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For once she was pleased to feel him looming at her back. ‘This is Mr Tremaine, from my insurance company—’ began Emily.
‘Ethan West.’ Ethan reached around her to offer a powerful handshake.
The insurance man’s eyes widened in recognition of the name, his manner turning from slightly supercilious to deferential.
‘No problem,’ he said hurriedly. ‘I was just giving Miss West some forms I forgot to give her earlier—’
Emily felt the sudden tension in the body behind her an instant before he interrupted: ‘Quest. Her
name is Quest, not West.’
The man looked flustered at the terse correction. ‘D-did I say West?’ he stuttered. ‘A slip of the tongue—I meant to say, Miss Quest still needs to itemise some of the things for the claim—’
‘That your car over there?’
Tremaine glanced over his shoulder to the nondescript blue car parked on the other side of the road.
‘Yes, I—’
‘You were waiting there when we arrived.’
Emily hadn’t even noticed. The fact he hadn’t immediately got out of his car and approached them made it very likely that he had been hanging back to see what they were up to.
He and Ethan made a fine pair of spies, she thought in disgust.
‘I knew Miss Quest was coming back,’ Tremaine was saying stiffly, ‘and since I had another appointment in the area I decided to wait.’
Probably an appointment with one of the curtain-twitchers of the neighbourhood, Emily decided, if indeed there was an appointment at all.
Ethan moved around her and twitched the papers out of her hand, his dark head bent as he rifled the pages. ‘Couldn’t you have faxed these?’
Tremaine cast Emily an accusing look. ‘The temporary address Miss Quest gave us didn’t list a fax number.’
‘Well, she’s now staying somewhere that does.’ Ethan shot off a number with machine-gun precision that had Tremaine’s stubby fingers scrabbling for a pen from the pocket protector in his shirt. ‘Once she faxes these back to you, what happens?’
Instead of humming and hawing the way he did whenever Emily had asked for details of her case, Tremaine launched into a description of the delays that had dogged the investigation, not appearing to notice he was spilling client-privileged information in the process.
‘It was unfortunate that the late Mr Quest forgot to renew his existing policy,’ he finished with a self-righteous pomposity that made Emily clench her fists at her sides, ‘and then signed an indemnity rather than replacement policy when he took the new one out, without the proper valuation being in place—’
‘Which was surely the responsibility of your company?’ inserted Ethan smoothly, shuffling off the unfortunate Mr Tremaine shortly thereafter, having milked him dry of his stammering explanations.
Except for the pleasure of seeing the little man routed, Emily fumed at having been relegated to a spectator in her own affairs. She retrieved her papers and was prepared to deliver a sharp rebuff if Ethan attempted to discuss anything that Tremaine had said, but his thoughtful silence was almost worse than being peppered with questions as they got to work, fitting the remainder of her possessions into the capacious boot of his car with room to spare.
Only when they were getting back on the road did Ethan refer to the unexpected encounter.
‘Does that happen to you very often?’ he murmured.
Emily swivelled in her seat, spoiling for a fight. ‘Does what happen?’
‘People calling you West, rather than Quest.’
That took the wind out of her sails, until she realised what he was implying.
‘No! And nor would Tremaine if you hadn’t squeezed his hand like a tube of toothpaste and intimidated him with your bark. I don’t have to trade on anybody else’s name—I’m proud to be a Quest!’
She brooded all the way back to the house, this time managing to keep her comments restricted to a biting minimum.
To her relief, Ethan seemed lost in his own thoughts, content to listen to the radio, apparently no longer in any hurry to corner her with more ruthless interrogations.
