Bring Me Back (B.A. Paris)(35)

‘What are you suggesting, Harry?’ I ask, my voice thick with anger at Layla. Yesterday, she refused to meet up with me, yet she’s willing to risk coming to the house and being seen. Unless she came during the night.

‘That maybe it was Layla that Ellen saw in Cheltenham.’

I sit down on the grassy bank. Harry picks up a stick and throws it into the water for Peggy. She retrieves it and brings it back to him and he throws it for her a couple more times. I stay silent. I know he’ll be assuming all sorts of things about what I’m thinking and I feel an odd sense of power that he has no idea what I know about Layla.

‘Did you show the doll to Ellen?’ I ask, when he finally sits down beside me.

‘No, not yet.’

‘I’d rather you didn’t. I don’t want her getting her hopes up.’ And the last thing I need is Ellen getting involved in a search for Layla. For the moment, she only knows about the Russian doll that she found, and that’s the way I want it to stay.

‘What about you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What about your hopes?’

‘I want Layla to be alive, of course I do,’ I say.

‘Well, it certainly looks as if she might be.’

I give a short laugh. ‘On the basis of two Russian dolls and a possible sighting? Isn’t that a bit weak?’

‘Perhaps. But I always thought she might turn up one day.’

I find myself frowning. ‘Really?’

‘Yes. I’ve never thought she was dead. Or that she was kidnapped.’

He’s never told me this before. ‘So where has she been all these years? And if you’re right, why has she turned up now? Why not last year, or five years ago, or five months after she first disappeared.’

‘I don’t know.’ He shrugs. ‘Maybe it’s all about timing.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, with you about to marry Ellen. Maybe she’s been keeping up with your life from wherever she’s been living and doesn’t like the fact that you’re about to marry her sister.’ He turns his eyes on me. ‘You do still want to marry Ellen, don’t you?’

I stretch my legs out and move to stand up. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘Even if Layla is back?’

I want to give him another ‘Yes, of course’ but I feel strangely bereft. Maybe Harry senses this because he puts a hand on my arm, as if in apology for asking the question in the first place.

‘Come on, let’s head back. Didn’t Ellen say she would make scones?’

I ask him if he managed to sort out the problem that prevented him from coming down the previous weekend and he tells me about one of his notoriously difficult investors.

‘Sometimes I’d like to get out of it,’ he finishes. ‘I reckon I’m getting too old for this game.’

‘You’re forty-five.’

‘And I’ve been doing it for twenty-five years. It’s been my life. But sometimes I can’t help wishing I’d got married, had a family.’

I laugh. ‘You’d be bored out of your mind tied to one woman.’

He gives a wry grin. ‘Maybe.’

‘Anyway, if that’s what you want – marriage, a family – it’s not too late. What about the current lady in your life? Would you consider making an honest woman of her?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Then don’t waste your time – or hers,’ I advise.

We arrive at the house and I pause, my hand on the gate.

‘Would you mind giving me the Russian doll you found?’ I ask. And Harry, being Harry, hands it over without question, putting it down to my need to have a tangible reminder of Layla.

Later, after he’s left, I go out to my office and open the drawer in my desk. I take out the four little dolls one by one and stand them in a line, then add Harry’s onto the end. Five pairs of unblinking eyes stare straight ahead, five painted mouths smile benignly. Or mockingly. Once again, I find myself asking – what is Layla playing at?

I get a clue when I check my emails and find one from Rudolph Hill.





I STILL LOVE YOU





THIRTY-ONE

Layla

Finn did exactly what I thought he would. He automatically presumed I was talking about the cottage and went straight there, which was good, because I wanted him to know I’d found his letter. But I also needed to get him to Pharos Hill, so that he would know, without doubt, that I was back, because I intended to leave a Russian doll on top of the tree stump, the one I used to tell him was shaped like a Russian doll. So I was glad when he finally worked out the significance of the email address I’d chosen. I doubted he’d been back to Pharos Hill since the day he put up a bench in my memory. What had it been like for him to realise that I’d been there earlier, and had gone? Had it reminded him of the night I’d disappeared from his life?

I’m not really wearing his ring. But sometimes I take it from where I’ve hidden it and slide it onto my ring finger, pretending it fits. And the bitterness comes, at twelve wasted years. It brings me so low I’m afraid I’ll go back to being what I was before, a nothing being, secret and soulless. It took me years of courage to move out of the shadows and into the light. I’m still a lesser being than I was before I disappeared. But at least I exist.