Seven For a Secret (33 page)

‘Well that's over, then,' Delia announced as Tom unlocked the front door and they all went in, casting off hats and jackets as they went, and gladly abandoning them on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs.

‘Drink, I think,' Tom declared, heading for the kitchen.

‘Just a small sherry for me, please,' Delia said. ‘Then I think it should be the will.'

‘Have you got it then?' Heather asked, pulling off her shoes with a sigh of great relief.

‘He gave it to me a couple of weeks ago, once he knew.'

‘Oh. You never said.' Heather wondered why she hadn't mentioned the will, then realized it was probably because being the trusted possessor of it made her feel important, needed.

‘No, well . . .' Her mother was looking shifty, as if she'd steamed the envelope open and taken a sneaky look already. Delia, still in her magpie hat, sat very upright on the sofa by the open French doors and thought that this really ought to be more formal, perhaps gathered round the table in the dining-room, where she was well aware that Heather did not, for the moment, like to be. She fished her reading glasses out of her handbag, opened the large buff envelope, and began to read the complicated formal bits about being of sound mind, followed by a couple of charitable bequests and then ‘. . . the residue to be divided equally between Katherine Melissa Bellingham and Suzannah Victoria Bellingham—'

‘What?' Kate, who had not been showing any signs of listening, interrupted abruptly. ‘Me and Suzy?'

‘Ssh,' Heather said, ‘listen to the rest first.'

Delia took her glasses off slowly, folded the document and said, ‘But there isn't any rest. That's it. £5,000 to the NSPCC, £1,000 to the Lifeboats and the rest to Kate and Suzy. He was fond of children.'

Tom cleared his throat and took a long sip of his beer. ‘Clearly,' he said, impressed.

The question that hovered unspoken was eventually asked by Suzy. ‘How much exactly does “residue” mean?' she said, scarcely more than whispering.

When Suzy finally escaped from the house and hauled her tent into the rowing boat she felt as if she'd won the National Lottery. ‘I've got a hundred thousand pounds. Probably about that anyway,' she told a passing pair of ducks. ‘I'm rich.' She wasn't allowed to tell anyone; Gran had said money wasn't for talking about, but she felt a lot more confident about being interesting with Simon. She had a secret, and it was more intoxicating than the sherry she'd been allowed after the funeral.

There was the sound of a lot going on at the island as she rowed along to it. It was getting dark, just, and her mother had said the usual annual thing about nights starting earlier, which was so depressing and made them all think about going back to school and the winter beginning. She looked over her shoulder as she rowed, and could see that there were more than just Tamsin, Simon and Tam's beloved, awful, Shane. She could smell woodsmoke, too, which made her think of bonfire night and being cold enough for gloves. Kate appeared on the bank, at the end of the garden, waving and calling to her, and she had to go back and get her. Kate had loads of money now too, and although Suzy would normally have felt inclined to ignore her and just go on rowing, now she felt linked to her by this peculiar secret and the odd generosity of this uncle they didn't know.

‘Why do you think he left it to us?' Suzy asked Kate as she clambered into the boat.

‘Don't know. I suppose it's because we really are the only people in his family. He could have left it to a dogs' home.'

‘Margot would have liked that,' Suzy commented.

Kate giggled. ‘She would wouldn't she? She's so lovely, old Margot.'

‘Funny thing to say. As if you're going to
miss
her or something. You're only going to the sixth form college, not boarding school or the moon.'

Kate trailed her hand in the water and splashed it up and down like a toddler making waves. ‘Mmm. Maybe. Perhaps I don't need to now.'

‘What about your A-levels?'

‘What about them? People get by without them. Specially if they've got money.'

‘Dad says it's not
that
much.'

Kate laughed, her teeth very white, Suzy thought, in the dusk. ‘Well he would, wouldn't he, in case we get silly and rush out and buy a Mercedes each.'

‘I wouldn't want one.'

‘I might,' Kate said thoughtfully.

Simon lurked behind a tree on the island watching Kate's arrival. He stepped forward to take her hand and help her out of the boat, hoping she wouldn't realize he'd been hanging around and waiting for her. She looked so fantastic, he thought, all that ripe-corn hair and a silly little black wispy dress that was going to be much too cold for her later.

