A Case For Trust (27 page)

But nobody had contacted her after he'd died, not even his notorious drinking buddies, and now, nobody would. She could discard this final encumbrance, pitch it on the pile of other rubbish she'd never be needing again.

She wrestled it out from the shelf—damn, but it was heavy—and started down the hallway to the front door. She almost made it, too. But the mouldy, musty smell clouded her nostrils at the same time she felt the cardboard disintegrate in her hands, and her feet were suddenly trapped in a cascade of paper, sending her hurtling to her knees, one shoulder painfully ramming the wall and leaving a round, flaking dent in the plaster.

Oh, fabulous. Just bloody fabulous. Add
that
to the list of repairs she had to make before settlement day.

Pippa rested her head tiredly against the wall and surveyed the mess of paper. The silverfish had been into it. Cockroaches, too, from the telltale trail of droppings. Her rubber gloves were in the kitchen, and now she was down on the floor, she couldn't really be bothered getting up again to retrieve them. What was a little cockroach shit between friends? She reached for the first sheaf of paper and stacked it desultorily on top of the next, barely glancing at the contents.

She'd almost got to the last of it when a staple, protruding from a beige envelope, caught the corner of her fingernail, ripping her flesh and stinging tears to her eyes.
Goddammit
. She couldn't even suck the pain away, with her fingers grubby from dust and vermin droppings. She struggled to her feet, inadvertently knocking the neatly stacked pile back into disarray, and as she stalked to the bathroom, kicked the offending envelope out of her path. It disgorged another envelope, this one brown and official looking. And still sealed.

She was curious for one moment, almost bent to pick it up, when her throbbing finger reminded her of more urgent priorities.

By the time she returned to the hallway, wound bathed, hands scrubbed and gloved, Pippa was all brisk efficiency again, and now equipped with another box. There was no homage to order now; she scooped the offending papers in handfuls into the box, and when she got to the envelopes, scooped them in, too. The whole pile went out to the industrial bin on the kerb, already filled with the other results of her pre-moving clean up.

But as she upended the box into the bin and watched the detritus slip and slide and fill the hollows between the bigger throwaways, the envelope slid down the side of an old bookcase and presented itself at her feet. Pippa wasn't normally superstitious, but she didn't quite believe in coincidence either.

In her hands the envelope felt weighty, urgent. It was unaddressed, and she looked despairingly at the rubbish pile for the bigger envelope that had held it. There was no way she was climbing into that bin to hunt for it and there was no way she was emptying the bin in search of it. Abruptly she ripped one end off the package and slid its folded contents out.

It was a letter from her mother. Written to her. It was her goodbye.

Pippa squeezed her eyes tight against the tears. All those years yearning for one last contact, a word, a moment, a touch, a breath. A different ending than an abrupt vanishing. Her father had sent her to school on the day of her mother's funeral; the bitch wasn't worth Philippa getting behind in class, though educating his daughter hadn't been an obvious concern previously. The embarrassment of answering shocked teachers' questions: yes, of course she was going to the funeral, she'd go after morning tea. The hushed church they'd rarely attended; the few mourners she barely recognised when she crept into a corner at the back; her father, drunk at eleven in the morning and garrulous with it, tripping out of a side door halfway through the service and sprawling, swearing, down the steps until he picked himself up and took himself off for more secular comforts. She'd had no way of getting to the cemetery; no one looked at her or spoke to her. She didn't know what she'd have said if they had. When the other funeral goers trailed out, she took herself home and buried her face in her mother's pillow. But by then it had already smelt like her father.

Pippa sucked hot summer air into her lungs and lifted her head from her knees. She splayed the letter out against them and began to read.

It wasn't a goodbye after all. It was a promise.

Her mother hadn't deliberately crashed the car, as Pippa had always believed. She'd been running away. Or rather, running to. Running to a new life she would set up for them both, in a sleepy coastal town to the north where her husband would never think to look and where Philippa could swim and surf and make friends. Philippa's father would go on a binge when he discovered his wife had left him, and Philippa just needed to stay out of his way, go to school as usual for a few days while her mother sorted out somewhere for them to live. Then she'd be back to collect her.

Well, she was right about that, it had all been over, though it didn't take a few days. If she'd only taken Pippa with her in the first place, it could all have been so different. The tears smudged her vision, choked her throat, dripped onto the ageing paper and immediately blurred forever the hastily scribbled words.

Vaguely Pippa became aware of a pair of polished brogues halting beside her feet, then a pair of suited knees hunching just inside her peripheral vision.

‘Philippa? What's happened?'

She couldn't look at him. She had not a skerrick of energy left to protect herself from Matt's unexpected arrival, nor his habitual probing, so she stared instead at the letter, turning the cheap lined paper over and over, blotting the wettened ink, smoothing the creases, refolding, unfolding. She felt rather than saw him sit beside her in the gutter. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him pick up the envelope in those long, lean fingers; he balanced it between his palms then flipped it over and read the minute code she'd missed in one corner.

‘O.P.T,' he said.

‘I'm sorry, what?'

‘OPT. Office of the Public Trustee. Although they've changed the name now, of course. Must be an old envelope.'

Philippa choked her answer. ‘Yes. Twelve years old.'

‘Uh-huh.'

He didn't say anything more, just sat silently beside her until Pippa thought her nerves would crawl out of her skin. His silence was worse than his probing. Finally:

‘It's a letter from my mother.'

‘And you've just received it?'

‘I've just found it. It was among Dad's things. I almost threw it out with all the other rubbish. I wish …'

‘Go on.'

‘Nothing. I just wish I'd found it sooner.'

‘Would it have made a difference, do you think? Finding it sooner?'

