The Peridale Cafe Cozy Box Set 2

by Agatha Frost

  “Not good enough to fake grief, Barker,” Julia said, cramming the last piece of toast into her mouth. “I looked into her eyes. I saw her pain.”

  “You saw what you wanted to see,” he replied unsurely. “Or what she thought you wanted to see.”

  “Are you talking about the same person?” Julia could feel her voice starting to rise. “You’re barking up the wrong tree as usual, Barker Brown.”

  “It would make a great twist for my book though.”

  “Are we forgetting Jessie is still missing?”

  Barker’s eyes suddenly darted to the floor, his smile dropping. Julia clenched her eyes shut, knowing she needed sleep, but also knowing the second she tried, her mind would start whirring in circles.

  “What was Jessie trying to tell me?” Julia mumbled as she traced her finger over the half circle and squiggle she had recreated in red ink from memory. “What does this look like to you?”

  “A worm going into a hole.”

  “Never mind.”

  Barker opened his mouth to speak, but their eyes locked when they heard a key rattling in the front door. Julia jumped up, the chair toppling over. She skidded into the hallway, her heart dropping when she saw her gran backing into the cottage as she shook off her umbrella.

  “It’s only me,” she yelled as she turned to close the door. “Oh, a welcoming committee.”

  Julia pushed forward a smile to hide her obvious disappointment. Barker rested a hand on her shoulder and squeezed hard. She could not count how many times she had run into the hallway thinking Jessie was about to walk through the door like everyone kept reassuring her would happen.

  “I thought I’d pop in and give you an update on the search,” Dot said as she adjusted her hair in the hallway mirror. “And, to see if you’ve showered. I can see you haven’t, but I think I might be able to smell it on my next visit, Julia.”

  “Any news?” she asked, not wanting to argue with her gran.

  “Not yet,” she said with an optimistic smile. “I’ve brought you some scones. They’re shop bought, but I don’t want you wasting away.”

  “I’ve eaten.”

  “More toast?” Dot asked, arching a brow as she pulled the scones from her handbag. “I thought so. You need to take better care of her, Barker.”

  Barker opened his mouth to defend himself, but Dot’s icy stare silenced him, reducing him to give a feeble nod. Julia was grateful Barker had only been feeding her toast. She was not sure she could stomach anything else; not even her peppermint and liquorice tea could fix her.

  Julia sat in the sitting room and forced down one of the scones as she stared out at the rain. Dot filled Julia in on the idle village gossip, and it seemed like Jessie had already dropped on their priority lists.

  “And Amy Clark has been looking everywhere for that bucket,” Dot said, wafting her hand. “It has brass handles too. I’ve told her it’s a lost cause. I bet those thugs from Fern Moore have taken it.”

  Julia’s phone beeped in her pocket. It was another text from Billy asking if there was any news. Julia replied and told him there was not anything yet, but there would be soon. She did not know who she was forcing the optimism for anymore.

  “Is there anything else you can think of, Gran?” Julia asked. “Anything about that time that you haven’t mentioned yet?”

  “It was twenty years ago,” Dot said with a sigh.

  “And you can still tell me who won what at the 1948 Olympics,” Julia replied quickly. “Anything.”

  “1948 was a good year. You know I would have been picked for the team if Ma hadn’t held me back.” Dot paused and finished her scone before turning and looking out of the window at the light rain. “It was a weird time. I remember seeing Evelyn everywhere, and then not at all. She turned into a recluse. Same as Aiden, but I don’t think he dared show his face. Alessandra and that daughter of hers paraded the new baby, even if we all knew that Doctor Gambaccini was completely embarrassed that her perfect daughter was another teen pregnancy statistic. I don’t think Grace had a choice but to become a doctor, if only to keep her mum onside. I can’t imagine it was easy having a baby so young and keeping it a secret.”

  “What about the toy shop?”

  “It was already closed by that point, if I’m remembering that right,” Dot said, tapping the side of her head. “Alistair made a big song and dance about closing, and then it stayed empty for months. If it had crossed our minds that Astrid was down there, we would have dug that yard up in seconds.”

