Never Say Goodbye (4 page)

Isabella Monkton looked down at her niece and nephew’s upturned faces, and so much love surged into her smile that it broke into a laugh. ‘But it’s huge,’ she protested. ‘It’ll take us a week to decorate it.’

‘That’s all right, we’ll help,’ seven-year-old Oscar promised, turning to his five-year-old sister for support.

‘Yes, we will,’ Nell agreed earnestly. Her adorable blue eyes were so like her mother’s, Isabella’s twin sister, that Bel sometimes felt Natalia was looking back at her from wherever she was now. Nell had her mother’s silky blonde hair too, and her rosebud mouth. In fact she was a little replica of Natalia, or Isabella, depending which of the twins you were looking at. Whether Nell had also inherited something of her mother’s character, only time would tell, Bel guessed, though she was certainly starting to show early signs of it. ‘And if we have a really big tree,’ Nell was explaining knowledgeably, ‘Father Christmas will definitely be able to find us.’

‘Mm,’ Bel responded, as though assessing the merit of this. ‘And I suppose there’ll be more room for him to leave presents underneath it, as well?’

Oscar’s face lit up as Nell jumped up and down in glee.

Turning to the young lad who’d been wandering up and down the rows of Christmas trees with them, helping to make the choice, Bel said, ‘It seems we’re going to have this one. Can you deliver?’

‘Of course,’ he replied, giving Oscar a wink. ‘I’ll bring it in my sleigh, shall I?’

Nell gasped excitedly. ‘Have you got a sleigh?’ she cried. ‘Auntie Bel, he’s got a sleigh!’

‘Don’t you need snow to drive a sleigh?’ Oscar pointed out.

The lad looked perplexed. ‘You’re right,’ he decided. ‘So if we haven’t had any by the time I’m ready to bring this, I’ll put it on the lorry. How does that sound?’

‘Good idea,’ Oscar agreed. ‘Can you bring it today? We don’t live very far from here, do we Auntie Bel?’

Loving that they considered her home theirs, and why wouldn’t they when they spent so much time there, she said, ‘Just a couple of miles. We’re on Bay View Road, at the Westleigh end. Do you know it?’

‘I sure do,’ he responded in his broad West Country burr. ‘We’ve got a few more deliveries scheduled to go up that way today, so I’d say it should be with you by five, six at the latest. Will you be home by then?’

The children’s anxious eyes came to Bel.

‘We’ll make sure we are,’ she told them. ‘Now, I guess we’d better pay for this eight-foot monster and choose some more ornaments, because I’m sure we don’t have enough to fill it.’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Nell cried, already skipping back towards the garden centre’s Christmas grotto.

‘And you said we could have a hot chocolate,’ Oscar reminded her, as they followed.

‘And you were going to decide whether you want one here, or down on Kesterly seafront,’ she reminded them.

‘Here,’ they echoed together.

After filling a small trolley with dozens of glittering stars, baubles, angels and lights, and handing over almost two hundred pounds at the checkout, Bel steered her little charges into the crowded cafeteria. Being the first weekend of December, it seemed half the families of Kesterly had decided to brave the chill wind to choose their trees. There was a time when they used to come here to visit Santa in his grotto, but since the scandal that had rocked this small coastal town a year or so ago, the custom had been dropped. Not that anyone believed every man in Kesterly was a potential paedophile, it was simply that sending small children to sit on a strange man’s lap no longer felt appropriate to the townsfolk, after the deputy head of a primary school had been arrested and imprisoned for the abuse of his own child.

Coming from the kind of background she did, Bel could only feel thankful that she didn’t have to try and talk her niece and nephew out of describing their hearts’ desires for Father Christmas. She invariably became fussed when having to explain about possible dangers, particularly of that variety, and her sister, their mother, had never found it any easier. Fortunately the children’s father, Nick, was much better at dealing with the sort of questions that generally arose when they were warned that not everyone was good.

‘What do bad men do?’

‘Where do they live?’

‘How do we know if they’re bad?’

‘What do they look like?’

‘Why do they want to hurt us?’

Unanswerable questions, every one of them, as far as Bel was concerned, yet somehow Nick managed.

Spotting a couple leaving the café, Bel made a rapid dash for their table, but wasn’t quite fast enough. A plump young woman with a pushchair and three children in muddy anoraks and wellies beat her to it, plonking herself down heavily to make sure Bel knew she’d lost.

