'Dad'll walk in anything,' said Harry.

'There's no point. You can't see anything.'

'What's the deal with walking, anyway?' This from Sean. 'Unless you actually need to get somewhere and you haven't got a car, it's just putting one foot in front of the other a complete waste of time.'

There was a brief silence while the others tried to decide if Sean had just uttered something profound.

'Does it always rain like this here?' asked Rebecca.

'Not always,' said Charlotte. 'It was really nice one year. We ate our dinner outside nearly every night.'

'Since I've been home from school it's rained nearly every day. It's like winter all the time.'

'Where did you live before?'

'Oh, loads of places, mostly in Devon and Ess.e.x. My grandad used to own lots of property, so when I was little we lived in one of his houses, and when he died, my mum liquefied some of it and bought houses of her own.'

'Oh.' Charlotte was impressed, in spite of being unclear on what liquefying actually involved. 'We've only got two houses, this one and our proper house in Heswall.'

'This is a proper house, too, dummy,' said her brother.

'It's not our real house, though. It's not where we live most of the time.'

'I'm at school most of the time,' said Rebecca.

'Do you mind?'

'No, I like it. And sometimes I go to stay with friends, and some of the time I go to stay with my Aunty Carole in Yorkshire. I really love it there. There are some stables just down the road from her house, where I can go riding. Are there any stables round here? I asked Mum, but she didn't know. She said she'd look into it. I've never seen anyone out hacking, have you?'

'I don't think so,' said Harry, who guessed that hacking must be something to do with horses, although the term conjured up a man going at a hedge with a scythe.

'We're going to the Algarve for the last two weeks of the holidays, to stay in my uncle's villa,' Charlotte announced. 'You can ride horses there. I've seen a picture in the brochure.'

'I've hardly ever been abroad,' Rebecca said. 'My mum doesn't like flying. We've been to Euro Disney on the train. Aunty Carole took us. She was going to take me to France again last year, but then I got a virus and couldn't go.'

'Is she your dad's sister?' asked Sean, who wasn't really interested in familial details, but was fed up with the subject of holidays, conscious that his father and stepmother had no plans to take him away anywhere, so that the best he could hope for was a few days in Manchester with his mother, pretending to admire the new baby. He supposed his father never thought about organizing a holiday for him, because he was always too busy organizing holidays for other people.

'She's not really my aunty. She's my mother's cousin, but I call her aunty because I don't have any real ones. My mum's an only child, and so was my dad.'

'Are your parents divorced?'

'No, my dad died in a plane crash. I think that's why my mum is dead against flying.' She leaned forward and flicked a biscuit crumb across the coffee table. Harry flicked it back, so Rebecca flicked it again, but this time it landed nearest to Sean, who sent the crumb skidding across to Charlotte, whose heavy-handed attempt scattered fragments of biscuit all over the table.

'There's always some reason for not doing stuff,' Rebecca continued. 'We can't go abroad because she doesn't like flying, or we can't have pets because she's allergic.'

'That's why you have Timmy, the stone cat by the fire,' Charlotte put in.

'Yeah,' said Sean, 'cos, like, a stone cat and a real cat are exactly the same thing.'

'Anyway, I'm going to Aunty Carole's for a week, starting next Thursday. She's got a dog and three cats.'

Down at The Hideaway, Jo heard the postman's van while she was separating the duvet from its cover, and her heart quickened as it did every morning at the prospect of another message. She had stopped rushing to get the post because that almost guaranteed that nothing would happen. She knew the pattern by now: something worthwhile only arrived when you did not expect it.

She descended the stairs with her arms full of bedding, giving a little cry when she had almost gained the lower floor. There was a postcard on the mat. She dropped the laundry and ran to pick it up. The communication was instantly recognizable, even from a distance of several feet, as a 'Lauren card'. The picture was the same as always, but there was a new message printed below it: Claife Station. Sat.u.r.day midnight. Tell no one. Come alone.

Tears sprang into her eyes. Her legs almost gave way, so that she had to sit down on the bottom stair. This was it. Lauren would be restored to her within days. All she had to do was follow the instructions, just as she had when answering the previous card, and this would be easier because no one need know. Sat.u.r.day night was excellent from that point of view, because Marcus would still be away and Sean was so used to her coming and going that he would ask no questions. What would they say, the pair of them, when she came home with Lauren?

