Silence again.
‘Good God,’ he said eventually. ‘You poor, poor thing. I can’t tell you how sorry we are … how sorry I am. Listen, this can all wait. It’s a lot for me to take in, for you it must be absolutely … well, I can’t imagine what you’re going through.’
‘No,’ I said, with a firmness in my voice that took me aback, as though there was another person inside me that had very distinct views on the subject. I wiped my face with barely concealed impatience. ‘It’s all right. If there’s really a book I want to find it. It’s the least I can do for her.’
‘If you’re sure.’
‘Yes.’ And as I said it, I knew it was true. ‘Quite sure. I’ll have a look for these notebooks tonight, once the café closes.’
‘I wouldn’t like to—’
‘No. I want to read them. There might be … it could … you know, there might be some clue in there about what happened.’ I screwed my eyes shut, forcing my breathing to calm.
‘There might be,’ he said, but he had an aura of reserve now, of caution. ‘Sophia, I should probably tell you that there are certain disturbing elements in your mother’s past and these are … well, possibly a little explicit, especially for her daughter to read.’
Explicit? My mother? I’d loved her desperately, but she’d spent her whole life avoiding being explicit or clear or straightforward about anything. All had been a ragtag bag of distraction strategies, designed to head off the real questions. ‘I don’t—’
‘If you find them, you can just send them straight on to us, or decide what to do later.’
‘All right,’ I said. I thought for a moment. ‘God. She’s written a book.’
‘Yes,’ he said, with a gentle tolerance, as though realizing that the majority of this conversation had been a body blow. ‘Yes, she most certainly has.’
* * *
It was true. I’d never thought she’d do it. When I was a teenager, she’d already been talking about it for years. Initially, I’d felt the thing to do was encourage her in this, a respectable hobby, something to distract her from my forthcoming escape into the real world. I knew that in her youth she’d been thought clever and been interested in literature and poetry. Nowadays this manifested solely in her compulsive habit of buying books at charity shops. Perhaps this buried interest could be awakened as a bulwark against her loneliness.
So I bought her manuals on writing and leather-lined notebooks, silver engraved pens and brightly coloured pencils. I brought them for birthdays and on visits to the house and I sent them as offerings when I felt particularly guilty for ignoring her pleas to return home for good.
Sometimes I would invite my dad to pitch in with the more expensive gifts, but all he would do was raise a single cynical eyebrow and offer me a half-smile. He knew there would never be a book, that all this talk about writing and the absolute lack of action was a screen for my mother’s insecurities; busywork to disguise her feelings of restlessness and thwarted potential, and in time I began to believe that, too.
But we’d been wrong. She’d not only been writing, she had gone out and got herself a publisher.
Did my dad even know about this?
And if he did, I wondered with a bitter little sting, would he even have told me? Maybe this was another thing that Rowan knew about and I didn’t.
I shook my head to clear it of self-pity.
I needed to find those notebooks.
Together with this, and getting the visitors’ centre project together for tomorrow (Amity had never called me back about rescheduling), I had a full agenda, but I couldn’t get to any of it straight away. The gardens were open for business again and I was taking over the role of hostess for the day, until we could find someone to run the café.
So far only two people had responded to the advertisement. One was Laura, a shifty forty-something. I’d interviewed her a couple of days ago and her vague CV (‘Why did you leave Annie’s Seaside Café then?’ ‘Ooh, me and Annie, like, we didn’t get on.’) and elusive eye contact had already convinced me she wasn’t right for this, or possibly any, role. But the truth was we were desperate; we needed someone to start immediately.
Nevertheless, I’d held off calling her back. I hadn’t been able to get Annie from Annie’s Seaside Café on the phone to check her references, and I was starting to wonder if she even existed.
The other candidate, Tina, had told me that her daily attendance was entirely dependent on her being able to get her sister to look after her kids. Her sister, however, sometimes got agency work, so she wouldn’t be able to work on those days.
‘Any idea when those days would be?’
‘No.’
‘Ah. Right. Thanks. I’ll be in touch.’
If Laura’s references continued to be elusive, I probably would be.
When a couple of old ladies came in ten minutes before four, it was all I could do not to tell them we were closed. I was due at the hospital in an hour. But this was my parents’ business, and my dad would need it if he recovered. I had to keep it afloat.
When he recovered, I told myself firmly, as I cleared away their empty cups after they left. It’s been a fortnight and he’s survived this long. I know my dad. He is strong and dark and tenacious, like tree roots. He’s had a terrible shock and is badly hurt, but he’ll be fine. I know he will. He’s going to wake up, and then he will tell me what the hell happened. Somebody did this to us all, and whoever they are, we are going to catch them.
We are.
‘Oh, hello there. Are you Sophia?’
I blinked away these dark considerations and looked up.
A woman stood in front of me. She was pretty in an unremarkable way, blandly dressed in a white shirt, brown skirt and belted jacket, her highlighted hair tied neatly at the base of her neck in a ponytail.
I’d been so distracted I hadn’t even heard the bell on the door jangle.
‘Yeah, I’m Sophia,’ I said. My heart sank. Was this another journalist? ‘Can I help you?’
