CHAPTER ONE
Suzie Harris was on a mission.
She wasn't sure she'd be able to see it through. In fact, she knew the chance of failure was high, but she was going to give it her best shot. She was going to try to sit through a Marlow town council planning meeting.
Suzie hated meetings, and the idea of a planning meeting seemed even more impossibly boring, but she'd recently come up with a ruse to make a financial killing, and she figured she'd need allies on the planning committee. So she'd decided to attend one of their meetings to discover who the key personalities were, how they made their decisions, and—most importantly—if any of them could be bullied into looking favorably on any application she later submitted.
The meeting was being held in the town council, a pretty Georgian house that overlooked the River Thames by Higginson Park. The entrance was a highly polished black door that wouldn't have looked out of place on Downing Street, and while most of the two-story building was set aside as office space, it also contained an old debating chamber that was still used for formal meetings. Entering it, any visitor found themselves standing on a viewing gallery for spectators with a few steps that led down to a large room that contained half a dozen desks, filing cabinets along the walls, and a serving hatch that opened onto a little kitchenette. On the far wall, the town's coat of arms of a swan captured in chains was carved into a wooden shield that looked down on proceedings. Like the town of Marlow itself, the debating chamber managed to be both grand and pocket-sized at the same time.
On this occasion, a screen and projector had been set up beneath the coat of arms so the committee could better inspect the planning applications as they worked through the agenda. Suzie, having arrived nice and early, was sitting in the little gallery with a notebook and pen ready to write thumbnail sketches of the council members, detailing their strengths and—more importantly—any potential weaknesses she could exploit.
The first person to arrive was a man in his fifties who was wearing a pin-striped suit, a blue shirt, and a sky-blue silk tie with pink dots on it. He was broad shouldered, had plenty of swagger about him, and his smile was so natural and effortless that Suzie found her heart give a little skip.
"You here for the planning meeting?" he asked.
"That's right," Suzie said, before reminding herself that she wasn't in fact a schoolgirl who found men attractive just because they had a sharp jawline. As he squeezed past her and trotted down the stairs to the chamber below, he lifted his elbows to show how very fit he was, before striding over to a desk where there was a pile of printouts already waiting.
"Are you here for a particular application?" he asked.
It was only at that moment that Suzie realized she hadn't worked out a cover story for her presence.
"Yup," she said, if only to buy herself time.
"Which one?"
"I'm sorry?"
"If you've got interest in a particular case, it's important we hear what you have to say. What application are you connected to?"
"You know," Suzie said, desperately extemporizing, "the one...on the...the main road. The big house—I mean, it's not all that big at the moment, but the owners want it to be...you know, bigger."
Even ever-optimistic Suzie could see that her cack-handed explanation had confused the man, but before he could ask any follow-up questions, the door opened and a woman entered. She was about sixty years old, and whereas the man seemed to radiate goodwill, this new arrival, Suzie thought, seemed to suck the joy out of the air as she looked about herself. Her manner reminded Suzie of all the many dry-as-dust teachers who'd been disappointed with her at school.
"'But soft,'" the man called up from the chamber below, "'what light from yonder window breaks?'"
"Don't be facetious," the woman snapped, before wrinkling her nose as she squeezed past Suzie. "Sorry, do you mind?" she said.
"Not at all," Suzie said, already deciding that she didn't like the woman. She struck her as the sort of person who knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing—and the cost would always be "too much."
