The Love Letter (36 page)

‘Ah yes, with your “lover”. He must be very proud of you.’

She put on a burst of speed, not wanting to think about Conrad.

‘You got Gordon Lapis on the bill,’ Byrne went on, matching her stride.

‘Gordon did that himself, really,’ she said breathlessly, almost running now as she thought about her secretive, reclusive author
and his big stage show. ‘He dived in ahead of me.’ Her mind was replaying Gordon’s incredible message:
we take the devils we know as bedfellows … to reveal the truth is to undress in public … far better to choose my own stage on which to uncloak.
‘I was just a catalyst between the Devil and the deep blue sea.’

‘Is he a devil?’

‘Not Gordon!’ She jogged unsteadily along the cobbles as they started the steep descent along the village’s narrow main lane. ‘Don’t tell anybody, but I think Gordon’s a bit of an innocent. I love him to bits. He needs protecting.’

‘And you can do that?’

‘Fellows Howlett will.’ She eased up the pace to stop her ankles turning on the uneven footing. ‘There’ll be a lot to organise, promoting the brand and protecting his interests at the festival.’

‘Assuming it goes ahead,’ Byrne dropped back to walk too. ‘Poppy might not be prepared to step beyond her threshold without the great Hector at her side, even carved in stone. And I suspect your ex-fiancé is taking a sledgehammer to that statue as we speak, if not its creator.’

‘It’d only take a small chisel to get rid of the bits Francis finds most offensive,’ she pointed out.

He laughed his gruff laugh. ‘He doesn’t love you.’

She turned to him, offended. ‘He says he does.’

‘We can all say that; it’s one of life’s most clichéd scripts,’ he muttered, then turned towards her and caught her arm, pulling her around to face him. They were standing beneath one of the village’s old street lamps. His furnace eyes gleamed beneath their dark brows. ‘I fell in love with you at precisely seven thirty-six last night, Allegra.’ Legs could hear her heart crashing louder than the waves on the harbour walls. She felt faint, barely able to breathe for excitement. It suddenly made sense. Yesterday afternoon, for all her vacillation, she would undoubtedly have been back in Francis’s bed like a shot had it not been for Kizzy. Just thirty-six hours later, her heart had staged another rebellion. Was that
because she had fallen head over heels for somebody else overnight?

She stared into his face in the lamplight, his hands warm on her arms, his jacket cloaking her shoulders, and felt as though she’d been wrapped in happiness from head to toe.

‘At half past eight tonight you saved my life,’ he whispered, ‘and I know for certain that I will love you for ever. You have my heart.’

Then Byrne abruptly let her go, turned away and started walking again, ‘See? Anyone can say it. It means nothing to say it. Knowing it is another thing.’

Still reeling around in the street light, she felt like her heart had been mugged.

He halted, waiting for her to catch up.

‘Francis is honest,’ she defended breathlessly, her pride deeply hurt. ‘He means what he says.’

‘He’s a shit,’ he hissed.

‘Francis and I were together for years and years. I trust him. He’d never hurt me.’

He laughed disbelievingly. ‘You thought he’d imprisoned you in a bedroom earlier.’

‘That was a silly mistake,’ she fumed, ashamed at herself for having been so jumpy. ‘All Édith’s talk of murder, and then Kizzy disappearing like that made me overreact.’

They were now walking along the narrow, cobbled street which housed Shh, along with the family solicitors she’d seen him enter earlier.

‘Did you just say Kizzy has disappeared?’

Remembering that she’d caught sight of Kizzy outside the office moments after Byrne, she was suddenly on her guard. ‘She and Francis had a row. She said she wasn’t going to stick around to be humiliated.’

‘So he got rid of her between courses?’

She shrugged, not liking it put like that.

‘If he can do that to her, just imagine what he can do to you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Maybe your friend is right telling you not to drive that old car of yours. Just make sure you check your brakes before you set out tomorrow. Better still, catch a train back to London.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Legs scoffed. ‘Francis would never do anything like that.’ Now that she thought about it, he had made some very odd comments about her car tonight, but she hastily dismissed such ideas from her head. ‘He might have every right to want to push me off a cliff given what I did to him, but he’s shown me nothing but love and affection since I returned.’

‘Beware of guilt and pity, Allegra. They are the worst possible foundations for any relationship. I’ve seen the way you behave with him.’

‘You don’t understand what he’s been through.’

‘I think I do.’

‘His mother can never come back; Francis used to say that Ella left him with nothing but the memory of her beauty because she died young.’ Tears filled her eyes. Then, realising what she had just said to a man who was self-confessedly about to lose his life, she let out a horrified gasp.

But Byrne was too agitated to pick up on it. ‘At least she died before she could let him down.’ He paused outside one of the little tea shops near the harbour where a poster in the window boasted two for one on angel cakes.

‘Poppy running away must have been terrible to come to terms with,’ she ventured cautiously. ‘I can’t imagine how differently my life might have turned out if my mother had left us all like that.’

‘You think I’ve turned into some sort of screwed up misogynist as a result, don’t you?’

‘No!’ she protested, adding, ‘I’m sure you hate men just as much.’

But the joke misfired as he glared at her humourlessly, ‘It’s what love makes men and women do to each other I can’t bear.’

‘So what’s it made
you
do, apart from mistrust absolutely everybody?’ she demanded angrily.

‘You just said it,’ he replied matter-of-factly. ‘My last girlfriend was still saying she loved me the day before she ran off with my best friend. How can that be?’

Horrified, Legs stared at the angel cake poster. ‘How long ago was this?’

‘Two years.’

‘Did you love her very much?’

‘I certainly thought so at the time, but I guess I didn’t really know her. The woman I’d been in love with wasn’t capable of doing that to me. Nor would the old friend I’d have trusted with my life.’

