Deep Water, Thin Ice (10 page)

‘Isn’t there some sort of medication that would help?’

‘They’ve tried various tablets I think but nothing’s worked. And the doctor offered her some help at home too but she doesn’t want it. She thinks if she lets them in to help it’ll be the thin end of the wedge.’ Liz gave a sad smile and leaned back in her chair. ‘He forgets where he is sometimes, or thinks he’s a child again and talks about his mother as if he’s still living with her. The next day he can be clear as anything and hold a reasonable conversation. But sometimes he mixes his words up which can make it a bit confusing.’ She glanced across at Alex’s plate. ‘All done?’

Liz stood up, clearing the plates in a swift, easy movement and walking through to the kitchen. She returned a couple of minutes later bearing two bowls of strawberries and then went back for sugar and cream.

Alex frowned thoughtfully as she poured thick cream over her fruit.

‘Do you happen to know what happened to Sarah Hellyon’s elder son?’ Liz looked blank. ‘Julian, I think he was called. He died young.’

Liz shook her head. ‘I know there was another son that’s all. I assumed he’d succumbed to one of those childhood illnesses.’ She regarded Alex thoughtfully while she swallowed a mouthful of strawberry and cream. ‘So tell me,’ she began. ‘Are you keeping yourself busy? Have you thought of joining the WI? Oh and I’ve got some more plants for you. Perhaps you’d like to join the gardening club?’

Alex’s heart sank.

*

It was early on a cloudy Saturday evening and, as the tide turned to come in, it brought with it a stiff breeze off the sea and the suggestion of rain in the air. Theo cut along the footpath over the bank from the road and walked down the side of the River Kella towards the village. His mind was full of Alex Munroe. He’d been trying for weeks to find out as much about her as possible but what he really needed to know he would only find out by being with her, watching her, talking to her. He needed to know what made her tick, what ignited her passions, what she loved and hated. Coming home from work the evening after their shared coffee, he’d asked his mother how the meeting had gone. Her answers had been frustratingly vague.

‘All right I suppose. How should it have gone? I showed her the photographs of the house and the family like you suggested. You’re right. She doesn’t seem to know anything about what happened.’

‘I told you. So what did you think of her?’

‘All right,’ she said again. ‘She’s
quite
attractive, but she’s too thin.’ She frowned then. ‘And she seems a bit headstrong to me.’

Headstrong? Was she? he wondered now. From what he’d seen of her, Alex Munroe was certainly no fool. But she was very vulnerable, that much was obvious. She had a fragile, damaged air. If he could just win her confidence…

Theo reached the quay and turned his attention back to the potential pleasures of the evening ahead, pausing by one of the boat builders’ yards to look around. There were few holiday makers left out and the yards were all closed up; the ferry, which ran short trips along the coast in the summer when the tide was too low to go upriver, had finished for the day. It was quiet. Theo moved swiftly round the back of the chandlers and tried the latch on a gate in a high wall at the back of a detached square building. It wasn’t locked and he entered the yard beyond and closed the gate silently behind him. The courtyard had been made over into a garden with a little shrubbery, a pot-strewn patio, and baskets of flowers hanging from the walls. He paused, half-hidden by the fronds of a buddleia and glanced up at the neighbouring properties: on one side a hairdressers with a flat above it and on the other a holiday home. The gallery stood on the bend at the bottom of the High Street and the buildings to either side were set on slightly different angles; no window looked directly down on him and there was no-one visible. A small single-storey extension jutted out from the rear of the gallery. He slipped soundlessly down the path towards its back door.

A gentle but insistent knock brought no response so he picked up a handful of fine gravel and threw it at the first floor window. When a curtain twitched and Helen Geaton’s face appeared, he pulled the bottle of champagne he was carrying out of its bag and held it up to show her. Her head disappeared and a few minutes later she opened the back door. Her manner was cool but there was the unmistakable scent of freshly applied perfume and she was breathing heavily. She held the door with one hand while the other fingered her hair into place.

