The Family Upstairs(71)

‘And he’s having a baby to secure his stake in the house.’

Clemency didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said, ‘What are we going to do?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ I said, rubbing my chin as though there might be a wise man’s beard there, but of course there was nothing of the sort. I didn’t grow a beard until I was in my twenties and even then it was pretty unimpressive. ‘But we are going to do something.’

She looked at me, wide-eyed. ‘OK.’

‘But’, I said firmly, ‘you have to promise me that this is our secret.’ I gestured at the objects I’d purloined from David and Birdie’s room. ‘Do not tell your brother. Do not tell my sister. Do not tell anyone. OK?’

She nodded. ‘I promise.’ She was silent for a minute and then she looked up at me and said, ‘He’s done this before.’

‘What?’

She dropped her gaze to her lap. ‘He tried to get his grandmother to sign her house over to him. When she was senile. My uncle found out and kicked us out. That’s when we moved to France.’ She looked up at me. ‘Do you think we should tell the police?’ she said. ‘Tell them what he’s been doing?’

‘No,’ I said instantly. ‘No. Because, really, he hasn’t broken the law, has he? What we need is a plan. We need to get out of here. Will you help me?’

She nodded.

‘Will you do whatever it takes?’

She nodded again.

It was a fork in the road, really. Looking back on it there were so many other ways to have got through the trauma of it all, but with all the people I loved most in the world facing away from me I chose the worst possible option.





54


Libby and Miller leave Sally’s office ten minutes later.

‘Are you OK?’ he asks her as they emerge into the sweltering heat.

She manages a smile but then realises that she is about to cry and can do nothing to stop it.

‘Oh God,’ says Miller. ‘Oh dear. Come on, come on.’ He guides her towards a quiet courtyard and to a bench under a tree. He feels his pockets. ‘No tissues, I’m sorry.’

‘It’s OK,’ she says. ‘I have tissues.’

She pulls a packet of travel tissues from her bag and Miller smiles.

‘You are so exactly the sort of person who would carry a packet of travel-sized tissues around.’

She stares at him. ‘What does that even mean?’

‘It means … It just means …’ His features soften. ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘It just means you’re very organised. That’s all.’

She nods. This much she knows. ‘I have to be,’ she says.

‘And why is that?’ he asks.

She shrugs. It’s not in her nature to talk about personal things. But given what they’ve been through in the last two days she feels the boundaries that define her usual conversational preferences have been blown apart.

She says, ‘My mum. My adoptive mum. She was a bit – well, is a bit chaotic. Lovely, lovely, lovely. But it was my dad who kept her on track. And he died when I was eight and after that … I was always late for everything. I never had the right stuff for school. I didn’t used to show her the slips for trips and things because there was no point. She booked a holiday in the middle of my GCSEs. Emigrated to Spain when I was eighteen years old.’ She shrugs. ‘So I just had to be the grown-up. You know.’

‘The keeper of the tissues?’

She laughs. ‘Yes. The keeper of the tissues. I remember this one time I fell over in the playground and cut my elbow and my mum was just sort of flapping about looking for something in her handbag to clean it up with and this other mum came over with a handbag exactly the same size as my mum’s and she opened it and pulled out an antiseptic wipe and a packet of plasters. And I just thought: Wow, I want to be the person with the magic handbag. You know.’

He smiles at her. ‘You’re doing really well,’ he says. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

She laughs nervously. ‘I’m trying,’ she says. ‘Trying to do the best I can.’

For a moment they sit in silence. Their knees touch briefly and then spring apart again.

Then Libby says, ‘Well, that was a waste of time, wasn’t it?’

Miller throws her a devious look. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘not entirely a waste of time. The girl. Lola? She’s Sally’s granddaughter.’

Libby gasps. ‘How do you know?’

‘Because I saw a photo on Sally’s desk of Sally with a younger woman holding a newborn. And then I saw another photo on her wall of Sally with a young girl with blond hair. And then I saw a child’s drawing framed on the wall that said “I Love You Grandma”.’ He shrugs. ‘I put it all together and hey presto.’ Then he leans towards Libby and shows her something on the screen of his phone.

‘What is it?’ she asks.

‘It’s a letter addressed to Lola. It was poking out of her handbag under her desk. I performed the classic kneeling-to-tie-my-shoelace manoeuvre. Click.’

Libby looks at him in awe. ‘But what made you even think …?’

‘Libby. I’m an investigative journalist. This is what I do. And if my theory is correct, Lola must be Clemency’s daughter. Which means that Clemency must live locally. And therefore, this address’ – he points at his screen – ‘is also Clemency’s address. I think we might just have found the second missing teenager.’