An Accidental Shroud (6 page)

Joss had read the letter with mounting excitement. He had a father, at last, his name was Jake Wilding, he lived in England. He had money. Joss had no feelings for this unknown father, but he had determined there and then to go to this place, Lavenstock, and seek him out, get what he could from him.

At fifteen, he was well able to pass for eighteen. He'd signed on with a merchant ship in Piraeus and would never have bothered to see his mother again if it hadn't been for Cassie. His only regret had been having to leave her behind. He loved his little sister as much as he was capable of loving anyone, and he wouldn't have left her if he hadn't known that her father's relatives, a fiercely possessive peasant family, would take care of her. She spent most of her time with them as it was. They adored her, tried to dress her like a little doll, which she hated, and spoiled her outrageously, which she tolerated. They would have liked to have adopted her legally but Naomi, out of some suddenly discovered maternal instinct, had stubbornly refused. She had let Cassie take the Andreas surname, but that was as far as she'd go.

Joss grinned now, to think that he had ever worried about Cassie, of all people.

His intention had been to make his way straight to England, but it hadn't been as easy as that. For a while, it was all he could do to survive. Later, when he'd learned the trick of it, other things had intervened and offered so much excitement that his original purpose had been driven to the back of his mind. His new life provided him with change and stimulus and the spice of danger and excitement he craved, the chance to prove he could live on his wits. From then on, he'd turned up on his mother's doorstep from time to time, when whatever he was doing brought him in her direction. The years passed, and he'd almost forgotten his original motive for leaving home when he heard about Naomi's legacy and her intention to move back to Lavenstock. The name had conjured up old memories, new possibilities, and he had arrived at the little house by the railway one night without warning and taken possession of the attic.

He'd then got himself a job at Wilding's. Naomi, though admitting that she had once known Jake, had said nothing to Joss about having been married to him, nor about him being Joss's father. And Joss didn't tell her what he knew. He concentrated on making a good impression on Jake before presenting him with a ready-made son. It was a pity there was now another son, Matthew, but Joss accepted this philosophically – lucky there was only one, and not several. It never occurred to him to ask who Matthew's mother was ...

At that moment, Cassie came in. 'Turn that thing off, we're going to eat in the garden. I got a Chicken Chasseur at Marks and Spencer this afternoon – and a bottle of wine. You'd better come quick before she finishes it off. She's well away already.'

'Chicken Chasseur, eh? In the money, are we?'

Cassie grinned and tapped the side of her nose. 'Money? Don't be naive.'

You had to admire her.

No longer the baby sister he'd allowed to tag along after him, looked after with a fierce possessiveness, taught to swim, tucked up in bed, foraged for meals for when Naomi couldn't be bothered. Cassie was now a strong-minded young woman in her own right, stronger in some things, it amused him to admit, than he was, and equally unprincipled. Ruthless, in fact. Sometimes, she could frighten other people.

But not Joss. They were a pair. He smiled, stretched and stubbed out his cigarette before going out into the garden to join them, totally unprepared for the catastrophe waiting for him there. Together, they could do anything.

October

Nigel Fontenoy, watching the Midland landscape flash past the carriage window, found himself in an increasingly bad temper. His return journey from London was being made intolerable by some yuppie using his mobile telephone as if he'd purchased a monopoly on personal space along with his first-class ticket. Nigel knew he ought to have protested but he was sure to be met by the sort of superciliousness he didn't feel he could cope with today – or any other day, truth to tell. He always avoided straight confrontations, preferring more devious methods of revenge.

Instead, like the other cowardly occupants of the carriage, he simply cast withering glances at the uncaring telephone user then turned to stare through the window as though the show-off conversations in the background had nothing to do with him, watching the grey skies and the trees bending to the wind and the autumn leaves flying.

