Fiona Harper Read online

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed hoarsely. ‘Yes, she must be.’

  It seemed that Fern had always had the ability to surprise him, but he was starting to think that this was due to his own blindness rather than any significant change in her. For example, he’d always known she’d had a good sense of humour, but he hadn’t known how cheeky, how grown-up she could be. It fascinated him. What else had he missed about her?

  ‘Josh! Will you stop standing there like a lemon and do something?’

  He grinned back at her. Yeah, he hadn’t reckoned on that bossy streak, but he kind of liked it. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  He walked to the nearest figurehead and took a look. It was a bust of Benjamin Disraeli, so he was pretty sure he hadn’t struck gold yet. He moved on to the next chunk of wood.

  His lack of insight probably had everything to do with the fact that he had been away so much. In his mind, Fern was still the same twenty-year-old who had greeted him softly and calmly at his graduation party. In the same way, until the night of her sixteenth birthday, she’d been the six-year-old with pigtails.

  He’d promised to keep an eye out for her and, in his mind, he’d done that, even if it had been a bit long-distance recently. An image of his mother and father popped into his mind, the sad look in their eyes every time he left for the airport. He didn’t stay put much. Life was easier that way. Only he was starting to realise that life was easier for him that way. Commitment was a lot more comfortable at a safe distance.

  Fern and Josh skidded into the vast marble-floored entrance hall of the Victoria & Albert Museum only to find six other teams crowded round a treasure hunt marshall, pieces of paper waving in their hands. Almost all the teams were talking at the tops of their voices—apart from one couple who were just scratching their heads.

  ‘What is the marshall handing out?’ Fern asked, trying to find an opening in the group. ‘Is it the map?’ She looked down at the red clue clutched in her hand.

  ‘It says we have to find a copy of Henry Beck’s map. What kind of map?’

  Josh wiggled his way further into the crowd, got a sheet of paper from the marshall, then edged his way out again. ‘It says it’s a map of the Underground. The original is in the print library here.’

  She smiled, She’d been commuting for the last ten years and knew the tube network like the back of her hand. This clue was going to be as easy as pie to solve.

  His brow furrowed as he turned the page round for her to get a proper look. ‘Map is rather a loose definition. It’s a copy of a line drawing on a scrap of paper.’

  Ten minutes later they were sitting in the café, wolfing down paninis in an effort to stay well-fuelled and puzzling over the photocopy of the ‘map’. For the purpose of the treasure hunt, printed numbers had been added next to various blobs on the drawing.

  ‘This isn’t really a proper map, is it? It was just a sketch—his original idea to show the stations in relation to each other rather than on a geographical scale.’

  Josh nodded. ‘Little more than a doodle. These blobs on some of the lines must be stations. I’m guessing we’ll have to work out which stations are numbered and visit them, taking pictures, in numerical order. One slip-up, one station wrong, and we’re out of the race.’

  She swallowed a mouthful of mozzarella, tomato and basil panini. ‘That sounds logical. Only—’ she smoothed out the pocket tube map she’d picked up at Charing Cross on the table next to her ‘—it doesn’t look much like this, does it?’

  She squinted at Beck’s doodle, hoping the roughly drawn lines would make a bit more sense if they were slightly out of focus. It was no good. Even blurry, the shapes bore little resemblance to the modern-day map.

  Josh finished his panini and took a sip of cola. ‘To be honest, yesterday was the first time I’d used the tube in years. I’m totally lost with this. I mean, I don’t even remember the map being the way it is now. The circle line has changed shape and there are new extensions everywhere.’

  Fern’s bottle of mineral water was halfway to her mouth. She put it back on the table. ‘I think you may have something there.’

  She and Josh had been like this all day, sparking ideas off each other. Their team dynamic was perfect. They knew each other well enough to trust each other, to know where the other was going with a line of thought, but they were still able to stimulate each other, push each other to think outside the box.

  Doing this treasure hunt was the single most exciting thing she’d done in years. It was pushing her mentally and she was thriving on the challenge. What a pity it only lasted for four days; she could have kept going for weeks, months even.

  Josh was bent over the map, his dark hair just within touching distance. It looked so thick and shiny. She tried very hard to block the next thought, the one whispering in the back of her head that, if Josh was by her side, she might be tempted to do this for ever.

  His eyes flicked up and he caught her staring at him. She blushed.

  ‘You were saying…?’

  Um, yes, she was vaguely aware that she’d been talking, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember what she’d been about to…

  ‘I had something, remember?’

  Once again, at Josh’s stimulus, her brain woke up and began to whirr. She smiled at him. No one else did this to her—fired her up and made her feel as if she were zinging with life.

  He drummed his fingers on the table.

