Marianne had just called the office to let them know she wouldn’t be in today. She wasn’t unwell, nor was she someone who normally shirked work. If anything she embraced it, but not today.
The shock of what was happening, of what had been handed to her by the postman first thing this morning, caused her heart to twist with another sickening wrench of fear.
Going through to the kitchen of her Kensington town house, she picked up the phone to try calling Joely again.
Still no answer.
Ludicrously she made another attempt from her mobile, as if it might have a better chance of connecting than a landline.
Still no answer.
She was becoming more concerned and agitated by the hour. She hated not being able to get hold of her daughter at the best of times, at a time like this . . .
Maybe she should call Callum. She knew he’d come if she asked him to, but he was at work, possibly in a meeting, or even in the studio recording a program. It wouldn’t be fair to disturb him when she wasn’t entirely sure what she’d say to him. “I can’t get hold of Joely” would hardly seem like an emergency when they’d both had such trouble these past two weeks.
She couldn’t say any more than that, at least not until she’d spoken to her daughter to get a clearer idea of what was going on.
Her confused blue eyes returned to the screensaver on her mobile—Joely, Callum, and Holly in happier times. Now, Joely had run away to carry out an assignment heaven only knew where and for an author who was as well known for being a recluse as she was for her peculiar books. Marianne hadn’t even known F. M. Donahoe was a woman until Joely had told her, and she might not have been particularly interested then had the postman not turned up this morning with a special delivery from F.M. Donahoe.
It was right there on the kitchen table, a large, neat brown envelope with her name and address handwritten on the front, seal broken, closely typed pages tucked back inside, out of sight.
Her mouth was dry as she looked at it. It had come out of the past like a karmic punch to the heart and all these hours later she still wasn’t breathing steadily.
She guessed Donahoe was Freda’s married name, unless it was a pen name—that was also possible.
Marianne had no idea what to do. There had been no note in the envelope, nothing to tell her what Freda wanted, or what she intended to do with these pages. And where was Joely?
Hearing the doorbell chime down the hall she pressed a hand to her heart to steady it. She wasn’t expecting anyone, but it could be Holly having lost her key again. Or the postman—please, God, not with another special delivery.
She walked along the hall aware of how dread was slowing her pace; the sudden and brutal thrust into the past was affecting her badly. For whole moments at a time it seemed to distort reality and make her uncertain of herself in a way she hadn’t felt in so long.
It had taken years to get over what had happened, and now it was as though she was being sucked back into the very worst of it.
Though she checked the spyhole the person on the porch had stepped aside so all she could see was the shoulder of someone wearing a gray coat. She knew she ought to call out to ask who it was, but she didn’t want to appear timid or pathetic. So she opened the door wide and stood tall, almost confrontational before the woman whose back was to her.
“Can I help you?” she asked tonelessly.
The woman turned around and as fear bloomed in Marianne’s heart she felt her senses swim.
“Hello,” Freda said smoothly. “We’ve never met, but I think you know who I am.”
“What do you want?” Marianne’s voice was clipped, too defensive, she needed to calm herself, handle this in a way that wouldn’t antagonize the woman, that made it clear she wasn’t afraid of her.
“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” Freda responded.
Battling with her conflicting instincts, Marianne stood aside and gestured for her to go into the sitting room. There was no point trying to avoid this, not while she couldn’t get hold of Joely.
The sitting room was large with a high corniced ceiling, two tall sash windows at the front, a white marble fireplace over the hearth displaying an assortment of family photos, and three neatly arranged lemon-striped sofas around a glass coffee table.
“Is this where your children grew up?” Freda asked, taking it all in and pulling a face that showed as much disdain as interest.
“Where’s Joely?” Marianne asked.
Freda sat down on one of the sofas and crossed her legs. “You’ll have read the memoir she’s been working on by now,” she said, folding her hands in her lap. “I think . . .”
“Where is she?” Marianne repeated.
With a small sigh, Freda said, “We have some things to discuss, you and I . . .”
“I am discussing nothing until you tell me where my daughter is.”
Freda waved a hand as though batting the words away. “She’s perfectly all right, and you’ll get her back as soon as you’ve done as I ask.”
Get her back? Marianne’s heart began to thud. Freda was holding Joely hostage? “Tell me where Joely is,” she growled, “or I’m calling the police.”
Freda laughed. “To tell them what, exactly?”
Marianne opened her mouth, but no words came out.