‘Sorry,’ the young woman grimaced, not appearing sorry at all.

Bel smiled thinly and turned away.

‘That was rude,’ Oscar whispered, slipping a hand into Bel’s.

‘Maybe she was here before us,’ Bel whispered back.

‘Oi, you want to teach that kid of yourn some manners,’ the plump woman shouted after her.

Bel turned round, certain the woman couldn’t have heard Oscar’s remark, so what was her problem?

‘Her,’ the woman cried, pointing at Nell. ‘Poked her bloody tongue out at me, she did. What kind of way’s that for your kids to carry on?’

Bel looked down at Nell’s guilty face and had to suppress a smile as she took her hand and led her away. She probably ought to have made her apologise, but the woman had the table, didn’t she? She couldn’t have everything.

And why not?
Bel could hear Natalia enquiring.
Some people do, so why can’t we?
Back then it had seemed that they did.

‘There’s a table,’ Oscar cried, and diving for it, he hit the chair so fast that he skidded straight across it and landed on the floor the other side.

Chuckling, an old man helped him up, while Nell screeched with laughter, and Bel, laughing too, settled her shopping under the table and gave him a hug.

‘Our hero,’ she declared, unbuttoning his coat. ‘He found us a table and made us all feel jolly again. So, what’s it to be? Two hot chocolates and two mince pies?’

‘Three,’ Nell piped up. ‘You have to have one too.’

Bel started to protest.

‘Please!’ Nell implored. ‘Please, please, please.’

Smoothing her silky blonde hair, Bel said, ‘Even though I’m not hungry?’

‘I’ll eat it if you don’t want it,’ Oscar offered helpfully.

‘He would,’ Nell assured her.

‘I have no doubt of it,’ Bel laughed. ‘OK, three mince pies coming up. Wait here, don’t move, don’t take your eyes off me, and don’t poke your tongues out at anyone else.’

With sheepish giggles they watched her go to join the line at the counter, until ‘Away in a Manger’ began playing on the music system and much to the amusement of those closest to them they broke into song.

Smiling and shaking her head, Bel felt their happiness lighting her world in a way only they ever could. She absolutely adored them, and was fairly sure they felt the same about her. Certainly they always loved coming to stay, and when they were with her she made sure to clear her diary so she could spend every minute of every day with them. It was no less than they deserved, and considering how much she enjoyed their company it was certainly no hardship to put her own life on hold. Not that she had much of a life these days, but that was hardly the point.

By the time they’d downed their drinks and devoured the mince pies (she managed half of hers before passing the rest to Oscar) there was no time to stop and view the Christmas lights on the seafront, as promised. They simply drove underneath them, Oscar and Nell squealing and cheering in excitement and waving to children in other cars, before joining Bay View Road which wound up and around the southerly headland, past Kesterly Park and the Aquarium. Their route took them along the stretch known as Fisherman’s Walk, where a dozen or more colourful cottages had seen a couple of centuries come and go, until they finally arrived at the more exclusive end of the road. Here properties were mainly gated at the front and enjoyed panoramic views of Westleigh Bay at the back.

Stillwater, Bel’s black and white Victorian villa, was no exception. Though it wasn’t quite as large as some of the mansions further along the street, it was still far too big for one person, but Bel had no plans to move out any time soon. In truth, she’d never had plans to move in, since she’d bought it as a renovation project, but by the time most of the work had been carried out it had become clear that she needed to stay in Kesterly for the foreseeable future. Her sister, who lived a few miles away in Senway village and who had found Stillwater for Bel in the first place, was sick. She needed help, and being as close as they were there was no way Bel would ever have let her down.

So with her newly renovated property not yet sold, she’d moved everything down from London in order to be closer to her sister and brother-in-law, and of course the children. Now, three years on, she was still in the house, and unless she wanted to make her life even more complicated than it already was, it was where she was going to stay.

Empty, but complicated, that was her world, which should have been a contradiction in terms, but in her case it wasn’t.

‘Where are we going to put the tree?’ Nell cried, as they piled in through the glossy black front door. ‘I know! It can go here, in the hall, because it’s very, very tall and the ceiling is right up there so there’ll be plenty of room.’

