He nodded. ‘It’s been a while, Darius.’
‘Too long,’ he said, heading for the door. ‘We’ll catch up later.’
‘Darius...’ she protested. ‘My entire life depends on my laptop!’
‘It’ll be safer there than left in the car. I’ll come back for them both later.’
‘Yes, but...’
‘I walked away from Hadley Chase. I have to walk back.’ He’d reached the doorway, looked back, held out his hand to her. ‘Will you walk with me?’
‘Why me, Darius?’ she asked, taking it.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, and finally there was the hint of a smile. ‘Only that no one else will do.’
He said nothing more until they were through the open gates of Hadley Chase and walking down the path that led to the river.
‘The Clarendon family used to live over there,’ he said, pausing at a gap between the trees and looking across the river to where a four-square Georgian house nestled beneath a rise in the Downs. ‘The families were very close. My father and Christabel Clarendon were practically betrothed in their prams.’
His father... ‘The house is the headquarters of an IT firm now,’ she said. ‘Steve told me.’
‘Steve?’
‘The security guy. They had a false alarm there last night.’ She turned to look up at him. ‘Betrothed?’
‘They were both only children,’ he said, moving on. ‘There was land and money on both sides and it was the perfect match.’
‘It takes a bit more than that.’
‘Does it? Arranged marriages are the norm in other cultures and they’d known one another since they were children. There would be no surprises.’
‘There are always surprises.’
‘Yes...’ They were climbing now through the woods and he stopped before an ancient beech tree that had once been coppiced and had four thick trunks twisting from its base. He looked up. ‘It’s still here. The tree house.’
He put a foot on a trunk that had been cut to form steps and, catching a low branch, pulled himself up to take a look, then disappeared inside.
‘Is it safe?’ she asked, following him. ‘Wow... This is some tree house.’
‘Gary built it for me,’ he said.
‘Gary?’ The floor was solid planks of timber, the roof a thick thatch where swallows had once nested, the sides made from canvas that rolled up. There was a rug and a pile of cushions, faded, torn, chewed or pecked. ‘Why?’
‘His dad worked on the estate. Gamekeeper, gardener, whatever needed to be done. When Gary left school, he became his dad’s assistant and did odd jobs around the estate. One of those odd jobs was to keep me amused during the school holidays. One summer he amused me by building this.’
‘He did a great job.’
‘It was more than a job. He was like an older brother,’ he said. ‘The kind that teaches you all the good stuff. The stuff that adults tell you is bad for you.’