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Lili was surprised by the question. ‘Why?’
‘So that we can discuss what I’ve found out.’
Lili frowned. ‘Can’t you just tell me on the phone? It’s going to take time for us to meet up and I don’t think I can stand the suspense.’
‘All right,’ Ray said slowly. ‘Are you sitting down?’
Lili had been pacing the floor. She sat down on the end of the bed. ‘I am now.’
She took a deep breath and heard Ray doing the same. ‘It’s Connie.’
‘What’s Connie? I don’t understand.’
‘She was the person who paid your school fees.’
Lili laughed. ‘Okay, enough with the jokes, Ray.’ She knew he enjoyed a practical joke. ‘Now, really, who is it?’
There was a long silence, interrupted by Connie calling up the stairs again, ‘Lili, darling, I’ve cooked some eggs over easy and streaky bacon just the way you like it. It’s on the table.’
Ray sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Lili. It’s true.’
Lili was pacing again, shaking her head; he’d got it wrong.
Ray continued, ‘When I discovered it was your social worker, I looked into the case of the missing English youngster on Corfu that no one came forward to claim. It didn’t make any sense. Who would just abandon their child?’
That was the question Lili had asked herself all her life, and the reason she had been reticent about looking for her parents. They didn’t want her; that was the conclusion she’d come to.
‘I started by going on the assumption that you weren’t abandoned.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I concluded that something must have happened to your parents, so I looked into newspaper reports. A young couple with British passports, had died on another Ionian Island the day you were found – it was a motorcycle accident.’
Lili shook her head. She got the distinct impression he was grasping at straws. ‘I don’t see what that has got to do with me.’
‘I’m not sure either. Why were they on another island? And if they were your parents, surely someone would have known they had a child – family, friends?’
‘So, what’s all this got to do with Connie?’ Lili asked.
‘Well, I started looking into the circumstances of how you were found, police reports, that sort of thing. Digging a little further, I discovered you had been brought home by a newly qualified social worker who was holidaying on the island at the time.’
‘Yes, I’m aware of that,’ Lili said, getting impatient.
‘The thing is, Lili, it was all too convenient, too coincidental. There had to be a connection between the two of you – but what?’
‘Did you just say – a connection?’
‘Why would she pay your school fees? Out of all the children she’s been involved with over the years, what makes you so special? Something happened on that island, Lili – something she’s not telling you. It all goes back to Corfu. Call it years of detective intuition – but I’m convinced of it.’
Lili swallowed.
‘Are you going to be all right, Lili?’
‘Yeah, sure,’ she said offhand, not sure how she felt right now. There was just one question going through her mind, and it wasn’t something Ray could answer.
‘Lili, are you still there?’
‘I’ve got to go.’
