Her tone had changed – the easy humour and casual flirtation of earlier had disappeared – and instead she sounded wary, formal. Mightily huffy, in fact. He’d upset her without even trying – a specialist subject of his. He felt a shiver run through him: not fear, not quite, but a spark of something…admiration, he thought. That was it. This tiny woman, almost a child from the looks of it, was swollen up with pride and fury and protective instinct. He’d poked a stick at her family, and now she was preparing to shove it right where the sun doesn’t shine. Which, he thought, looking around him at the familiar farmyard, was pretty much everywhere in Cornwall right now.
“Right. I’ll do just that,” he said. “See you around, Pippa. Daisy. Lily. Scotty. Ben Ten. Phineas and Ferb. Give my regards to Madame SpongeBob.”
He nodded at each of them individually as he turned to walk away, and Pippa felt her anger soften down to mild irritation. He’d remembered all of their names. Even the animals. That was pretty much a first in her experience; even she forgot them sometimes, resorting to “You, there, with the feathers!”, or “Oi! Boy child!”
Maybe he wasn’t that bad after all, she thought. Possibly he was just one of those unintentionally rude people who doesn’t realise they’re being offensive. Or possibly, she admitted, she was just one of those unintentionally prickly people who don’t realise they’re being defensive. She’d had a lot to defend over the years, and when it came to the kids and her ability to care for them, defensive was her default setting. None of which was tall, dark and cow-handy’s fault.
She chased after him as he strode away, wellies squelching in the mud.
“Wait!” she shouted, tugging hold of his arm to stop him. “Where do I know you from, really? You’re so familiar…” she said, realising as she touched it that his arm was solid as the oaks shading the side of the farm driveway. He looked city, but he felt country. He felt good.
The shutters went down again and he glanced at her clinging hand, raising his eyebrow eloquently: Back Off, Broomstick, clear as day.
Ben sighed, watched as her hand peeled away from his arm. She was the same as all the rest. Just another stranger who felt she knew him. Not quite there yet, still piecing it together, but give it a few minutes – she’d match the face with the name, with the story, with the legend. And she’d assume she knew him inside out. They all did.
He felt the familiar sense of frustration rise within him. It had been over a year since his release from prison, but still people stopped him. Still people chatted to him, touched him without permission, slapped him on the back and tried to shake his hand. Congratulated him, told him well done, like he was a hero for having survived eight months in HMP Scorton. He hated it. The lack of privacy, the pictures in the paper, the feeling of having his whole life played out in public. In fact, he’d come here to try and escape exactly that – back here to this isolated stretch of Cornish coastline, where the cows outnumbered the people and the internet was patchy at best. He’d hoped to have a week of solitude, without any prying eyes or being expected to bare his soul to complete strangers. Which showed what he knew – even here, his face was known.
Pippa stared at him intently, rubbing her cheeks and smudging that oil patch even harder into the milky-smooth velvet of her skin. Huge, cornflower-blue eyes. English rose all the way, if English roses had taken to abandoning the need for underwear and had just trodden in a cow pat.
He waited the few beats he knew it would take, saw the confusion in her eyes clear as she finally recognised him. Never mind, he thought. He could leave in the night; find somewhere even more deserted. Somewhere his face wouldn’t be known. Somewhere they wouldn’t have him pegged as the UK’s most popular jailbird. Somewhere he wouldn’t have to face someone who thought they knew him, thought they understood his story.
She pointed one grimy finger at him, and said, triumphantly: “You! I’ve figured it out! I know who you are! You’re that bastard who threw me in the duckpond when I was seven!”
Chapter 2
Ben stared back at her, wondering if he’d fallen into some kind of wormhole and landed in an alternative reality. Okay. She did recognise him – but not for the reasons he’d assumed. She hadn’t got a clue who Ben Retallick really was, had never heard of his case, never heard of Darren McConnell, and clearly hadn’t got any idea that he was one of the most famous criminals in the country. He’d assumed she would be like all the rest – about to quiz him, prod him, look at him with that familiar mix of admiration and fear.
Well…she hadn’t. She seemed to have him pegged for a far more historic crime – one he couldn’t even remember. Maybe he’d started to believe his own hype…
“It was a long time ago – fourteen years or something like it – but I know it was you, there’s no point denying it!” she said, almost jumping up and down in her excitement. Again, he studiously avoided looking at her upper half. She might be twenty-one, if he had the maths right there, but it was still a decade or so younger than him. It was still…wrong. And he’d worked very hard at avoiding women altogether since he’d been released. Since Johanna and her family made it clear they wanted nothing to do with a common-or-garden ex-con, no matter how justified his actions had been. Johanna – his fiancée when the incident that changed his life forever had occurred – had disappeared as fast as his career. She was engaged again now, he heard, to some corporate lawyer in Abu Dhabi. Good luck to her. And him, poor bastard – he’d need it.
“I’m sorry, but I’m not entirely sure what you’re talking about,” he replied, ragging himself back to the here, the now, and to Pippa – wondering if she’d accidentally sniffed some adhesive while she was fixing the loo.
