The Homecoming

by The Homecoming (retail) (epub)

  Her flesh began to creep as she realised that if it had been any of her family they wouldn’t be creeping in so silently. Although she often dozed during the day, none of them worried about waking her. They called the moment they entered the kitchen. Whoever had come into the house was making as little noise as possible so had no right to be there. And she was alone in the house.

  She held her breath, spitting out the nut she had been about to eat, and listened intently. Someone was coming upstairs. One by one she heard the stairs creak. The draught was still disturbing the air so whoever it was had left the door open, ready to make his escape. Along the landing now. Then she knew without doubt that the intruder was standing outside her door.

  Too terrified to move she wrapped her arms around her chest and stared as the door slowly closed and the key was turned. She called then, her voice croaky and weak.

  ‘Lydia? Is that you? Why are you locking the door?’ Then louder, ‘Who is it? What d’you want? My husband will be back in a minute, mind!’ She began to sob then, deep throbbing groans that revealed the extent of her distress. Someone was playing a trick on her, and her in bed, a sick woman. ‘Who is it?’ she wailed. ‘Open this door. Please, open the door, I’m choking.’

  She didn’t hear the intruder unlock the door nor his footsteps as he ran back down the stairs, and she was still sobbing when the door opened and Stella appeared.

  Stella was alarmed, hearing the crying, then, on opening the bedroom door, seeing her sister in such a state. Annie’s face was wet with perspiration, her hair sticking up and wild. The covers had been strewn across the floor and Annie was panting, holding her throat as if she were choking.

  ‘Annie! Love! Whatever’s the matter?’ Stella ran to her and poured a drink of water from the jug on the bedside table. Annie’s arms flayed out and knocked it from her hand without drinking. Stella tried to calm the woman, sitting beside her on the bed and holding her still. After a few moments she felt her relax and the sobbing became a subdued whine. Stella patted her as if she were soothing a baby, wondering what could have happened to get her in such a state. It was months, years since this had been a regular occurance.

  ‘Now, tell me what happened,’ she coaxed, as she wiped Annie’s face with a cool flannel and continued to calm her. ‘Only out for half an hour I was, stopped to chat to some friends. I have to get out sometimes, Annie. Billy will be back soon. And Lydia. You’ll have them both back before you know it.’

  ‘There was someone here,’ Annie whispered.

  ‘There can’t have been, love. I was only gone a little while.’

  ‘He came up the stairs and stood outside my door.’

  ‘Nonsense, you’ve had a bad dream that’s all. Look how hot you are, a nightmare you’ve had. I keep telling you to keep a window open, this room gets too hot.’

  ‘Stella, listen to me. He came in, stood there by the door and locked me in.’

  ‘But the door wasn’t locked when I came back. How could he have locked you in?’

  After a while, although she didn’t believe Annie had experienced anything more frightening than a bad dream, Stella pretended to believe her and after washing her, getting her a fresh nightdress and settling her once more in bed, she sat and waited for Billy to return from his drink with Gimlet.

  Lydia was home first, having cancelled a planned visit to the cinema and spent a couple of hours with Molly instead. When she was told what had happened she was worried.

  ‘What if she was telling the truth?’ she whispered to her aunt. ‘What if someone to do with Rosie Hiatt thinks I know more than I’ve told and has been here searching for something? Oh, Auntie Stella, I’m frightened.’

  For the second time that night Stella had to soothe an agitated relative! This time she wasn’t so gentle.

  ‘Oh come on, Lydia, don’t you start going crazy on me! Your mam had a bad dream and that’s all there is to it. Now, I’ll get a sandwich made shall I? Your dad is usually starving when he and Gimlet have had a couple of hours of putting the world to rights.’ Her common sense approach did what she hoped and made Lydia realise how unlikely it was that someone had been in their home.

