“What do you think?” Malcolm asked when she came back down the stairs.
“It’s lovely,” Fran replied. “I’m not surprised you’ve had so much interest. But I need to have a think, so I’ll be in touch soon.” She walked out of the house clutching her bag tightly, still convinced the pale-faced young man with the shiny suit would stop and search her on the way out.
Chapter Thirty-Six
“Spanish omelette?”
“Only if we have Sangria and a beach to go with it.” Fran placed her tote bag on the kitchen table, somehow sure that Adrian could see the stolen goods inside. She hadn’t told him about going to view the house. She’d told him she was taking a book to a café for some alone time.
“We have orange juice and a garden.” He smiled. “How was the café?”
“Lovely.”
“How was the book.”
“Very good.”
“Did you eat?”
“No, just a coffee. I’ll take that Spanish omelette if the offer still stands.”
He slid the eggs onto a plate, sprinkled on some black pepper and topped with rocket leaves.
“You know, you could’ve been a chef,” Fran noted.
“Maybe I still will be.” He tossed a kitchen towel over one shoulder and grinned.
Fran tucked into the food, aware of her quick movements, still agitated from the stress and exhilaration of lying about the house viewing. She forced herself to slow down, so Adrian didn’t notice her jitters. Deceiving him left a bad taste in her mouth.
“We could go for a walk after lunch,” he said. “Or get a pint.”
“Sounds nice.”
“Are you all right?” he asked. “You seem a little distracted.”
She moved a piece of her omelette around the plate, considering what to say. “I have a confession to make, Adrian.”
He tilted his head, almost in amusement. “What do you mean?”
“I called the estate agent yesterday and made an appointment to view the Whitaker’s house. That’s where I was this morning.”
“Oh,” he said. He turned away from her so that she didn’t see his facial expression. “Right, that makes sense. I thought you were shaky because you’d had too much coffee.”
“I could’ve got away with it then.”
“Yes, you could have.” He turned to face her again, raising an eyebrow. She examined his face, searching for disapproval, or support, or something. But he remained impassive. She wasn’t sure, but she suspected that he was closing off to her. Each small deception, every time she insisted on talking about the Whitakers, he became better at hiding his true feelings. She knew, though. She knew he was sick of it.
“I’ve never been very good at lying to you.” Fran reached out to squeeze his hand.
“Hit me with it then.” Adrian picked up his fork, fingertips gripping the stem too tightly. “Come on. What are we getting into here? You’re going to find them, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sorry.”
“What did you discover at the house.”
“Well, I had a poke around. They’d left their computer behind. All the clothes and small items were gone apart from two things. Esther’s dress, the one she was wearing when I found her on the village green that time. And Esther’s bible.”
“Hmm. Odd.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“You stole them, didn’t you?”
Fran shrugged slightly. “Is it stealing if the owners have abandoned them?”
“Probably.”
“Then you’re married to a criminal I’m afraid.”
He speared a rocket leaf with his fork and let out a heavy sigh. “I’ve been married to worse.”
“Do you know who owns that house? Is it someone in the village?”
“I always thought it was that chap who lives on the hill. You know, face like a beetroot, always wears a tweed jacket.”
“Rory Ellingham?”
“Yes, him. Actually…” He tapped the plate with the edge of his fork. “Yes, that’s right, I’m remembering now. He and his wife have a few properties in and around Leacroft but it’s his wife, Anita, who takes care of them. Collects the rent, that sort of thing. He does something with the stock market. I met him once, years ago, when Mum and Dad were still alive.”
“I know Anita,” Fran said. “She used to come to the choir practice.”
“That’s handy,” Adrian said. “Fran—”
“Also, we might have to have Nick Taylor around for dinner one night so I can get information out of him,” she said, cutting him off.
“Fran.”
“I thought you could do your Moroccan lamb and spicy couscous.”
“Fran. I don’t want to do this.”
Her lip wobbled.
“It’s time to stop.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “I can’t. I can’t stop. I need to know what happened to them.”
Adrian lowered his head until his chin rested against his chest. His back was arched over and he seemed tired. “Okay.”
She brushed away tears with the back of her hand, cleared her throat, and turned her head sideways so that she didn’t have to meet his gaze. “For better or worse, eh?”
And then, in an uncharacteristically chilly voice, he said, “When will better be coming back?” Before taking his plate and leaving the kitchen.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Fran didn’t have Anita Ellingham’s phone number, which meant that she was forced to contact her through Facebook. She’d spent hours agonising over what kind of excuse to make up for messaging her out of the blue. A casual coffee wouldn’t work. They’d never been good friends. Anita had been with the choir for less than six months before quitting, which meant that they’d never built a strong connection. Fran always got the impression that Anita gossiped about her relationship with Adrian. She was one of those that speculated that Adrian and Fran had started their relationship when she was a young student, which wasn’t true at all.
She couldn’t fake a reminiscing session or persuade her to come back to the choir. There was just one way that Fran could see, and that was to invite Anita personally to the choir’s summer party, even though it was two weeks away. It seemed the most organic way to open the conversation between them.