Legs thought about Francis again, and that terrible day she’d told him she wanted to be with Conrad. How long had it been since she’d said ‘I love you’ to him? A week? A fortnight? She’d grown accustomed to using it in place of a full stop at the end of phone calls and pillow talk.

‘Did
you
want revenge?’ she asked in a small voice.

He nodded, face deadpan. ‘I killed them both.’

Legs’ jaw dropped in horror and she felt her skin chill over. Then she saw a glitter in his eyes and laughed as she realised with a punch of relief that he was just joking, returning fire on her own wisecracks.

They turned towards the harbour again and started along the final steep, cobbled descent, the sea wind sharp against their faces. ‘They moved to Cork last year to start up an IT business,’ he explained. ‘I heard they got married and are expecting their first child in November.’

‘Can you forgive them?’

‘Why would I want to do that?’ He looked across at her sharply, and this time there was no glitter of amusement.

‘It might help you move on,’ she suggested. ‘Perhaps you’ll even find new love waiting at seven thirty-six one evening?’

He shook his head. ‘You can’t take love where I’m going.’

Legs’ skin chilled again, this time to sub-zero as she thought about him losing his life.

They were in front of the Book Inn already, the sea still troubled by the storm and lashing hard against the harbour walls.

On the hotel steps, Byrne took her hand in his and shook it, which felt so formal after their two extraordinary nights’ acquaintance. ‘Thank you for what you did for me tonight.’

‘Anytime,’ she dismissed, handing his jacket back: ‘There are better ways to—’ She was about to say ‘die’, but managed to stop herself just in time and blither, ‘There’s more than one way to crack a nut.’ In the circumstances, she wasn’t sure that was a much better way of putting it.

He held open the door for her. As she was about to step through it, Legs turned back to peck him on the cheek. In her hurry, she planted her lips far closer to his mouth than she intended, almost biting his chin.

For a moment she could feel him freeze in horror and then, to her astonishment, his hand reached up to the back of her head and his mouth moved to hers.

The kiss probably only lasted a couple of seconds, but afterwards she knew for certain that she had never been kissed like that in her life. The pit of her belly sizzled like a cymbal, her head was as light as a helium balloon and she seemed to have forgotten how to breathe.

Byrne let her go and looked away, clearing his throat. ‘I shouldn’t have done that. Go back to your lover in London, Heavenly Pony,’ he told her softly. ‘There’s only stormy water here, not deep blue sea.’

He turned to climb the stairs to his room, leaving her banging a palm against her head, her heart thudding against her ribs, as she tried to stop the walls spinning around her, feeling as though her morals were round her ankles.

Back in Skit, she peeled off the crocheted dress and positively danced around the urinals bathroom cleaning her teeth before
falling ecstatically into bed, then picking up her iPhone to set the alarm, although she doubted she would sleep a wink knowing Byrne was lying in bed under the same roof.

One look at the long list of new messages made her want to hurl it from the room. She hadn’t even replied to the old ones yet. She’d leave them all until morning, she decided, feeling bad about it. But in one corner of its glowing screen, she could see that Gordin Lapis had just sent her a live message.

Beware the Devil in disguise,
was his cryptic opening.

Legs longed to press the ‘offline’ option, knowing the last thing she needed was an exchange with the eccentric author. But she thought guiltily about his long, heartfelt email to which she hadn’t yet responded. And then she thought about Conrad, to whom she had shown no loyalty whatsoever. She’d hardly thought about him all day, she realised with a jolt, except one painful moment surrounded by nude art when she realised she no longer fancied him the way she once had. Her dedication to lover and career was feeble. She had to be professional and show Gordon that she cared tonight.

All gone v well this end.
She messaged him back.

Look like an angel.
Gordon’s reply came almost immediately.

Know you will be a total star here during festival week.

Walk like an angel.

Conrad will confirm details next week.

Talk like an angel.

Now he had truly gone off the rails, poor man. She’d email Kelly in the morning to check what was going on, just as soon as she had escaped Farcombe and its lunacy.

Are you listening to Elvis?
she asked carefully.

Title ideas for Julie Ocean and Jimmy Jimmee,
he replied.
I fear sexual tension may be getting out of control. Am thinking of sending Jimmy deep undercover to a Carthusian closed order.

She laughed. That sounded more like the old Gordon.

She started to type,
Thank you so much for the message you sent
to me earlier
– but it looked so clichéd that she couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence. Instead she rolled back to the start cursor and wrote:
Sleep tight.

Don’t go!
he messaged faster than she could dream of typing herself.

She waited.

Still there?
he enquired eventually.

She impatiently miss-typed
Yss.

There was another endless pause.

At last his dialogue line was refreshed,
Sleep tight.

And he was declared offline.

Legs cast the phone aside and lay in darkness, still wide awake, listening to the pregnant bat colony budging up overhead. There seemed to be so many devils in disguise around her, she had no idea where to start looking for an angel. She certainly didn’t feel like one right now.

The bats in the roof above Skit woke Legs just before dawn. They were having a busy night, all the new mums dashing back into the maternity colony after foraging for their offspring, the roost overhead chattering, chirping and scolding. It was like trying to sleep beneath a school assembly.

Unable to get back to sleep, she turned on her light and picked up the manuscript of the crime thriller Gordon had recommended, but within two pages her heart was pounding and her mind jumping backwards and forwards trying to tie the clues together.
The Girl Who Checked Out
was too high grade for relaxation. She no longer had an appetite for well-crafted murders, especially those involving redheaded corpses in shopping trolleys.
Last night’s antics at the hall had left her perplexed and strangely depressed. She felt silly to have been so frightened, yet she’d had a very real sense of foreboding, and Kizzy’s sudden disappearance still alarmed her, as did Francis’s attitude. He seemed so cruel and detached.