worst plan is to stand here debating. Come on.” With her jacket over her head and her overnight bag under one arm, she clambered over the fence and set off. To my relief, she wasn’t immediately swallowed by a hidden bog —the water actually only seemed to come up to her ankles—but I wasn’t particularly keen to follow her. Rhys, of course, was, which I suspected was only partly because they were dating and mostly because he was the kind of person who genuinely enjoyed doing this kind of thing.