Pippa had already thought through that question, had been arguing with herself about it. ‘No, not in any real sense. Not practically. It might have made a difference to the way I thought of her, though. She was leaving him. She'd had enough and was leaving him. She'd saved some money and we were going to run away; she was going to find somewhere for us to live and then come back and collect me. But then she had the accident and was killed before she even left town.'

‘And how did the OPT come to have the letter?'

‘I don't know.'

‘But they sent it to your father? Why didn't he give it to you?'

‘Because he was a cruel, manipulative bastard. Maybe he knew she was leaving him, and he wanted me to think she was leaving me, too. I don't know. I never understood half the things he said or did.'

Matt was silent for a long moment.

‘It's odd that it came from the OPT. Did your mother leave a will? Perhaps it was included with that?'

Pippa shook her head. ‘No. It couldn't have been. See? She wrote it the same day she died. And anyway, she didn't have anything to leave in a will. She'd saved her escape money, her letter says she'd been saving that for years, but Dad looked after all the family finances; there's no way she'd have put that in a will if there was a chance Dad would find out about it.'

‘Hmm. Well, let's find out, shall we?'

‘Sorry?'

Bewildered, Pippa offered no resistance when Matt slid his hand under her elbow and hauled her to her feet. He was punching numbers into his phone and held up his hand briefly to silence her when she questioned him again.

‘Brax? Matt Mason. Can I bring somebody to see you? Now. Don't give me that, mate, your office closes in fifteen minutes, what else could you possibly be doing today? I'll see you shortly.'

And just like that, Pippa found herself packed off to see Braxton Gale, the Public Trustee.

***

‘I'm afraid that's the most I can tell you from the file, Philippa. The letter was found in your mother's handbag at the scene of the accident with her other personal effects, and the police tried to give it to your father when they notified him of her death. He refused them, and as it seems she died intestate, they forwarded them to this office for archiving.'

Pippa looked up hopefully from the spot on the desk she'd been examining, but the trustee shook his head at her silent question.

‘I'm afraid we don't hold items indefinitely—they would have been destroyed long ago. This letter, though—somebody in the office went to the trouble of identifying that you were her daughter and sending it to your last known address when the rest of her effects were destroyed. As you were still a minor, there would have been a cover letter to your father telling him the letter was for you.'

‘I'm surprised he didn't burn it,' Pippa said bitterly. ‘He tried to erase every other memory of her.'

‘Perhaps he had a change of heart?' Matt suggested gently.

‘More likely it arrived when he was on a bender and he didn't even see it; just shoved it in the pile with the bills he was never going to pay.'

‘Brax, do you have the police report from the accident?'

‘Give me a break, Matt, you know I can't divulge that kind of information to a client.'

‘You're not. She's not a client. You're sharing it with a professional colleague. Can I see it?'

Brax sighed, tapped at his keyboard then swung the computer screen to face Pippa and Matt. Matt leaned forward to peer at the document file, his eyes scanning the report faster than Pippa could possibly keep up.

‘This doesn't make sense. She was travelling south?'

‘Yes, apparently. Got too close to the freeway barrier, clipped it, spun and ended up facing the oncoming traffic. The car was a write-off. She didn't have a chance.'

‘But she was travelling
south
?'

Pippa barely heard his question; she was reading over and over the description of the damage to the car, and to her mother. It was instant, at least. After the flash of shock and confusion, she wouldn't have suffered.

‘Who did the car belong to?' she asked nobody in particular.

‘It was registered to your mother.' Brax's tone was questioning, and Pippa shook her head in bewilderment.

‘She never had a car. Dad would never let her. She wasn't allowed to drive his except to pick him up from the pub when he was really hammered.'

Brax and Matt stared silently at her for a moment before resuming their discussion. There were a lot of frowns and shrugs and fingers pointing at the computer screen. Pippa let them wash over her. On the one hand, there were too many new details to absorb; on the other, too many unanswered questions. She came back to awareness as Matt stood from his chair and accepted a sheaf of paper from Brax. ‘One more thing. Mrs Lloyd mentioned in her letter to Philippa she had savings. What happened to the money, do you know?'

Brax sat himself back at his computer and tapped again. ‘She had a little cash in her wallet—less than a hundred—which went to the trust account. There was also a driver's licence, some photos, a couple of store cards and a bank debit card. The name on the debit card didn't match the name on the licence, though.'

‘And what happened to those? Were they destroyed with her other effects?'

‘Yep. If the next of kin wouldn't accept them, they'd have been destroyed.'

‘What was the name on the debit card?' Pippa spoke for the first time in ages.

‘Ms Patrice Carolyn Barker. Was that her maiden name?'

‘No. I don't know that name at all. It couldn't have been her account, then?'

‘The banking protocols were a little looser then, but she'd have still needed some form of identification to get an account in that name.'

Matt was still studying the computer file. ‘Can you tell if that account's still active?'

‘I can. It's long dormant. And before you ask: no, I won't give you any more details. Apart from the fact a debit card was in Mrs Lloyd's possession when she died, there's nothing to suggest you or your client—apologies, Philippa—have any right to the information.'

‘Can we have copies of the licence and other contents of Mrs Lloyd's wallet?' Matt asked, brusque efficiency tinged with aggression. Brax rolled his eyes but didn't argue, simply hit the print button on his computer and stood to collect the copies. As Matt reached for them, Brax gripped the end of the paper tightly.

‘You cannot do anything improper with this information, Matt, or god help me, I'll come after you and what happened with Consolgard will look like a spinster's tea party.'

If his threatening tone hadn't alerted Pippa to the tension between the lawyers, the sharp glance Matt flicked in her direction would have. But Matt's response was placatory. ‘All I'm going to do with them is try to establish some information about my client's mother, hopefully find some details that will give her some closure. There won't be any repercussions, I promise you.'