1. Alfie and Emma

“Mr McAlister!”

Alfie McAlister turned to see a small Harry Potter lookalike waving at him energetically. The boy was so slight that Alfie still had difficulty remembering that Noah was now in secondary school. Alfie had always been tall for his age, probably one of the things that stopped him being bullied in the bog-standard comprehensive he went to in London’s East End.

Noah had been an unexpected asset in setting up the community library while he was still in primary school. He turned up every weekday after his lessons until his mother got home from work and virtually ran the children’s section single-handed.

He had been taken under the guidance of Miss Radford-Jones, the redoubtable elderly lady who had allowed the library to be housed in her large mansion. She was particularly insistent on good manners and so Noah refused to call Alfie by his first name, insisting that that would be disrespectful to an adult. Alfie wondered when Noah would stop thinking it was disrespectful. He had a sudden image of himself, stooped with age in an old folks’ home, being visited by Noah who was now either an Oxbridge professor or a detective chief superintendent, but still calling him “Mr McAlister.”

“I haven’t seen you for ages,” said the boy as he caught up with Alfie. “Sorry I can’t get to the library so often, but I’ve got football practice and the chess club and things. And Mum’s given me a key now.”

Alfie had also been brought up by a single mother, but he had been a latch-key kid from an illegally early age. And the extra-curricular activities in his school in the east end of London definitely didn’t include things like football practice and chess. He sometimes found it hard to believe that he was now a multi-millionaire, thanks to the sale of his start-up.

“That’s okay, Noah,” he said. “I’m afraid I haven’t been in the library as much as usual – I’m helping to set up the new local history museum.” No need to say he was underwriting the project.

“And what about the Bunburry Triangle?” asked the small boy, his eyes shining. “Are you and Ms Hopkins and Ms Redwood working on a case at the moment?”

“It’s very quiet, with nothing that needs investigating,” said Alfie. “Liz is getting on with making fudge, and Marge is busy delivering it and doing the accounts.”

“That’s a shame,” said Noah, disappointed. “I might have been able to help.”

His enthusiasm for amateur sleuthing had been boosted by being told he could be an associate member of the Bunburry Triangle. Alfie’s friend Oscar made things worse by suggesting that Noah head up a freelance group called the Bunburry Irregulars, stealing the name from Sherlock Holmes’s band of youthful intelligence agents, the Baker Street Irregulars.

“If anything happens, you’ll be the first to know,” Alfie promised. Then he registered that it was a weekday. “Why aren’t you in school? You’re not skiving off, are you?”

“Of course not.” Noah looked earnest. “I wouldn’t do that. It’s an inset day.”

“A what?”

“A teacher development day. When the teachers have to go in, but we don’t. It would be good if that happened every day.”

“But you like school,” said Alfie, hoping to be reassured.

The small boy frowned. “It’s a bit like the curate’s egg.”

“I’m sorry?” said Alfie.

“It’s an expression that comes from an old cartoon,” said Noah. “Mrs Walters, our English teacher, told us about it. She’s my favourite. The cartoon shows people having a meal, with a bishop saying to the curate, ‘I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg,” and the curate says, ‘Oh no, I assure you that parts of it are excellent.’ So, if you say something’s like the curate’s egg, it means there are a lot of bad things about it.”

Alfie stifled a grin. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “What are the bad things?”

“Some of the teachers are pretty horrible,” said Noah, wrinkling his nose. “Like the history teacher. He’s always shouting at us for no reason. And the janitor’s always shouting as well and blaming us for things we haven’t done. I don’t like Miss Milton either. She’s our PE teacher, and she doesn’t like me because I’m no good at the long jump and the high jump. She only likes the kids who win.”

Alfie was frowning now. Noah wasn’t long-legged enough to excel at these. “That doesn’t sound very fair,” he said.

“It’s not,” said Noah. “But the history teacher always tells us life isn’t fair.”