  “I know,” Julia said. “I wouldn’t have known if it wasn’t for the storm. Maybe Jessie would still be here. I told her to leave the slab, but we lifted it anyway.”

  “She’s too much like you,” Dot said with a small smile. “Anyone would think she was your daughter by birth. You’re so alike.”

  Julia tried to smile at the compliment, but it took all her strength not to cry. She was proud to call Jessie her daughter, whether she gave birth to her or not, she just wished she had told her sooner.

  After finally showering, Julia loaded up on coffee and rode her bike into the village. She could not bring herself to look at her café, so she rode straight to the B&B, avoiding the missing posters covering every free surface.

  “Julia,” Evelyn said, smiling uneasily after opening the door. “What a pleasant surprise.”

  “Can I come in?” Julia asked, looking over Evelyn’s shoulder. “Is it a good time?”

  Evelyn glanced over her shoulder before nodding. She stepped aside and let Julia in. It was nice to see Evelyn wearing one of her familiar bright coloured kaftans and turbans, even if her eyes were still red raw.

  “I was just trying to contact the other side,” Evelyn explained as they walked into the candle filled room. “No luck so far. Astrid is still evading me.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Julia sat on the couch as Evelyn blew out the candles and turned on the lamps dotting the rooms. “I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Ask away.”

  Evelyn shuffled across the room and sat next to Julia. She gripped her hands, her eyes darting down to the crystal around Julia’s neck. She had not taken it off, even to shower, since Evelyn had draped it around her neck.

  “How did you do it?” Julia asked, her voice already shaking. “How did you do it day in and day out for so many years?”

  Evelyn’s smile faltered, her hands clenching Julia’s.

  “I never gave up hope,” she whispered, leaning into Julia’s face. “It was the only thing that got me out of bed in the morning. It didn’t get easier over time. It felt like somebody cut off my arm and I never went to the hospital, and I just learned to live without it.”

  Julia wrapped her fingers around the crystal and closed her eyes. She begged the universe to give her a sign that Jessie was out there somewhere. She could not live for the next twenty years never knowing.

  “I don’t think I can do it. I’m not strong enough.”

  “Julia South, don’t you ever say that,” Evelyn said sternly. “You have lived through the hardest things a person can experience, and you still serve people cakes with a smile. You lost your mother as a child, you came out of a divorce a stronger woman, and you’ve seen the worst humanity has to offer. I look up to you.”

  “You do?”

  “Of course,” Evelyn said. “Us women need to stick together. I’m here for you. I’m just down the road.”

  Julia nodded, understanding exactly what Evelyn was saying. As she looked into the woman’s eyes, she felt like she was seeing the truest and most honest version of the B&B owner she had ever seen.

  “Thank you, Evelyn,” Julia said. “I think I needed to hear that.”

  “Humans are a beautiful contradiction. We’re impossibly fragile, and yet stronger than we will ever realise. We have lived through wars, disasters, riots and storms, death and murder, and some of us have even lived through cults. It would be easy to give up and hold our hands up in defeat to the universe, but
it is in the struggles that we learn who we are and what our purposes are. Even now, twenty years later, I still find myself in Astrid’s bedroom once a week. You wouldn’t think a scent would last that long, but I can still smell her. Maybe it’s in my imagination, but I don’t suppose that matters, does it? It’s when I feel closest to her. I think I may go in there soon. I haven’t been able to face it since – well, since she was found dead. I can say that now. She deserves that ownership. Somebody locked my daughter in that basement, and they have to live with that until their day comes. I spent years blaming myself, but I can finally sleep with a clear conscience, and that’s more than that animal can say.”

  Julia absorbed each of Evelyn’s words and let them soak in. She had never given the B&B owner enough credit for her wisdom.

  “Did you say you went in Astrid’s bedroom?” Julia asked. “You still have it?”

  “It’s at the top of the house.” Evelyn looked up at the ceiling with a small smile. “I could have turned it into another guest room. The Maker knows I needed the money for some years, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It’s become my temple. Untouched, aside from the police poking their noses around and taking things at will as evidence. I got things back eventually and put them exactly where Astrid had left them.”