‘I’m Monica. The guy outside – Rowan – sent me to talk to you.’
I blinked at her.
‘About the job?’ she ventured. She had a slight accent. ‘In the café? You put a card up.’
‘Oh! Oh, I’m so sorry, yes I did!’ I carried the cups away to the counter. ‘Sorry, there’s been … things are kind of disorganised around here. Can I get you a cup of tea? Coffee?’
She looked at me and her head tipped sideways, like a clever little bird. ‘If anyone looks like they need some tea, it’s you.’
I opened my mouth to refute this, but in those days any small act of kindness was enough to set me off.
In the end she fetched the tea and talked.
When she walked out thirty-five minutes later, she was hired and set to start the following morning. Her name was Monica, she’d worked in a tea shop in Aldeburgh, and now that she’d had her daughter she was looking for something nearer home.
She was the first person I’d interviewed who didn’t seem to have some incipient personality disorder or be on the lam from the law.
When I locked up, I was smiling for the first time in over a fortnight.
A little stroke of luck, at last.
* * *
That evening, after my visit to the hospital, I searched for the Morningstar notebooks.
A quick look around the house revealed nothing beyond what I’d already found since I’d first discovered my mother dead. Searching the same places again failed to make the notebooks magically appear.
I sighed, already hot and pink in the louring summer heat, my mother’s dusty-rose room lit by her favourite mock-Tiffany light, which gave everything a hectic, multi-coloured cast. The curtains for the bay window looking out into the garden, with its view of the tree she’d been hanging from, remained resolutely closed. I wasn’t sure I would ever open them again.
I needed to get back to work – day-job work. The Scottish Heritage presentation was happening tomorrow and
I needed to make the final adjustments to my files. Already, Benjamin’s email was playing in my dreams.
‘… while Sophia is “indisposed” ’.
Those insolent quotation marks haunted me. As if my mum’s death and dad’s injuries were on a par with a hangover.
The project or the notebooks?
Choose, Sophia.
I started from the ground floor up, turning out the wardrobes, the drawers, the hundreds of random chests and dressers, revealing moth-eaten clothes, dusty papers, broken tools, lost pieces of plastic; unintelligible and gnomic now they were separated from whatever had spawned them.
There were things I didn’t recognize – the most notable being a tall silver cabinet bolted to the wall of the office. It looked sturdy and expensive, but had been empty except for a pair of brackets at the top and bottom. Perhaps Rowan knew its purpose.
Wearily ascending the stairs, I went to my mum’s room next.
Her old jewellery box sat on a faded, yellowing doily on the dresser. My dad had made it for her years ago, and I had varnished it, badly. It had been a joint birthday present from us to her.
I’d checked through this already – the jewellery was long lost, and only a few odd pieces remained: a cloisonné brooch with chunks of missing enamel, a tiny finger ring, a strange pendant – a thin gold cross within a circle with barely legible characters etched into it. You’d be hard-pressed to fit any notebooks underneath the box, but I moved it back to look anyway.
There were indeed no notebooks, but there was something thin and white hidden beneath the doily.
It was two folded pieces of paper.
Surprised, I opened them out.
The first was a receipt, from somewhere called Trevor and Hartley Country Supplies in Woodbridge; it was for a Baikal SPR 310 (second hand) and two boxes of smokeless 3-inch cartridges. It had been bought on June 21st of this year, about seven weeks ago.
I opened up the other piece of paper – stiff and glazed with plastic, and with something glued to it – and was stunned to see a small photo of my mum. She gazed out unsmilingly at me, her hair piled up on top of her head.
Above her, on the paper, was the title ‘Shot Gun Certificate’, and an expiration date for four years from now.
Several things hit me like a blow to the gut.
Firstly, my mum had a shotgun licence.
Secondly, according to the receipt, she’d bought a gun. Presumably in response to the burglaries.
And finally, I thought, as I turned around the room, scanning the surrounding junk, if that was so, and we’d already searched the house, then where the hell was it?
* * *
It was after nine when the sun finally set. I was covered in dust, tired and hungry but not ready to stop looking.
I shut my eyes against the bright light of the single suspended lightbulb and sighed, the phone clutched to my ear, a weak cup of coffee at my elbow.
‘A gun, you say?’ Rowan sounded as alarmed as I felt. ‘You’re sure?’
‘Yep. I looked Baikal SPR 310 up on the internet. It’s a twenty-bore shotgun made in Russia – cheap and, er, cheerful. And there were two boxes of cartridges as well.’
Rowan sighed. ‘Sorry, Soph, can’t help you there. I don’t know anything about guns, and I never saw one in the house. Jared never mentioned it either.’
We were both silent for a while.
‘So, here’s the thing,’ I said, reluctant to form the words. ‘If it’s not in the house, might it have been stolen during one of the break-ins?’ I rubbed my dusty forehead. ‘We need to tell the police it’s missing, and sooner rather than later, before someone uses it.’
Rowan was silent.
‘Are you absolutely sure it’s not still in the house?’ he said eventually. ‘If they were being burgled like that, Jared and Nina would have been cunning about where they put it. I’ll bet you any money they were going to try and scare intruders off with it. You know, fire a few warning shots.’
