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‘It’s not creepy, Lili. It’s grief.’
Lili fell silent.
Abigail sighed. ‘I’m sorry, that’s not fair of me.’ She knew she sounded like she had a monopoly on grief because she’d lost her husband. Lili had lost people too; her parents had died when she was little, making her an orphan. Even though she’d been so young, if anyone knew about grief, it was Lili. She had carried around that loss all her young life. ‘Sorry,’ she said again.
Lili touched her arm. ‘Don’t be. By the sounds of it, you’re right, Lord Somerville wouldn’t have had an affair.’
‘Besides,’ said Abigail, ‘there’s something my stepdad told me – well, two things actually – that were news to me.’
Lili stared at her. ‘What things?’
‘About the night of the Great Storm in 1987.’
‘The year you were born?’
‘Yes. Well, it turns out there was a baby left in the storm porch of the cottage that very night. The nurse who was living there at the time took him in – and my father thinks she adopted him.’
‘No, way. Your husband was a foundling?’
‘Yes, just like you, Lili.’
‘But he never knew.’
Abigail nodded. ‘That’s right. He thought the nurse was his biological mother. She must have never told him the truth, that she adopted him.’
Lili nodded. ‘And it would never have come to light if he hadn’t been given the cottage.’
‘Exactly. That’s why he had a DNA test.’
‘You need to speak to his parents, Abigail. But also you need to find out the results of that test. Do you think he told one of them the results?’
‘I don’t know.’ Abigail recalled the funeral. Toby’s sister Clarissa had seemed at pains to avoid her, which had been difficult in the confines of a small flat.
‘Have you figured out the password yet to his AncestryDNA account?’
‘No.’ In truth, it had upset Abigail that she hadn’t. She’d thought it would be her birthday, or his, or their wedding date; every PIN she had tried, that had some special significance to him or them as a couple, hadn’t worked. She just couldn’t figure it out.
‘There might be a way around getting locked out of an account. Why don’t I speak to Ray?’
Abigail suddenly had a strong sense of déjà vu. She recalled she’d had the same conversation with her stepdad, Gerald. He knew Ray and had suggested she speak to him. And just like Lili, he also felt she needed to speak to Toby’s family.
‘My friend who runs the heir-hunting business. He finds lost descendants of people who died intestate with money or property, but on paper, no obvious heirs.’
‘But that’s not my circumstances, and it wasn’t my husband’s. We are the heirs.’
‘Yes, but he loves a mystery. That’s the art cop in him.’
‘The what?’
‘Oh, I didn’t tell you? He used to work for New Scotland Yard finding lost art, and now he finds lost people. There’s a lot of genealogy involved.’
‘Genealogy?’
‘Building family trees. That’s where you need to access the findings of his DNA test.’
‘Do you think he can do that?’
‘Maybe, I don’t know. You’d have to see him and find out.’