  Julia looked up at the ceiling, wondering why she had never asked about Astrid’s bedroom before. It was exactly what Evelyn would do; turn her daughter’s bedroom into her sanctuary.

  “Can I see it?” Julia found herself asking before she thought about it.

  “If that’s what you want, of course you can. Forgive me if I don’t follow you up. For all my talk of strength, I don’t actually think I’m quite energised enough to face it today, but maybe tomorrow, or the day after. It’s not going anywhere, is it? Follow the stairs up to the third floor. It’s the door at the end of the hall. You can’t miss it.”

  Julia left Evelyn in the dim sitting room and crept up the stairs, the building creaking underneath her. Julia walked around the first floor hallway and then up the second set of stairs and continued up the third until she reached her destination. Evelyn was right about not being able to miss the door at the end of the hall. From everything Julia knew about Astrid, it could only be her room.

  Tiptoeing as softly as she could, Julia approached the oak door, which had been decorated in silver and gold marker pen stars and crescent moons. A dream catcher hung from a nail in the centre of the door, a sprig of dried sage hanging from one of the beads.

  Julia reached out for the doorknob, unsure of what she hoped to find. Anything of significance was likely sitting in a box in the police station across the road, but Julia felt the sudden urge to feel as close to Astrid as she could. She shared more than a face with Jessie; she also shared a free spirit and the status of a misunderstood outsider.

  Holding her breath, Julia opened the door and slipped into the room. The small room was dark and musty, not unlike Jessie’s. It had started raining and the sound of it beat down on the exposed wooden roof, soothing Julia. She closed the door behind her and flicked on the light. The pink paper lampshade above her sent a warm wash across the small space. The walls were covered in posters from David Bowie’s youth, which was before Astrid’s time, as it was Julia’s. The surfaces were filled with crystals and candles, and other trinkets from around the world, proving that she was Evelyn’s daughter to the core.

  Leaning over a chest of drawers, Julia peeled back the curtain and peered through the circle window, which looked down at the street below. She watched as Barker pulled up outside the station, talking quickly into his phone as he pushed on the door and disappeared inside.

  Julia let the curtain fall and looked down at the pictures on the desk, not wanting to touch anything. She poured over the various photographs of Astrid and Evelyn, which were scattered amongst pictures of Astrid and Aiden, looking every inch the loved up teenage couple. Something pure radiated through the pictures, telling Julia it was much more than the school flings she had seen and experienced herself.

  She walked over to the dressing table, which looked like it had also been used as a desk. Dust-covered bottles of perfume and lotions cluttered the surface, along with fluffy gel pens in every pastel shade imaginable, and a stack of cassette tapes from bands Julia vaguely remembered from her own school days.

  There was a scrapbook in the centre, one page red, and the other black. The double-page spread Astrid had been working on was titled ‘The Final Days of Normal’. It featured a picture of Astrid along with the rest of her class in the classic Hollins High School green and black blazer Julia remembered. Beneath it were three pictures of Astrid and Aiden, all of which Julia had copies of at home thanks to Johnny. On the black side, there was a single picture featuring Astrid, Aiden, and Grace at the lakes. It was similar to the picture Julia had seen in their yearbook but from a different angle. Where the other had been from the front on, this one had been taken from the side, and Julia could even see the person taking the version of the picture she had seen.

  Julia brushed her fingers against the picture, and it moved under her touch. She carefully slid it off the page and lifted it up to her face. Astrid was wearing heavy black clothes, which jumped out against Aiden’s swimming shorts and Grace’s frilly bikini. Grace’s blonde hair shone under the bright sun, as though it was naturally that colour. She was still a slender woman, but her teenage frame was something Julia had never experienced herself at that age. Her stomach was completely flat, almost convex, and her ribs shone under her bikini top. Julia turned the photograph over. It had been dated ‘June 27th, 1997 – Lake District’ in glittery pink ink. Julia turned the picture around again, and frowned before flipping it back again. She wondered if there had been a mistake, but she remembered the school trip herself two years before in 1995, and it had been in June to celebrate the end of their final exams.

