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‘She’s been invited to a birthday party.’
‘Does she want to go?’
‘Why wouldn’t she? Of course she wants to go.’
‘Sarah can take her. She is too young to stay at one alone.’
‘You sent her off to walk to the cottage on her own. It would have taken her six and a half hours at her speed.’
‘It would have been character building. I let her take a map.’
‘She’s three!’
‘Ack, you are deliberately misstating the facts for your own advantage as usual. I had Hannibal following her.’
‘Yes, but she didn’t know that, did she? Anyway, Sarah can take her, but it’s a sleepover after, so she’ll—’
‘No.’
‘I’ve already said she could—’
‘And I’ve just said no.’ Tricky. Very tricky. Molly wasn’t his daughter, and thus Ben was technically the only one who could say what she did or didn’t do, but he knew Ben would never point this out or use it against him. Possibly because there were now three of them sharing the same hyphen. ‘She’s too young, Ben.’
‘They’re nice people. There are other girls going.’
‘No.’
‘Didn’t you ever go on sleepovers?’
Aleksey actually laughed and relaxed enough to take some wine. It made the glass look depressingly depleted. ‘I did once. Nikolas was invited many times to his friends. They liked him.’
Ben frowned, fork poised. ‘He was invited but…’
Aleksey shrugged. ‘We were identical. So I went in his place once. I knew all his friends, of course, just as well as he did, so it wasn’t hard.’
‘He just let you...go instead?’
‘Oh, no. There was a battle. For about five seconds until I locked him in the garden pavilion overnight. Ack, he probably enjoyed it. Gave him time to practise some tunnel digging.’
‘Didn’t your mother wonder where he was, or you, I mean?’
This puzzled him and he replied, ‘She never knew where we were. Anyway, Molly can’t go.’ Ben’s mouth opened to argue, and Aleksey added swiftly, ‘Would you let someone take Radulf overnight into a house he didn’t know and people he was unfamiliar with, who you did not know at all, and who might be…vivisectionists?’
‘Vivisectionists. On Dartmoor.’
‘Absolutely. In case you have forgotten, PB came back bloodied around his neck where he fought restraint, and he was bitten. And we do not know if those bites were animal, do we? Radulf thinks he was taken by vivisectionists.’
Ben was chewing slowly. ‘I don’t think they bite animals. They experiment on them.’
‘So, there, you agree with me. We are not letting Molly go somewhere where we would not even risk a dog who has no value, because even a shelter surrendered him to people who wanted to lose him. Now, please let me concentrate on these stalks. Did I ever tell you about the uses of bark in prison? I am reminded of those days.’
* * *
Chapter Seven
When Ben had cleared the table, he came over and stood alongside Aleksey’s chair, angling his lean body against a firm shoulder. They both knew that if he were not broken, Ben would be straddling him and urgent.
‘Hot tub?’
