Tyler, Robinson and Clifford was wedged in between an interior-design shop with a glittering chandelier in the window and an antiquarian bookshop.
Katie had pictured Howard Clifford with short iron-grey hair and a pinstripe suit, and for extra effect a red silk handkerchief in his breast pocket, but he was nothing of the sort. She guessed he was in his mid-forties, his hair was a sandy-blond colour and there wasn’t a pinstripe or silk handkerchief in sight. His suit was a dark shade of blue; its jacket was hanging lopsidedly on the back of his chair, a tie poking out of a pocket, a Marks and Spencer label just visible. With his shirt open at the neck and his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, he was as informal as his office was chaotic, with files, folders, law books and papers covering every available surface. There was a cricket bat propped against a filing cabinet and a lone well-worn trainer next to it. On the windowsill behind the desk was a framed photograph of two young grinning children peering out of a Wendy house; they both had the same sandy-blond hair as he had. At odds with all this was his voice, which was the same as it had been on the phone, extremely courteous and very proper.
‘Please, Miss Lavender, sit down. May I offer you a cup of tea or coffee?’
As tempting as the offer was, she didn’t want anything to delay the purpose of her visit. ‘No thank you,’ she politely declined.
‘Then to business,’ he said briskly, sidestepping a three-foothigh tower of files and going round to his side of the desk. He sat down and reached for an envelope next to a computer that was decorated with a collection of yellow Post-it notes. ‘I’ve been instructed to give this letter to you to read,’ he said. ‘The original instructions were given to this firm thirty years ago and the matter became my responsibility ten years ago when I joined the firm. Accordingly I’ve been informed that I must leave you alone whilst you read the letter.’
Genuinely mystified and not a little alarmed, Katie watched him leave the room. When the door was closed, she opened the envelope and took out four sheets of cream notepaper. She recognized her mother’s expressive handwriting at once; the flamboyant flourishes of the pen strokes that had been Fay Lavender’s character all over. Sadness clutched at Katie’s heart. She took a deep steadying breath and began reading.
My dearest Katie
,
This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, but I know that it is absolutely the right thing to do
.
If my instructions have been followed properly you will be reading this a year after my death. The reason for this is that I hope that you’ll be over it and will be strong enough now to take the shock of what I’m about to tell you
.
There’s no way to dress this up other than to come right out with it. The truth is, your father, who was the best father you could ever have had, and who loved and cherished you, was not your biological father. Your biological father and I made a pact the moment I knew I was pregnant with you that he would have nothing to do with me ever again or interfere in any way with your upbringing. In return, he made me promise to carry out just one wish on his behalf; it was something I was in no position to deny him. But I shall leave that to Howard Clifford to explain to you, or whoever else has been entrusted with the task
.
Let me say straight away that your father knew about the affair, as brief and as reckless as it was, and he somehow found it in his heart to forgive me. He said he did so because he loved me. I just hope you can find it in
your
heart to forgive your father and me for our deception
.
If you do think less of me for what I did, and I wouldn’t blame you if you did, I hope you will never think less of your father. He was such a good man – a wonderful husband and an adoring father. I made a promise to him that you would never know the truth whilst he was still alive, and I held firm to that promise
.
You’re probably wondering why I feel it’s important now for you to know the truth after all these years. My justification is simple: the only reason you’ll be reading this letter is because your father and I are no longer around, and I hate the thought of you being alone in the world and not having anyone – by that I mean family – to look out for you. I want you to meet your biological father – in the hope that he’s still alive when you read this – along with any other children he may have had. You always did want to have a brother or a sister; remember how you used to write to Father Christmas to bring you a baby sister? Sadly your father and I could not make that wish come true for you. Much to your father’s disappointment, it turned out he couldn’t actually have children, maybe that’s why he treasured you the way he did
.
Please, my darling girl, forgive me for any pain and distress you feel as a consequence of reading this letter
.
With all my love
,
Mum
.
PS What happens next is up to you, Katie. I have given very clear instructions to Howard Clifford, who will be dealing with this matter, and he will help you all he can
.
