He glanced across at her. ‘D’you want to talk about it? The investigation, I mean? It must be hard having to keep it all to yourself.’
‘Not tonight,’ she said softly.
‘In which case. Can you smell that?’
Rachel sniffed the air. ‘Fish and chips!’
Adam grinned impishly. ‘I will if you will,’ he said.
‘Only if they have mushy peas.’
They each bought cod and chips and walked back up the road, eating as they went.
‘I’d have had you down as a health freak,’ said Rachel.
‘Me? I’d better have a stern word with my PR.’
Rachel giggled. ‘Why didn’t we do this sooner?’ she said.
‘Do what? Eat chips?’
‘No, spend time together, get on as friends.’
‘I always got the impression you thought I was a knob,’ grinned Adam.
‘You are a knob,’ she laughed, throwing a chip at him. ‘Just not a total knob.’
He looked at her for a long moment. ‘Come on,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘I want to show you something.’
He led her through a maze of back streets until Rachel had completely lost her sense of direction.
‘Adam, where are you taking me?’
He stopped outside a honey-stone building with a crest carved over the door. ‘Here.’
‘What’s this? Whose is it?’
He took a set of keys out of his pocket and jangled them. ‘Mine.’
‘Yours?’
‘Well, the company’s. Oxford has a huge tourist industry but very few hotels actually in the town centre.’
Rachel looked up dubiously at the dusty windows. ‘It’s a hotel?’
‘No, not yet. The lawyers tell me that it won’t be too difficult to get the planning permission, but I’m still a bit nervous.’
‘You? Nervous?’ She smiled.
‘Come on, I want to show you inside,’ he said, rattling a key into the lock and opening the door.
Rachel had been expecting something grand, like most other hotels she’d seen, but it was just a normal hallway.
‘You’re disappointed,’ said Adam.
‘No, actually. I quite like that it could just be a house from the street and then you open the door and – it is. Like it’s your home away from home.’
‘No ordinary home, though,’ he said, leading her down the corridor, past what looked like a cosy drawing room and up to a wooden door. ‘What do you think?’