Letters to the Lost (5 page)

The bed was covered with a quilted counterpane in salmon-pink polyester, and though the dressing table was bare, on closer inspection it still bore the traces of spilled powder and the sticky rings left by bottles and jars on its polished surface.

Feeling like she was being watched, she went over to the wardrobe. The door stuck for a second before swinging back, so that the wire coat hangers inside gave off a silvery murmur. Most of them were empty, but pushed to the far end there were garments hanging; things from another era, another world, where women dressed like ladies in tailored suits and button-through dresses, and wore high heels and hats. In the darkness right at the back she saw the soft gleam of fur, the glitter of teeth and glassy eyes. Unnerved, she unhooked the nearest hanger, which held a beige trench coat. That would do to cover up the dress and provide a bit of warmth without making her look like the Granny in
Red Riding Hood
, or the Wolf.

At the bottom of the wardrobe shoeboxes were stacked in haphazard piles of two or three. The labels on their ends showed sketches of the contents. The ones on top were sturdy and unlovely, the type of shoe designed to cushion bunions and accommodate swollen ankles. Probably just what she needed, yet her gaze flickered over them to the bottom of the pile, where the boxes were older and more fragile, showing yellowed line drawings of elegant slippers with pointy toes and high heels. She slid out a box.

The shoes inside were of soft black leather, covered with a furring of mould like the bloom on a plum. She buffed it off with the edge of the pink bedspread and slipped them on. The heels were no more than an inch high, but they were narrow and she wobbled precariously as she took a couple of experimental steps. They were a bit big, but since the alternative was going barefoot she’d just have to manage.

A whisper of perfume wreathed itself around her as she slid her arms into the coat. It reached to the knee, fastening with big horn buttons and a fabric belt with a buckle. After a moment’s hesitation she rejected the buckle and, dredging up some long-buried image from an old black-and-white movie or something, knotted it tightly instead.

Outside the light was already dying. She studied her headless reflection in the dressing-table mirror and saw nothing that she recognized. She looked smart, sophisticated; a woman of the world instead of a girl from the roughest estate in Leeds. And then she bent her knees and saw her face, ghostly in the gloom, her asylum hair, and the effect was shattered.

With a grimace she straightened up and left the room. At the top of the stairs she paused and looked at the closed door. The encroaching dusk cloaked everything in veils of grey, blurring boundaries and giving her a sudden sense of unease. She twisted the handle, rattling it this way and that, but the door remained closed. Locked.

She withdrew her hand sharply and backed away, then hurried down the stairs, ignoring the pain in her ankle, forgetting the need to be quiet, wanting only to get out of the shadowy house with its locked doors and mysteries and secrets and back into the world of lights and people and normality.

Will Holt stopped the car in front of a row of garages at the end of the road and slumped back against the seat. Greenfields Lane. At sodding last; next to Platform nine-and-three-quarters and the Lost City of Atlantis it had to be the most difficult place on earth to find, especially in rush-hour traffic.

Not that you could tell it was rush hour from down here, tucked away from the car-clogged roads. Greenfields Lane might not be as rural as its name suggested, but by London standards there was a fair amount of shrubbery – most of it growing around number four. According to the manageress of St Jude’s Nursing Home, Nancy Price had only left her house two years ago, but in the early February dusk Will could see that undergrowth had almost engulfed it already.

It was pretty, though – or could be, if it was as well-kept as the others. The terrace was older than the houses around it, and consisted of four simple little red-brick cottages, probably built for workers of some kind when this part of London was no more than a village, separated from the city by fields where cows grazed. He wondered what it had been like here before the bigger Victorian and Edwardian villas had encroached, their backs turned like boorish guests at a party. Before the garages and the double yellow lines and the rows of wheelie bins.

He twisted uncomfortably and stretched, as far as he could in the tiny car. A 1975 Triumph Spitfire was a thing of beauty, but it was not, unfortunately, a thing of comfort, economy or practicality. Outside it was raining half-heartedly, and in the hour and ten minutes since he’d left St Jude’s the erratic heater had finally got up a pleasant fug, making the prospect of getting out extremely unappealing.