When she had finished reading, Katie sat very still and stared unseeingly ahead of her.
A knock at the door made her start. Behind her Howard Clifford came in; he was carrying a tray of tea things. In her stunned state, she focused all her concentration on the flowery teapot, the matching small milk jug with the chip in the rim, the sugar bowl and the two cups and saucers. Anything but think of what she’d just read.
‘I thought you might have changed your mind about something to drink,’ he said.
She nodded, unable to speak
‘Milk?’
She nodded again.
‘Sugar?’
She shook her head.
She put her mother’s letter down in front of her on the cluttered desk and with trembling hands she took the proffered cup and saucer. She suddenly shivered, as though a rush of cold air had entered the room. She watched the solicitor swivel his chair and open a filing cabinet behind him. After a few seconds of rustling he pulled out a packet of chocolate fingers. ‘My weakness,’ he said, passing her the packet.
She shook her head and took a long wobbly intake of breath. And to think she had believed herself impervious to shock. Finally able to speak, she said, ‘I take it you know the exact contents of my mother’s letter?’
‘Yes. Drink your tea and then I’ll tell you the rest.’
‘The rest?’
‘Your tea,’ he said firmly.
Dazed, she did as he said.
When he seemed to be satisfied with how much she’d drunk, he passed her the packet of chocolate fingers again. This time she took one, and while she nibbled on the biscuit, he sat back in his chair, his elbows resting on the arms.
‘When you were born, your biological father set up a trust fund for you. That fund can now be released and accessed by you.’
‘What kind of trust fund?’
‘The kind that represents a considerable amount of money.’
She swallowed. ‘Can you define
considerable
?’
He smiled, leant forward, slipped on a pair of glasses and opened a file to his right. He turned a couple of pages, paused, then said, ‘As of yesterday, that fund was worth seven hundred and fifty-eight thousand pounds and sixteen pence exactly.’
With no real grasp of what she was feeling, only that her brain seemed to have seized up and she was numb, Katie made her way to Victoria station. Why bother returning to work when she didn’t have a job to go back to?
She caught the first available train to Brighton and sat in the stifling carriage with her face turned to the grimy window. The sky had finally cracked open and it had started to rain, a real deluge. When the window became too opaque with dirt and rain to see through, she looked at the two middle-aged women sitting opposite her. Flushed with the airless heat, and fanning themselves with magazines, they were happily discussing the spoils of a successful shopping expedition. It sounded as if they’d been hunting down outfits for a wedding; all they had left to find were the right handbags. Next to Katie was a man playing solitaire on his laptop. There was an unpleasant whiff of cigarettes and BO coming off him. How ordinary and familiar it all seemed.
But ordinary wasn’t how she felt. She felt as though her world had been blown apart, shattered into a million pieces that could never be put back together again. This morning she had left home ready for the normal kind of Friday, cheerfully taking her seat on the usual crowded commuter train in the full and happy knowledge that the end of the week had almost arrived, that Slackerday and Slumberday lay ahead – as she and Tess had renamed their favourite days of the week. But now nothing was as it had been when she’d woken up. Nothing made sense. Nothing felt real. What if she closed her eyes and fell asleep? Would she wake up and find that today had been a dream? First losing her job and then . . . and then this bombshell.
Her mobile rang. She saw that it was Tess and that she had tried ringing earlier. She switched the phone off. She couldn’t speak to anyone at the moment. Not even Tess. She hoped her friend would forgive her.
She closed her eyes. Immediately she was back in Howard Clifford’s untidy office. He was explaining to her in his kind but firmly matter-of-fact way that in accordance with the instructions Tyler, Robinson and Clifford had received, the trust fund was hers whether she wanted to get in touch with her biological father or not; there were no strings attached, the two things were not related. An unfortunate choice of word, she had thought.
‘But why should I now suddenly be entitled to it?’ she had asked. ‘What’s significant about now?’
‘Only one person could make the decision as to when you received the money, and that was your mother. She came to see me shortly after your father died, that is to say when Desmond Lavender died, and lodged instructions with this firm that a year after her death, whenever that took place, I was to give you the letter you’ve just read, along with details about the trust fund. She didn’t want you to know about the fund while your father – Desmond – was still alive.’
