AllFreeNovel
Share Us
chapter 39
alex
Jack may believe in me, but I don’t. For my own peace of mind, I need to prove to myself that I wasn’t hallucinating; that I really saw Lottie on that train.
At the weekend, I go down to my parents’. The logo I thought I saw on the woman’s fleece came to me fromsomewhere. I just have to find it.
‘Why don’t you let the police handle it, love?’ Mum says, as I kneel beside the bookcase in my parents’ living room. ‘They know what they’re doing.’
I pull another photo album off the bottom shelf. ‘Mum, I told you, they don’t even believe she was on the train.’
‘Alex, love. It’s no reflection on you. But—’
‘It was Lottie,’ I say.
‘You’re certain, are you?’ Dad says. ‘Certain enough to shut down the rest of the investigation and throw everything you have at this?’
I pause at that. Memory plays strange tricks on us; I know that better than anyone. In the last two years I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen Lottie’s reflection in a shop window or glimpsed her blonde head ahead of me in a crowd.You see what you want to see.
‘There is no “investigation” any more,’ I say. ‘Unless we get more government funding, it’s over anyway.’
Mum watches me sadly as I flip through the pages of the album. She thinks I’m on the edge of a nervous breakdown. She says she believesI believeI saw Lottie, which means she doesn’t think I saw her at all.
‘Darling, you’re not making any sense,’ she says.
‘None of this makes any sense,’ I say.
She and Dad spend the weekend tiptoeing around the subject, treading on eggshells, clearly afraid of setting me off. I put aside my agnostic convictions and go to church with Mum on Sunday morning because she asks me to, but it doesn’t bring me any peace. Sitting in the pew, I feel raw and exposed, as if I have a target on my back. Afterwards, fellow parishioners come up and tell me how sorry they are about the ‘false alarm’ in London.
When we get home, Dad hands me a shoebox filled with loose photographs that didn’t make it into the albums. ‘Might as well be sure,’ he says.
My throat tightens. ‘Thanks, Dad.’
I sit down at the dining table and sift through the pictures. We returned to Devon year after year throughout my childhood and there are photographs of me and Harriet at every age from toddlers to teens. During those holidays at South Weald House, when we only had each other for company, we shared a sisterly rapport that never quite translated back to normal life. The two of us used to watch TV together in the hotel bedroom when Mum and Dad had gone to the pub nearby and we were supposed to be asleep. We’d take it in turns to be lookout at the window and as soon as we saw them walking back up the hill to the B&B, we’d turn off the TV and jump back into bed. In those moments of complicity, we were as close as we ever came to being friends.
I scoop the photos into a neat heap and put them back in the box. Most of them are rejects, either out of focus or marred by a finger across the lens. God knows why Mum even kept them—
And then there it is.
At my shout, Mum hurries in from the kitchen, her hands dripping water and soapsuds. She leans over my shoulder and peers at the photo in my hand.
Harriet and I are sitting cross-legged with another little girl on a lawn somewhere, ice-cream cones melting in our hands. We look to be about seven and nine years old. Behind us, a woman in her late forties is laughing, her hand raised to shade her eyes against the sun. She looks familiar, but I can’t place her.
‘See her T-shirt?That’sthe logo I saw on the train,’ I say.
‘Mrs Garton,’ Mum says, remembering. ‘She was the housekeeper at South Weald House. Lovely woman. Harriet was friends with her daughter; that’s her, sitting next to you.’ She turns to Dad as he puts down his paper and gets up from his chair. ‘What was the girl’s name, Tony?’
‘Buggered if I know.’
‘Katie … no, Cathy, that’s it. But it can’t have been Mrs Garton you saw, love. She died years ago.’
‘It wasn’t her,’ I say impatiently. ‘But it was the same logo. The woman I saw was wearing a fleece, not a T-shirt, but it was definitely the same design.’
I didn’t imagine it. I’m not going crazy.
A South Weald House logodidexist. Therewasa staff uniform, of sorts.
Whoever the police spoke to, that retired member of staff they traced, was wrong.