  Lydia wanted to go straight upstairs and investigate her bedroom to make sure nothing had been touched but she didn’t. No point in frightening her mother more by revealing that she accepted the possibility of an intruder. She went to check that her mother was all right, leaving the bedroom door open so Annie could hear the buzz of conversation and be reassured that there was someone there. For a while at least they had better not leave her alone in the house, even for half an hour. She wondered with a stab of panic what her chances of a normal life would be if Auntie Stella grew tired of giving so generously of her time.

  ‘I’m so grateful to you,’ she said when she went back down to where Stella was preparing a plate of sandwiches.

  ‘No fuss. I’m her sister after all.’

  ‘But you do so much and I’m afraid we don’t tell you often enough how much you’re valued.’

  ‘Pass the cheese and stop making me feel embarrassed. I do it because I love you, you’re my family, all of you.’

  By the time Billy came in, the house was calm. Stella explained what had happened and he ran straight up to his wife but returned immediately. Annie was fast asleep. Like Stella he thought it was nothing more than a dream. ‘But,’ he said with a glance at Lydia, ‘just in case, I’ll put the bolt on the back door when we go to bed, just in case, eh?’

  ‘Yes, just to reassure Mam.’ Lydia smiled.

  When her father left to walk Stella home, calling for her to bolt the door after them, Lydia went to her room and stared at it as if she hadn’t seen it before.

  Books on every surface, including the bed itself. There were catalogues and invoices, and advertising placards, together with samples of wools, colour cards, files, lists of suppliers and lots more clutter all dealing with the new business, spread around the room making it look nothing like the normally tidy room she inhabited.

  If someone had been here, where would he have looked? What was he looking for? She had no connection with Rosie Hiatt, why would anyone think she had? Yet she still stared around hoping for a clue to why someone had entered their home, in spite of her reassurances to Stella, she had a firm belief that her mother hadn’t been mistaken.

  Annie was sick, keeping to her room for so much of her time, but she had never shown any hint of an over-active imagination. And a dream, well surely once you woke from a dream it faded into memory faster than a blink? Annie’s description had been so detailed.

  The books spread about so untidily she ignored, and looked instead at the drawers and cupboards, sifting carefully for a sign they had been disturbed. After several minutes she shrugged. Since she had begun the preparations for opening the wool shop she had been anything but tidy. How would she know amid this mess if a dozen people had been there?

  She undressed and sat on the bed, waiting for her father to return so she could unbolt the door for him. She was very tired. The extra work and the worries about the shop were beginning to tell. ‘Hurry up,’ she murmured to her absent father. ‘I’ll fall asleep if you aren’t back soon.‘ Her eyes closed and she forced them open and let them wander aimlessly around the room, hardly seeing anything, just trying to stay awake to hear her father’s first gentle knock. Then she saw it and at once all tiredness fled.

  On the corner cupboard was a notepad that hadn’t been there before. With shaking hands she picked it up and read:

  ‘Keep away from the police, or you’ll regret it, and so will your mother.’

  Chapter Seven

  It was Stella who told Glyn about the night Annie had been frightened. He had guessed something was wrong. When he saw Lydia she was very nervous, glancing around as if aware of someone watching her. He asked her repeatedly what was wrong but she always smiled and insisted there was nothing. Determined to find out what was worrying her, he had asked Stella.

  ‘I don’t
think for a minute that it was true, mind,’ she said after explaining about finding Annie in a state convinced she had heard someone in the house and been locked in her room.

  ‘And Lydia agreed that it was nothing more than her mother’s over-active imagination?’

  ‘Well, let’s be honest, Glyn. My sister Annie isn’t a saint. She has us all running round after her and when she’s been left alone, even for a short while, she does play up and try to make us feel guilty.’

  ‘You think that’s all it was then?’

  ‘I can’t think of anything else, love. Surely Lydia didn’t really believe someone had been in the house, locked Annie in, then unlocked the door and run away without robbing the place or even staying more than a couple of minutes? What sense is there in that?’

  ‘You are sure it was nonsense? No one had been in had they? Nothing taken? Did you check all the rooms?’

