Secret Sins: A Callie Anson (21 page)

‘She’s…not well,’ repeated Granny. ‘But she’s being well looked after.’

‘She’s in a crazy house.’ As Alex put it into words, she knew it was true. If she wasn’t dead, what other reason could there be for her mum not to contact her?

‘They don’t call it that, of course. It’s a sort of private hospital.’

Alex’s world reeled. ‘Have you seen her? Talked to her?’

There was another long pause. ‘I tried to. She’s not allowed to have visitors. But I do keep in touch with…her condition. The doctors think she might be getting a wee bit better.’

Alex groaned. ‘Why didn’t Dad tell me? Jilly always tried to make me think that I was with them because Mum didn’t want me. I knew that couldn’t be true. But why didn’t Dad tell me the truth?’

She knew the answer, really. It was because Dad wouldn’t do anything Jilly didn’t want him to. And Jilly didn’t want her to know where her mother was.

‘I can’t answer that,’ said Granny.

‘But you
can
tell me where she is!’ Alex realised. ‘I could write her a letter! Oh, tell me, Granny! Where is my mum?’

Usually, after Evening Prayer, Callie was anxious to get back to her flat—to see Bella and give her a quick walk, then to put her feet up and have a cup of tea. But now, with Peter in residence, she dreaded what she’d find.

Bella came to the door to meet her as usual, wagging her whole body with pleasure. Callie crouched down and stroked her, looking round for Peter.

‘Hi, Sis,’ he called. ‘I’m in the kitchen.’

What was he up to? With a last pat for Bella, she straightened up and went through to see.

Peter was standing by the counter, grinning, pointing to an unfamiliar black-and-chrome contraption on the work surface. ‘Look, Sis!’ he said. ‘Look what I’ve bought you!’

‘What is it?’ she asked blankly.

‘What is it? Why, it’s only the latest and most wonderful gadget!’

It wasn’t immediately evident to Callie what the gadget was meant to do. ‘Is it a fancy tin-opener?’ she guessed.

‘Oh, Sis.’ He shook his head reproachfully. ‘Can’t you see?’

‘Well, no,’ she admitted.

Peter opened a box next to the contraption. ‘What would you like? Tea? Or coffee? Espresso, cappuccino, filter coffee? Decaf or regular? Or maybe hot chocolate?’

‘Tea, I suppose,’ Callie said, still mystified.

‘Okay.’ He selected something from the box and showed it to her; it was a sort of capsule. ‘See, Sis? You pop this in here. Like this. Then you put your mug here. Very important, that. Then you push this button. And in a few seconds…’ With a grand, theatrical gesture he pointed to the machine as it spewed out a stream of brown liquid into the mug. ‘Voilà! Fresh tea, made to order!’

‘But…why?’ What, Callie wondered, was the matter with boiling a kettle? Why did you need a machine that took up half the available work surface, just to make a cup of tea?

‘It’s easy. It’s fast. You can have any sort of hot drink you fancy, with no effort.’ He displayed the box of metallic capsules. ‘Just pop one of these into the machine, and before you know it, your drink is ready.’ Peter looked at her expectantly. ‘Well, Sis? Isn’t it brilliant?’

‘It’s…very nice.’

His face fell, just like a small child whose gift had been rejected. ‘I thought you’d like it,’ he said. ‘I wanted to do something to thank you for putting up with me, and I thought you’d like it.’

‘I
do
like it.’ Touched, Callie made an effort to sound
enthusiastic
. ‘It’s a lovely surprise, Peter. Really. I love it.’

He was, she thought, awfully sweet. A nuisance as a
houseguest
, but her brother was awfully sweet. Callie felt ashamed of herself for resenting his intrusion into her life. What sort of a priest would she make, if she couldn’t even tolerate her own beloved brother for a few days?

Yolanda made a hot milky drink for Rachel, to settle her before bedtime, and took it upstairs to Rachel’s bedroom. She raised her
hand to tap on the door, which was cracked open, then paused as she heard a murmured voice on the other side.

‘I e-mailed you,’ said Rachel, softly. ‘Didn’t you get it?’

She must be on her mobile phone, Yolanda realised.

What she ought to do was to knock loudly, wait a few seconds, then push the door open and go in.

But instead she waited, and listened.

