Page 85 of Last Christmas in London

The busker must have noticed something shift in my expression because his voice softened. ‘He’ll be at the graveyard. Don’t know which one, mind. But he told me once that it’s the one day he and his dad get together to lay flowers on the grave. A kind of Christmas ceasefire.’

I shook out my shoulders, trying to get the feeling to return to them. So that was it. I had seen the strain on Simon’s face whenever he mentioned his father in passing, a quiet resentment, usually followed by a brief but sharp-edged silence.

‘Yeah,’ I murmured, my thoughts spinning. ‘He said they didn’t get on.’

The busker scoffed. ‘No one seems to get on with Michael Holland, though, do they?’

He returned to packing up his bag, unaware he had just dropped a weight in my stomach; I suddenly felt as if I had just missed the bottom step and was about to fall flat on my face.

My pulse drummed in my ears. ‘Wait! Michael Holland?’

‘Yeah, the documentary guy. I was surprised too when Simon mentioned it.’

‘Michael Holland is his dad?’

The busker nodded, though I didn’t see it, I just heard it.

‘Nothing like Christmas to reunite family, aye,’ he said, zipping up the last of his goods, unaware I’d stopped listening.

Michael Holland was Simon’s dad?

The arse of a man who had ripped into that poor runner for bringing him the wrong shirt. The pretentious, sneering man who Pim Hardcastle had torn to shreds in the viral video for something he wrote twenty-odd years ago.

How was he Simon’s father?

I thought back to when I had first met Simon in Covent Garden, busking with that easy smile and his blue guitar, doing crowd work between songs with ease and charm. A man who wrote jingles for a living. Who gave every spare coin he earned from music to charity – well, mostly. Who was good.

How had this man come from that man?

Holland was a common enough name. It had never occurred to me that Simon, with his easy laugh and warm brown eyes, could be related to a man who seemed incapable of joy.

But Michael Holland had a son. I had read it online. A wife who had died of cancer several years prior. And one son.

And Simon had said he’d been raised by a dad who worked in media and cut him off. That sounded like Michael Holland.

I felt light-headed.

‘You all right, love?’ the busker asked. Apparently, he’d just asked me a question, and I had missed it.

‘Oh sorry,’ I said. ‘Away with the fairies.’

He chuckled. ‘Happens to the best of us.’

I nodded, but my thoughts were already elsewhere.

Michael Holland. Simon’s dad.

I had so many questions.

‘I was just saying Simon’ll be back on Boxing Day. He’s doing an early show for the bargain-hunters – he’d normally have a break between Christmas and New Year, but I heard he gave up his New Year slot for some reason. But you probably know more about that than me.’

He winked and I flushed, because I did know the reason. But it wasn’t the reason he was thinking. Mostly.

‘I’ve got to get to Kent this evening,’ I said after a moment, thinking about how I had promised Denise and Bob, and I needed to get Josh down there too. And make up things with Megan, if she was even talking to me, that was. I reached into my pocket hurriedly. ‘Do you have his number?’

The busker shook his head, this time disappointed. ‘I don’t.’

I growled. ‘What about Ethan? Is he here?’