AllFreeNovel
Share Us
chapter 82
alex
I’m in the pub garden with Lottie, savouring the first really warm day of summer, when Quinn comes outside looking for us. I invited her to Mum’s memorial service weeks ago, but I didn’t think she’d actually show up.
I wave her over. I haven’t seen her since I came out of hospital, nearly six months ago, and I’m surprised how much healthier she looks. Clearly giving up the booze and getting back into the field to be shot at and bombed has done her good. She’s still got the rakish eye patch, of course, but she no longer resembles a heroin addict searching for her next fix.
‘You’ve just made Lottie’s day,’ I say, making room on the wooden bench.
‘Other way round,’ Quinn says.
Lottie clambers onto Quinn’s knee, unselfconsciously moving the reporter’s withered arm out of the way to make room. Anyone else watching them might be surprised by my daughter’s uncharacteristic affection, given they haven’t seen each other in six months, but they struck up an unlikely bond in Sicily: the hard-bitten, childless war correspondent and my difficult, awkward, immeasurably brave daughter.
Or perhaps not that unlikely, after all.
‘So,’ I say. ‘How was Nagorno-Karabakh?’
‘Lively. The ceasefire’s broken down again, so I’ll probably be on my way back in a day or two. How are the Shetlands?’
‘Unbelievably dull. Thank God.’
‘When are you coming back to London?’ Quinn asks.
I glance across the pub garden to where Jack is in deep conversation with my father. The two of them hit it off the first time they met, while I was convalescing at Harriet’s cottage. My sister has been my staunchest supporter over the last few months. I couldn’t have managed without her. I’m really going to miss her when we leave.
‘At the end of the summer,’ I say. ‘Lottie’s going back to school in London in September. She seems ready.’
‘I’m sure he’ll appreciate the shorter commute,’ Quinn says, dryly.
My relationship with Jack is still under wraps, for now, but I know our secret’s safe with Quinn. I’d never have thought I’d say this, given the way we started, but I can literally trust this woman with my life.
She was the one who saved it, after all.
I don’t know exactly what happened that day at Elena Martini’s villa. I’ve got no memories of anything after she stabbed me. I nearly died: according to my medical records, my heart stopped twice on the helicopter to the hospital in the Sicilian capital, Palermo. So I don’t suppose I’ll ever know how Luca and his mother came to be lying at the bottom of the cliff. But I can guess.
A tragic accident, the Sicilian police decided. It appears Signor Bonfiglio – a distant cousin of the old lady, apparently, although no one is quite sure of the relationship – was trying to save his elderly relative, who suffered from dementia, and the two fell to their deaths. No one else was home at the time.
When I regained consciousness, six days later, I was in a private room at St George’s Hospital in London, the victim ofan apparent mugging near my home. Jack must have called in quite a few favours to pull that off.
We debated long and hard whether to tell the world Lottie had been found. After Quinn had spirited my daughter out of Sicily, she’d taken her to Harriet in the Shetlands, and when I was discharged ten days later I flew up to join them. Perhaps I could’ve passed Lottie off as a relative of my late husband, using the alias Luca had given our daughter, but I’d had enough of lies and deception. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, waiting for the truth to come out. I wanted Lottie to know who she was.
A simple press release was never going to work. There’d been too much interest in the story for too long to get away with that. So I finally gave Quinn her exclusive, and sat down for a ninety-minute TV interview.
We stuck to the truth as much as we could. Quinn told the moving story of a bereaved grandmother, driven by the death of her beloved son to commit an unforgivable act. A woman who, when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, returned Lottie to her mother and then took her life at her mountain home in Sicily a few days later. There was no mention of the unfortunate Signor Bonfiglio.
Quinn knew how to sell the story. INN promoted the interview across its domestic and international channels, and followed it up with a series of scoops: the first pictures of Lottie, playing in the garden; access to the villa where she’d been kept; interviews with my dad and Harriet. INN sucked the life out of the story, and although the other networks and newspapers covered it, they’d lost the initiative and they knew it. In journalism, there’s no such thing as second place. Besides, the story had suddenly become a lot less interesting: instead of the dramatic, stranger-danger abduction that fed into every mother’s worst nightmare, the Lottie Martini kidnapping hadturned out to be nothing more than a convoluted custody battle. A few commentators wrote opinion pieces about the rights of grandparents and then the news cycle moved on.
Lottie spies a puppy playing with a family at a table a few feet away and abruptly wriggles off Quinn’s lap. ‘Posso andare a giocare con il cucciolo?’ she asks me, folding her hands in mock-prayer.
‘In English, Lottie.’
She scowls. ‘Can I go and play with the puppy, Mummy?’
I nod and she runs off.
‘Must be hard to let her go,’ Quinn says.
‘It was harder when she was too scared to leave my side,’ I say.
