The Legacy: Trouble Comes Disguised As Family (Unspoken Book 2) T. Belshaw (management books to read .txt) 📖

on the van if we need it.’ He walked to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Okay if I go up?’

Jess nodded.

Ten minutes later, Jess walked upstairs to find Wade sitting on her new bed, typing furiously on the laptop. She stood by the bedroom door and coughed. Wade jumped as though he had been given an electric shock. He recovered his composure immediately.

‘Made me jump… Nearly done. The signal wasn’t great in here, so I’m just optimising the Wi-Fi.’

‘Sorry,’ replied Jess with a little laugh. ‘Optimise away.’

Wade finished typing, then carrying the laptop in front of him again, walked around the bedroom, watching the screen closely. At the doorway he stopped. ‘Excuse me, I just need to do the landing.’

Jess moved out of the way and the engineer walked slowly out. ‘I’ve already done the other bedrooms, what’s in here?’

He stopped at a heavy, white painted door.

‘The attic,’ Jess replied.

‘Am I all right to go up? If you get a signal there, you’ll get one anywhere.’

Jess nodded. ‘The door at the top is locked though.’

Wade opened the door and stomped up the bare wooden steps.

‘There’s a very good signal here,’ he called.

‘Fabulous,’ said Jess as his heavy, boot clad feet stomped back down again. He pointed back up the stairs.

‘Try it inside the attic. These Q boxes are very powerful.’

‘I erm, don’t intend to spend a lot of time in there… not just yet anyway…. It’s a bit creepy,’ she confided.

‘You never know, you might want to turn it into a home office one of these days,’ he replied.

Jess shuddered at the memory of the short time she had spent in the loft, shook her head and standing aside to allow the installer to get by, she closed the door behind him.

Back in the lounge, Wade placed the laptop carefully on the lion’s foot coffee table, filled in a log sheet and passed it to Jess to sign.

‘All done. I’ll leave you a card in case you need anything, I’m a freelance installer, not tied to Sky, so I can drop in whenever I’m needed.’ Wade handed her a copy of the log sheet with the business card, and let himself out. Jess stood on the doorstep while he loaded his tools into his van.

‘Look, erm, Jessica, was it? If ever you feel lonely, or if you fancy a drink one night, just give me a ring.’ He grinned and with a cheery, ‘have a lovely day,’ he climbed into his van, reversed into the lane and with his radio blaring, sped away.

Half an hour later, Gordon, the satellite installer called her in for a quick demonstration of her new Q box service.

‘I usually do the lot,’ he said, ‘I was surprised to see Wade here too.’

‘They might have sent him out because of the remote location,’ said Jess. ‘I don’t know when the phone line was last tested.’

‘Oh, I’m not complaining,’ Gordon replied. ‘Less work for me. I can get onto the next one now. I think it’s an admin cock up though.’

‘Well, I’m not going to complain either,’ said Jess. ‘I’m just happy to have everything up and running so quickly.’

After Gordon’s departure, Jess walked through to the kitchen to find Harry picking up his brochures. ‘I’ll leave you this one,’ he said, pointing to the one he had shown her. ‘The quote is on top. Just ring if you decide to accept and we’ll set things in motion. It will take a few weeks to get the stuff made, installation should only take a few days.’

Jess picked up the quotation and whistled.

‘Phew, you were right about it not being cheap.’

‘You get what you pay for. The new one will last you for many a year.’

Jess showed him out, then made lunch and settled down on the sofa to test out the newly installed satellite TV channels. She logged into her Netflix account, saved the details, then watched an episode of The Crown, while she ate her lunch. Sam texted as she was eating.

How’s the installation? Are we Netflixed up yet?

Watching The Crown as I type, replied Jess.

I’ll nip over on Saturday afternoon with wine.

Oops, sorry, I’m out on Saturday with Bradley, my lawyer. He’s got a surprise for me.

I bet he has. Sam sent a wicked devil emoji.

Jess snorted. I think you’re confusing me with someone who has little control over their underwear.

Go for it, Missis, he sounds delicious.

Jess smiled as she ended the messaging session with a wink emoji.

Speak later, need to organise house warming before the new kitchen is installed.

Jess, as a writer, refused to use the shorthand text method and Sam knew that it annoyed her so kept it to a minimum herself.

After lunch, Jess checked her emails, downloading the contract for the new magazine articles and replying to the responses to the queries she’d sent out. Walking through to the kitchen she picked up Alice’s memoir from the table and skim read a couple of entries, before picking up her notepad and scribbling, Sept 1939 across a new page. She sat down at the table and began to make notes as she read.

September 1939

At eleven o’clock on Sunday September 3rd 1939, I opened up the kitchen for the farmworkers to enable them to hear an historic speech from our Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, or The Undertaker, as Amy had renamed him. Not all the lads worked on Sundays, some were rostered to tend the animals, milk the cows etc and I called them in when I heard the BBC inform us that there was going to be a speech of national importance.

We had been edging towards war for the entire year and Germany’s invasion of Poland a couple of days before had made the prospect an inevitability. As we waited for the broadcast, my thoughts went back to the autumn of the previous year when the same man joyfully waved a piece of paper at the cameras whilst declaring, ‘Peace for our time.’ I wondered if he had brought a scrap of worthless