‘Helen,’ Theo said in a smooth, soft voice. ‘I thought you might be lonely.’ He held up the bottle again. ‘I brought us champagne to celebrate.’

‘To celebrate what?’ she said pertly.

‘Our new friendship.’

‘And what made you think I might be lonely?’

‘A little bird told me your husband had forsaken you for fishes again.’

‘Did it?’ She hesitated. ‘You’ve got a nerve creeping into my garden like that.’ There was a faint attempt at indignation but it failed and she just sounded weak.

‘I suppose I have.’ Theo looked slowly round and nodded. ‘Very pretty.’

‘Thank you. I’ve been working hard at it.’

‘Aren’t you going to show me how much you’ve done to the house?’

‘Suppose someone saw you come in here?’

He grinned and shook his head.

‘Do you have so little faith in me? The boatyards are closed.’ He looked up as the moisture in the air turned to a fine soaking drizzle and then looked back at her with a shrug. ‘It’s raining. There’s no-one around. I checked.’

‘Bob might come back.’

‘Oh come on. You know as well as I do, he’s away for the weekend. We can be as long as we want.’ He reached out his right hand and stroked it round her ear and then down under her chin, slowly sliding it down to the exposed cleft of bare skin on her chest. ‘Don’t you want to get out of these tight clothes?’

Helen glanced up the yard, looked back into his eyes, then stood back and let him in.

Alex pulled at a piece of wallpaper and ripped it off the wall in a satisfyingly long piece.

‘Yesss,’ she declared emphatically and threw it on the floor, turning to grin at Theo who was scraping at another wall of the bedroom.

‘You’ve picked the best wall,’ he said, aggrieved. ‘It’s welded onto this one.’

‘No, it’s all in the wrist action. Are you ready for coffee yet?’

‘I thought you’d never ask.’

Alex went downstairs to the kitchen, musing on how strange it felt to have Theo in the house, helping like this. It was nice though. Waiting for the new filter coffee maker to run through, she looked out of the kitchen window. It was a Saturday morning in early July and the sun, already high in the sky, streamed across the parkland grass painting it pale cadmium yellow.

She’d intended to pay a professional decorator to do the spare bedroom near her own but no-one had been available at short notice. Theo had been at the Hall trying to sort out a defective light when the last of the decorators on her list called back to say he couldn’t come. He’d immediately offered to help if she wanted to do it herself and she’d been unable to resist the offer. A few days before, on the phone to Erica, she had apologetically asked her sister if she wanted to come down after all. With Erica’s visit just two weeks away Alex wanted the spare room looking good. It was important that the house made a good impression, essential to avoid giving her sister any leverage.

She glanced round the kitchen as the water hissed and sputtered through the filter and thought again about replacing the shabby, scratched units. She had the money; she had an embarrassment of it and it only seemed to deepen her sense of guilt. Not only had she lost Simon, but she had all his money too. Her own earnings had been as nothing compared to his and then of course there was his family wealth. The security had been welcome but there was enough to keep her more than comfortable and then more besides. She felt she should do something useful with it but wasn’t sure what. She’d been toying with setting up a trust fund for Ben but she hesitated to mention the idea to Erica, unsure how to broach the subject. Her sister was touchy about the disparity in their income and sometimes dropped envious remarks about it. But when Alex had offered to help out financially a couple of years before, Erica had been offended.

The last drips of coffee fell into the jug and she put it on a tray with two mugs, milk and sugar and took them upstairs. Theo had proved to be a breath of fresh air: he was naturally buoyant and enthusiastic, a constant source of energy and of diverting stories. That morning he’d been telling her about fighting off pirates in the seas near Somalia, and, on another trip, diving from the transom of a boat into Caribbean water striped red from the sunset. Her initial reservations about letting him help had gone. There was no pressure from him; he genuinely seemed happy messing around in the house in his free time. ‘Gets me away from my mother,’ he’d explained, pulling a face.