She poked him in the chest with one finger – hard enough that it made him take a step back.
“You remember! Of course you do! It was ages ago, and you were here with your…grandfather, I think? Is that right? He was talking to my dad about some business thing or another, and you stayed here for a couple of nights. I was seven, so Patrick would have been, well, about three, and the twins and Scotty didn’t even exist then. You seemed really glamorous, all the way from London – don’t you remember, really?”
She gazed up at him expectantly, eyes huge and sparkling, and he realised he didn’t want to disappoint her, didn’t want to dismiss what was clearly still vivid in her mind – but he genuinely couldn’t remember.
“I know I came here,” he said, screwing his eyes up in concentration. “It’s one of the reasons I booked my stay. I was eighteen, I think, spending the summer with my granddad before I went off to uni. I was bored rigid. There were…yes, there were some kids, I remember now!”
He cast his mind back: eighteen. Jesus. A whole lifetime ago. His parents had just moved to Australia and he was packed off to his granddad for a few months, filling in time until he started his law degree.
It was a different world back then. A world of youthful arrogance and easy potential and the safe and certain knowledge that the whole universe was his for the taking. An endless summer of heat and rain and surfing; blonde-haired girls with skin that tasted of saltwater; of working on his grandfather’s farm and drinking cider and planning the rest of his life. His granddad, a wizened old man with a leanly corded body even in his seventies, had brought him to Harte Farm to discuss a joint venture with the vaguely hippy-ish couple who owned it. They were organic, he thought – ahead of their time.
And there were kids, yes, now he thought about it. A sulky brat of a boy, who had a habit of hiding and spying, and a hooligan girl with wild hair and a tendency to walk around naked. He looked at Pippa again. At the windswept tresses, roughly tied up into a boisterous ponytail. At the braless chest beneath the hot-pink jersey.
Really? Could that be her? All grown up, in ways you can never imagine when they’re seven and you’re eighteen? When that feels like a world of difference, the unthinkable rather than the inadvisable?
“You jumped on my head,” he said, smiling at the memor
y. He saw it now: he’d had a hangover, as was usual back then. Too much scrumpy the night before. He’d been trying to sleep it off in the fields, found a patch of shade beneath the spreading arms of one of the old oaks that dotted the place. Half asleep, dreaming of London and home and those sailing girls with the salty skin and dirty laughs.
She’d yelled, like Boadicea screaming out a war cry, and launched herself from the lower branches of the tree, landing straight on top of him. He’d never even noticed her – she’d been wearing camouflage paint, greened-up like Rambo, hiding in the dappled leaves. Twigs stuck in her hair, soles of her bare feet covered in mud from running wild all day.
It amused him to think of it now, but he’d been a bit embarrassed at the time. Shocked out of his stupor by Stig of the Dump, caught out by a kid. A strange and slightly scary kid, who seemed to have made him the target of some kind of farm-based war game. God knows how long she’d been up there, watching him as he snored and drooled and sweated cider.
He’d picked her up by the skinny ankles and run all the way across the field, dangling her inches from the ground. She screamed and yelled and twisted herself up to try and scratch him, but he held firm until he reached the duck pond – where he’d swung her back and forth as if he was winding up for the Olympic discus, then let her fly through the air and land with a huge splash in the middle of the water.
His grandfather had given him a right telling off – what if she couldn’t swim? What if she’d banged her head? What if she’d squashed a duck? But her parents, they’d been cool. Just laughed and said it served her right – she was a little savage and deserved a bit of her own medicine. Yeah, they’d been cool, and from what she said a few minutes ago, they were gone now. They might have taken off for a commune in Marrakesh, but he got the impression that wasn’t what she’d meant. Rather that they were dead, like his grandfather. That the little girl he remembered had had to grow up very quickly, and way too soon.
“You remember now, don’t you?” she asked, laughing. “You remember my war cry?”
She let it out again and he heard Scotty, Lily and Daisy join in in the background. My God! A whole family of them! Savages, one and all.
“Okay, okay…I surrender!” he said, holding up his hands in the universal gesture of giving up. “I do remember now – but you can’t blame me for not recognising you. You have changed a bit, you know? You’re more…”
He floundered, trying to find a word that didn’t sound lecherous, curling fingers against his palm in case they accidentally made the equally universal gesture for “curvy-woman shaped”.
“Yes?” she said, hitching an eyebrow up at him suggestively. “More what, precisely?”
He looked awkward, less self-assured and arrogant. The tiny lines at the corners of his eyes crinkled up, showing white beneath his healthy outdoorsy tan. She’d had a terrible crush on him back then, Pippa remembered. He’d been this tall, handsome, exotic stranger and she used to sneak around following him. Obviously, she barely registered on his all-grown-up radar. The scream-and-jump routine had just been her way of getting his attention. Her pick-up techniques had improved…well, not significantly since then, she acknowledged. It’s not like she’d had much practice.
“Just…more,” he said, finally, gazing over her shoulder as though he was trying to avoid making eye contact with her. “Who’s that?” he asked, chocolate-drop eyes narrowing.