‘You made it then,' he said, cursing himself for stating the stupidly obvious, but continuing to hang on to her hand.

‘Hey what about me?' Suzy yelled, furious to be left to deal with the oars and the ropes by herself. ‘I'm not a
ferry
,' she complained, while Kate looked blankly back at her as if not quite understanding what her role in the safe mooring of the boat should be.

‘Oh I'm sure you can manage,' Kate said with a smile, ‘you're amazingly capable.'

‘Amazingly stupid,' Suzy muttered, securing the rope to an overhanging branch and stamping off with her tent and bag in search of Tamsin and whoever was making all the noise just beyond the first line of trees. Bugsy was upside-down, swinging from a branch and trying to drink lager from a can. Most of it went down his face towards his forehead and hair, but the over-loud way he roared with fury and frustration told Suzy that he'd probably got quite a lot of it inside his body already. Darren was perched higher up the same tree, chucking twigs at Bugsy and aiming for his nose. Simon and Shane prodded at the little fire that Suzy thought didn't look safe – it looked too spread out, without any stones to mark its edges and stop it spreading over the dried-out ground and the leaves that were already starting to fall. She hoped she wouldn't be the only one who'd keep a careful eye on it.

‘Another three boat loads are coming!' Tamsin squeaked with excitement next to her, looking out towards the slipway below the pub just up the river, ‘It's going to be a real party. Darren's brought a sound system with loads of batteries so we can have it really loud, and there's stacks of drink.' Tamsin was looking amazingly like Orville the puppet duck in a green fake swansdown jacket. Suzy had a fleeting thought that this might look just like pondweed if it should accidentally happen to get terribly wet.

She felt cross and betrayed, her game, her lovely Swallows and Amazons sleep-out, in ruins. ‘You said, you
promised
it would be just us and Shane and Simon,' she accused Tamsin.

‘Well, you weren't too happy with that if I remember rightly,' Tamsin replied smugly. ‘I'd have thought you'd be
pleased.
Safety in numbers. Anyway, you can always go home if you want to. After that disgusting trick you played on me this morning, you should be glad I even let you come here at all.'

Suzy smirked, remembering Tamsin howling, her face seasick-green and wild-eyed with terror, fleeing from the sight of Uncle Edward's corpse in the murky half-gloom of the dining-room that morning. Her face had been almost the colour of the bizarre jacket she was wearing.

From the terrace outside the pub, Heather, Tom and Delia picked at their salads and watched Lisa Gibson's tightly-skirted bottom waving in the air as she attempted hopelessly to get into a small boat in high-heeled shoes. She shrieked and giggled and fell on one of her friends, who dropped an oar in the water and swore loudly. The boat was leaning and rocking, girls yelled and squealed and laughed, and eventually the overloaded craft pulled away from the pub steps and moved precariously off towards the island and the source of a great deal of unaccustomed noise.

‘Call that music!'

‘Should someone get the police?'

‘Are they
allowed
to have parties over there?'

Disapproving remarks from pub patrons filled the air around Heather, and she could see Delia looking from one speaker to another, her face expressing her agreement with their comments.

‘It's only a bit of fun. Better than trashing the village hall,' Tom said softly, collecting glasses and going back into the bar to get them all a refill.

‘Your children are out there,' Delia said to Heather, waving her hand vaguely in the upstream direction. ‘Surely you don't want them associating with, well,
rough
people.'

‘They'll be OK, it's just the village kids. They
should
mix more locally, I've been thinking. And it's not as if it's just Suzy. Kate and Simon are there, too.'

Delia thought for a moment, neatly cut the last piece of tomato on her plate and said rather pointedly, looking round swiftly to see if Tom was on his way back. ‘Well at least Kate is with people more her own age. We should be grateful for
that
.'

Heather bit her lip and stopped herself from responding with something cutting and hurtful. Her mother had had a trying day. A funeral, to Heather and Tom, was still thankfully a rare experience. To Delia and to those elderly dignified men at the crematorium, it was probably increasingly and depressingly the usual social thing.

‘I think they've got a barbecue going over there,' Tom said, coming back with drinks. ‘I'm sure I can smell sausages. Perhaps it would have been fun if we'd joined them,' he added, looking glumly at the sulky faces of his wife and mother-in-law.

