‘Why are you taking her side?’ Craig’s face was accusing. ‘You don’t know her! She’s bad news. I’ve a good mind to put a protection order on her, stop her coming anywhere near him or us.’

Frankie hesitated, doubtful that this would ever be granted. Doubtful that that would be in Fergus’s best interest, either. Imagine him as a teenager, finding out he had another mother somewhere – his real, biological mother – and then them telling him that they’d legislated against Julia seeing him. It had been strange enough for her, hearing about Harry Mortimer, but at least she’d had the choice of going to find him. Denied this, Fergus might end up hating them. ‘You can’t stop her from wanting to be in his life,’ she said quietly, ‘when she gave birth to him. That’s not going to happen.’

Craig’s eyes were mutinous. ‘We’ll just see about that,’ he replied.

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

‘Goodness, you’re very tense,’ the woman said, pushing her knuckles into Paula’s shoulder blades and grinding them around. ‘Try to relax. Let yourself go limp. Deep breath out . . .’

It was late Saturday morning and Paula was lying on a massage table, cocooned in towels and anointed with rosemary-scented oil like a great big pink leg of lamb. A tense leg of lamb. Truth be told, she felt about as relaxed and limp as a tree trunk. She was here for her friend Nicky’s birthday treat – girls’ day in the spa! – but was finding it impossible to ‘let herself go’, despite the massaging woman’s exhortations.

‘And breathe in . . .’ Pummel, pummel, grind, grind. It felt as if the woman was digging her elbows into Paula’s knotted shoulders. ‘And out. All the way out, that’s it. Release the pressure. Release the tension.’

I’ll give you pressure and tension in a minute, if you don’t pipe down, Paula felt like saying. She’d been hoping that this forty-five-minute ‘Back, Neck and Shoulder Miracle’ might be conducted in silence, so that she could at least zone out for a while and stop worrying about her parents, but that now seemed unlikely. Should she pretend to be asleep? Maybe let out a little snore? She gave a deep, long sigh instead, and that seemed to please the massage woman.

‘Good. Lovely. There we go,’ she said tenderly, swishing her oiled hands up and down Paula’s back. ‘Much better.’

If only it were that simple, Paula thought to herself, face pressed into the towel-clad hole of the massage table. Because back in the real world, there had still been no word from her mum, other than the hotel’s polite messages of rebuff. She and her dad were hoping that Jeanie might be on the return flight from Madeira tomorrow and that they could reconcile their differences, but . . . Well, Paula wasn’t going to bet the house on it, put it that way.