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her understand that he just wasn’t interested in her. In the end he said the only way to get her to accept the truth was for her to see him with me. Luckily that seems to have worked.’
    When he’d heard the passionate intensity in his sister’s voice Brough had known that it wouldn’t be a good idea to give her his own opinion of Julian Cox. Certainly the man seemed to be very attractive to the female sex, if the number of women’s names he peppered his conversation with were anything to go by.
    No, he wasn’t looking forward to this evening one little bit, Brough acknowledged grimly—and he owed Nan a visit as well.
    Nan, their maternal grandmother, was coming up for eighty but was still fit and active and very much a part of the small Cotswold community where she lived, and thinking of her reminded Brough of something he had to do.
    His grandmother had in her glass-fronted corner cabinet a delicate hand painted porcelain teapot, together with all that was left of the original service which went with it. It had been a wedding present passed on to her and Gramps by her own grandparents, and Brough knew that it was one of her long-held wishes that somehow the teaset might be completed. Brough had tried his best over the years, but it was not one of the famous or well-known makes and it had proved impossible to track down any of the missing pieces. The only avenue left to him, according to the famous china manufacturers Hartwell, whom he had visited in Staffordshire, was for him to buy new pieces of a similar style and have them hand-painted to match the antique set.
    ‘The original manufacturers we amalgamated with produce a small range of antique china in the same style, but unfortunately we do not produce either that colour nor the intricate detail of the landscapes painted into the borders,’ the sympathetic Hartwell director had told him. ‘And whilst we could supply you with the correct shape of china I’m afraid that you would have to find someone else to paint it for you. Our people here have the skill but not, I’m afraid, the time, and I have to tell you that your grandmother’s set would be extremely time consuming to reproduce. From what you’ve shown me I suspect that each of the tea plates probably carried a different allegorical figure from Greek mythology in its borders, so your painter would have to be extremely innovative as well as extremely skilled. Your best bet might be someone who already works on commission—paints and enamels and that kind of thing.’
    And he had suggested to Brough that he get in touch with a particularly gifted student they had had working with them during her university days. No one had been more surprised than Brough when he had tracked down the young woman in question only to find she lived and worked in Rye-on-Averton.
    The telephone number and the young woman’s name were written down on a piece of paper on his desk. First thing in the morning he intended to get in touch with her. Time was running out; his grandmother’s eightieth birthday was not very far away and he desperately wanted to be able to present her with the missing items from the teaset as a surprise gift.
    Although his grandmother hadn’t been able to take on Eve full time after their parents’ deaths—her husband had been very ill with Parkinson’s disease at the time—she had nevertheless always been there for them, always ready to offer a wise heart and all her love whenever Brough had needed someone to turn to for advice. She had a shrewd business brain too, and she had been the one to encourage Brough to set up his first business, backing him not just emotionally but financially as well.
    She still took a strong interest in current affairs, and Brough suspected she would be as dismayed by Eve’s choice of suitor as he was himself.
    And tonight Eve was expecting him to put aside his real feelings and to pretend that he was enjoying Julian Cox’s company, and no doubt, for her sake, he