Fran shifted to be able to see Johnny better, her frown deepening. He was bandying the word ‘we’ around without a second thought, as though Fran’s desire to keep an eye out for Red had turned into a team sport.
With the whisky drained, Johnny put his tumbler down, the remnants of some very determined ice cubes chinking against the glass.
‘Or maybe that will make it more difficult to find him. Maybe he’ll be harder to find if he’s out hunting.’ Johnny sighed. ‘I’m no cat expert, as you can tell.’
Fran smiled, her frown dissipating. ‘Me neither. I just wanted to help the little guy, that’s all.’
‘Well then.’ Johnny stood and waited for her to do the same. ‘We’d better get searching.’
Chapter 10
They began their search for Red in the car park. On Johnny’s insistence they double-checked around the vehicles, and in the vicinity of the bushes he’d checked out earlier. Portraying himself as a complete cat novice, he suggested he might have missed a vital clue, but no sign of the cat meant it wasn’t long before they began to trail their way through the gardens. Fran suggested they search away from the manicured formal areas, making the assumption it would be easier for Red to conceal himself in one of the large banks of lavender and the borders filled with ornamental grasses.
It wasn’t until dusk bade its final farewells and the dark determination of the night took over that Fran realised she hadn’t thought to bring a torch. She didn’t even have a torch – funnily enough it wasn’t one of the items she’d thought to include when she’d packed for what should have been a lazy week lounging by the chateau pool.
‘If I’m being honest, I’m struggling to see anything useful, now,’ Johnny said. He sounded disappointed, then brightened. ‘Hang on, phone app.’
A weak beam illuminated a border, fronds of a tall grass swaying in the LED beam from his phone.
‘We can give up if you want,’ Fran said, swiping at her own phone to find its torch and adding the beam to Johnny’s.
‘Hell no,’ Johnny replied. Fran could see his grin in the failing light. ‘I haven’t felt this cool for weeks. I’m loving it out here. Never mind the cat, I think I might turn nocturnal until this heatwave passes.’
Fran agreed with him, the drop in temperature now the sun had gone was very welcome.
‘It’s a shame they close the pool at night,’ Johnny said, his torch sweeping the grassy border. ‘I reckon a swim right about now and then a stint on a sun lounger – or perhaps that would make it a moon lounger – would be fantastic.’
Fran noticed the beam of her own torch tremble at the thought of him in the pool. An image of him, pulling himself from the water and padding across to a lounger, flooded Fran’s brain and did strange things to the base of her stomach. She did her best to shake the image from her mind.
‘I might even feel cold. Do you remember that?’ Johnny asked.
‘Remember what?’ His question caught her off-guard.
‘Feeling cold. Wanting to put on a jumper. Hot drinks in front of an open fire. Winter …’ He sounded wistful.
‘I love walking along the beach in the winter. When the sea’s broiling and crashing, it’s so windy the seagulls can hardly hold out their wings and you can taste the salt in the air.’
‘You live near the sea?’
‘I grew up in Lyme Regis.’
‘I think I went there once when I was a kid. Great big curving harbour wall and loads of fossils, is that the place?’
‘Did you go out to the ammonite pavement? It’s a bit of a walk from the main seafront, but it’s so worth it. I used to spend ages out there when I was young, making up all sorts of stories as to why so many ammonites ended up fossilised there.’
‘Ammonite apocalypse – that sort of thing?’ Johnny swung his torch beam around, then apologised when she shielded her eyes from the glare before he turned the light back onto the plants.
‘Funnily enough, some of my imaginings were a bit apocalyptic. Ammonite family picnic gone wrong, ammonite stampede,ammonite on the town turned bad.’ She grinned in the darkness, wondering if he would notice her play on words.
‘Ammonite on the town?’
Fran heard his stifled laughter, and it made her grin even broader. ‘I had a fertile imagination when I was a child, what can I say?’
‘And a decent sense of humour too, it sounds like. Was it just you, or did you have brothers and sisters to help you sculpt your tales of ammonite picnic massacres?’
‘Just me. It was always just me and my mum.’ She remembered her formative years, wondering why she had no father. The clashes she’d had with her mother when she’d asked who he was, and her mother wouldn’t discuss him past telling her they were better off without him. Her later, more adult, reasoning that perhaps her mum had suffered some kind of an attack, maybe had become pregnant against her wishes, and that was why she wouldn’t talk about it. That thought had been enough to make Fran stop asking.
‘Is your mum still in Lyme Regis?’
