by Agatha Frost
“You knew her?”
Minnie nodded. “She was about five years younger than me, but you know what Peridale is like. Everyone knows everyone in that village. I was at your parents’ wedding. They were so young but so clearly in love.” Her smile turned wistful. “Albert and I also grew up without a mother. She died when we were very young. Our father only waited eight months to remarry. We used to call her the ‘wicked stepmother’ – not to her face, of course. She’d give us a swift slap for so much as breathing too loudly at the dinner table. She was a headmistress without a single ounce of patience for children.” Minnie’s expression turned sad. “I was so proud of never laying a finger on Lisa. It was something I held onto. I wasn’t like that woman. I probably inherited some of my aloofness from my stepmother, but I never hit the girl. And now I can’t even say that.”
Minnie lifted a shaky hand to her mouth, obviously holding back tears.
“The night before she was stabbed,” Minnie continued, “she came in here. Rare in itself. She tried to tell me she couldn’t keep running everything. I didn’t want to hear it. I was too busy listening to my old records. She was killing my mood. I even said that to her. Can you imagine?” Minnie looked stricken as if she couldn’t even recognise the woman she’d been only a short time earlier. “I saw the snap in her eyes. I pushed her too far, and she pushed back. She laid it all out for me, every one of my flaws, and boy oh boy, was she honest. She might as well have held a mirror up to my soul.” Minnie’s shaking hand closed at her side. “I slapped her right across the face, and she didn’t say a word. She just walked out. Didn’t even slam the door.” Her searching gaze went to Julia. “What if that’s the last moment I ever get with her? What if—”
“Let’s not play that game,” Julia interrupted gently. “Like you said, there’s no relationship more complicated than mother and daughter. My mother might have died before things between us got complicated, but my gran was as good as a mother to me. After my mum died, my dad mentally checked out, so my gran was left to raise my sister and me. Granted, I was the better behaved, but my sister nearly pushed my gran to hit her more than once.” Julia paused, knowing her words weren’t sinking in; Minnie was too lost in her grief and guilt to hear them. “What did you want me to help with?”
“This,” she said, resting her hand on the laptop. “It’s Lisa’s. I don’t know how to use these things. I want to get into her emails. I know The Buyer has been contacting her with offers, but I’ve never seen them for myself. Every time she printed them off, I ripped them up without even reading them.”
Minnie passed the laptop across to Julia. It opened on a password page. As someone who constantly forgot her laptop password, Julia knew about the ‘hint’ button all too well. She hovered over it, and the hint was ‘father’.
“What was Lisa’s father’s name?”
“Lawrence,” Minnie replied with a roll of her eyes. “Second husband. He was a photographer. Short fella, but he was beautiful – and he knew it. Tight with money. Counted every penny like it was trying to run away. We met on a photo shoot in Milan. Caught him in bed with another woman six months into our marriage.” She sighed. “He promised to take my career to new heights. Instead, he left me with a bun in the oven. Never wanted anything to do with Lisa when she was growing up. Pancreatic cancer got him in ’98.”
Julia typed in ‘lawrence’, but it didn’t work. She followed it with ‘Lawrence’, and the screen magically unlocked. The desktop background looked like any other beautiful view until Julia realised it was the same valley through the window.
“Who was your third husband?” Julia asked as she double-clicked the email icon. “I’m curious now.”
“Dick Richards.” This eye roll was even more pronounced. “Don’t ask. I don’t know what I was thinking either. Incredibly boring. Strange looking, too. He had huge eyes, a giant nose, barely a chin to speak of, and this squeaky nasally voice. I used to call him Owl. We met when I was doing some extras work for a film company to make ends meet. He was on the soundstage next door, directing a workout video.” She gave a little self-deprecating head shake. “It was the age of the Jane Fonda VHS, and I thought I was going to become the next big thing in fitness. I could barely stand on one leg, but we gave it a good shot. We self-produced a tape after our honeymoon, but we struggled to sell it. Let me tell you, shifting five hundred VHS tapes isn’t as easy as it sounds. I was giving them away in the end, just to get them out of the garage. I gave that one five years, but one night I cracked and realised I couldn’t stand listening to his voice for one more day. I think he was relieved when I told him I wanted a divorce.”