Already October, and he only had until mid-November to make up his mind. He tried to concentrate on the terms which had been put forward at the meeting with Jermyn's. But his thoughts squirrelled around in his mind, refusing to be put into any sort of order. So much, of course, depended on his father, and he needed to be quite clear in his own mind what was entailed before presenting the idea to him. He was only
too
clear, he feared, as to what George's reactions would be. He was unlikely to agree to the proposition, at least in the first instance. It would be up to Nigel to put it to him in a favourable light. Ever since Jermyn's director, Alec Macaudle, had been to see the shop in September, Nigel had been trying to prepare the ground, but George seemed to have an uncanny knack of turning aside from the subject whenever it was raised. Occasionally, Nigel had received a distinct impression that George knew exactly what was going on, without having been told. It was possible. He was a wily old bird. On the other hand, how could he have found out, when Nigel had been at such pains to hide it from him? He couldn't surely have deduced it from that one visit Macaudle had made to the shop in September? George had hung around on that occasion, but Nigel had made sure of there being no opportunity to introduce them – and he'd had all subsequent correspondence addressed to him personally and had kept it securely locked up at all times.

George, however, was going to have to face the truth sooner or later. Provincial jewellers like Fontenoy's, however well-respected their name, were in the junior league nowadays . .. their outlets were narrow, competition was fierce. It wasn't as if they were London-based, working in the largest antique jewellery centre in the world. The only answer was to merge, to allow himself to be bought out by one of them: Jermyn's, to be precise. The shop would still be run by him, still be known as Cedar House Antiques, the only difference being that he would be relieved of the constant worry.

Meantime, though, he still had certain assets; the thought of one in particular went a very long way towards lightening the gloom. Yet he frowned, remembering the appointment that evening. It had been a long day, and he was tired, but he would need all his wits about him, all his powers of persuasion. He sat up straighter as they went through a tunnel and the reflection of a girl's face in the window from the next bank of seats sprang out – sweet, young, soft. Smiling. He returned the smile, knowing she could see his reflection, too. A good-looking man, well dressed, obviously prosperous, a mature man who knew how to charm women. The girl stopped smiling, stood up abruptly and left the compartment.

He shrugged. Forget it. In any case, he'd finished with all that now. He was becoming more circumspect as he grew older.

The appearance of the battered old railway buildings at the top of the embankment, just before the train plunged into the next tunnel, signalled it was time to collect his belongings and get ready for disembarking. Perhaps it was that young girl, or maybe a sudden memory of that unspeakable encounter last month, but at that moment the thought of Naomi slid again into his mind. Naomi at eighteen. A peculiar sort of excitement coursed through him. She might have changed with the years, but not so much that she wouldn't, considering her present circumstances, allow herself to be persuaded at last to see reason.

The weather had taken a turn for the worse as he came out of the station and headed for the car park. Rain was lashing down, it was distinctly chilly and a strong wind had got up. The biggest storm that Lavenstock had experienced for half a century, however, didn't begin in earnest until about ten, although it raged until dawn.

During the night, the Stockwell overflowed its banks, buildings were damaged, trees uprooted. At least one major accident was caused by a branch falling across a car windscreen, causing the driver to swerve and several vehicles to pile up behind him. An unlucky woman visitor, sleeping on a camp bed in a conservatory, was killed when a chimney-stack fell through the roof. On the outskirts of Lavenstock, an ancient tumbledown house, already dangerously shaky on its foundations, collapsed. The town had known nothing like it in living memory.

Old George Fontenoy, uneasy in his bed, was subliminally aware of the chaos outside, of the screech of the wind in the chimney and the rattling window-frames and the rain drumming on the roof, of bangs and crashes on the periphery of his drug-induced sleep. At some point the noise reached a crescendo that penetrated his subconscious and he awoke in panic and terror, his heart beating arrhythmically. Drenched in sweat, he lay listening to the cacophony outside, willing the sleeping pills to lull him back into oblivion. He didn't succeed for some time but later, much later, he did sleep.

Scarcely a soul in Lavenstock slept well that night.