Plunging his hand into the crumpled M&Ms packet on the passenger seat he felt a stab of guilt when he found that it was empty. On the radio the pips sounded the hour. At least he could go straight home after this; there were no new leads and surely even Ansell the Arse couldn’t come up with anything more that could be done on this case today. And that would be another Thursday over.

God, he thought, scrubbing the heels of his hands into his tired eyes, what am I doing, wishing my life away like this? Getting fat and embittered working for the biggest twat in London in a job that was only one step up from selling dodgy life insurance or grave robbing?
A Mickey Mouse job
, as his father had once sneeringly called it.

And just like that, at the exact moment when he thought of his father, the radio presenter announced that he would soon be talking to ‘top historian and Professor at St John’s College Oxford, Dr Fergus Holt’ about his ‘epic new TV series’, conjuring him out of Will’s head so that his face hung in the frigid air before him like the genie from Aladdin’s lamp.

He switched the radio off quickly. The day was bad enough already without being forced to confront his father’s stellar success, as well as his notable lack of it. Reaching for his faux-leather salesman’s briefcase he got out of the car into the cold, wet afternoon.

He started with the house at the opposite end of the terrace to Nancy Price’s. The front door was painted the sort of indeterminate greyish-blue-green that denoted Good Taste, and there were herbs growing in the window box beneath the front window. After a minute the door was opened by a man wearing a striped butcher’s apron, wiping his hands on a tea towel. Music – something classical Will recognized but couldn’t name – was playing in the background.

‘Yes?’ He peered at Will over square, black-framed glasses, his natural good manners not quite masking his irritation at being disturbed.

‘Hi, I’m so sorry to disturb you. I’m Will Holt, from a firm called Ansell Blake, Probate Researchers. We’re looking into the estate of a lady called Nancy Price, who we believe used to live in the house at the end there, and I wondered if you might be able to help fill in some details?’

Experience had taught Will that he needed to get through this little speech quickly. If he managed to get that far without having the door shut in his face, he was halfway there. Mike Ansell would always round it off with the suggestion that he ‘come in for a quick chat’, at which point he’d step forward, giving the hapless homeowner a choice between moving aside or forcibly ejecting him. ‘And since nobody wants that kind of unpleasantness in their own home, you’re in.’ Will knew a little bit more of his soul would die if he ever resorted to tactics like that to get his commission.

The man dragged a hand through his sparse hair, distracted. From the kitchen behind him the smell of toasting spices wafted, redolent of warmth and comfort. In spite of the M&Ms Will’s stomach rumbled.

‘I’m not sure I can help you. My partner and I bought this place just over a year ago and the house at the end was empty then. To be honest, it’s a bit of a problem, looking so run down – it brings the area down, if you see what I mean. If you can get something done about it that would be extremely good news.’

‘Well, if it does turn out to have belonged to Miss Price, it would be sold and the proceeds of the sale distributed amongst any heirs. You don’t happen to know anything about her, do you? If she had any relatives?’

Before Will had finished speaking the man was shaking his head, eager to get back to his cooking and his music and his ordered evening. ‘Sorry, I’ve no idea. The old guy next door will know, though; Mr Greaves. Good luck with the search.’

‘Thanks,’ Will said to the greenish-greyish-blue door.

Mr Greaves’s door was unequivocally red, though the paint had dulled and the cast iron knocker had been nibbled by rust. Will knocked, and waited, turning his back against the rain and bowing his head. Jesus, it was cold. The path beneath his feet had once been well-kept, but now weeds sprouted through the cracks between the paving stones. He knocked again. Before he’d got his hand back into his pocket the door was yanked open.

‘Hi – sorry to disturb you—’

‘Whaddayawant?’

Will’s speech stalled. The woman who’d answered the door was Chinese, and tiny. Through the narrow gap she’d left between door and frame he could see that she was wearing a blue tunic with white piping on the sleeves and collar, and a ferocious scowl.

‘I wondered if I might speak with Mr Greaves?’ Even to his own ears his voice sounded stupidly posh, uncomfortably close to the mocking impression Ansell was fond of doing in the office.

‘No. Mr Greaves have his tea now. He no see visitors.’ Her accent was a curious mix of the Far East and the East End.

