Caroline yawned. A big indulgent yawn that ordinarily would not be tolerated at Pillowell Cottage. It came as the floorboards in Dora’s room creaked under her weight. ‘Uch .’ She squirmed, stretching towards the sunlight bleeding in from the east. A furtive check to make sure Joanna was still asleep had her reaching under the bed for Mrs Hooper’s snow globe. She held it up to peer into the frozen wonderland beyond its perfect glass dome. A shake, and the swirl of snow settled over the storybook-perfect cottage with its family safely entombed in an everlasting winter.
She got out of bed to make room for the snow globe in her underwear drawer. Too big an object for the hole she’d dug in the bank, she was going to have to risk keeping it here. But she must hide the gold ring she pinched from the pub, and the brooch with the wine-red stone she took from the vestry at St Oswald’s. She must do it today. And as she was awake early, she could slip out now and be back before either Dora or Joanna noticed she was missing. She was feeling particularly anxious since eavesdropping on her aunt’s conversation with the police on Sunday; the net was closing in, and she needed to be careful – if anyone discovered it was her doing the stealing, it would let Dean Fry clean off the hook.
Reluctant as always to expose her bare body, even to her sister, Caroline whipped off her nightie and tugged on her dungarees, T-shirt and cardigan in two swift movements. Avoiding the mirror and the haircut she’d been given in town yesterday, she positioned the Alice band she didn’t strictly need any more and pushed her feet into her jelly sandals, the ring and the brooch safely stowed away in a pocket.
Stars were dropping out now. A couple of lights had come on in the village, and Lillian told herself there was little point going to bed. She’d never drift off without taking one of her late husband’s sleeping pills, and she was trying to wean herself off them. Anyway, Gordon would be getting up in less than an hour, expecting his breakfast, and the idea of going and lying down only to hear him wake up and steal his first sigh of the day, she didn’t think she could bear it.
In the same way Gordon never needed sleeping tablets, he never needed an alarm clock either. Wired to be early, from having it beaten into him at his boarding school, he was up and out for his ramble through the woods or along the footpath to Slinghill every morning. Not that he ever took Laika, calling her an embarrassment because of her truncated legs, and moaning she couldn’t keep up with him. What was an embarrassment, Lillian brought the slightly absurd image to mind, was him going about in his suit trousers fastened with a pair of his father’s old cycle clips.
The clock on her mantelpiece – insistent, oppressive – she could envisage burying it, and the thing ticking away for years below ground. Lillian looked at a blur of wood pigeons through the window, or was it her reflection in the glass? Grey and tired, she judged, always harsh. She should sort herself out before Gordon came down, otherwise there would be questions. Questions he already knew the answers to but asked anyway, in the hope things had changed. She switched on TV-am, wanting the company of Anne Diamond and her co-host Nick Owen, and to forget for a moment or two the dire financial situation she was in; as reluctant to discuss it with her son as she was to think about it. Barely audible – she couldn’t risk waking Gordon – the breakfast television presenters were refereeing a debate about new working-time directives between a woman economist and one of Thatcher’s cabinet.
‘We’re trying to help small businesses,’ Lillian imitated the woman’s whine before the news cut in and showed a repeat of the police appeal made by Liz and Ian Fry the previous day. Grim and drawn, the trauma of their missing child had aged them overnight, and it was upsetting to see. ‘Bring her home safe,’ Liz’s voice was breaking under the pressure of the insurmountable anguish. ‘I need Ellie home.’
Lillian switched it off; the distressing images these news bulletins supplied were another reason she couldn’t sleep. Poor Liz, she sighed, leaning down to stroke her dachshund’s cinnamon-brown eyebrows. Supposing Ellie had come to harm, whoever did it was still out there. The thought was a terrifying one, and further soured her opinion of the place.
Gordon’s up . The floorboards above her head groaned in protest. She yawned. Wasn’t it always the way? Lillian wriggled in her chair and reckoned if she were to go to bed she’d sleep like a baby. Yawning again, she picked over Gordon’s sudden decision to return to Italy tomorrow. Booking a flight for Wednesday when he was out in Cinderglade with Dora and the girls. She asked him what the rush was – he wasn’t scheduled to go back until September. But he wouldn’t answer. He’d been in a foul temper since Saturday, complaining he’d overdone it trimming the hedge the day before, but Lillian knew it had more to do with him not being invited to Ellie’s party. Not that she said this, it didn’t pay to push Gordon when he was in one of his moods. In her experience, it was better to stand well back, let whatever troubled him blow over.
Up on her feet, Lillian took the few necessary paces to her study to look at her favourite photograph of Ursula – the one she could now see so much of Joanna in. Along with Lillian’s lover – a man whose darker side that others spoke of was never shown to her – Joanna was making life worth living too. A special child with such a gift for the piano, she was a joy to teach. Although, she wished Gordon wasn’t quite so taken with her – worrying, the occasions she’d come home from organ practice, to find them so intimate. Of course, it was all perfectly innocent, Joanna was such a dear; who could resist? Not that people around here would see it like that. Gordon’s fondness for Ellie got enough tongues wagging.