Freda’s eyes became opaque, glassy, unreadable, as she said, “You must have known the day of reckoning would come, Linda.”
Marianne still couldn’t speak. Inside she was shaking, as much in anger as in fear. What did this woman want? Why couldn’t she have left the past where it was? What did she hope to gain from raking it all up again?
“Yes, tea would be very nice, thank you.” Freda smiled. “Milk, no sugar,” and, as if Marianne really had made the offer, she settled back more comfortably in her seat, waiting to be served.
The music had stopped.
Joely’s eyes opened slowly. The powerful voice of a gifted soprano who she suspected might be Sir’s mother was still echoing in her ears. It was fading now, the applause of an ecstatic audience drifting like mist into nothingness and leaving her to confront the awful suspicion of why Freda had ended her torturous loop with this particular aria. Joely was familiar enough with Puccini’s works to recognize “Vissi d’arte” and to know that at the climax of the opera Floria Tosca threw herself from a tower to her death.
Wishing that thought had never occurred to her she picked herself up from the daybed and made her way to the desk. Outside storm clouds were gathering like ghouls over the channel, blackening the sky and casting the cliffs in oppressive shadow.
She was so hungry that the pangs were making it almost as difficult to focus as the music when it was blaring, but she forced herself past it and opened up her laptop.
After taking a few more moments to collect herself she began again.
According to the memoir, Sir was twenty-five in 1968, which meant he’d been born in . . . 1943. If he was still alive today he’d be . . . seventy-seven.
Her father had been born in 1947 in Australia, and had lived there until 1967 when he’d come to England to attend medical school. His family had immigrated in the mid-1970s, which was when he’d met his future wife, Marianne. In 1968 he would have been . . . twenty-one. He’d died three years ago at age sixty-nine.
He had never been a music fanatic, or even much of a concertgoer.
The dates and ages were all wrong, plus he’d never worked as a teacher, much less in a girls’ school, or made a habit of telling lies—as far as she knew.
She took a breath, let her head fall back to clear it of rogue doubts, and started again.
Sir was definitely not her father.
Her father was not Sir.
Her mother, on the other hand, had been fifteen in 1968. Her name wasn’t Freda, but obviously Freda had used her own name to make the story seem like a personal memoir until she’d decided to reveal the fact that it wasn’t.
So what was it, exactly?
Putting a label on it hardly mattered; what did was the reason for doing it at all, and what she was planning to do now—apart from imprison her ghostwriter in a tower, play music to her at full volume as if to blast out her brains, presuming she didn’t starve to death first, or do a Tosca out of the window . . .
Realizing hunger, fear, stress were combining to make her delirious, she took some more deep breaths, and went to drink from the tap before returning to the desk.
How long was Freda planning to keep her here?
Where was she? What was this really all about?
Rain and fierce gusts of wind were battering the windows now and the temperature in the room had noticeably dropped.
Joely returned to her computer and began working on the theory that her mother was “young Freda” to see if it flew.
Her mother, aged fifteen . . . From the photos Joely had seen of Marianne in her teenage years she’d certainly been beautiful, she still turned heads now, but a young Bardot?
Had she gone to boarding school?
Yes, she had, and it had been a weekly one as far as Joely could recall, but the way her parents, Joely’s grandparents, had been portrayed . . . The self-centered, hedonistic, neglectful, narcissists . . . That certainly didn’t chime with the people Joely had known, but they’d been so much older by the time Joely had come along . . .
How had Freda known them?
There wouldn’t have been a trial if Sir had pleaded guilty, so nothing could have come out about them then . . .
She’d have to come back to that; she was trying to deal with her mother for now, the statuesque, elegant sixty-six-year-old transformed into an immature, overconfident, and self-absorbed teenager who’d fallen victim to her fixation on a handsome young teacher. It happened, back then and now, but even if she’d been some sort of Lolita once, it still didn’t explain why Freda was writing about her now.
Nor did it provide an identity for Sir.
What was she missing?
It had to be there, she was sure of it.
Scrolling back to the start of the memoir she began reading it again, making sure she was taking in every last detail, checking her notes, analyzing Freda’s tone and nuances in the recordings, but she got no further than the first few pages before the music started up again, snatching at her thoughts, and making concentration impossible.
Tears filled her eyes and her heart almost burst with frustration as she returned to the daybed and put a pillow over her head to help block out the deafening concert.