And if Anita did come to the party, then they could have a glass of wine together and she could casually ask about Elijah and Mary. It wasn’t something she could come out and say without building up to it naturally. Fran had learned as a journalist that people didn’t give you information if they suspected the situation was forced, but they would offer it willingly in a natural conversation. People like to talk; they just don’t like to be forced to talk.
She’d sent the message to Anita a few minutes after the disastrous omelette lunch with Adrian. Then she took her bag upstairs and laid out the dress on their bed. She placed the bible next to it and let out a small sigh. Take my hand, little one. She closed her eyes and remembered Esther alone in the dark. She hadn’t seemed afraid, simply reluctant to go anywhere with a stranger. Fran lifted the dress and searched through the tiny pockets. She found a bobble, and a folded piece of paper. She unfolded it carefully, as though a frog or a bug was going to leap out at her.
Esther Whitaker. Seven years old. Father is Elijah.
Fran stared at the words for a long while, frowning. Why would Esther have this in her pocket? What did it mean? She thought that Mary might have put this in Esther’s pocket in case the child wandered off again. But it would require the person who found her to go through her pockets, which was odd, and there was no phone number. Surely Mary would want to include contact details on something like that. Fran turned the paper over in her hands. It was flimsy, thin, crumpled. It’s possible that the idea was half-cooked by Mary. If she’d been thinking clearly, she might have bought Esther some sort of engraved bracelet to wear, or at least laminated the note. Fran dropped the note onto the dress and opened the bible.
On the ins
ide cover, in childish, but quite neat, handwriting, it said: My name is Esther Whitaker.
Not, this belongs to Esther, but: My name is Esther Whitaker.
There were shivers running up and down Fran’s arms. She turned the pages in the book. It was more like a collection of popular bible stories, its verses illustrated with colourful cartoons. She flicked through the depiction of Adam and Eve in Eden. Noah’s Ark. The Tower of Babel. It was later, as the book focused on the teachings of Jesus, that Fran noticed scribbles in the margins. She sat down on the bed and spread the book out on her lap. Esther had taken a black coloured pencil and crossed out some of the words. She’d blocked out whole paragraphs. There were words in her handwriting. Wrong. No. Fran turned the pages, finding more scribbles. Father says this is wrong. Not Father’s lesson. Father doesn’t want this. Fran closed the book and closed her eyes, too. It was such a strange thing for a child to do.
Mary had told her that Esther’s imaginary friend was God, and looking at the diary, it seemed that she was right. But the strange part about those words was how they seemed to contradict what was in the bible. Why wouldn’t Esther believe in the holy book for her own religion? Firstly, the devotion of this seven-year-old kid alarmed Fran, and secondly, it seemed contradictory.
Unless Mary lied. What if Esther had been talking about Elijah the entire time? What if Elijah had told Esther that the words she read in her seemingly harmless children’s bible were false? She remembered some of the rumours spreading around the village. There were rumours that Esther had been stolen, and there were rumours that Elijah was some sort of pastor. Well, Esther carried a note reminding her of who she was. She also had an authoritarian “Father” figure in her life, whether he was biologically her dad or not.
Fran leaned back on the duvet. She had to find them.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
When Anita responded positively to her message, Fran decided to keep a conversation going by asking her how life was, what she’d been doing to stay busy after the choir. She kept it casual. Anita was not always a likeable person, with a prickly personality and snobbish tendencies which meant that their Facebook back and forth was an unusual occurrence for them. She hoped it didn’t arouse Anita’s suspicions.
The messages dripped into her inbox slowly. One or two a day. Probably because Anita was so busy all the time. She’d taken on a Spanish course at Leacroft library, seeing as she and Rory had a holiday home on the Costa del Sol now. They went there every few months, so she hadn’t had much time for anything else. She asked how Fran was, and whether she was still with Adrian. It didn’t take long, Fran thought. Even though she and Adrian had been married for getting on ten years, some of the villagers still believed it wouldn’t work, and that Adrian was the kind of man to leave her for a younger model once he got bored. She swallowed her pride and answered politely, telling her that she and Adrian were together and as happy as always.
But it was going to be a slow process extracting information from Anita. She needed to do something else in the interim or she was going to go mad. Trying not to think about Adrian’s disapproval during their omelette lunch, Fran set the wheels in motion for a fake dinner party for Nick Taylor. It turned out that he’d recently divorced his wife, which gave Fran an idea. She sent a message to perpetual singleton, extrovert and Adrian’s old colleague, Suki. A pretend blind date might just work. She bit her lip as she typed out the email. Perhaps even a love match would grow out of this mess.
Convincing Adrian had been another matter, but at least it was an opportunity for him to show off his culinary skills. In fact, he’d immediately brightened up when she mentioned Suki, and announced that they’d be having sushi in honour of Suki’s Japanese heritage. Fran decided not to question his change of heart. She hugged him, and thanked him, and made a promise that everything would be okay. A promise she could not guarantee she could keep.
