‘I believe so.’ He sighs again. ‘I hate leaving you alone in this.’

‘Yes.’ I look down to the house, thinking of all those sleeping peacefully. ‘Does Allan know?’

‘No.’

My head shoots up. ‘Why?’

‘There is a leak.’

‘But it would never be Allan.’ I fight the urge to strike out. This isn’t Tom. He would sell his soul for Allan.

‘It’s no longer in my hands.’ His voice catches.

I will not let emotion into this. I have a role to play. ‘So he doesn’t know?’

‘No.’

‘This George Russell . . .’

‘Allan believes the cover story of the aunt in Penzance.’

I cough. ‘Surely he doesn’t.’

He laughs. ‘We all believe things, Joan.’

My gut turns. ‘Yes.’ So many of us have been fooled, haven’t looked when we didn’t want to see.

‘Right, we both need to get some sleep.’ Tom stands and walks up the path away from the house and I retrace my steps back. I dry off the bottom of my plimsoles and replace the cardigan on the hook before returning to my room. Allan is in light sleep and I carefully slide into bed and lay staring at my husband. Is anything as it seems?

24

Lottie

4 August 2018, 6.00 a.m.

‘Damn.’ Lottie rubbed her eyes and grabbed her phone. Six a.m. Yawning, she knew she could have used more sleep. It was way too early to be awake, but she’d forgotten to close the curtains last night. The rising sun filled the room with a blinding light. There was no point in drawing the curtains now and trying to go back to sleep. She had a lot to do today.

She swung her feet out of bed and kicked her mother’s diary and the shoebox with Gran’s notebook. Her grandmother was dying. The reality hit, and her shoulders slumped. There was no time to waste. With any luck her mother would still be asleep, and Lottie could do something to stop her from confronting Gran, or Gramps for that matter. She understood her desire to know. Lottie had that same desire. Who was her father? Maybe her mother didn’t know, or didn’t want to remember. When she was a teenager, she saw several articles about her mother’s abduction and Lottie began to make a few guesses based on her age and her mother’s time in captivity.

She went to the mirror. The dark haired, grey-eyed woman looking back at her was no English rose. Her mother and Gran both had dark hair and dark eyes, but they were fair skinned. Lottie’s eyes, her best feature according to Paul, stood out against her tanned skin. Her irises were pale grey with a dark grey ring. They haunted her, and she thought they haunted her mother, too.

Looking away, her glance fell on the file. How could one pile of papers contain enough to explain how her life had collapsed? Yet they did, showing the refused insurance claim for the theft of the jewellery, the police report saying there had been no evidence of a break-in or damage to her safe, the legal paperwork for the sale of the flat, the outstanding invoices for the gems and the gold and platinum, and her Vegas marriage certificate. She sighed. Married in haste and repenting at leisure. He had taken her freedom, her money, her career and her self-esteem. She was an idiot. At least the money from the flat should have cleared by Monday or Tuesday, then she could close the chapter of her life entitled ‘Lottie the up-and-coming London jewellery designer’. God, she had been blind.