‘I know. I know,’ Rachel said, in a hushed voice that was half impatient, half tender. ‘It’s hard for me, too. But we can’t see each other. Not now. Maybe not for a while.’ There was a pause. ‘I know. But you mustn’t ring. It’s too dangerous. She never leaves me alone. Not for more than a few minutes. I can barely go to the loo without her wanting to go with me. She means well, but—’

Yolanda didn’t move; she felt that she couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to.

‘Yes,’ murmured Rachel. ‘You know that I love you, too. We just have to be patient, that’s all.’

Alex didn’t get much sleep that night. Her mother was alive; her mother wasn’t well. All of her suppressed emotion about her mother’s absence from her life had been stirred up into a turmoil of love and longing.

Granny, in the end, wouldn’t tell her exactly where Mum was. But she’d gleaned some clues, both from what Granny had said and from what she’d been unable to deny. She was in Scotland. Not the Highlands, and not in Edinburgh. Somewhere in the Borders area, in some sort of private clinic.

If there was one thing Alex was able to do, it was to find information on the internet. And the internet didn’t sleep.

Through the night, in her darkened room, she trawled
electronic
waters in search of clues; by the time she finally slipped into bed, unable to keep her eyes open a moment longer, she had a little list of possibilities.

If Alex got little sleep, Yolanda got none. In the room next to Rachel’s she was tense and wakeful, her mind going round and round in dazed circles.

It was obvious that she had to do something. But what should she do? Should she confront Rachel? Or go straight to Neville Stewart?

Maybe, she told herself, she was over-reacting.

Perhaps there was an innocent explanation for what she’d overheard, and it hadn’t meant what she thought it meant. In that case, she owed Rachel the opportunity to explain.

But to talk to Rachel first presented two difficulties. First of all, Rachel was in a very delicate physical state. Any sort of excitement or agitation—above and beyond what she’d already been through—could bring on premature labour. And if her worst suspicions were true, it would show Rachel her hand, give her an opportunity to take some sort of action which could compromise the investigation.

Besides, her efforts to think of a possible innocent explanation had produced absolutely nothing credible. And she had tried very hard. Yolanda had come to be very fond of Rachel over the past days, beyond just her natural protective and nurturing instincts. She admired Rachel’s stoicism and bravery; she liked her as a person.

But what if that stoicism, that bravery, had an entirely different significance? What if they meant that she really didn’t care about Trevor’s death? That she was, in fact, relieved to be rid of him?

Or even something more sinister…

Yolanda shied clear of taking that last step. It was
difficult
enough for her to get her head round the fact that Rachel loved someone other than Trevor. Someone whose existence Yolanda had neither known about nor suspected…

It was then that she remembered the phone call she’d intercepted, early that first morning. A whispered voice, asking ‘Rache?’

She ought to tell Neville Stewart. Now. But how could she betray a poor, helpless woman who could give birth at any moment? If confronting Rachel herself involved the risk of
bringing
on a premature birth, how much more so would the inevitable consequences of informing the officers in charge of the case?

She was, Yolanda reminded herself sternly, a police officer. That was her job, her calling. And it was the basis on which she was here in this house. Not as a midwife, not as a friend and companion to Rachel. As a police officer, with a duty to uphold
the law. Her next course of action shouldn’t even be an issue: it should be a foregone conclusion.

Then an idea came to her—one which would, in any case, buy her a few hours of time. She would talk to Eli. Eli was wise and experienced. She thought she could probably guess what he would say, but she would put the facts before him and see.

Mark was troubled with a profound unease.

Chiara was not, he knew, a fanciful child, quick to make something out of nothing. No, if Chiara was worried that
something
in her family was wrong, he was prepared to believe her.

Serena and Joe shouting at one other? Yelling, as Chiara had put it?

He couldn’t imagine Serena yelling at anyone, for any reason. She was the most placid, the most unruffled of people. Mark thought back over all the years of his life and couldn’t remember a single instance of Serena losing her temper. Even his brazen schoolboy efforts to tease her into betraying some sort of
emotion
, when she was a teenager beginning to be interested in Joe, had been lamentable failures. Serena just couldn’t be drawn into an outward display of feelings.

His sister’s unflappability was one of the touchstones of his own existence.

Mark had wanted to confide in Callie when he went round to see her later that evening, but was constrained by Peter’s presence. He was distracted, though—enough so that Callie noticed. She walked out with him to say goodbye in privacy.

‘Are you okay, Marco?’ she asked. ‘You seemed…not quite with us tonight.’

He shook his head. ‘I have something on my mind. Sorry.’

‘Work?’ Callie guessed.

