Silver Bay(91)
Author: Jojo Moyes

‘If it’s council business,’ she said, ‘he sees people on Fridays.’

‘Fridays.’

She nodded.

‘His office told me he’d be working from home today.’ I don’t know why I lied. I thought perhaps if I could keep her talking I might find out a little more about him.

‘He’s in London,’ she said. ‘He’s always in London on Thursday nights.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I must have got it wrong. He’s still at the bank, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘I saw him in the newspaper. Quite an important man, isn’t he?’

She pulled the letters from the box and leafed through them. Then she looked at me. ‘I can give you his number, if you like.’

I glanced at my notebook. ‘I have it, but thank you.’

I could ask to come in, I thought. But I wouldn’t know what to say to his wife. I had no back story thought out, and until I knew how to present myself, there was no point. Hello, Mrs Villiers. I’m a journalist. Can you tell me if your husband – the pillar of the community – is actually a wife-beating sociopath? Is he a bullying, unfaithful control freak partly responsible for the death of his own child? Lovely curtains, by the way.

‘I’ll ring his office. Thank you.’ I smiled, in a friendly, businesslike way, as if it were of no importance. I would go into the village and have a coffee. I could always come back, once I had worked out the best way to proceed. Perhaps the wife was the way forward. Perhaps I could pretend to be a local feature-writer, keen to do something on the Villiers family life. If I could get her by herself, over a cup of tea, there was no saying what she might admit to.

‘’Bye then.’

‘’Bye.’

The girl stood in front of me, not really paying me any attention, and pushed her hair back behind her ear. Then as she began to walk slowly towards the house, I noticed she had a pronounced limp. And something funny happened to my heart.

I’ve heard that expression: the world just fell away. I hate cliché. In my writing I’ve always worked hard to steer away from it. Yet that was the only phrase that echoed through my head.

I put my bag on the pavement beside me, and stood very still, staring after her.

‘Excuse me!’ I called, not caring who heard me. ‘Excuse me!’

I shouted until she turned round and walked back slowly towards me.

‘What?’ she said, head tilted to one side. It was then that I saw it. And, for a moment, everything stopped.

‘What . . . what’s your name?’ I asked.

Twenty-six

Kathleen

I was making lunch for Hannah when I heard the door slam. That isn’t unusual in this house, not with a dog, a near-teenager and guests who either seemingly hail from barns or leave the sea wind to close doors. But the ferocity with which my ancient portal hit the frame, then the agitated thumping of Mike – not a small man – leaping up several steps at a time made me curse gently. His feet sounded like the pounding of a battering ram. When he made it into his room he must have left the window open because that door banged noisily behind him too, sending a shudder through the house.

‘We’re not in need of demolition just yet,’ I yelled at the ceiling, wiping my hands on my apron. ‘You go through my floorboards, you’ll be paying for ’em!’

We had the radio on so at first I couldn’t make out what he was yelling, but we both paused at the commotion in his room.

‘You think he’s having another fight with someone?’ said Hannah.

‘You get on with your homework, Miss,’ I said. But I turned off the radio.

This is an old house, wood-built, a little rickety in places, so from the kitchen you can hear a lot of movement upstairs, and as Mike threw himself across the room and dragged the chair back from his desk I was moved to remark that that man had ants in his pants.

‘Perhaps he got bit by a redback,’ she said, suddenly interested.

‘Monica?’ he was yelling into his phone. ‘Send it now. Send it now.’

Hannah and I exchanged a glance.

‘That’s his sister,’ she said quietly. And I thought, That’s the journalist, and my peaceable mood dissolved.

I was making a cheese omelette, and whisked the eggs furiously, trying to lose the dark thread of my thoughts in domestic tasks. Since Liza had told me her plans, I had never cooked so hard, nor the hotel been so clean. Pity there were no other guests – they would have had a rare five-star service. I stuck my head down, and whisked until I had forgotten what I was thinking about and I had eggs so light they were ready to fly out of the bowl. It was several minutes before I noticed that since Mike’s shout there had been no noise at all from upstairs. Not even the usual padding of his feet as he moved from desk to leather chair, or the creak as he lay down on his bed.

Once again Hannah was engrossed in her exercise book, but there was a quality to the silence that made me curious.

I took the pan off the heat and walked to the doorway. ‘Mike?’ I called up the stairs. ‘Everything okay?’

Nothing.

‘Mike?’ I said, holding the banister and taking a step up.

‘Kathleen,’ he said, and his voice was tremulous. ‘I think you’d better come up here.’

As I entered the room he told me to sit down on the bed. In truth he was so pale, so unlike himself, that it was a couple of seconds before I agreed to do so. He moved towards me and squatted in front of me, like someone about to propose. Then he said those two little words, and as I heard them spoken aloud I felt the colour drain from my face. Afterwards he told me he was afraid I’d have a stroke like Nino Gaines.

He was a fool, I thought, with the part of my mind still capable of functioning. Or a madman. We’d been harbouring a madman all this time. ‘What the hell are you saying?’ I asked, when my voice returned to me. ‘What kind of joke is this?’ Suddenly I felt furious with him, and he waved a hand at me, telling me, uncharacteristically rudely, to shush, to wait while he opened his computer.

He stood up and, as I began to protest, scanned down a load of messages. Then, as I wondered whether I should try to leave the room, a little box opened on his screen and there she was. Unbelievably. In full colour. Staring at us with a wary incomprehension that matched my own. And my hands began to tremble.

‘This is the picture Monica took today. It looks like her, right?’

My mouth hung open and my hand was glued to my chest. I was unable to tear my eyes away from that face. And then, in halting sentences, he told me what his sister had told him.