  ‘Oh, sorry! I was going to say that you were on to something about the map changing.’ She prodded the unfolded pocket tube map on the table. ‘If this simple diagram has changed within the last decade, think how different it must be from the first one produced in the Thirties.’

  ‘We need to find the original printed map based on this design.’

  ‘Exactly. Some stations must have closed and others must have been added. We need to find out what’s still the same.’

  They stood up in unison, letting their chairs scrape backwards, and leaving the remains of their lunch on the table. She’d just about finished anyway. Josh picked up his backpack.

  ‘I think I saw something like that in the entrance—on a poster for an exhibition of Modernist design they’re holding here this month. He must’ve been a bit of an original thinker, this Mr Beck.’

  She swung her own bag on to her shoulders. ‘Let’s get going, then.’

  ‘Thank goodness we had all that extra cash from the fruit and veg task,’ Josh said as he handed over two ten pound notes to a uniformed woman and waited for change. ‘The entry to the museum might be free, but they certainly make up for it by charging for the exhibitions.’

  Fern shook her head. ‘We were lucky, that’s all.’

  Josh took the tickets that the woman handed to him and they headed inside the exhibition. ‘Just goes to show that sometimes taking a chance can reap bigger rewards than you’d ever expect.’

  She grunted.

  They found the big poster of the 1939 version of the Underground map easily and, thank goodness, this one was very similar to the pencil lines on the sketch. Once they’d located a few key points it was fairly easy to work out which stations the nameless blobs on the clue were.

  The rest of the afternoon was spent racing other teams in and out of tube stations. All Josh’s competitive juices were flowing at maximum levels. He’d had no idea his home town could be this exciting.

  Fern was also as pumped up as he’d ever seen her. In fact, he could have sworn that before today he’d never seen her do ‘excitable’, but there she was, bouncing from foot to foot as the train sped through the dark tunnels, the tube map clenched in her fist.

  ‘Two more stops,’ she mouthed to him, then, louder, ‘we need to move along a carriage. That way we’ll be in exactly the right place to run straight off the train and into the exit for the Metropolitan line.’ She glanced over her shoulder quickly at a pair of red T-shirts further down the carriage and beckoned for him to come closer. ‘That way we should beat those two to Moorgate.’<
br />
  Fern’s extensive knowledge of the tube network had been invaluable this afternoon, he thought, as at the next stop they jumped out and moved along one carriage. Her memory was amazing, practically photographic. He couldn’t be one hundred per cent sure, but he guessed that they’d leap-frogged over enough teams to now be in the top five. Everything seemed to be going their way finally.

  When the doors opened they were ready. They burst out of the train and ran straight into the exit tunnel for the Metropolitan line, just as Fern had predicted. They darted up a flight of stairs that led—after a journey through a minor labyrinth—to the next platform. A train was sitting there, its alarm pinging, warning that the doors were just about to close. They looked at each other and dived for the carriage, slipping inside just as there was a hissing noise and a rumble and the doors slid shut.

  It was getting close to rush hour now and the carriages were getting progressively more crowded. This one, in the centre of the train, was full enough for them to be pressed against the doors. Fern wiggled round to see out of the window and giggled. ‘Look!’

  He turned too and found himself pressed up against her, front to front. Don’t think about it, he warned himself, and looked where she was pointing. A chuckle burst out of his mouth. The team they’d been racing against were frantically banging on the illuminated button to make the door open, but it was too late. The engine whined and they moved forward with a jolt.

  Heaven help him, the hormones were back. And this time he was pretty sure they’d come with reinforcements. He and Fern were fully clothed, for goodness’ sake, and only just touching. She was pressed up against his chest and her scent was filling his nostrils. So close. He could see the wide blackness of her pupils and the faint colour in her cheeks.

  If it wasn’t his hormones, it was some strange genetic kick-back because, right at this moment, he felt almost compelled to drag her into his arms and make her his, like some caveman.

  ‘Well, this is cosy.’ He did his best to keep his voice low and nonchalant.

  ‘Yes.’ Fern took a deep breath and the heat in her cheeks increased. She knew without a doubt they’d just darkened to a rather obvious shade of pink.

  To make matters worse, every time the train juddered on its rails they brushed against each other. There was no way she could ignore it. As her torso slid across his it detonated tiny electric shocks that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. Every time she got close to imagining she was pressed up against something else—something neutral, like a cushion or a pillow—the train threw them off balance again and a whole rush of tingles travelled up her nerve endings to her brain, screaming all the way that it was Josh she was touching, Josh she was rubbing up against, Josh whose lips she could imagine brushing past her ear lobes, trailing down her neck…

  Stop it! You are just making things worse for yourself.

