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The obvious assumption would be that he had lost his way, but his furtive manner told another story. As Seb made these observations, the man looked over his shoulder to check there was no one to see him before he stepped inside the room.
‘Very nice,’ he said softly as he looked around the book-lined room.
Interesting, Seb decided—the mirror was angled in a way that made it possible for him to watch the man without the intruder being aware of his presence in the room.
The figure in the overalls was moving with increasing confidence now; he even began to whistle a slightly off-key tune through his teeth as he walked around the room picking up objects, turning them over like an expert before replacing them or, in one or two instances—the man definitely had an eye or, as his grandmother would have put it, he knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing—putting them in his pocket.
He spotted the cupboard containing Seb’s grandfather’s collection of Georgian silver, smiling broadly as he did so, and Seb had his first full-face look at the guy.
A shaft of startled recognition turned Seb’s curiosity into something far more personal—something cold, very cold. Ironically at one point the man had picked up the file that told Seb all he needed to know about his intruder and a lot he didn’t want to know about George Laxton...Francis...Richie...Griffiths, a small sample of the aliases that this moderately successful conman went by.
The contempt etched on Seb’s face gave way to alarm; his eyes went to the door that Mari could walk through at any moment.
That was one introduction he didn’t want to make.
If ever he felt a twang of conscience about his decision to keep her in the dark, he reminded himself that if Mari had wanted to know her parentage she would have put the wheels in motion herself, so what she didn’t know... It would hurt her.
When he’d decided originally to look into her parentage he had debated the ethics of it, but had gone ahead despite his misgivings, tempted ultimately by the idea of producing the loving mother he knew Mari secretly longed for.
When he’d got the information back it had turned out to be no fairy-tale ending: her mother had died from an accidental overdose after she had abandoned her children.
