Chapter 13
2016
‘A concentration camp?’ Lucy repeated quietly as she stared at the newspaper clipping from the box and reread it, bringing a feeling of cold, intense horror. Was this why no one had heard of Persephone? Had she gone to a concentration camp? Had she died in one?
Lucy sat up on her knees and started rifling through each and every piece of paper from the Perspex box, trying to discover anything that would shed further light on this strange document. But there didn’t seem to be anything worth looking at in more detail. Lucy pulled at a piece of her hair and wound it round and round her forefinger for a while, and then stood at the window, looking out, down the drive as she finished her tea. It was only once she realised she was staring, again, down towards Will’s cottage, half hidden behind the trees, that she pulled the thick curtains closed, turned away and began her new evening ritual of locking the house for the night.
The next day Lucy went into St Peter Port in search of some decent coffee, breakfast that was better than the factory bread she’d bought to toast, and Wi-Fi. She scanned her inbox, including the latest email: an offer of a large freelance project, copywriting all the new marketing material for a travel company she’d once worked with years ago.
Lucy looked at it for a few minutes, waiting for that feeling of joy at a new commission to hit, but it didn’t come. Was it because she was dwelling on the strange notice about concentration camps and compensation or was it because of another reason – one she couldn’t identify yet? She would work it out later. She emailed her soft toy client to check in with them and looked through her work. Her heart wasn’t in it today, but as a freelancer, she knew she had to crack on. She emailed the travel company, accepting immediately and feigning delight at the prospect. What would she do for money if she didn’t put her back into it, and clients began firing her?
It then occurred to her that since the revelation that she now part-owned a rather large house in Guernsey that she and Clara intended to sell, they wouldn’t be as strapped for cash as usual. It was hard to get her head around that and having now slept on the idea that she was a homeowner for the first time in her life she clicked open a property website to scout out how much five-bed manor houses in Guernsey cost on the open market.
‘Jesus Christ,’ she cried out rather too loudly when a small selection of glossy homes showed as a list with eye-wateringly high prices attached to them. She knew it wasn’t cheap to buy a house in the Channel Islands, but she’d been away from here for so long that she’d rather lost touch with how much houses went for. She thought perhaps a million at a stretch. But the houses listed of comparable size to Deux Tourelles were at least three million pounds. Lucy sat back and sipped her coffee. Three million pounds. She and Clara had just inherited a house worth three million pounds, give or take fees, tax and all the other payments that change hands as part of a house sale. But still. She couldn’t make that figure sink in.
‘Buying a house?’ someone said next to her.
Lucy looked up to find Will standing by her table, holding a takeaway coffee.
Still stunned by the figures on the screen and Will’s unexpectedappearance, Lucy didn’t reply but simply stared at him with a blank expression on her face.
‘Will,’ he said, pointing to himself as if he thought she’d forgotten who he was.
Lucy laughed. ‘I know. And no, I’m not buying a house. Just looking.’ She didn’t want to tell this relative stranger that she’d inherited Deux Tourelles. It seemed too personal, too much information. Besides, she quite liked Will and what if she told him and then he suddenly seemed to quite like her too, perhaps a little more than he did when she hadn’t been a millionaire. She laughed to herself at this. She was a millionaire. Or she would be when she and Clara sold the house. Clara would be a millionaire also. This was insane. Had Clara looked up the price of—
‘You all right? You keep disappearing.’ Will spoke and jogged her back to the present.
‘Yes, sorry. I’m being so rude.’
‘A bit,’ he said with a smile. ‘But it’s early. I’m a bit like that before I’ve had coffee so don’t worry about it.’
‘What are you doing here?’ Lucy asked, attempting to renew her ability to make decent small talk.
Will looked at his coffee cup. ‘Getting coffee,’ he said in confusion. ‘Have you just asked me a trick question?’
‘No, I mean in St Peter Port.’
‘Oh right. I’ve got a meeting with a gallery owner who’s agreed to show some of my work.’
‘Are you an artist?’ Lucy asked, impressed, gesturing for him to sit down.
He shook his head and pulled out the chair opposite before sitting. He was wearing battered Converse and a well-cut black jacket. He looked effortlessly cool compared to her overstuffed rucksack full of receipts and jeans with the hole in the knee that was too big because she’d once got her foot caught in it while putting it on and had ripped it even further.
‘Photographer. Landscapes mostly,’ he replied.
She thought back to his horrified reaction when she’d been dangling the Box Brownie camera precariously by its handle.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.
‘Free Wi-Fi,’ she joked at the same time the waitress walked past and rolled her eyes at the remark. ‘I’ve got a lot of emails and a lot of work piling up so thought today I’d better crack on.’
‘What do you do?’ he asked.
She told him.
‘Impressive,’ he said genuinely.
‘It’s not. Not really.’