‘No. Family.’ Mark grimaced.

‘Not
my
family? Not Peter.’ She sounded apprehensive. ‘I know he was going on a bit about that coffee machine—’

Quickly he reassured her. ‘No, not Peter. Of course not. No, it’s
la mia famiglia
, as usual.’

‘Anything you can tell me about?’ Callie suggested diffidently. ‘I’m a pretty good listener.’

Grateful for the offer, and sorely tempted to take her up on it on the spot, Mark hugged her. ‘You’re a
wonderful
listener,
cara
mia
.’ He kissed her on the nose. ‘And I
will
tell you. When I’ve managed to get my own head round it. Soon.’

But how was he going to get his head round it, without talking to Serena?

On his way to work, Neville stopped at the news agents on the corner to pick up the morning papers: with all those reporters and photographers haunting the inquest, there was sure to be something about the case.

It hadn’t made the front page of any paper except the
Globe
. They’d been lucky enough to snap a photo of Rachel in the instant before Neville got between her and the cameras, and they’d made the most of it.

T
RAGIC
R
ACHEL
, screamed the headline.

‘Oh, hell,’ Neville muttered. He paid for the papers with a five pound note, shoved his change in his pocket, and went across the street to his favourite greasy spoon caff to have a quick browse.

‘Coffee,’ he ordered automatically, knowing it would be blessedly strong.

The
Globe
’s story was, of course, written by Lilith Noone, his old nemesis; at times it seemed to Neville that she had been put on the earth especially to plague him, though he knew that she did not confine her efforts to him alone. She had, as usual, put her finger on the one thing guaranteed to get him in hot water with Detective Superintendent Evans. Skipping over the preliminaries about poor tragic Rachel, he went to the end.

‘It has been nearly a week since the murder of dad-to-be Trevor Norton. The police have CCTV footage of the killer, just seconds before he committed the evil crime that will deprive a
child forever of its father, and all for the sake of an iPod. Why have they not yet caught this monster, before he kills again? These lawless yobs must not be allowed to make our streets
no-go
zones for decent people!’

On Thursday mornings, Callie always went to the vicarage for a staff meeting with Brian—to compare diaries, make forward plans, and discuss the events of the past week. While she didn’t at all mind the meetings themselves, she inevitably found herself dreading the moment when Jane Stanford opened the door to her.

The fact of the matter was that Jane didn’t like her. Callie was as sure of that fact as she was baffled as to the reasons. Marco said it was because Jane was jealous of her, but she didn’t see why that should be so: she had absolutely no interest in stealing Jane’s husband. Brian was perfectly acceptable as a colleague and boss; she couldn’t, though, imagine any circumstances in which she would fancy him. Even if she were desperate, even if she didn’t have a gorgeous and very fanciable man in her life already, she would never find Brian even marginally attractive as a man. So why should Jane Stanford dislike her so?

The dislike was usually manifested as an icy politeness. That was preferable to the occasional alternative, a spiteful sniping. On a few occasions Jane had even gone out of her way to discomfit Callie. So it was no surprise that Callie didn’t look forward to their encounters.

She drew a deep breath before ringing the bell, bracing herself, wondering—not for the first time—why Brian never came to the door himself.

The person on the other side of the door, though, was neither Jane nor Brian. It was a young man with Jane’s dark hair and Brian’s slightly weak chin. One of the twins, home from Oxford for the Christmas holidays, she realised instantly.

‘Oh, hello. Charlie, is it? Or Simon?’

The young man grinned at her. ‘Right the first time. I’m Charlie. We’re identical, but these days it’s easy to tell us apart.
My brother is the one who’s currently joined at the hip with his girlfriend. You won’t see him without her.’

‘Oh—I didn’t know he had a girlfriend. Is she visiting, then?’

Charlie jerked his head in the direction of the stairs. ‘Upstairs. They’re in his room. Snogging, no doubt. At least they have the decency not to do it in public, and frighten the horses.’

What, Callie couldn’t help wondering, did Jane make of that? Jane was very proprietorial when it came to her boys; Callie had never met them before now, but it was clear from everything Jane ever said about her sons that she took a very active interest in their lives.

‘You must be the curate,’ Charlie said. ‘Dad’s expecting you.’ He looked her up and down appraisingly. ‘He didn’t tell me you were pretty.’

Callie felt herself blushing. Ridiculous, at her age.

‘But I suppose,’ Charlie added, ‘he wouldn’t dare say that, in front of Mum.’