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

Sh.e.l.ley had managed to avoid Maisie's strawberries-and-cream event by being unavoidably on duty at the gallery, but had promised a donation in lieu of attendance, which she planned to hand over the gate next time she spotted Maisie out in the garden. (A foray as far as the front door was never a good idea, since a swift escape from such an advanced position was extremely unlikely.) Having correctly antic.i.p.ated that the first dry day would bring the Perrys forth, Sh.e.l.ley strolled down the lane and found Maisie deadheading in the border alongside the drive, a fortuitous situation which put her within easy eye-catching distance of the garden gate.

After thanking Sh.e.l.ley for her donation, Maisie naturally took the opportunity to go into all the whys and wherefores of who had turned up on the day, and how much money had been raised. 'You haven't seen anything of Jo lately?' she asked. 'I know the two of you are quite friendly.'

Sh.e.l.ley was surprised by the abrupt change of topic. 'No. I haven't seen her for a while. Why?'

'Well, there was a little bit of an upset I just thought she might have said something to you about it. Tell the truth, I've been wondering whether to pop along and have a chat with her, but it's rather awkward one doesn't know quite what to say.'

The concept of Maisie ever being at a loss for words was novel enough to arouse Sh.e.l.ley's curiosity. 'Did something happen at the strawberry tea?'

'Well, yes. I felt awfully sorry for her, but of course if we had known and with the anniversary coming up ...'

'I'm sorry, Maisie, but I don't know what you're getting at.'

'Ah then you're just as much in the dark as the rest of us.' Maisie looked disappointed. 'I thought Jo might have confided in you, with your being friendly. It was Gilda, you see. You can't blame her, of course she wasn't to know.'

'Wasn't to know what?' Sh.e.l.ley struggled to conceal her mounting impatience.

'That our Jo Handley is also Joanne Ashton ...' She paused to see if Sh.e.l.ley would register anything, but when she received no more than a puzzled look, she continued: 'The woman whose child was abducted at Barleycombe in Devon. You must remember the case: it was all over the papers at the time, and every so often they drag it up again. Jo is the mother of that little girl.'

'Not really.'

'Oh, there's no doubt about it. Gilda just happened to say something about having a daughter who is virtually the same age as the little girl who was kidnapped, and Jo got upset and ran out. Normally I would have gone straight after her, but I didn't understand what the matter was at first. I a.s.sumed she must have been feeling unwell, and what with a houseful of people and more arriving. Then when Gilda explained ... she was mortified, as you can imagine, she had no idea that we didn't know about it already well, how could she have done? Not her fault, I said. Not her fault at all. I did walk down to The Hideaway later on to try to have a word with Jo, but her car wasn't outside so I knew she must be out. And if she had been at home, I don't really know what I would have said to her. One doesn't want to make things worse by going on about it because she obviously can't face talking about it, poor girl, and who can blame her?'

Sh.e.l.ley could not help thinking that if Jo had created some sort of scene, then perhaps it should be her rather than Maisie who offered the apology, but her sympathy was tempered by a strong suspicion that Maisie's unsuccessful attempt at commiseration might well have been a front for a fact-finding mission. 'I'm not sure that I really understand,' she began. 'How come Gilda knows about all this? She's only lived here for ten minutes.'

'It seems that Gilda knew Jo years and years ago, when they were both at the same school together; so when Gilda saw the kidnapping case in the papers, she knew who it was, even though she hadn't seen Jo for quite a few years. Then of course she bought The Old Forge, never thinking for a minute that she would be living nearly opposite someone she had been at school with. She recognized Jo straight away, although apparently Jo couldn't remember her. It's such a small world, isn't it? Remind me to tell you in a minute about a very similar coincidence someone told Fred and me about, when we were wardening the other day at Holehird.'

Sh.e.l.ley didn't want to get diverted into funny coincidences at Holehird, so she interposed quickly: 'You're sure Gilda had the right person?'

'Oh, absolutely no doubt about it ... You don't forget the people you were at school with, do you? I once b.u.mped into one of our old head girls, I don't know how many years after I'd left. She was much older than me, but I still recognized her. And you know, when I thought about it, I could see that Gilda was right about Jo being the woman whose little girl disappeared. She does her hair differently now, but apart from that she hasn't changed very much.'

Sh.e.l.ley nodded. While Maisie had been talking, she too had reached back into her memory and plucked out an image, half remembered from newspapers and television.

'I can't imagine why she never told any of us,' Maisie continued.

'I suppose she wanted to put it all behind her make a fresh start.'