‘I can wait? Or come back in half an hour? I’m from Ansell—’

‘No. After tea I get him ready for bed. No visitors today. You come back tomorrow.’

And that was that. The door shut with such force that the knocker rattled and Will was left standing in the dark and rain, both of which were getting heavier. He sighed. The house next door – the third in the row – was in darkness, but he trudged dutifully up the path anyway and knocked, without hope or enthusiasm, then counted silently to twenty before turning away.

He’d got back into the car and was just about to start the engine when he noticed a figure coming up the lane, head down, walking slightly unevenly. In the darkness it was just a silhouette against the bright lights of the street beyond, but there was no doubt that it was a woman; a woman in shoes that seemed to be causing her some discomfort. She was carrying a bulging shopping bag, and as she got closer, into the circle of light cast by the streetlamp, he could see that her face was pale, her jaw set, her dark hair beaded with rain. She seemed to be heading towards the row of cottages – towards the house at which he’d just knocked, he guessed. Wearily he opened the door and braced himself against the wet.

‘Hi! Hello? Hi there—’

She started visibly, her white face a mask of alarm. God, I’m such an oaf, Will thought as he broke into a sort of half-jog towards her. What woman wouldn’t be terrified at being approached by a bloke in a car down a dark backstreet? He tried to produce an encouraging, sensitive smile.

‘Sorry . . . Sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .’ Seeing the stricken expression on her face he stopped a few feet away from her. ‘Sorry. I knocked on your door, but you weren’t in. Obviously.’ Oh God. ‘I’m from a firm called Ansell Blake—’

She was shaking her head, shrinking away, as if she wanted to run. ‘I don’t know anything about it. You’ve got the wrong person.’

And he’d actually thought the day couldn’t get much worse. ‘I’m so sorry, I thought you lived here. Do excuse me. I was looking for someone who might be able to help me find out about an elderly lady who used to live in the empty house there and I just assumed . . .’ He was babbling, and he stopped himself. ‘Sorry.’

Just for a moment, no more than a split second, her pinched face showed a glimmer of interest. And then it was gone, extinguished by wariness.

‘Sorry, I don’t know.’

Head down, she walked away, as fast as she could in the troublesome shoes, struggling with the cumbersome bag of shopping. And he was left, standing in the rain and feeling not only foolish, but oddly guilty too, as if he’d scared her away.

He was watching her, she could feel it. She couldn’t turn round and go back to the house now. There was nothing for it but to keep walking.

Reaching the garages she pushed through the undergrowth she’d come through the other night, trying to look as nonchalant as possible. Oh God, he must think she was a complete weirdo – if he didn’t already know exactly who she was and what she was doing. She couldn’t remember the name of the company he’d said he worked for, but they sounded like lawyers or something. What if someone had seen her and tipped them off about squatters?

Her mind raced. But he’d said he was trying to find out about an old lady, hadn’t he? The old lady who’d lived in the house. Stumbling out from the bushes behind the bins she stopped for a moment to relieve the pressure on the blister that had formed on her heel. She should have played along, pretended she lived in the area, asked him the old lady’s name. Maybe he was looking for Mrs Thorne too?

The idea gave her a weird tight feeling in her chest, which might have been excitement or unease. She wanted to find her; she owed her that much as repayment for the fig rolls and the rice pudding and the loan of the coat and shoes. She’d squared it with her conscience by promising herself that she’d do her best to trace Mrs Thorne and hand over the letter from her lost love. If there was someone else looking for her, that would probably double her chances of success, which was a good thing.

And yet, it felt strange. Like Mrs Thorne was hers, even though she knew nothing about her. Nothing ordinary, anyway, like her first name or what she looked like or even whether she was alive or dead; only that she had once been in love with an American airman called Dan, and that he had loved her too. And loved her still.

She had been walking mindlessly, not paying any attention to where she was going, thinking only of filling in time until it was safe to go back to the house, but now she noticed a church on the opposite side of the street. It was an old-fashioned kind of church with a big square tower of dirty grey stone, and a sign outside which said, ‘
All Saints Church. All Welcome’
above a list of times for services and Holy Communions. Remembering the newsletter she’d discovered in the heap of junk mail, she found herself crossing the road.