My heart sank. ‘That sounds like such a terrible idea, it could only have come from my parents.’
‘Hmm,’ said Rowan with deliberately vague diplomacy. He never liked to hear me criticize my dad. ‘I don’t know much about guns,’ he went on, ‘but I do know that if you apply for a gun licence, you need to tell the coppers where you’ll be keeping the gun. You can’t just prop it up next to your door with the umbrellas, like.’
‘I found a metal cabinet in the office,’ I said. ‘But it was empty.’
‘Oh, oh yeah, that. I put that up. Was it for guns? Neither of them said.’ I could hear him yawning.
‘Did you not ask them what it was for?’
The question seemed to make him uncomfortable. ‘I dunno … I might have done. They didn’t mention guns anyway.’
If they had, would you have told me? I thought. After all, you didn’t tell me about the burglaries.
‘We can talk about this when you get in anyway,’ he said. ‘Shall we see you back at the cottage in a bit?’
‘Look, Rowan, I’ve been thinking. I’m going to keep on looking for this gun. I’ll sleep here tonight.’
The idea seemed to shock him into a moment’s silence.
‘Oh, Soph, you can’t do that. Come back to the cottage.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ I said, with far more conviction than I felt, and my voice tightened. ‘If I hear so much as a creak I’ll call you straight away.’
‘Sophia … if you’re sure.’
‘Yeah, I’m fine, Ro. Honestly. And I’ll see you tomorrow night at the hospital.’
* * *
I wasn’t looking forward to spending the night in the house alone, but this business with the gun had rattled me. They’d bought it in June, less than two months ago, while the break-ins were in full swing.
Clearly something about these crimes had frightened them on some deep level as, even by my parents’ standards, firearms were not a rational decision.
Had something else been going on? Something else that Rowan wasn’t telling me? I needed to corner him, question him more closely. I picked up the phone, but realized it was now late – his kids would be in bed. It would have to wait.
I cast my mind over the last few months and all my interactions with both of my parents. Other than my mum seeming a bit more independent, nothing unusual sprang to mind.
As far as I could tell, the only thing that had changed about my parents’ lives before these troubles began – before all this death and horror – was that my mum had written a book.
I didn’t even know what it was that I suspected, but I realized I’d have no peace until I found her notebooks.
* * *
By midnight I’d searched everywhere. There was nothing but moth-eaten boxes of old clothes in the attic. And nothing in the damp basement, with its glinting rows of jars of preserved fruit, its cans of supplies, its empty crates.
Eventually I had to admit that the gun and the notebooks simply weren’t in the house.
But maybe, I thought, they were outside it.
Maybe they were in my dad’s shed.
I stirred uneasily at this thought.
My dad’s shed is, to all intents and purposes, his home. It’s a small blue-painted shack he built himself at the bottom of our garden, where he plays with his woodworking tools. It’s shaded by the same trees I found my mother hanging from.
I didn’t want to go into the garden at all, particularly now that it was dark. I didn’t want to see them both there again, even in memory.
For a while I sat there, letting my coffee go cold, before I finally forced myself to my feet and pulled the Maglite out of the kitchen cupboard.
* * *
The garden was so much darker than I remembered. I paused at the door, staring out into the night, putting off the moment before I stepped forward and triggered the sensor on the security light, illuminating the darkened lawn and revealing whatever gloomy spirit was out there waiting for me.
Out I went, and
there was that audible click as the floodlight came on.
There was nothing out there. The very bottom of the garden was still black because the fairy lights were gone, of course, and the floodlight only covered the first half of the lawn. Beyond it there was just the lush darkness of leaves and thick springy grass.
I switched on the Maglite as I drew nearer the shed.
An eerie feeling descended on me as I tripped quickly along the garden. I kept imagining that the beam would jiggle away from the shed door where I focused it, and there would be my mother, not a figure of terror but of dread, dread and soul-crushing guilt, her heartbroken disappointment in me made manifest on her dead white face, a dire visitant from beyond the grave that I would never be able to unsee or undream.
The key to my dad’s shed came up out of my pocket and scratched at the lock while the flashlight shook and I breathed in short sharp little gasps.
If my dad dies – oh God don’t let him die – but if he dies I am selling this place, I thought. And I will never come back here again. Never never never …
The door opened, squealing against the floor as I shoved it and nearly fell in, my hand feeling desperately against the rough walls for a light switch.
Nothing.
Stop panicking, Sophia. You know there is one. You watched him switch it on a thousand times …
There.
The strip light above juddered into bald, clinical life, and I let myself draw breath again.
My dad’s tiny lair had an unkempt, dishevelled appearance even when inhabited; now it was like the Marie Celeste, complete with a coffee cup sporting a film of scum, which I’d made for the policeman but he’d never drunk.
I had only been in here once, to let the police in a couple of days after my mum died, and they’d searched the drawers and abandoned dresser in a desultory way for clues. I had stood in a corner, looking away, towards the house.
Before then I’d never come in here alone. It wasn’t allowed. The few times I’d attempted it, as a small child, had led to a smacked bottom and a week of growling disapproval.
Everything Is Lies Page 5