Like the country-house staff in an Agatha Christie.
“Yeah,” I said. “Phone slipped. Sorry.” The phone hadn’t slipped as much as an inch, but it came out sounding natural enough, I thought. And if it hadn’t, so what? When it came to Mattie, I would be—in John’s mind, at least—below suspicion. Like the country-house staff in an Agatha Christie. He was twenty-eight, maybe thirty. The idea that a man twelve years older might be sexually attracted to Mattie had probably never crossed his mind . . . or maybe just for a second or two there on the common, before he dismissed it as ludicrous. The way Mattie herself had dismissed the idea of Jo and the man in the brown sportcoat.
