Bone and Cane Read Online Free

far more than they did in the alleged victim of injustice. If Ed committed new crimes, people would hold Sarah responsible. And rightly so.

3
    Q uaglino’s was half empty, which suited Sarah fine. She told Jasper March about Donald Dewar’s offer of the week before.
    ‘He gave me until yesterday. I thought of discussing it with my agent. The local party probably would have let me go, wished me well, all that. But they wouldn’t have meant it and I’d have hated myself for ever. So I called him and said that I was staying in Nottingham West.’
    ‘You did the right thing,’ Jasper March told Sarah, then drained his espresso. ‘I can see the decision’s starting to eat away at you. Don’t let it. Once you show the whips you’ll put ambition over everything else, they’ve got you.’
    ‘That’s reassuring,’ Sarah said.
    They were on after-dinner brandies. March, ten years her senior, was an old fashioned Tory with old-fashioned good looks: square jaw, jet black hair, not too much tummy. Their conversation had been absorbing enough for the food to be of secondary importance. They’d had two bottles of Madiran: a complex, tannin-rich wine that complemented the game they’d eaten. Jasper had drunk more than her, but only a little. Sarah was pissed enough to be relaxed. Pissed enough to fancy him a little, even though he was too smooth to be her type. She’d been surprised when he asked her to dinner.
    Jasper hadn’t given the slightest hint of flirtation all evening, so she was probably safe from making a drunken fool of herself. She could count the number of men she’d slept with after drinking too much on the fingers of one hand. All three she regretted. Jasper was a barrister, she reminded herself, searching for something to talk about.
    ‘Do you still practise?’
    ‘No need to practise. I’m pretty good at it by now.’
    She forced a smile. Jasper had made it clear to her that his marriage was over, that he would divorce after the election regardless of whether he held his seat. So maybe he was flirting, in a cack-handed way.
    ‘I meant the law.’
    ‘Not since I joined the government. But I’ll keep my hand in – when – I mean if – we get shown the door. Politics isn’t the be-all-and-end-all. Why do you ask?’
    ‘Oh, nothing.’ A waiter returned with Jasper’s credit card. ‘Why did you ask . . . me out to dinner, I mean,’ Sarah said, as the minister helped her on with her coat. ‘I got the impression you had a specific thing you wanted to discuss with me.’
    ‘I did have an excuse worked out,’ Jasper said, with a rehearsed chuckle. ‘Do you know, I can’t for the life of me remember what it was.’
    It didn’t matter how pissed she was, or how long it had been since she had had a shag, Sarah would not sleep with Jasper tonight. But she decided not to rule out the possibility of sleeping with him in the future. When he put an arm around her waist as they were leaving the restaurant, she didn’t remove it. She didn’t quite reciprocate either, only leant into him enough to let him see that his attentions weren’t entirely unwelcome. Then the flashbulbs started going off.
    Twenty minutes later, when she got back to her one-bedroom retreat in Parliament View, she rang Dan.
    ‘I thought I ought to warn you, there’ll be some press sniffing around tomorrow. They might even try to get to you at work.’
    She explained what had happened with Jasper March.
    ‘You don’t waste much time, do you? I only moved out yesterday.’
    ‘He said he wanted advice, not a date. Or a beard for the tabloids.’
    ‘They won’t get to me, but thanks for the warning. You ought to tell Winston.’
    Winston was Sarah’s electoral agent. She poured herself a pint of water before getting into bed. It was a double bed, though Dan had rarely come over from Nottingham to share it with her. His social-work job kept him there in the week and often left him drained at the weekends. They had been