'I don't see how you ever could not a thing like that. They never found out what happened to the little girl, did they?'

'No.' Sh.e.l.ley's voice was thoughtful. 'Didn't the husband disappear, too?'

'Well it certainly wasn't Marcus who was involved,' said Maisie. 'I don't know about the husband. It's the little girl I remember. She looked such a sweet little thing.'

Sh.e.l.ley delved further into the recesses of half-forgotten headlines. 'He fell off a cliff that was it. The police decided he'd committed suicide; a lot of people at the time wondered if it was guilty conscience.'

'People will say anything.' Maisie shook her head. 'Anyway, it must have been awful for her to be reminded of it, and coming completely out of the blue like that. Of course, if we had known about it already, then it wouldn't have been so bad. If only she had told us ... Well, any damage is done now. You know Jo better than I do. Should I have a word with her, do you think? Tell her I'm sorry about what happened, and rea.s.sure her that we're not all talking about it?'

But we are, Sh.e.l.ley thought. Out loud she said, 'It's difficult to know how to approach it. I would just leave it, if I were you. Let it all blow over she obviously doesn't want to talk about it, so I'd say least said, soonest mended. I have to get back I promised Brian I would only be five minutes. There's some bookkeeping I'm supposed to be helping him with.'

As she walked away, Sh.e.l.ley wondered what Brian would make of it all, and come to that, what she made of it herself. Was there something a bit strange about keeping such a big thing a secret or would that be the natural thing to do? She had almost reached her own gate when she encountered the two little girls from The Hollies and The Old Forge, coming the opposite way. They both said 'h.e.l.lo' to her, but a second later she heard the younger one instructing the older one in a low, urgent voice: 'Look out. Mrs Perry's in her garden. Stay on this side of the road and don't let her see us or she'll keep us talking for ages.' Sh.e.l.ley smiled to herself. How quickly the young catch on. As she opened the front door of Ingledene, she glanced back and saw that they had managed to evade Maisie and were just going out of sight round the bend.

Charlotte thought there were distinct advantages to hanging out at Rebecca's house. It not only got them away from Harry and Sean, but also brought them into the orbit of Mrs Iceton's catering, which meant lunches of pizzas and microwave chips, rather than her mother's healthy summer salads. In spite of these advantages, however, Charlotte could not quite decide whether she liked it at The Old Forge or not. The house both attracted and repelled her. It was rather gloomy inside and had a funny smell, although this was partly compensated for by the contents. The Hollies was furnished in the minimalist style of a holiday let an arrangement intended to reduce the amount of housework her mum needed to do in order to keep everything pristine whereas Mrs Iceton did not seem to worry about housework, so clutter was scarcely an issue. The living room looked as if someone had taken up residence in a little-frequented junk shop, scattering their discarded newspapers, clothes and coffee cups among the furniture and bric-a-brac while the owner of the business was otherwise engaged.

Charlotte had never seen anything quite like it. There were objects of all kinds just lying about, and all these things seemed to have a story attached. The artificial flowers under a gla.s.s dome had belonged to Mrs Iceton's grandmother, while an enormous plant in a crazed china bowl whose dust-laden, leathery leaves flopped haphazardly across a menagerie of dulled bronze miniature animals, was known as 'Esmeralda' and revered as the oldest living thing in the house. She learned that what appeared to be a tiny ancient pair of binoculars were something called opera gla.s.ses, and that the ancient photo alb.u.m on which they rested, a volume covered in dusty grey silk, from which a plaited brown and green ta.s.sel drooped over the edge of the table, contained black and white photographs of Rebecca's grandparents' wedding day. The wedding dress in the photographs was kept in a trunk upstairs, from which she and Becky had been allowed not only to remove it for examination, but also to try it on. Everywhere was a confusion of old and new. A plastic mug full of pens sat between an apparently random collection of pebbles and a china pierrot which could have been won at the fair. The pierrot wore a permanent expression of mild surprise, which could have been induced by finding himself in the range of a precariously balanced pile of books. There were books everywhere, and they all looked to Charlotte as though they belonged in a second-hand shop. Even the paperbacks were brown and faded. Her own mother sometimes bought second-hand paperbacks from the Oxfam shop, but these books all looked much, much older than any of them.

Rebecca's bedroom was almost as much of a muddle as the rooms downstairs. There seemed to be just as many books here too, some of them still to be unpacked from the cardboard boxes in which they had arrived at The Old Forge months ago. Charlotte had offered to help with them, partly because she liked reading and partly because she liked Rebecca, who, even though she was nearly as old as Harry, never patronized her.