On the day of the party, Fran woke up with the beginning of a tension headache. She hadn’t slept well and was considering whether they were doing the right thing, but Adrian was fine. He helped her tidy the house, and later that evening, whistled as he sliced salmon into sashimi. He was in his element with sheets of nori, making homemade maki rolls. Fran sat on a stool in the kitchen, leaning on the counter to watch him work. It eased her headache and settled her stomach. She could watch him there for hours.
“Do you think they’ll get on?” Fran mused.
Adrian laughed. “Suki gets on with everyone if she’s had enough vodka tonics. We do have tonic water, don’t we?”
Fran went to check. It was no secret that Adrian and Suki had once been intimate, but it’d been over twenty years ago now, and everyone involved had moved on. Still, the thought of Adrian’s ex-lover coming into her home misaligned her emotional balance. Especially considering how happy he was about it. She grabbed a bottle of vodka and some tonic water from the pantry. Then she checked her phone. No messages, either from Mary or Anita. She spotted that it was 6:30, which meant their guests would be here in an hour. She took the drinks into the kitchen to find Adrian arranging edible flowers over the sliced fish.
“Goodness, you really are going all out.”
“This is my time to shine, darling!” He grinned at her, teeth on full display. Fran laughed.
She busied herself by arranging fruit for dessert before heading upstairs for a quick change of clothes. Before she knew it, Suki had arrived and was drinking vodka in the kitchen with her husband. She smoothed her dress and forced her face into a bright smile. She’d met Suki several times before, but each time Fran was taken aback by her height, her slim frame, and her long—now completely silver—hair that fell down past her shoulders. Suki kissed her on both cheeks, ever the bohemian. She was wearing a black dress that grazed her ankles. Her feet were bare. She had the appearance of a woman about to get married on the beach.
“I’m excited to meet this man you’ve set me up with,” she said, her thumb moving up and down through the condensation on the glass. “How exciting.”
“He’s nice,” Fran said, trying to keep up the ruse that the entire night was about these two people meeting each other. “He’s an estate agent, but not stuffy at all. Divorced, but he didn’t cheat. She cheated actually.”
“Oh no!”
“But it hasn’t made him jaded.”
“Good. Any kids?”
“A son. At university.”
“Which one?”
“Warwick.”
“Not bad. Smart then.”
Fran nodded. The doorbell rang. Adrian winked at her as he left to get the door, leaving her and Suki alone.
Suki, who was perched on the same stool Fran had been sitting on earlier, flipped her hair over one shoulder and leaned forward, her bracelets rattling. “Why am I here? You never invite me to dinner. There’s something going on. Isn’t there?”
“Just do me a favour, okay? Go along with...” Fran’s arms flailed. “This. This whole night. We need information out of this guy.”
Fran’s heart pounded as she half expected Suki to walk straight out of the door. Instead, the silver-haired woman stretched her bright red lips into a broad smile. “Sounds like fun. I’m game.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Fran had forgotten how bland Nick Taylor was. He had the personality of a potato and spent the entirety of their starter—a lovely clam chowder made by Adrian—talking about the housing market, and in particular, the millionaires who couldn’t sell their mansions. Or the nouveau riche paying more than houses are worth just to live in the right location. And all the while, through this boring, lengthy explanation, Suki leaned towards him, her chin resting coquettishly against her upturned palm and topped up Nick’s wine.
“What’s it like selling houses in such a small village?” Suki asked. “You must know everyone. Is it hard to keep secrets?”
“Well,” Nick said, his face pink from both the wine and Suki’s attention. “It’s not so bad. People don’t tend to keep se
crets around here. We all know each other so well anyway.”
“Oh, I bet there are a lot of secrets,” Suki said. “These small villages are full of them. And then you get new families coming in, destroying the status quo.
“That’s true,” Nick agreed.
Adrian made a move as though he was about to clear the starter plates away, but Fran placed a hand on his wrist. Suki was doing an excellent job of getting information out of Nick. Now she was pleased Adrian’s ex-lover had agreed to come tonight. It was a stroke of genius.
“That happened recently, actually,” Fran said. “This lovely family, the Whitakers, came from Arizona. They seemed a bit troubled, didn’t they Nick? Nice enough though. And then the village turned on them and it didn’t end well.”
“How horrible. I hate it when good people are treated unfairly. What happened to them?” Suki innocently sipped her vodka tonic.
Nick’s eyes brightened. He appeared to enjoy having the inside scoop. “Well, we let out the house, as you know. They were so eager to move in they dropped off the deposit money the day of the viewing. I was in the office when it happened.”
“Very odd,” Suki said.
“I got to know them a bit,” Fran added. “From what Mary, the wife, said, they didn’t know many people in England. They were probably desperate to put down roots.”
“Yes, we discussed that at the office, too,” Nick said. “They needed references for the lease, and they had a bit of trouble with that. Took them longer to get the references than it did the money, but they were so keen that we held the house for them. In the end a friend from Derby did it.”
Friend, Fran noted. Not family. Mary had used the word cousin. Perhaps she’d lied, or Elijah had lied to her. Unless Nick was mistaken.
Little One Page 11