  ‘Billy, Lydia and I checked downstairs and in the bedrooms. Lydia looked in her room while Billy and I checked downstairs again. We didn’t find a thing out of place. Everything was just as we’d left it. Nothing was missing or one of us would have noticed for sure.’

  ‘And nothing had been moved? There wasn’t anything there that shouldn’t have been?’

  ‘A burglar who brings something instead of taking something away? Now there’s a novelty!’

  When Glyn called to take Annie to Stella’s the following day. Annie handed him the key and told him to, ‘Lock up secure, mind! I don’t want to come home again and find someone in the house. Terrible shock that was, and knowing no one believes me makes it worse.’

  ‘I believe you,’ Glyn said. ‘And I think Lydia does too. She’s been nervous ever since.’

  ‘Sorry I am that she’s been frightened but I had to tell someone. I can’t get it out of my mind.’

  ‘Tell me then, it might help if you talk about it.’

  ‘I was sitting on the bed crouched and terrified, listening as someone came up the stairs. The door knob was turned and my door was pulled shut. The key snapped and I was locked in. I don’t know how long afterwards that Stella came back, not more than ten minutes I suppose, but before she did the key snapped again.’ She swallowed nervously. ‘There’s loud it sounded, the key turning in the silence of the house.’ She shivered at the memory, clinging to his arm as they reached the pavement and he helped her into the taxi. ‘Then,’ she went on, ‘footsteps running down the stairs. Not loud, mind, the man was trying not to be heard. What could he have wanted, Glyn? He didn’t take anything, Billy and Lydia and Stella made sure nothing had been taken.’

  When he left her at Stella’s, where the final touches were being done to the displays in the shop, Glyn drove to his next pickup looking very thoughtful.

  * * *

  The market in the town was transformed. From attractive and neatly displayed stalls selling every kind of food and a wide variety of other goods, the approach of Christmas had made it less functional and given the whole place a party mood. Every stallholder had done their best to make the place attractive, each vying with neighbours to give the customers the finest spectacle.

  The expression on children’s faces made their work worthwhile and many were reminded that if some adults swore that Christmas was a sham, for the children, seeing the colourful exhibitions through their innocent eyes, it was a magical time.

  Lydia loved Christmas and every aspect gave her pleasure but today she was unable to concentrate on her work. The customers, whom she normally enjoyed helping to make their choice from the market stall’s wide selection, were a trial. She wanted to be home, locked in the house where she felt safe, or with Stella, getting the shop ready for customers and forcing her mind away from the thought of an intruder.

  ‘Why don’t you go home?’ Molly said. ‘Fat lot of good you are here. Ring Mrs Thomas and tell her you’re ill.’

  ‘But I’m not ill.’

  ‘Pale as milk, heavy-eyed, and walking around like a weary sleep-walker? I call that a reason for saying you’re ill and getting yourself off home!’

  ‘I haven’t slept very well, I keep thinking I can hear someone trying to break in,’ she admitted.

  ‘If anyone wanted to break in, they wouldn’t do it at night while the three of you were there, now would they?’

  At eleven o’clock Lydia was persuaded, and once Mrs Thomas came and agreed that she was not well enough to work, she went to the bus station and thankfully headed for home.

  She smiled as she remembered Molly’s insistence that she didn’t stay on the stall, then her friend’s words came back and alarmed her. ‘If anyone wanted to break in, they wouldn’t do it at night while the three of you were there…’ No, they would choose a time when the house was empty, like now! Suddenly she was afraid to enter the house. It was no longer a haven, a place of safety. On the steps leading up from the foreshore, she stopped and looked up at the windows. The back window was her bedroom, where she had always felt comfortable. Was there someone inside this minute, searching through her things?

  Slowly she opened the door. It wasn’t locked! Mam must have forgotten again, she thought with irritation. She’d been so badly frightened, had upset them all, then forgot to lock the door! She went through the small kitchen and up the stairs. A sound alerted her and she stopped and pressed herself against the wall. It was coming from her bedroom. In trepidation she climbed the second flight of stairs, her heart beating painfully in her throat. She was terrified at what she might find but she couldn’t not go. To flee, to turn her back on this threat was impossible. She reached the doorway and cautiously looked into the room.