Julia found her way to Lisa’s inbox. Five new emails appeared instantly. One was for a book newsletter she was subscribed to, another a reminder to update payment settings for something. The other three, like the majority of the emails, had similar subject lines: Purchase Offer, Purchase Offer – Updated, Purchase Offer – Final. Julia didn’t even have to scroll down to see that identical emails had been coming through, regular as clockwork, all with the same subjects, all from different email addresses.
“Is that them?” Minnie asked, leaning against Julia’s arm as she stared at the screen. “There’s so many. How do we read them?”
Julia double-clicked on the email at the top, and a short, formal message popped up.
“Read it out, dear,” Minnie prompted. “My eyes aren’t what they were.”
“‘Dear La Casa owners’,” Julia read after clearing her throat. “‘We are upping our offer to buy your hotel by another two thousand euros, bringing our current offer to four hundred and fifteen thousand euros. This is our final offer. On acceptance, you will receive the funds promptly, in cash. We await your timely reply.’”
“How much did you say that offer was, dear?”
“Four hundred and fifteen thousand.”
“Four hundred?”
“And fifteen thousand.”
“Bloody hell!” Minnie collapsed back into the sofa. “I could have sworn Lisa said the offers were in the low two-hundred-thousands. We only paid ninety-eight for the place, but that was twenty years ago. If I’d wanted to sell, we would have got more than they were offering by going to market.” She blinked. “But four hundred and fifteen thousand? They want to pay that much for my hotel, and in cash?”
“Are you considering it?”
“What choice do I have?” Minnie bit into her lip. “Lisa was right. I can’t run this place without her, and she doesn’t want the job. That money would pay for the ransom with three hundred and fifteen thousand left over. Heck, if I wanted to, I could buy a house in Peridale. I’ve always wanted to visit the old place.”
“Minnie, I—”
“If you’re going to say you can’t accept the ransom money, I insist,” she said, holding up a hand. “The note was addressed to La Casa. This wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t invited you all here. I got carried away with the idea of reliving the old days with Dot. The days before I became that fake woman in all those pictures.”
Julia hadn’t intended on refusing the offer. How could she? No amount of money mattered more than her gran. Julia didn’t care where that money came from. If that made her selfish, then she was happy to throw up her hands and admit her selfishness without hesitation.
“Thank you.” Exactly what Julia had been about to say before Minnie interrupted her. “I know she’s my gran, but she’s the closest thing to a mother I’ve had for most of my life.”
“I thought your father remarried?”
“He did,” Julia said, pausing to figure out the quickest way to explain that her ‘stepmother’, Katie, was her age and more like a friend or a sister – even if she had given birth to Julia’s almost two-year-old brother, Vinnie. Instead, she simply opted for, “It’s complicated.”
“Told you it’s the most complicated relationship,” Minnie said with a wink, her spirits seemingly lifted after the talk. “Now, how do we reply to an email?”
“With another email,” she explained. “You can type it out.”
“I could never get the hang of a typewriter.”
“You could dictate?”
“Okay.” Minnie nodded, tapping her finger on her chin. “Okay, write ‘I will accept your offer. Please contact us at your earliest convenience.’ How does that sound?”
“Like what they want to hear,” Julia said as she quickly typed out the short message. “Are you sure you want me to send it? Something tells me there’s no going back with these people.”
Minnie looked around the room and smiled. Julia half-expected her to shake her head and throw the laptop out the window, but instead, she gave one firm nod. Julia clicked ‘send’ without hesitation.
