‘Ah. A woman of impeccable taste, your mother.’ He gave her a thin smile, his eyes cloudy and sad as they momentarily held hers. ‘Give her my best. And Patrick too.’ A brief hand-wave and he was gone.

Outside, the street light across the road was flickering, even though it was still early afternoon. Esther crossed the room to peer out of the small front window beside the piano, pressing her legs against the radiator underneath it for warmth. A man in a flat cap ambled past, and she found her eyes darting to the now functioning red lights in the little camera above Dimitri and Sue’s. The man could not have been less like Chris Mews. He was squat and bow-legged, comically similar in fact to the bulldog tugging him along by an extendable lead. A drear November day, but at least her sense of safety was settling, she realised. Except that without Dylan, it meant little. Only with him home, and safe too, would she feel whole.

BONFIRES

41

‘Mum, where’s Dad got to?’ Esther had found Astrid at the bottom of the stairs, redoing her lipstick in the oval, brass-framed mirror that lived there for the purpose, beside a dire portrait she had commissioned from an amateur artist friend by way of a wifely gift many years before. The portrait was irredeemable in its awfulness – twee, and a poor representation of Astrid’s formidable angular beauty – but Esther’s father had nonetheless been typically, loyally vehement in its defence, choosing a hanging spot likely to garner the widest possible audience.

Beneath the mirror, on a shelf, lived a primary-school photo of Lily and Dylan sitting together, their childhood white-blond hair flattened and tidy, their grins self-conscious, but full of impish glee. Esther found now that she could only bear to look at it for a moment. The day before Christmas Eve, and all their efforts to eke Dylan out of hiding had failed. Only the postcards kept arriving, proof that he still had no idea that his duplicity had been rumbled. Receiving a card of the Inca ruins at Machu Picchu that week, sporting a cheery, festive ‘Feliz Navidad madre! Dx’ on the back, Esther had even felt a twinge of annoyance in the depths of her anguish. From Argentina up to Mexico. Now supposedly whizzing back south to Peru. He really was beginning to treat them like idiots.

Astrid pressed her lips together, expertly spreading the colour as she eyed Esther through the mirror. ‘Your father? Who knows? At the bottom of the garden probably, which is a bit much, given that Les and Virginia are still here. Fetch him in, darling, will you?’ She waved her lipstick in the direction of the spacious drawing room, which was lined with black mock Tudor beams like the rest of the house, and where handsome sliding glass doors offered the easiest access to the lovingly tended half-acre of garden, long since swallowed up by the afternoon dark.