‘This isn't really a day for having fun,' Delia reminded him.

Back in their own garden later, Heather and Tom wandered down to the river and looked along the water to the island where they could just make out figures moving in silhouette against the trees and firelight.

‘I don't suppose Suzy will want to stay out too long with that lot,' Tom commented, putting his arm round Heather.

‘No, I expect you're right. She and Tam would have been better spending the night in the treehouse if they wanted a bit of peace.'

‘Peace isn't the kind of thing I associate with Tamsin,' Tom said, making Heather laugh. She was watching a figure rowing from Margot's dock up towards the island. All she could make out was that it was a man, not a teenager.

‘Late arrival,' Tom said, indicating the rower, ‘unless it's Russell going off to collect Tamsin.'

Heather shivered. ‘It isn't Russell,' she said.

The sharp smell of smoke and the night-rending blare of emergency sirens pulled Heather back to consciousness. Half-dozing, she realized acutely that she wasn't just having a worried-parent dream about something selected randomly from the list of what's most dreadful that can happen to children. It was way after three o'clock, and the party on the island had gone quiet hours ago. She'd done some lying awake, agonizing with Tom as to whether Suzy should really have been allowed to stay camping out with Tamsin as arranged, or be collected and made to come safely home. Her decision in favour of Suzy getting her own way had been, Heather admitted to herself, influenced by the fact that her mother continued to make her own disapproval so obvious as they left the pub the night before.

‘What time is Suzy to be home?' Delia had asked.

‘You know she isn't coming, she and Tamsin arranged this night out ages ago,' Heather had explained, worrying if her mother's memory was starting to give way.

‘But you can't let her out there all night! It's an All Night Party!' Delia had gasped, as horrified as if Suzy was being specially equipped by Heather with a personal supply of illicit drugs.

‘It isn't a party, or at least it won't be as soon as they get bored and cold. Tam and Suzy are playing camps, that's all. They've had it planned for weeks,' Heather had replied, trying to bluff away her own misgivings and at the same time prove that
she
could bring up her own children with tolerance and leniency and
still
end up with reasonable, well-adjusted grown-ups at the end of it all. Though when
did
it all end, she wondered, still, at over forty, childishly trying to outface her mother and now cravenly using her own daughter as a weapon to do it with.

Once the party sounds had died down, and Tom and Heather imagined that everyone else had gone safely home to sleep somewhere more comfortable, they'd concluded with relief that Suzy really would be safe enough, with Tamsin and in the company of Kate and Simon. Now Heather sat up fast enough to make her head whirl, sniffed the air and knew she'd been terribly, irresponsibly, wrong. Tom was already out of bed, leaning out of the window, seeing the smoke drifting along the river in the deep grey dawning light.

‘I can't see flames,' he told her, as if that would be any comfort. ‘And the smoke
might
just be the barbecue fire. The sirens could be a road accident or
anything
– that sort of thing always does seem worse in the middle of the night,' he added, his anxious face belying his attempt to deny his fear, while at the same time he was hurling himself into his clothes. ‘I'll whip a boat from the pub and go and check on them. Probably they're asleep and I'll scare them witless.'

‘I'll come,' Heather said, reaching into a drawer for her jeans.

‘No, don't,' he said. ‘What about Delia?'

‘I'll see if she's awake. If she is I'll tell her what's happening, and if not I'll leave a note in the kitchen. She
was
exhausted.'

Heather ran alongside Tom to the pub, faster than she knew she could. Her head was full of dreaded ‘what ifs', just as she knew Suzy's must be. Suppose the boats had all caught fire and they were all trapped over there? She thought about fire, about how Uncle Edward's body had, that afternoon, been cremated to pale ash as finely ground as powder. It was impossible not to picture that happening to Suzy and Kate, out there under the trees cut off from the shore. It wouldn't have been far to swim if the river had been just a safe and placid lake, but there was a fierce current around the island, and it was treacherously close to the weir. The earliest dire warnings the girls could remember weren't about the danger of strangers but the terrible unguessed hazards of the river. As they ran down the lane towards the water, a fire engine hurtled past, lights flashing. Heather flattened herself against the hedge to let it pass, gasping painfully and her throat burning with the unaccustomed effort of running.