“Then it’s done,” Minnie said, standing up. “I’m going to shower, and then I’ll get back to the hospital. Would you stay here and watch for a reply? And if nothing comes before I head back, would you mind keeping hold of it to keep checking?”
“Of course.”
Minnie stumbled across her small flat, her steps clunky and stiff as though multiple joints hurt at once. She reached a white door in the sea of rich colours and patterns. She paused before opening it and turned back to Julia.
“You look just like your mother, you know,” she said. “Just as beautiful.”
“Thank you.” Julia blushed. “Lisa is the spitting image of you, too.”
“She is?” Minnie furrowed her brow and looked over at the wall of pictures. “Yes, I suppose she is.”
Julia waited in the cluttered living room, listening to the shower. Minnie’s room had no television or any other sign of technology aside from a record player. She could see the appeal of such a life, although it wasn’t one she could cope with for long. As much as she disliked the beeping of her phone and the constant stream of information it provided, she already felt completely disconnected from the world in Savega. She couldn’t imagine how that would feel after twenty years.
After thirty minutes of no email reply, and with the shower still running, Julia gently knocked on the door to the bedroom. When no response came, she opened the door and popped her head in. As she’d suspected, Minnie was fast asleep on the edge of a king-sized bed in the middle of the eclectically decorated bedroom. Still fully dressed, she hadn’t even made it to the shower.
Julia turned off the water in the en suite bathroom – the only part of the self-contained flat that resembled her room in La Casa – and turned off the light. She pulled an ice-white fur throw from the back of an ornate armchair and covered Minnie with it.
Leaving her great-aunt softly snoring, Julia tucked the laptop under her arm and headed back to the main part of the hotel. She crept down the staircase and emerged into brightness, where the soothing calmness of the decorating was utterly at odds with the rooms where she’d just been. In a moment of luck, Barker walked through the front doors just as she came around the desk.
“Been snooping?” he asked.
“I was . . .” Julia paused and thought about her response before saying, “ . . . getting to know my great-aunt. What about you?”
“Oh,” he said, grinning ear to ear. “I have definitely been snooping. I did what I’ve spent the last few months being good at for retired women with too much money.”
“You tried to prove someone’s unfaithfulness?”
“Close,” Barker replied, pulling out his phone. “I followed a dodgy man around with a camera, and for once, actually found something other than a secret gambling addiction or sneaky smoking habit. Swipe through these.”
Julia accepted Barker’s phone and looked through the pictures. Inspector Hillard was in all of them. The sequence of the photographs acted like stop-motion animations, showing the inspector going in and out of the clothes shops, talking to men in cars, and in more than a handful of the pictures, accepting thick brown envelopes.
“I called DI Christie and asked him to do something he could actually do,” Barker said as Julia continued swiping. “Couldn’t find much on Inspector Hillard myself, but Christie knows a guy who knows a guy who was able to dig up that Hillard has been working in Savega for two years. How long did Gabriel say the gang had been here?”
“Two years.”
“Coincidence?” Barker whispered, looking around the empty hotel foyer. “Or have we just found The Buyer?”
Julia swiped one too many, landing on a picture of her asleep, mouth wide open, sprawled out on a lounger on the terrace with a book resting between her chest and bump. Hardly any time had passed since that first morning, and yet it felt like it had happened in a different lifetime.
“Good work,” she said, swiping back one before returning the phone. “I have some news too. If the gang and The Buyer are connected, and Inspector Hillard is The Buyer, he’s about to be four hundred and fifteen thousand euros short. Minnie’s accepted an offer to buy the hotel.”
“Seriously?”
“She’s going to pay the ransom.” Julia gulped, and for the first time allowed herself to feel excited. “This could be it, Barker. This could be how we get them back.”
16
Dot
“I spy with my little eye,” Percy said, dragging out each syllable as he looked around the small outbuilding, “something beginning with . . . S.”