“What? Who?” blathered Pippa, who’d been slightly lost in thought as she looked up at his face. How could she not have remembered him straight away? He’d been the first love of her life, and had broken her tiny heart by dunking her in the duck pond – which, she had to admit, she thoroughly deserved.
She turned, following his gaze. Saw a plume of black smoke, then heard the bang. The scrape. The crash and grind of metal clashing on the gravel.
“Oh,” she said, the fun fading from her cornflower eyes, “that. That’s Patrick. On his bike. Or off it, perhaps.”
“Has he…just crashed it? Is he all right?” said Ben, watching as the gunmetal smoke funnelled up into the equally grey sky. This was all a bit surreal, as though he’d wandered into an episode of the Twilight Zone. And he’d thought his life was odd.
“Yes, he’s just crashed it,” she replied, setting off at a fast clip towards the scene of the accident, “and yes he’ll be all right. He crashes it at least once a day, just to keep me on my toes. Don’t feel obliged to follow – he’ll just be a pig to you. You’ll want to thump him and I’ll feel embarrassed.”
“Well, with an offer like that! How could I refuse?” he answered, striding to keep up with her. She seemed relaxed – if a little downtrodden – but he thought he’d better tag along, just in case this was the one time the crash-test dummy had taken his antics a step too far.
The younger children trailed behind them and he felt a tiny hand creep into one of his. The little boy. Scotty. The kid looked up at him, the same glowing, healthy looks as the rest of them. They all looked like adverts for Scandinavian log cabins, with their shining blonde hair and big blue eyes. Thoroughly disconcerting.
“Don’t worry,” said Lily – or maybe Daisy – as they passed. “Patrick’s just a bit of a mollusc,” said the other one, completing the sentence.
The mollusc in question was sprawled on the path, one of his legs trapped beneath what looked like an old Kawasaki. He wasn’t wearing a helmet and his hair – predictably blonde, but a lot dirtier than the others’ – was splayed across a face that was scratched raw with gravel burn. It had to hurt and would be a swine to clean with all those tiny scrapes pockmarked with even tinier stones.
Pippa paused, her lips twisting into a grimace, then walked over without a word. She leaned down, picked up the bike and threw it to one side. It bounced, the spokes whirring in the wind. Wow, thought Ben, she was stronger than she looked. Or maybe, he realised, it was just that she’d had a lot of practice – nobody was reacting as though this was an unusual occurrence, not even the younger kids. In fact, Daisy and Lily had their arms crossed over their chests and were mimicking the exasperated expression their big sister was wearing. Lord help the local boys with those two when they were older!
“This,” she said, kicking her younger brother in his good leg with her mud-coated wellie, “is Patrick. Patrick, this is Ben Retallick. He’s staying in Honeysuckle for the week. If you could try and avoid hitting him with the death machine, blowing up his belongings or stealing his car, I’d really appreciate it. What do you say?”
The teenager gazed up at them all, looking from his stern big sister to a confused-looking Ben. His sullen face, seared red by his scrapes, broke into a huge grin.
“Wow, sis!” he said, brushing himself down and standing up. “Do you know who this is?”
“Yes, Patrick, I do,” she replied, sighing. “It’s Ben Retallick. The boy who threw me in the duck pond when I was seven.”
“Nah,” he replied, staring at Ben as if he was the only interesting thing he’d ever seen in his whole existence. “This is Ben Retallick – that posh lawyer who got sent down for beating the shit out of some loser who got off with it. You remember? Bad Boy Ben, they called him – it was all over the bloody newspapers! Put the bloke in hospital for weeks! You treat me like I’m dirt ‘cause PC Plod in the village has a whinge about me, sis, but you’ve gone and invited a proper ex-con into the family home – what will people say?”
Chapter 3
Pippa couldn’t sleep, for about a million and one reasons, not all of them involving caffeine. After he’d dropped his bombshell – thrilled that he’d got one over on her – Patrick had limped off to the village saying he was going butterfly-hunting. That was a lie, clearly, and not even a good one. He was going to the pub. Everyone knew he was under-age, but as his birthday was only a few weeks off, the eyes of the staff were well and truly turned. They didn’t see the harm – mainly because they didn’t have to deal with the fallout. She was lucky enough to have that plum job.
She’d tossed and turned so many times in her bed, worrying about him, about what he was doing. About what she wasn’t doing. About how she could try and reach him. About how she’d quite like it if he just buggered off and lived somewhere else.
That last one was usually the final stop on the late-night train ride through her brain. She knew Patrick – she loved Patrick. She understood why he was the way he was – but it didn’t make it any easier to deal with.
That’s when she usually reached the point where she had to try and talk herself down, get some rest so she could deal with the challenges of the next day. With the needs of the kids still young enough for her to matter to them – the ones she could still save, if Patrick was determined to plough his own destructive path.
The calming thoughts, though, just weren’t coming that night. They were being chased away by all the anxious thoughts instead. And the anxious thoughts were bigger, nastier and came equipped with badass stun guns.
Pippa's Cornish Dream Page 2