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‘All the time,’ she replied nonchalantly. ‘The other nannies never told you because they didn’t want to get into trouble for losing Ryan. And I was always back where they’d left me before they returned with him.’
It was just as well all those other nannies had quit. He’d have fired them anyway.
‘I think Heather would have told me if I hadn’t been here today.’
Daisy gave him a sceptical look. So young...so cynical.
‘Yeah, I’m surprised, too,’ he admitted, taking a seat on the bench next to the pub wall. He patted the wood beside him, motioning for Daisy to join him. She didn’t. ‘So why do you keep coming back here?’ he asked.
‘To talk to them.’
Right. ‘But why here? Most people would go to the churchyard, you know. If you want to visit their graves Heather will take you.’
Not him. The last place he wanted to be was in that churchyard, with generation after generation of Bryces and their scandals haunting him, more real than the Lengroth ghost. No, scratch that. The churchyard was the second to last place he wanted to be.
Here was the absolute last. Looking at the spot where his brother had died.
‘Because this is the last place that they were alive,’ Daisy said, with the simplicity and bluntness of a child. ‘It’s just their bodies in the ground by the church. Here is where they were last really them.’
‘That makes sense.’ Or at least, he supposed it did if you were ten. ‘What is it you want to say to them?’
Daisy’s face closed up. ‘That’s private.’
‘Right.’ Cal looked over at the tree stump. Sitting on top of it was Ross’s old teddy bear—the one he’d kept on the top shelf in the nursery. ‘I’ll tell you what, then. You have your conversation and I’ll go and wait by the road for your brother and Heather. Okay?’
He’d still be able to see her from the road, but not to hear her words. It was about as much privacy as he was willing to give her, under the circumstances.
Daisy weighed the idea up, glancing between him and the road, then back to the tree stump. Finally she nodded. ‘Okay.’
True to his word, Cal walked out of earshot and waited by the wall, scanning the streets for Heather and Ryan. No sign yet, but if Daisy wasn’t worried neither was he. High above the village loomed Lengroth Castle, with all the worries he still had to deal with inside it. That was enough worrying to be going on with, anyway.
Then he frowned as his gaze followed the road down the hill from the castle to the wall he leaned against, moved past the memorial flowers and to Daisy, by the tree stump.
It’s the wrong way round, he realised suddenly.
Mrs Peterson had told him that Ross and Janey had been returning to the castle in the early hours of the morning, after some party or another, when they’d crashed. Ross had been over the limit, so Janey had been driving—and she had never liked to drive at night.
It had sounded plausible, so he’d never questioned it. And he’d never felt the need to return to the scene of the accident, as Daisy obviously did. But now he was here he saw what was wrong with the story.
For the car to have hit the wall, and then the tree, it must have been driving away from the castle—not towards it.
Where were you going, Ross? And why?
Cal shook his head. Another puzzle for him to try and make sense of.
A flash of movement across the road caught his eye and he saw Heather waving at him as she and Ryan walked towards him. He waved back, tucking away his questions about his brother to think about later, when he was alone.
First he needed to deal with his niece and nephew. Not to mention their nanny.
* * *
‘You run to Daisy,’ Heather whispered to Ryan as they got closer. ‘Leave Uncle Cal to me.’
She’d been terrified for a moment when she’d seen Cal standing alone by the pub wall, but then Ryan had gasped and she’d seen Daisy, just beyond him, talking to a tree stump.
Why she’d needed to send her brother running off so she could do that, Heather had no idea. But she was sure she would find out soon enough.
Once they were safely across the road, Ryan dashed over to his sister and Heather moved more slowly to stand beside Cal.