Like with his ear-tugging poker giveaway, Percy’s habit of staring at the thing he was picking made it easy for Dot to figure it out. Still, she looked around the room, pausing to glance at her watch. It was already six in the evening, and no food had been brought to them – if any was coming at all.
“Sink,” she said.
“How do you get them so quickly?” Percy said, sighing heavily. “You’re far too clever for me, my dear.”
“You were staring right at the sink again.” Dot dabbed at his forehead with the yellow pocket square he’d had in his shirt pocket when they were first taken. “I’d give anything for that fan right now.”
“You never know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”
Dot had never heard a truer statement. She looked around the cramped space. It was as rundown as she’d assumed based on its exterior. The small room contained a single bed with no sheets, a sink on one wall with a small window above it, and a toilet with only a short half-wall for privacy. The walls were exposed plaster with huge chunks missing to show the old bricks between, and the single window was so dusty and streaky that it barely let in any natural light.
It was also far too small to crawl through, even if they could get up that high.
A prison cell, essentially, although Dot had seen prisoners on documentaries with better-kept rooms. The villa was a palace in comparison, but they were never setting foot back inside there, not after their failed break-out.
“It’s your turn, Dorothy.”
“Hmmm?”
“I spy.”
Dot sighed. She wasn’t in the mood to play another game of anything, especially since they’d long since run out of objects to spy.
She glanced down at Percy’s leg.
She had to keep him distracted.
“I spy with my little eye,” she said reluctantly, looking around the room for something neither of them had used yet, “something between with . . . L B.”
“Oh, a two-letter game!” Percy shifted his weight, looking wearily around the room, a fresh layer of sweat already covering his face. “I might have to think about this one.”
While he did, Dot looked at the makeshift bandage wrapped around the cut on his shin. After being thrown into the outbuilding last night and realising her cries for medical attention were going to be ignored, she gave nursing her best shot.
Dot had torn the trouser leg off at the knee, using the rip as a natural tearing point. Washing away the blood had revealed a chunk of glass from the window, around the size of a fifty pence piece, lodged in his shin. Percy cried when she pulled it out, but the relief that followed seemed worth it. With nothing to stitch him up, she did the only thing she
could. She wrapped it as tightly as she could and prayed the bleeding would stop.
Somehow, they fell asleep side by side on the tiny bed, although Dot woke more than once to watch Percy’s breathing.
In the morning, she cleaned the cut and changed the dressing with another strip of the trouser fabric. She noticed the darkening skin around the wound but didn’t comment on it. She didn’t need to be a real nurse to know what an infection looked like.
“Is it . . . long beam?” Percy asked, nodding up at the ceiling as she dabbed at his shiny face.
“Not quite.”
“You might have me stumped here, my—”
Percy stopped as they heard jangling keys. They sat up straight, backs against the wall, legs stretched out in front of them on the bare mattress. Unlike the villa, this door had only one lock to keep them in. Not that more were needed. Dot hadn’t braved looking through the window for a few hours, but the six men in the clearing with their guns pointed at the outbuilding were enough to stop any thought of attempting freedom.
The door opened. Dot was relieved to see Rafa. One eye was swollen entirely shut, the skin around it a similar hue to Percy’s cut. His bottom lip jutted out, thick and split down the middle. Having taken a kettle to the back of his head seemed like the least of his worries.
“I won’t insult you with an apology,” Dot said, no longer attempting to push forward her sweeter voice. “In our position, anyone would have done the same.”
Rafa didn’t say a word. He dumped a loaf of bread in the sink under the window before turning to them. They flinched as his body blocked the light. Rafa glanced down at Percy’s leg before diving forward to snatch his glasses.
“Goodness me,” Percy muttered, blinking hard as he pushed himself against Dot. “I can’t see a thing without them.”
“I don’t think he cares, dear.”
Rafa pocketed the glasses and reached out for Dot. For a split second, she thought he was going to wrap his hands around her neck. Instead, he went for her brooch; she would have preferred the neck.