‘Great,’ he said now as she appeared in the room with the coffee. ‘An excuse to stop.’

They sat on the floor to drink it and there was silence but for the mewing of a herring gull sitting on the roof.

‘We ought to put some music on,’ Theo suggested.

‘Music?’ she said doubtfully. She’d been avoiding it wherever possible, knowing it would bring back a string of memories, either of Simon or of that last painful concert. ‘What sort of music?’

‘I don’t know. Oasis, Genesis, the Manic Street Preachers, the Beatles maybe. I could bring something tomorrow. Who do you like?’

She relaxed.

‘Oh…pop. To be honest I’m not really into pop music. I’m sorry. I’m sure that sounds really pompous but I’m afraid I just don’t get it.’

Theo shrugged.

‘Don’t apologise. Each to their own. So what would you listen to for relaxation? Or can’t you listen to music for relaxation?’ He grinned. ‘Is that a contradiction?’

‘Not at all. I love Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. I’ve always liked jazz, swing, old show tunes. I like old films too so maybe I associate the music with them.’

Theo shuffled his bottom back so he could lean against the wall and took another mouthful of coffee.

‘I like old films too,’ he said. ‘When you think what small budgets some of them had compared to today and how atmospheric they are. Look at
Casablanca
, that’s a great film. So what’s your favourite film then?’

‘I don’t know…
High Society
maybe, or
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. Brilliant. I love
Sleepless in Seattle
; it’s not that old but it’s got a great soundtrack.’

‘Ah, sloppy romance. I couldn’t possibly admit to liking those. I think my favourite would have to be, let me see,
Kelly’s Heroes
. Does that qualify as ‘old’? – it’s much more manly, anyway.’

Alex laughed and drank a little coffee. Theo was wearing old cropped jeans and a faded t-shirt. There was a slight bulge in the fabric of the shirt over his breast-bone and her eyes were irresistibly drawn back to it.

‘What do you wear round your neck?’ she asked.

‘This?’ Theo put a hand to the bulge and then flicked it out. He undid the chain and handed it to her. It was a piece of solid polished silver, swollen at one end with a design cut into its flattened base.

‘What is it?’ Alex turned it over and stared at the design.

‘It’s a seal. You know, an identifying mark they used to press into wax to seal letters. It’s the Hellyon seal, more than three hundred years old. Hillen Hall is in the design, inside the H.’

Alex stared more closely at it.

‘Fascinating,’ she murmured. ‘So this came to you when your father died?’

‘No, it’s always been mine. Father wasn’t bothered about it and neither was Julian. I’ve always loved it so father gave it to me when I was a kid.’

Alex handed it back to him then picked up the coffee jug. ‘More coffee?’

‘Sure. Top it up.’ She filled his mug and her own. ‘So…this sister who’s coming to stay,’ he said. ‘What’s she like? Like you?’

‘Like me?’ Alex’s eyebrows shot up and she laughed and shook her head. ‘No, not like me at all. She’s my half-sister actually. We share the same mother, different fathers.’

‘But you’re close?’

‘Yes, mostly. Very close. My father left before I was even one. He was a violinist; nice voice too. Couldn’t cope with the demands of family life apparently.’

‘That’s what your mother said anyway.’

‘Quite. More likely he couldn’t cope with her. Anyway, soon after, she met someone else, whirlwind romance, another marriage. That didn’t work out either but by then my baby sister Erica was born.’

‘I see. So do you see anything of your father?’

‘I did…once or twice, but it was Erica’s dad who turned up most often when we were kids. My father had a fit of conscience when I was twelve and got in touch. He took me out a couple of times.’ She stopped and drank some coffee.

‘And…’ he prompted.

Alex shrugged.

‘And nothing really. I wasn’t sure what to make of him. I hardly knew him. And he’d got his own life then, a new wife, other children.’ She shrugged again, staring at the coffee. ‘I went to see him perform once though,’ she said, her expression brightening. ‘He was good, really good.’