Husband Material (London Calling #2)(63)

“And now”—I turned my jabbing finger toward Rhys—“you’ve just called your girlfriend a complete knobhead. Why am I the bad guy?”

With her head in Rhys’s lap, Ana with one n gave a little shrug. “I suppose because a lot of the time I can be a complete knobhead.”

“You see?” Rhys gave a vindicated nod. “A good relationship is based on honesty.”

Somehow I was still outnumbered. “Look.” I gave up. “If it means that much to you…of course you can come to our wedding.”

“And Alex and Miffy and Barbara and Gabriel and the Professor?” asked Rhys.

Alex and Miffy we’d have been pretty much obliged to invite anyway since they’d invited us to theirs. To be honest, I was increasingly convinced that weddings were just an elaborate cycle of vengeance that had got really out of hand. Some pair of selfish bastards had forced their friends to come to a tedious party two thousand years ago, and their selfish bastard friends had decided to pay them back by forcing them to come a tedious party, and then some wholly independent group of selfish bastards had built an industry around it and here we were. An eye for an eye leaves the world overpaying for table settings.

“Yes.” I shot a quick confirmatory glance at Oliver—although honestly at this stage if we were stuck with a wedding full of CRAPPers it was as much his fault as mine so he’d kind of lost the right to object. “You can all come. It’ll be lovely. The more the merrier.”

“There you go, Rhystocrats,” Rhys said into his phone. “Happy ending all around. For more heartwarming content like this, remember to like, share, and subscribe to my channel and to follow Cee-Arr-Ay-Pee-Pee on all of the social medias.”

Ana with one n looked up from his lap. “And I’m at not-that-ana-the-other-ana in all the usual places, and I upload content daily when I’m not having arguments with my boyfriend’s colleagues.”

“And in case you’re wondering,” Rhys added, “I know it seems weird, my channel telling you how to find pictures of my girlfriend’s boobies, but I’m fine with it. She’s a lovely girl and it’s her job.” He paused for a moment and added, “Also they’re very nice so if you haven’t checked them out, do give them a go.”

There wasn’t a great deal I could say to that, but fortunately a knock at the door meant I didn’t have to.

“That’ll be the professor,” said Rhys.

“Or Barbara,” I added apprehensively. “In which case I should go and apologise.”

I eased myself reluctantly out of the chair, and when the banging on the door intensified, I tried not to tell myself that it probably was Barbara because it would be characteristically impatient of her. Still, it wasn’t worth putting off any longer, so I quickened my step a little.

It wasn’t Barbara. It was a man and a woman I didn’t recognise, both in their midforties. They had a uniformed police officer with them.

“Sorry to interrupt,” she said, “but this couple have just called my station, and they tell me you’ve broken into their house.”





"ONE MORE TIME, MR. O’DONNELL," said the police officer after they’d brought us all in, which had taken a while because there’d been one of her and seven of us, of whom three were out in the garden, either being sad or examining insects. “How did you and your friends come to be in Mr. and Mrs. Plastowe’s house?”

I told her again. I was sure that everybody else had told her as well, and I was sure our stories would be relatively consistent, but I also didn’t quite trust my colleagues to be able to talk to the police without going off on long tangents about mosquitoes, their social media followers, or, in several cases, what an absolute prick I was.

“So then you”—she looked down—“had a cup of tea and argued with your coworkers about why you weren’t inviting them to your wedding?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Why aren’t you inviting them to your wedding?”

“Is that part of the investigation?” I asked.

The police officer shrugged. “No. But they seem like nice people.

One of them invited you to his wedding.”

“Did you invite the entire police station to your wedding?”

“Of course.”

They probably did things differently in the countryside. “Look, it’s nice to get to know you and everything, but is it possible that we could maybe go now? It’s been several hours and we have to be up early in the morning.”

“I’d love to,” said the police officer, with a slightly apologetic tone to her voice. “But the problem is that not only did you break into somebody’s house—”

“We didn’t break in. There was a key under the mat.”

“Still counts as breaking in. But then you also said that you were in the area because you were guests at one of the most exclusive society events the northwest has seen in years, and that means your whole case has been kicked up the chain.”

That didn’t sound good. “Kicked up the chain?”

She made an afraid-so face. “The Twaddle-Fortescue-Lettice wedding is a big deal. Security alone is dragging in Coombe Valley police, Merseyside Police, and the Northwest Motorway Police… It’s a big job.”