  On Monday morning she would be back in her stale old job, visiting the same old coffee shop for lunch and Josh would be gone. Their lives were so different that their paths only ever intersected briefly. Okay, he might stick around for a few weeks because of his dad, but eventually he’d be gone. He’d leave her behind again.

  She turned to look out of the window. The only things visible were bunches of cables fixed to the wall of the tunnel, illuminated now and then by the bright lights of a passing train.

  ‘So you do it every day, huh?’

  This? What did he mean? And it sounded conspicuously as if he was making conversation. Since when had Josh resorted to small talk with her? She looked back at him quizzically, feeling the skin above her brows wrinkle.

  ‘I don’t think I could stand commuting,’ he said.

  Oh, of course. He was talking about taking the tube. For a minute there she hadn’t the foggiest what he’d been going on about. Her normal life—her job, her parents, even Lisette and the dithering Simon—seemed like another life, one that had taken place on a far-away planet in another dimension.

  He’d been back in her life for less than forty-eight hours, yet it was almost impossible to believe there’d be a time when Josh wouldn’t be beside her, racing along crowded streets, skidding through quiet museum hallways. These few days, this treasure hunt, had become everything that mattered.

  Nothing was real but the feeling of his hand in hers as they raced from place to place, his smile when they cracked a clue, that intense way he looked at her sometimes, as if he were trying to look right through her. These were the things she lived and breathed for now. The treasure hunt had become its own little world, a bubble of super-charged life.

  She closed her eyes and let a cold rush of reality flood through her. This bubble had to be popped—mentally, at least.

  If there was one certainty in this world, it was that Josh would go. It was who he was. And she needed to keep that sharp little fact in the forefront of her mind.

  Josh would go. He would.

  Which made him far too dangerous to fall in love with.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THEY found themselves standing in the ticket hall of Holborn station for a third time. Fierce-faced commuters pushed past and flowed round them. Josh looked on as Fern slapped her photocopy of the tube map ‘doodle’ in frustration.

  ‘We’ve tried every platform in this station and nowhere does it say where we can get to Aldwych. What are these treasure hunt people playing at?’

  He drew her to one side of the ticket hall, out of the way of a woman with a vicious-looking trolley case. ‘Are you sure we’re in the right place?’

  She nodded vigorously. ‘It was quite clear on that map at the V&A and, anyway, I remember going there when I was a child to visit Dad at work. For a few years he had an office there. There was a little connecting track, a branch line, that went from Holborn to Aldwych and back again.’

  Now she mentioned it, he could remember the tail-like line on the map in the museum. He turned the map in Fern’s hand round to get a better look. There it was again, clear as day.

  Another treasure hunt team, the one they least wanted to see—Aidan and Kate—came dashing up the escalator. He and Fern were losing their lead. If they didn’t get a move on now they’d be out of the race. He turned on the spot, looking for inspiration, a sign, a map…anything.

  A map! He ran over to the poster-sized tube map on the wall. The little dark blue spur and Aldwych station were missing from the Piccadilly line. ‘Fern! Over here.’ He pressed his finger on to the map. ‘It’s disappeared.’

  She looked at the map, then back at him, clearly worried. ‘That’s impossible! It can’t have just vanished!’

  He stared hard at the blank space on the map. ‘No,’ he said slowly and leaned in close so the other team having a conflab at the top of the escalator couldn’t hear, ‘but they could have closed it down.’ He lifted his eyebrows and waited.

  Her eyes widened. ‘You’re right! I have a vague memory of a news story…oh, years ago.’

  He steered her casually to the barrier and they touched their tickets to the pad so it whooshed open. Once on the other side, he tried to give a good impression of being ‘clueless’. The other team were watching them closely and he didn’t want to give anything away.

  A man in uniform was standing to one side and they approached him. He let Fern talk. She was so sweet and unassuming that people just fell over themselves to help her. Like him, really.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Did he notice a little flutter of the eyelashes there? She was really working it.

  ‘Am I right in thinking Aldwych station is no longer in operation?’

  The guard’s gruff demeanour melted. ‘That’s right, love.’

  ‘So we can’t get a train there?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not since 1994, but the station’s still there. It gets used for filming and such. Last thing they did there was…oh, what was it called? Some period drama. I’ll get it in a—’

  ‘Thank you.’ Fern beamed at him. ‘Thank you so much.’
/>
  They grinned at each other and were about to dash out of the exit when they spotted Kate and Aidan edging their way. Blooming cheek.

  ‘I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want those two riding our coat tails. We worked this one out and they haven’t done anything but stand there and eavesdrop.’

  Fern looked across at Kate and narrowed her eyes. ‘What do you have in mind?’

  ‘I think we should head down the escalator. They’ll think we’ve got a juicy tip from the guard and follow us, at which point we’ll double back, lose them and proceed as planned.’