  For a moment she didn’t believe what she was seeing, and she stood in her doorway staring at the intruder with anger mounting by the split-second.

  He was standing beside her bed examining a small package.

  ‘Glyn! What are you doing?’

  Startled, he dropped the package and stuffed it out of sight under the bed covers, which had been thrown back as if he had been searching through her bedding.

  ‘It was you who came here and frightened Mam! What are you looking for? Tell me what you want and you can have it. You don’t have to break in and skulk around, we’ll give it to you!’ She was trembling with the anti-climax of seeing Glyn and not some unknown thief. The relief increased her anger.

  ‘Lydia! You gave me a fright. I didn’t expect you home.’

  ‘That much is obvious! Get out! And think yourself lucky I’m not calling the police!’

  Glyn took the two steps necessary to reach her and held her shoulders, making her look at him. ‘Lydia, I’m not trying to steal anything and it was not me who came and locked your mother’s door. I forgot to give your mother back her key when I locked up and I took the opportunity of looking, in the hope that I might find something that you missed. Something that might give a clue to what’s going on. You’re involved in something and I want to find out what it is.’

  ‘Very convincing!’ She pushed past him and grabbed at the covers, pulling them back and revealing the object he had been studying. The rather battered cardboard box, which she quickly opened, contained a selection of beribboned medals.

  ‘How convincing are you about these?’ she demanded. ‘They’re the medals the police are looking for, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, I think they might be.’

  ‘And you were going to hide them here?’

  ‘No, Lydia! It isn’t what it seems. I was looking for – I don’t know what – I was just hoping that if your mother really heard someone in the house, that I’d see something that you had missed. I guessed that the intruder must have come, not to take something, but to bring something, and I found this box. I had to look inside as I had no idea whether or not it was yours. It isn’t, is it?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘From the robberies is my guess and as such these medals would be incriminating if they were found on the thief, so he hid them in your room.’ His voice slowed as he realis
ed she didn’t believe him. ‘Go on, call the police. I’ll tell them exactly where I found them.’

  ‘And where was that?’ She was trying hard not to believe him. It would have been so easy to accept what he said. Far easier than telling herself that Glyn Howe, a man she had known all her life, a man she was still half in love with, was a thief and possibly worse.

  ‘They were hidden in one of your summer sandals, tucked in between them in the shoe-rack in your wardrobe.’

  ‘Not a very clever hiding place.’

  ‘You didn’t find them. And I don’t suppose he meant to leave them there for very long. Just until he could either sell them or dispose of them safely.’ He stared at her. Her lovely face was troubled as she fought against believing him. He knew she would want to believe him, but would try and remain neutral, not wanting to be his partner even in a conviction of his innocence. He had hurt her so badly and it saddened him more each time he looked at her.

  ‘Why would he hide them here?’ he asked. ‘Tell me, who’s been in the house since the incident at the castle?’

  ‘I haven’t any reason to think they were hidden here! I haven’t seen them before and Dad and I searched this room thoroughly after Mam’s fright.’

  ‘Did you take your shoes out of the rack?’

  ‘Why am I answering your questions? You should be answering mine!’

  ‘Tell me, who’s been here?’

  ‘Molly, Tomos, your father, and you! Which one do I suspect? The one I found trying to hide this!’ She waved the box at him angrily.

  ‘You shouldn’t have touched it, not without gloves, there might have been fingerprints,’ he said.

  ‘How clever of you to mention that – after I’d picked it up and opened it, examined it and made sure my prints were all over it! Covering yours? Was that your reason, Glyn?’

  ‘Tried and found guilty am I?’

  She sank down on the bed, her shoulders slumped. ‘Glyn, I don’t want to think you had anything to do with this affair, but what am I to think? You come out of the Navy, tell me you no longer want to marry me. You talk about a girlfriend whom you never see, or hear from. Now I find you with stolen goods and, worst of all, trying to hide them in my bedroom.’