She stared into the photographed face of little Ursula, captured on the last family holiday before she died and Derek sent Gordon away to school. The memory was almost too much for Lillian as she looked at the merest circle of dust on her desk where the little snow globe used to be. The last thing Ursula gave her; it was her most treasured possession. Along with the garnet brooch her mother bequeathed to her that, pinned to the lapel of her best jacket, disappeared when she left it in the vestry with the discarded cassocks. She thought of Dora complaining of knickknacks disappearing from Pillowell, and the more serious issue of Dora’s father’s missing dagger. The idea there could be a thief in the village was deeply unsettling. This sort of thing didn’t happen around here and, coupled with Lillian’s fears of what the police might be about to discover in nearby woodland, had her heart jumping beneath her blouse.
A rattling from outside, startling, unexpected. Lillian jolted upright in her chair, fully alert.
What the hell was that?
Laika was on to it, springing from her bed and yapping wildly to be let outside. Ferreting the key from its vase and turning the lock, Lillian stepped on to her dew-wet lawn in time to see a darkened shape tearing away under the rose arch. Her lover wouldn’t risk calling round while Gordon was here, would he? Surely he could wait, her son would be out of the country tomorrow.
The violent thwop , thwop of a police helicopter scooped low over the trees. Looking up to see the warming sun had swapped places with the moon, she appealed to the heavens for the safe return of little Ellie, before scurrying back inside her cottage, wanting the reassuring creak of floorboards as her son moved around upstairs.
‘Where d’you get that?’ Joanna’s voice from the shadows, and Caroline jerked her head to it.
‘It’s Dora’s.’
‘She know you’ve got it?’ Joanna sat up in bed and pushed back the covers.
‘No.’
‘You nicked it, then?’ Joanna, at her elbow, extended a finger to touch the sparkly diamante hair clasp before Caroline could tuck it away. ‘I’ll tell.’
‘No, you won’t.’
‘Yes, I will.’ Joanna jutted out her chin, determined to have her say for once. ‘Unless you show me what else you’ve taken.’
‘I’ve not taken nothing.’ Caroline touched the snow globe hidden in the drawer, its unyielding spherical shape hard under her cotton knickers. ‘I’m going to put it back.’
‘What? Like you’re going to put that brooch back.’
Caroline glared at her.
‘Don’t look at me like that – it’s red and about this big.’ Joanna made a circle between finger and thumb.
‘How d’you know about that?’ Feeling around inside the pocket of her dungarees, Caroline satisfied herself the gold ring and brooch were still safe.
‘Seen you.’
‘Seen me what?’
‘Playing with it.’
‘You’re naughty, you are.’
‘You’re the naughty one.’ Joanna rubbed sleep from her eyes. ‘But I might not tell if you show me what else you’ve got.’
Caroline said nothing and shut the drawer.
‘What you hiding in there?’ Joanna pointed.
‘Nuffin.’
‘Show me.’ Joanna, her palm as flat as when she fed the horses.
Caroline handed her the snow globe.
‘Cor, that’s pretty. Look at the little family inside.’
‘Lovely, isn’t it?’ Caroline said, unable to share how the little quartet reminded her of what life was like before the coastguard fished their father from the sea, turning four into three. And with the memory came a blaze of what she’d been that day – the sun on her face, the chime of an ice-cream van in her ears, running along the sand in her polka-dot swimsuit – and her mother, carefree and sandy-kneed, sculpting horses from the soft Welsh sand, eyes brimming with love … There was no love in her mother’s eyes now, she thought, gulping back tears, except perhaps for Joanna.
‘Where d’you get it?’ her sister wanted to know.
‘Mrs Hooper’s,’ Caroline answered quickly.
‘Mrs Hooper’s ?’ Joanna’s grin vanished. ‘Oh, no, Carrie, you can’t. Nicking from Dora’s one thing, but Mrs Hooper? She’s got nothing; you know that. You’ve got to give it back.’ And she dropped the snow globe inside the drawer as if it burnt her fingers.
‘Why do I? She’s done loads for you, but nuffin for me. I’m keeping it, she won’t notice.’
‘She will, you’ve got to give it back.’ Joanna, insistent, collected her towel and wash-ups. ‘It’s not right.’
‘Will you shut up if I show you the other things I’ve taken?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Right then, after breakfast. I’ll show you after breakfast.’
‘No. I want to see them now.’
‘They’re not here, stupid. I’ve got a special place for them – down by the lake.’
‘Promise?’ Joanna creased her soft little brow.
‘Promise.’