Lindsay Hammond, home again for the weekend, lay rigid in her bed, trying to think of anything other than the gale ... the new garden layout, for instance, which Christine had been trying to interest her in before bed. But thunder and lightning terrified her, and she couldn't concentrate her mind on Christine's ideas. She could only see the photos they'd been looking at, pictures of the original garden taken before the house was pulled down, showing a landscape of Victorian extremes: of threateningly spiky yuccas and downy grey Dusty Millers, poison-green spotted aucubas and feathery ferns, fleshy hellebores, deadly laburnum pods and gigantic, dangerous clumps of Japanese knotweed.

The wind was tearing through the wood, the branches soughing and creaking, and she imagined the creatures deep in the interior, the birds being blown from their nests, the little brown muntjak deer, trembling and terrified. But the house was new and kept in good repair, Jake had built well and strong. Nothing rattled, shook or fell off. She was glad she wasn't Cassie, alone with that grungy mother of hers in the horrid little house that looked as though it only needed a huff and a puff to blow it down.

She finally dropped off into an uneasy sleep, haunted by fantasies of the wind lifting Cassie's house up, whole, blowing it across the sky like some witch's hovel in one of her old fairy books. But even that wouldn't scare Cassie. She wasn't afraid of anything.

It was some time later that she awoke again as light flashed across her closed curtains. The house had been struck by lightning, she thought in panic, then realized it was only the headlights of a car.

Cassie Andreas certainly wasn't frightened by the storm but she found it hard to calm down and get to sleep. Storms excited her – and she was far too hyped-up, wide awake, listening to the creaking and groaning of the loose section of guttering outside her bedroom window and the intermittent banging of the side gate, which had lost its fastening. She thought about getting up again and making herself some hot chocolate, but she'd only just got warm and at the thought of leaving her duvet-wrapped snugness she stayed put.

The storm reminded her of the
meltemi.
When she'd been staying with her Greek grandmother, she could pretend to be afraid and creep into her bed and snuggle up to her vast, pillowy softness. But this was England, she was no longer a child, there was no grandmother here, and nobody could imagine snuggling up to Naomi for comfort.

She was glad she'd allowed her mother to come here. She could have persuaded her not to, you could talk Naomi into anything, and Cassie had early discovered she could manipulate anyone, if she chose. She was sorry to have left the sun behind, but here she and Joss had rich friends – Lindsay and, of course, Matthew. Money was of paramount importance to Cassie, her life so far having been singularly lacking in it. Also, in Greece she'd always felt herself to be some sort of hybrid, neither Greek nor English. She'd hated that, sensing that there must be something better than either the dull, peasant life of her Greek relatives or the feckless, hand-to-mouth, come-day go-day existence of her mother.

'We'll see about staying here, it all depends,' her mother had said when they arrived.

Yes, we'll see, thought Cassie, now, with a secret smile. We shall see.

The gate banged loudly again, several times in quick, erratic succession. She wondered if the roof might blow off, which in this house seemed entirely possible. The broken-down fence would certainly be laid low. Perhaps Joss might now be shamed into doing something about it, he was competent enough, though whenever he was asked to do anything like that he always managed to find urgent business elsewhere. If it had to be fixed, she would have to do it herself, as usual. She was the only one who ever did things around here. She wished, passionately, that she'd been the son, and Joss the daughter. She often thought of herself as a boy.

Cassie wondered how Joss had been able to go on working for Jake Wilding for so long. She didn't think Jake was the sort to tolerate slacking and incompetence.

'No problem,' Joss had said, with his slow smile, when she'd asked him once. 'I'm the blue-eyed boy as far as Jake's concerned.'

Cassie, however, had known men like Jake in the village at home. 'All smiles to your face and a dagger in the back when you're not looking,' she'd said darkly, though the real reason she didn't like Jake was because she knew he instinctively distrusted her. She smiled, amused by the idea, and not at all upset.

But then a little worm of fear began to burrow beneath Cassie's hard little shell. She tried to ignore it, but a web had been woven, meshing them all together into a tight knot, from which none of them might find it easy to extricate themselves.