‘But then you’ll only be able to see it from the window in the roof,’ Oscar complained, gazing up at the magnificent glass dome that Bel had designed and installed to flood the ebony staircase and whitewashed landings with light.

‘That’s where Father Christmas lands,’ Nell reminded him.

‘Yes, but you have to see it through the window, don’t you, Auntie Bel?’ he objected, ‘or people will think we haven’t got one.’

‘Well, not necessarily,’ Bel responded, dropping her bags next to an ornate limestone fireplace where a real fire could burn to welcome guests as they arrived. ‘We can always put some lights around the porch to show we’re nice and Christmassy,’ she suggested, ‘and I was thinking perhaps the tree could go in the sitting room, next to the fireplace so Santa won’t have a problem finding it when he comes down the chimney.’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ they cheered.

‘But is the ceiling high enough in there?’ Oscar worried.

‘If it isn’t, we’ll just chop a little bit off the top of the tree,’ Bel replied. ‘I expect we’ll have to do that anyway, or the fairy’ll be swaying around on the end of a stalk like a silly old drunk.’

Shouting with laughter, they charged across the hall and into the room that Bel loved best in the house. By knocking down several walls she’d created an open-plan kitchen-cum-sitting room that occupied the whole of the back of the property, and installed no less than six arch-topped French windows, each opening on to a spacious flagstone deck and vast flat lawn. At the far end of the lawn was a gate into a wild-flower meadow, and beyond that a ragged cluster of coastal rocks sloped gently down to a pebbled beach. Even on a gloomy winter’s day the views from the house were spectacular, taking in a magnificent sweep of the estuary, along with Kesterly’s southerly headland and the notorious Vagabond Cliffs.

The room’s interior had a wonderfully friendly feel to it, with a grand marble fireplace dominating one end of the room, and a custom-built farmhouse-style kitchen seeming so settled into the other that it might always have been there. In between was a truly eclectic mix of tables, sofas, deep-pile rugs and squishy pouffes that made a perfect rough-and-tumble space for the kids, while a niche close to the fireplace gave room for Bel’s desk.

She’d only just got the fire lit, ably assisted by the log-carriers Oscar and Nell, when the bell rang from the front gate. Since they were only expecting the tree Oscar and Nell leapt up and dashed into the hall, and had already pushed the button to release the gates by the time Bel joined them at the front door, surprised by how still they were.

‘It’s the police,’ Oscar stated in perplexity as a marked car drove in through the gates.

Bel’s heart turned over. Something had happened to Nick, the children’s father. It didn’t occur to her to think of her own father.

‘What do they want?’ Nell whispered.

‘I don’t know,’ Bel replied, watching the car pull up at the bottom of the front steps.
Please don’t let it be Nick, please, please,
she begged inwardly. ‘Go back in the warm,’ she told the children. ‘They’ve probably got the wrong house.’

They simply pressed in closer to her as a young male officer came round from the driver’s side, while a woman in a padded coat, who appeared equally young and slightly harassed, climbed out of the passenger seat.

‘Can I help you?’ Bel asked, as they started up the steps.

‘I’m Detective Constable Lisa Peters,’ the young woman told her, displaying her ID. ‘And this is PC Brad Lowman. We’re looking for Natalia Lambert.’

Bel’s shock felt physical. Surely she hadn’t heard right. ‘I . . . um,’ she faltered, as the children closed in more tightly. ‘Can I ask what this is about?’ she managed.

‘Are you Natalia Lambert?’ the detective enquired.

‘No, I’m her sister. Natalia . . .’ Bel’s arms went round the children. ‘Natalia died fifteen months ago.’

The detective’s eyebrows rose skywards, but before she could respond her mobile rang. Without excusing herself she clicked on and turned back to the car.

Bel glanced at the uniformed officer, who merely shrugged.

‘I’m going to take the children inside,’ she told him, and without waiting for his agreement she led them back to the sitting room.

‘Why are they looking for Mummy?’ Oscar wanted to know, his tender young face pale with concern.

‘I’m not sure yet,’ Bel answered, ‘but obviously there’s been some sort of mistake.’
Or something had happened to Nick and Talia was still assumed to be his next of kin. Please God don’t let it be that.

‘Is Mummy still alive?’ Oscar asked fearfully.

‘I want to see her,’ Nell said, starting to cry.