The Keeper of Lost Things(16)
The clock in the hall struck six and still Laura could not bring herself to go home. She now realized that she was already home. The flat was just somewhere to go when she couldn’t be here. Tears spilled down her cheeks again. She had to do something; a displacement activity, a distraction, however short-lived. She would do her job. She still had the house and everything in it to take care of. For now. She would keep doing it until somebody told her to stop. She started a tour of the house; upstairs first, checking everything was in order. In the main bedroom she smoothed the covers and plumped the pillows, dismissing as ridiculous her suspicion that the bed had recently been slept in. The scent of roses was overwhelming and the photograph of Anthony and Therese lay facedown on the floor. She picked it up and returned it to its place on the dressing table. The little blue clock had stopped as usual: 11:55. She wound the key until the ticking started, like a tiny heartbeat. She passed the bay window without looking out at the garden. In Anthony’s room she felt awkward in a way that she had never done when he had been alive. It seemed too intimate; an inappropriate intrusion. His pillow still smelled of the soap he always used. She pushed away unwelcome thoughts of strangers pawing through his things. She had no idea who his next of kin might be. Downstairs, she closed the windows in the garden room and locked the door to the outside. The photograph of Therese lay flat on the table. Laura picked it up and gazed at the woman for whom Anthony had lived and died.
“I hope to God you find each other,” she said softly before replacing the picture in its usual upright position. Laura wondered to herself if that counted as a prayer.
In the hall she stood by the study door. Her hand hovered above the doorknob, as though it might burn her if she touched it, and then dropped back down by her side. She was desperate to see what secrets it might hold, but the study was Anthony’s private kingdom, and one which she had never been invited to enter. She couldn’t yet decide if his death had changed that or not.
Daring herself, she stepped outside through the kitchen door and into the garden. It was late summer and the roses were beginning to shed their petals like fragile, worn-out ball gowns coming apart at the seams. The lawn was perfect again. It bore no imprint of a corpse. Well, what had she expected? Not this. As she stood in the middle of the grass in the ebb and flow of the sun-warmed, rose-scented air, she felt lifted; strangely reassured.
On her way back down to the house, the glint of setting sun on tilted glass caught her eye. It was the study window, left open. She couldn’t leave it. The house would not be safe. Now she would have to go into the study. She had no idea where Anthony kept the key when it wasn’t in his pocket. As she tried to think where it might be her fingers closed around the cool wooden handle. It turned easily at her touch and the door to the study swung open.
CHAPTER 12
Shelves and drawers; shelves and drawers; shelves and drawers; three walls were completely obscured. The lace panels at the French windows lifted and fell in rhythm with the evening air which breathed gently through the crack in the frame. Even in the half-light Laura could see that every shelf was packed, and without looking, she knew that every drawer was full. This was a life’s work.
She walked around the room peering at its inhabitants in astonishment. So this was Anthony’s secret kingdom; a menagerie of waifs and strays meticulously labeled and loved. Because Laura could see that these were so much more than things; much more than random artifacts arranged on shelves for decoration. They were important. They really mattered. Anthony had spent hours every day in this room with these things. She had no idea why, but she knew he must have had a very good reason, and somehow, for his sake, she would have to find a way to keep them safe. She slid open the drawer nearest to her and picked up the first thing she saw. It was a large dark blue button which looked as though it belonged on a woman’s coat. Its label noted when and where it was found. Memories and explanations began to coalesce in Laura’s consciousness; tentacles grasping for connections that she could sense but not yet substantiate.
Laura reached for the back of a chair to steady herself. Despite the open window and the drafts, the room was stuffy. The air was thick with stories. Was that what this was all about? Were these the things that Anthony had written his stories about? She had read them all and she distinctly remembered one about a blue button. But where had all these things come from? Laura stroked the soft fur of a small teddy slumped forlornly against the side of a biscuit tin on one of the shelves. Was this a museum for the missing pieces of people’s real lives or the furnishings for Anthony’s fiction? Perhaps it was both. She picked up a pair of lime-green hair bobbles on a loop of elastic that lay next to the teddy on the shelf. They would have cost only a few pence when new, and one of them was badly chipped, and yet they had been carefully kept and properly labeled like every other object in the room. Laura smiled at the memory of her eleven-year-old self with swinging plaits adorned with bobbles much the same as these.
LIME-GREEN PLASTIC FLOWER-SHAPED HAIR BOBBLES—
Found, on the playing field, Derrywood Park, 2nd September . . .
It was the last day of the summer holidays and Daisy’s mum had promised her a special treat. They were going for a picnic. Tomorrow Daisy would start at her new school; big school. She was eleven now. Her old school had not been a success. Well, at least not for her. She was pretty enough, with beautiful long, dark hair; clever enough, but not too clever; didn’t wear glasses or braces on her teeth. But it wasn’t enough to keep her camouflaged. She saw the world through a slightly different lens from other children; nothing too obvious, just a fraction out of kilter. The faintest fontanelle in her character. But Baylee-Ashlyanne Johnson and her posse of apprentice bitches soon sniffed it out. They pulled her plaits, spat in her lunch, urinated in her school bag, and ripped her blazer. It wasn’t what they did that upset her the most; it was how they made her feel. Useless, weak, scared, pathetic. Worthless.