That was true enough, Alfie thought, but it didn’t sound like a helpful part of the curriculum. Some of his own teachers had been positively brutal, although that was possibly the only way they could try to control a class when half the pupils had absolutely no interest in learning and only wanted to disrupt things. But Noah’s secondary school seemed decent enough, and surely things had improved over the years.

“Is there a counsellor or someone at the school you can talk to about these people?” he asked.

“Oh no, Mr McAlister,” said Noah. “I can talk to my friends, but I can’t talk to anyone else. I’m not a grass.”

That sounded depressingly familiar. Pupils in Alfie’s school had indulged in activities from shop lifting to drug dealing, and being a grass would definitely have led to being beaten up. But it was a completely different thing to protest about staff being unnecessarily authoritarian.

Alfie was about to explain this to Noah when the small boy said: “Is it your birthday?”

Alfie blinked at the unexpected change of topic. “No, it’s not. Why do you ask?”

Noah was peering at him intently. “You just look really happy,” he said. “Sometimes you look a bit sad. So, I wondered if something nice had happened.”

Alfie almost blurted out that Noah was right, something nice had happened. Thankfully, he stopped himself in time.

“I’m glad I look happy,” he said. “That’s a lot better than looking sad.”

“It is,” agreed Noah. “Anyway, I’d better go. I promised Gwendolyn I’d give her a hand in the library. She’s very good with the grown-ups’ bit, but she doesn’t really understand the children’s section.”

“I’m sure she’ll be very grateful for your help,” said Alfie. Gwendolyn, the librarian, almost never looked happy, but that was because she was a Goth, and cheerfulness didn’t fit the image. However, she had blossomed in the role of running the community library, and Alfie was sure she was secretly delighted by its success.

“See you later,” said Noah, heading towards the library.

Alfie set off for the outbuilding which Miss Radford-Jones had allocated to the history museum. It needed significant renovations, and he was keeping an eye on progress.

In light of Noah’s comment, he realised he was smiling. He suspected he had been smiling all morning. Ever since waking up with Emma beside him. He still couldn’t quite believe it. He realised now what a tight rein he had been keeping on his feelings for her, convinced that the age gap between them was too great, and that she found him staid and boring. He had left her sleeping while he went out to buy fresh croissants for breakfast. But when he returned, he discovered that although Emma was now awake, breakfast wasn’t her first priority.

Alfie, cursing himself for being staid and boring but still feeling obliged to ask the question, said: “Don’t you have to go to work? Shouldn’t you go home to change?” Her discarded clothes were the leggings and t-shirt she wore for yoga, not her police uniform.

Emma leant back lazily against the pillows. “Didn’t I tell you? It’s my day off.”

She hadn’t told him, and he briefly wondered whether it was true or if she was pulling a sickie. Could police get away with taking sickies?

It was well after breakfast time when the croissants were finally eaten with farmhouse butter and thick-cut marmalade. And eventually Emma reluctantly decided that she should go home.

“I’ll call you,” she said, picking up her yoga mat and giving Alfie a final kiss. “Thank heavens Dorothy isn’t here. Within half an hour, the whole village would know I was a dirty stop out.”

Dorothy the postwoman delivered as much gossip as mail – possibly more – but had become the subject of gossip herself by embarking on an unlikely romance with Police Sergeant Harold Wilson. Dorothy had confided to Alfie that the sergeant was going to propose marriage to her.

The most common reaction to the relationship from the villagers was that Dorothy needed her head examined. Alfie couldn’t imagine how they would react when they discovered the pair were getting married. And how would they react if they found out about him and Emma? Would they disapprove of the age gap, Alfie being well over a decade older than Emma? At least he had no intention of proposing. He had learned his lesson with Vivian. She had firmly refused to get married, telling him that love should be based on mutual respect, not a legal contract. A marriage certificate, she said, was not just an unnecessary piece of paper, it represented a social construct that subjugated women. Emma was virtually the same age that Vivian would have been. Like her, she was a strong, independent woman and would share her views. Alfie wasn’t going to do anything that could be construed as pressurising her, or...