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She wasn’t in the mood for mysteries, but she couldn’t help being curious all the same as she ran a finger under the flap. Inside she found a folder of photographs and a note.
She sat down on the bed, switched on the lamp, and read the note first.
Dear Miss Carlow,
We found this when we had the bedroom unit in the flat taken out. It must have fallen down behind it. We could see it belonged to your late aunt, and thought you might want to have it, so I put it with your things. I hope I did right.
M. Henderson.
So, Rhianna thought with a grimace, I seem to have a legacy from Aunt Kezia after all. How very weird.
She opened the folder and tipped out the handful of snapshots it contained.
It was an odd collection, all apparently taken round Penvarnon House and its grounds. None of the local views she might have expected. Just people. And clearly not posing. No one was smiling or saying ‘cheese’ because they’d glanced up and seen a camera on them.
And Aunt Kezia had been no photographer either. The angles were odd, capturing her subjects’ back views, and the shots were hurried and blurred because the subjects were moving.
She studied them more closely, recognising Francis Seymour in several of them. But mainly they featured another man entirely, and for a bewildered moment she thought, It’s Diaz. Why did she take all these pictures of Diaz?
Then she looked again, and realised that this was Diaz as he would be in ten or twenty years time—broader, heavier and greyer. But the resemblance was almost eerily strong, and she said, under her breath, ‘Of course—it’s his father. It’s Ben Penvarnon.’
The next one showed a woman seated on the terrace at the house, her head bent, her body slumped, and it was only when Rhianna looked more closely that she realised she was sitting in a wheelchair.
How cruel, she thought, of Aunt Kezia to take a photograph of Esther Penvarnon, her employer, like this, and how unnecessary.
The rest all seemed to be of Moira Seymour, taken invariably from a distance and only just recognisable. In one she was standing near the top of the path down to the cove, glancing back over her shoulder, as if she knew there was a camera trained on her. In others she was emerging from the shrubbery, pushing the bushes aside, her face white and formless, or standing under the shadow of a tree with her husband.
There was something strange, even furtive about the photographs, Rhianna thought with distaste as she shuffled them together to replace them in the wallet. Then paused, because there was something else there. A slip of folded paper.
A cheque, she realised, for twenty-three pounds, made out to K. Trewint, and bearing the signature Benjamin Penvarnon. It was over twenty-five years out of date, and had clearly never been presented.
Rhianna stared at it in utter astonishment. How could her aunt possibly have overlooked such a thing? She’d have backed her to pay it into her account the same day—even if it had only been for twenty-three pence. So how could she have forgotten?
She refolded it and put it back in the wallet with the snaps, aware that her breathing had quickened. She felt as she’d done once when she was very young, when she’d turned over a stone in the garden only to release a host of creeping things that had scuttled everywhere. She’d screamed, knowing that if one of them ran over her sandal she wouldn’t be able to bear it, and that she’d be sick or worse.
Now, she just felt—grubby in some odd way, wishing very much the bedroom unit at the stable flat had stayed where it was, with its secret intact.
Her instinct told her to destroy the entire folder, but she could hardly throw it overboard. It didn’t seem fair to the dolphins. So she’d have to take it back to London with her and get rid of it there, she decided, tossing it back in her bag.
And now what she needed most in the world was a shower, she thought with a sudden shiver.
In the bathroom, she stripped and walked into the cubicle, rubbing handfuls of her favourite gel into every inch of her skin as if she were taking part in some essential decontamination process. Then she stood, head thrown back and eyes closed, allowing the cool, refreshing torrent to pour over her until every last trace of foam had gone.
She turned off the shower at last, with a sigh of relief and pleasure. Twisting her hair into a thick mahogany rope in order to squeeze out the excess water, she stepped back into the bathroom.
She’d heard no sound above the rush of the shower. Had felt no prickle of awareness. Yet he was there, standing in the doorway, watching her. Waiting for her.
She halted, hands still raised, totally, sublimely exposed, as a slow, quivering heat suffused her body under his silver gaze. As she acknowledged that it was much too late for even a token attempt to cover herself.