'I'm glad you came to live here,' Charlotte declared as she knelt in front of a carton of books, pa.s.sing out the contents volume by volume to Rebecca, who was stacking them spines outwards in a pile on the floor, now that they had filled all the available shelving in the room. 'It means there will always be someone to hang around with when we come up in the holidays.'

'And I'm glad you'll be here.' Rebecca readily returned the compliment. 'It's really nice to have a friend in the holidays, because all the girls of my age who lived near our last house already had their own friends, because they all went to the local schools.'

Basking in the implied compliment of 'my age', Charlotte asked: 'But don't you have friends at your school?'

'I've got lots of friends at school, and sometimes I get asked to stay with them, but I can never invite them to stay with us because Mum always says she needs to get straight first, and somehow she never does. You couldn't put anyone in the spare room here the bed's all dismantled up against the wall and you'd have to climb over loads of boxes and other furniture to get at it.'

'Why have you got so much stuff?' asked Charlotte.

'It mostly came from my grandparents. They never threw anything away, Mum says. In fact, I think some of it belonged to my great-grandparents. There are some boxes that haven't been unpacked in years they just move with us. Mum's got a lock-up unit down in Ess.e.x which is stuffed full as well.'

'What's in all the boxes?'

'I haven't got a clue.'

'There might be something really valuable.'

'Mum wouldn't care if it was. I don't think she's all that interested in money.'

'But you must be quite rich, if you go to boarding school?'

'I suppose. I don't really know. Mum never talks about money. She wanted me to go to boarding school because she went herself. She thinks it's better.'

'How about your dad? Did he go to boarding school?'

Rebecca hesitated in the act of balancing a book. 'I think that's high enough; I'd better start a new pile.' She glanced towards the door, put a finger to her lips and slipped across to check that the coast was clear before she spoke again. 'You can't shut these doors,' she said. 'None of the latches work properly. You know what I told you before about my dad?'

Charlotte nodded, eager for confidences.

'Well, it sort of wasn't exactly true. That's just what we tell people, because Mum says it's easier to pretend to be a widow.'

Charlotte's eyes widened. It was outside her sphere of experience for adults to invite children to be a party to shared deceptions. 'How do you mean it isn't exactly true?'

'It is true and it isn't. It all depends which dad you're talking about.'

'How many dads have you got?'

'The thing is, Gilda isn't my real mother. My real mother died of cancer when I was a little baby.'

'Your birth mother,' Charlotte put in helpfully. Being an aficionado of daytime television was a great help when it came to defining familial relationships.

'Right. She was my mum's that's Gilda's best friend, and when she knew she was dying she asked Gilda and her husband to adopt me because they couldn't have any children of their own. Only, she didn't know Gilda's husband all that well, and she didn't realize that he wasn't really very nice. He used to drink too much.'

'So what happened to him?'

'Gilda threw him out. So she isn't a widow at all; she just tells people that because it sounds better than admitting you've got a drunken husband somewhere.'

'What about your real dad?'

'He's the one who really is dead. He was killed in a plane crash before I was born. It's no secret that I'm adopted, but it's easier for Gilda if we mix my adopted dad and my real dad into the same person which makes her a widow.'

'It sounds more complicated to me. How long have you known about all this?'

'As long as I can remember. Mum says you have to tell adopted people that they are adopted, and she has kept my real name because my actual mother wanted that. A couple of years ago she took me to see the outside of the hospital where I was born, and the house where my parents used to live, and she's shown me photos of my real mum and dad, although she hasn't got many, just a couple of when they were on holiday stuff like that.'

'And you can't remember your real mum at all?'

'Of course not. I told you, I was only a baby. I can't remember my father or my stepfather, either.'

'Your parents might have been really rich there might be a big inheritance or something,' suggested the materialistic Charlotte.

'I shouldn't think so. The house where they lived was pretty tiny.'

'It's a really romantic story. A friendship between your two mothers, going on beyond the grave.'

'I suppose so. Come on, don't stop.'

Charlotte obediently reached into the box for the next volume. 'Anne of Green Gables,' she read. 'How funny she was an orphan, too.'

'It's not exactly funny being an orphan,' Rebecca chided. 'You don't get comedians going out on stage, saying, "Hey, I'm an orphan", and getting a huge laugh.'

'Sorry.'

'It's OK. It's not a big deal.'