‘What if I had died before her?’
‘The fund would have been closed and the money given to a charity of your mother’s choosing.’
‘What if I don’t want the money?’
‘That’s entirely your prerogative. But if I were you, Miss Lavender, I’d think very carefully before looking a gift horse in the mouth.’
If I were you, Miss Lavender
. . .
The question was: who was she? Who was Katie Lavender? One minute she was the daughter of Fay and Desmond Lavender with thirty years of memories and certainties behind her, and now those years meant nothing; every single one of them had been a lie. Dad hadn’t been her father and Mum hadn’t been the woman Katie had believed her to be.
The telephone was ringing when she let herself in. The answering machine picked up the call. It was Ian. She made no effort to lift the receiver. ‘Hi, Katie,’ she heard him say in his jaunty trouble-free voice. ‘I tried your mobile but it wasn’t switched on. Just wanted to let you know there’s been a change of plan; I won’t be flying back tonight after all as I’m now at the airport on my way to Dubai. Berlin’s been fun. I know I’ve said it before, but you’d love it, we must come here for a long weekend some time. I’ll call you tomorrow. Bye.’
If anyone were to ask Katie what exactly it was that Ian did for a living, she’d be hard-pressed to say. Accountancy was his background, and as far as she knew he was a project manager and spent a lot of time travelling round Europe, and more recently the Middle East and Manila in the Philippines. What he actually did was a mystery to her. He spoke about his work a lot, especially the office politics that went on, something that really excited him, but if she were honest, and she wasn’t proud of this admission, she frequently tuned out whenever he started talking about his work. Frankly, it just sounded so dull. Tess had once joked that Ian secretly worked for MI6, that his job for a major German bank was a cover. It didn’t seem very likely.
But as the day had so far taught her, nothing was as it seemed.
She put the kettle on and went upstairs to change out of her work clothes. Back down in the kitchen again, she made herself a cup of tea and took it outside to the rain-washed and now sun-filled garden. The air had been cleared of all its earlier oppressive mugginess, and as she wiped the wooden chair and table dry, she breathed in the heady smell of warm damp earth.
The small walled garden had been Mum’s pride and joy. She had thrown all her energy into making it even more beautiful than it already was, freely admitting that it was her way of turning her grief and mourning for Dad into something creative and positive. Katie had inherited her mother’s green fingers, and after her death she had willingly assumed the mantle of responsibility for the garden. As with so many things, it was a way to feel close to Mum.
Moving here after Dad’s death had been her mother’s way of starting a new life. Tired of living in the country, she had wanted to be in a town, to have everything on the doorstep and be surrounded by people of all ages and backgrounds. Katie had helped her organize the sale of their old house in Midhurst, and together, whilst scouring the internet, they’d found this small but perfectly formed two-bedroomed terraced house with its south-facing garden. The previous owners had converted the third bedroom into a large and lavish bathroom and extended the kitchen into something equally lavish with French doors opening on to the walled garden. Originally, when she had decided that Brighton would be her new home, Mum had been adamant that she wanted a sea view, that nothing else would do, but when she’d seen this garden with its walls dripping in wisteria blooms and a fig tree offering a corner of welcome shade on a hot day, she had changed her mind. And anyway, if you stood on a chair in either of the two bedrooms, you could see the sea. You could certainly hear the seagulls; their insistent cries were as constant as the ebb and flow of the tide.
If Dad’s sudden death had taken them by surprise – he’d died of septicaemia as a result of, of all things, food poisoning – Mum’s death had been even more of a shock. She had been knocked over by a car. Witnesses had said she’d simply stepped into the road without looking where she was going. The driver – a forty-six-year-old man with his young family in the car with him – had been distraught, so the police told Katie. He’d repeatedly claimed he’d had no way of avoiding Fay. There had been no reason to disbelieve him. Fay had been rushed to hospital with a serious head injury. The medical staff had had to put her into a coma in order to operate, and whilst the operation was a success, she never came out of the coma. She died four days later.