Holly Palmer fell in love with the old public house as soon as she saw it.
All of her instincts should have told her of the mistake that she was about to make.
They didn't.
ASIN: B00YG0Q8OM
Preview
It had been a year to the day since the fire at the Ivy. The public house stands on the A169 between Pickering and Whitby in Yorkshire, and Holly Palmer fell in love with the place from the moment she first set eyes upon it.
She
and her husband, Dave, had been on holiday and travelling across the
North Yorkshire Moors, when a wrong turning had them scratching their
heads in a lay-by with a map spread across the bonnet of their Audi. All
had been going swimmingly until the satnav packed up ten miles down the
road, and now they found themselves in the middle of nowhere. Holly
looked up in exasperation and caught sight of the roof timbers further
down the hill. She wandered off, leaving her husband to come up with a
solution to their dilemma.
“Dave!” She shouted, suddenly. “Come and look at this!”
Her
long-suffering partner sighed, folded up the map, and trudged down the
road; he stopped abruptly when he saw where she was pointing.
“This
is it!” She exclaimed, pointing excitedly at the ruin standing across
the road. “This is just what we’ve been looking for!”
The
Ivy stood before the couple, majestic in its dereliction, and Holly
decided that this part of the North Yorkshire Moors was precisely where
she wanted to live. Making a note of the estate agent’s address and
telephone number from the ‘For Sale’ board, they made an appointment to
view as much of the property as was safe on the following day. Returning
to their car, Dave quickly worked out the route back to Pickering, and
they booked in at the Black Swan on Birdgate.
It
was later that evening that the first inklings of trouble began to
creep into the mind of Dave Palmer. They were in the pub’s bar when one
of the locals overheard Holly’s conversation with the landlord, Mike
Proctor.