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know, and they will. You heard Charles tonight. It’s going to be a slow road back to politics, whatever happens with this book. And in the meantime we can focus on our new life here. This house, the Swell Valley. It’s a new chapter for all of us.’
    I hope so , thought Annabel. I really hope so. But if this was day one of their new life: deranged neighbours wandering into the kitchen, Eddie inviting agents for supper, Milo getting rusticated again and reporters slavering outside the door like a pack of wolves, she had her doubts. They hadn’t even bumped into David Carlyle yet, but that was bound to happen. On a clear day you could see Hinton golf course from Riverside Hall’s attic windows.

    ‘Goodnight, Eddie.’ She let go of his hand and rolled over.
    Eddie kissed the back of her head tenderly.
    ‘Goodnight, my darling. It’s good to be home.’

CHAPTER THREE
    Laura Baxter watched the raindrops shudder their way down the grimy train window as the 5.02 p.m. from Victoria hurtled through the Sussex countryside. For once she didn’t feel tired. Ever since she’d gone back to work, she’d been operating in a permanent fog of exhaustion, what with Luca still waking in the night and the long commute, not to mention the poisonous politics of the TV world. But today, none of that mattered.
    She’d had an idea for a show. A bloody brilliant idea, if she did say so herself. She could hardly wait to talk to Gabe about it.
    Ironically, it was the argument with Bill Clempson and his merry band of ramblers that had inspired her, although the idea itself had come to her in the midst of a disastrous meeting at Television Centre this morning. Sisters , a dark comedy drama that Laura had been working on with an old friend from the Beeb, and which looked certain to be green-lit a few weeks ago, had suddenly been binned by the powers-that-be at ITV drama.

    ‘But you loved the pilot,’ Laura protested. ‘Jim Rose said it was the most original thing he’d seen since Sherlock .’
    ‘It’s a great show,’ the commissioning editor agreed. ‘It’s just not quite the tone we’re looking for at the moment.You mustn’t take these things so personally.’
    The problem was, Laura strongly suspected it was personal. John Bingham, Laura’s long-term lover before she met and married Gabe, was out to get her. John had been head of Drama at the BBC when Laura first met him – charismatic, powerful, charming and married; unhappily so, according to him. Laura was young, impressionable and madly in love. It wasn’t until she got pregnant and John callously cut her off, crawling back to his wife and torching Laura’s career for good measure, that the scales had fallen from her eyes.
    It all felt like a lifetime ago now. After she lost John’s baby, Laura had moved back to Fittlescombe and met Gabe; the rest was history. She hadn’t given John Bingham a moment’s thought in years. Until family finances had forced her to go back to work and she’d discovered that, in the interim, Bingham had risen to become one of the most powerful men in the whole of British television. Now at ITV, where he’d sent the drama ratings through the roof and was considered little short of a god, John Bingham could make or break the careers of writers and producers with a nod or shake of his balding head.
    He’d actually got in touch with Laura when she first went back to work, inviting her to a swanky, intimate lunch at the Oxo Tower ‘for old times’ sake’. Laura had been shocked by how old he looked – how old he was. The fit, rugged fifty-year-old she remembered was now over sixty, with a pronounced paunch and saggy, bulldog jowls that quivered when he laughed. How was I ever attracted to him? she thought, as he boasted about his success, bemoaned his marriage and assured her how bad he felt about ‘that business with the baby’ and how glad he was that it was all ‘water under the bridge’.

    ‘Do let me know if I can help in any