  Julia placed the photo where she had found it. She stepped back before turning, the edge of her shoe catching on the woven rug covering the dusty floorboards. She put her hands out to catch herself and fell into the wall. There was an almighty rip as her hand planted through David Bowie’s lightning bolt covered face on the poster next to the door.

  Clutching her hand, Julia looked at the ground, hoping Evelyn had not heard her tumble. She looked at the poster, wondering if there was a way to fix it. Bowie frowned back at her, his nose and mouth curling into the wall. Julia fingered the edge of the ripped paper and pulled it back to see what was behind it. Her stomach fluttered when she saw a hollow space behind the poster. Julia glanced over her shoulder at the picture on the desk, hoping Astrid would forgive her for invading her privacy. Julia wondered how many police searches the hole behind the poster had survived. It reminded her of the loose floorboard in her bedroom at her gran’s, where she had hidden the Jilly Cooper novels she had bought at the charity shop with her pocket money.

  Teasing carefully on the twenty-year-old sticky tack, Julia pulled the poster away from the top and let it hang down. The hole covered most of the surface of the paper, and looked like it had been created by a hammer, and then made bigger by ripping at the edges. Within the space between the frame and the plaster board there was a rusty old bent nail, and on that nail hung a dust covered crushed velvet satchel. Holding her breath, Julia reached in and pulled the bag off the hook, no doubt for the first time in twenty years.

  Julia pulled on the frayed gold thread and dust flew everywhere. She peered into the bag and was met with a plastic white lid. She reached inside and pulled out the bottle, along with a piece of cardboard, which fluttered to the ground. Julia turned the bottle over in her hands, recognising them as a brand of pre-natal vitamins, similar to ones her sister was taking for the twins. The prescription label was faded, but Julia could just make ‘Grace Gambaccini’ by squinting and holding it up to the pink light.

  Julia bent over and picked up the cardboard, which had moulded to the shape of the bottle. Turning it over, she stared at the warped g
rainy pregnancy scan picture, the tiny baby reminding her of the one of Sue’s twins stuck to her fridge. Julia turned it over, Grace’s name also on this. She looked back at the photograph on the desk and pulled out her phone. She took pictures of the bottle and the scan, along with both sides of the photograph.

  When she was finished, Julia stepped back, her heart stopping dead in her chest. The penny finally dropped, and she knew who had locked Astrid in the basement, and more importantly, why.

  Chapter Fifteen

  After getting their address from Roxy, Julia stared at the picture by the lake on her phone for the whole taxi journey to Aiden and Grace’s house in Burford. She only looked up when they passed The Flying Horseman.

  “That’s sixteen quid, darlin’,” the taxi driver said, tapping his finger on the red LED meter on the dashboard.

  Julia thrust a twenty-pound note into his hand and told him to keep the change. She looked at the small detached cottage and checked the address Roxy had texted her to make sure she had the right place. Aiden and Grace lived in a nice white cottage with a classic thatched roof on the corner of a bending street. They had a small, well-tended garden and beautiful curtains in the window. Despite the grey sky above, the old cottage was everything one would expect to find in the Cotswolds.

  Not wanting to waste any time, Julia unclipped the gate and hurried down the winding path to the black front door. She knocked firmly three times before looking down at her phone screen, which had faded to black, reflecting back her image. Her dishevelled appearance took her by surprise, the purple bags under her eyes so heavy she considered charging them rent. Her usual chocolatey curls were scraped back into a bobble, still damp from her shower. Julia rarely wore makeup, but her fresh complexion was sallow and grey from the lack of sleep and a diet of toast and butter for how ever many days it had been since Jessie went missing. Was it four, or six? She shook her head, her brain unable to focus.

  The door opened, but instead of Aiden and Grace, it was Mark, their eldest son. His jet-black hair was straightened over his eyes, almost covering them. Smoky eyeliner lined his eyes, and there was a black studded choker around his neck. The scratchy blur of an electric guitar drifted out from deep within the house.