“Did you read to the end of what I sent you?” Freda asked, sounding only mildly curious as she replaced her teacup on its saucer and put both on the coffee table.
Marianne simply stared at her. She had no intention of answering anything until she knew what this woman was up to with Joely.
“I’m sure you did,” Freda continued, “but even if you didn’t you already know everything that happened, what you said and did, the lives you destroyed . . .”
Biting out the words, Marianne said, “What you’ve written . . .”
“What your daughter wrote,” Freda interjected. “They’re her words, not mine, at least most of them. Obviously, I gave her some guidance. I can’t help wondering how she feels now she knows that she’s the author of her own mother’s sexual exploits with a much older man.”
Hating the very idea of Joely even knowing about it, never mind being tricked into writing about what had happened back then, Marianne rose to her feet. “It’s time you left,” she said with so much steel in her voice it caused Freda’s eyebrows to arch.
“It’s uncomfortable, isn’t it,” Freda said, “thinking of your own flesh and blood engaging in a sexual act with you, even if only in a literary sense. However, I believe incest isn’t a stranger to your family. Didn’t your mother mistakenly sleep with her own brother at one of the famous orgies?”
Marianne’s eyes flashed with rage. “That was an ugly, vindictive lie spread by a girl who was jealous of my mother,” she cried furiously. “It wasn’t true, but it was vile enough to make it impossible for my mother and her brother to see each other again.”
“Really?” Freda said disbelievingly.
“I don’t care what you think,” Marianne spat dismissively. “I don’t even care how you know . . .”
“Sit down,” Freda told her. “What your mother did or didn’t do with her brother is of no interest to me. I’m only interested in what you did to mine.”
Marianne glared at her as the past crackled like sparks in the air between them. David Martin—or Michaels as he was called in the pages she’d read—the man who still haunted her dreams to this day, was this woman’s brother. Marianne had never imagined that she and Freda would meet, not back then, or now, but here she was sitting on the sofa and clearly proud of the way she’d tricked Joely into telling the terrible story of her mother’s teenage mistakes.
“You know what you did to him,” Freda said, her tone seeming oddly distant and yet horribly present. “He was a good man, a decent man with his whole life ahead of him.”
“He was . . .”
“He wanted to teach. It was his dream and he had so much to offer . . .”
“Why are you doing this, Freda?” Marianne cried. “Why are you here?”
Freda regarded her with incredulity and scorn. “You know the answer to that,” she retorted. “I want the truth, Linda Barnes—or I believe they call you Marianne now. I want your name in that memoir, not hidden behind a law that protects minors . . . You’re going to finish the story with a full and unambiguous admission of who you are and what you did to my brother.”
Marianne didn’t hesitate. “I’m not doing anything until you tell me where Joely is. I need to know she’s . . .”
“I don’t care what you need to know . . .”
Marianne turned on her heel, walked to the kitchen, and snatched up her mobile.
Moments later she was upstairs closing the bedroom door behind her, and going swiftly to the bathroom she locked herself in. Her hands were shaking so badly it took longer than it should have to connect to Callum. You’ve got to answer; you’ve just got to.
“Hey, Marianne,” he said cheerily.
“Callum, do you have Andee Lawrence’s number?”
“I’m sure I do, but is everything all right? You sound . . .”
“I’ll explain later. Text it to me, please. Do it right away.”
It came through in seconds and moments later another voice was at the end of the line: “Hi, this is Andee.”
“Andee, it’s Marianne, Joely’s mum. I’m sorry to be abrupt, but do you know where she is?”
“I’ve been trying to get hold of her, but I’m guessing she’s at Dimmett House.”
“If you know where that is, please can you go to check if she’s all right?”
Immediately concerned, Andee said, “Yes, of course. Why has something . . .”
“I just need to know that she’s OK. Call me back when you . . . How long will it take you to get there?”
“About forty-five minutes. I’ll leave now if it’s urgent.”
“Please—I’d be very grateful if you could. Thank you. I’ll wait to hear from you.”
After ringing off, Marianne tried Joely’s number again. Once more she went straight to voicemail. She turned to stare at herself in the mirror. Her face was flushed and stricken, her eyes glittery and wide with fear. It’s all right, she tried telling herself. Andee will be sure to find her, then you’ll be able to deal with the rest.
Taking a breath, she unlocked the bathroom door, and pulled it open.
Freda was standing right outside.