Henri clenched his teeth. I could see the muscle working on his jaw and that he was fighting the urge to be angry with me. ‘I covered the table for a reason,’ he snapped. ‘If I wanted you to see, I’d have shown them to you.’
‘I know,’ I said, ashamed at my uncharacteristic behaviour. ‘It was unforgivable of me, but, oh, I don’t know… there are too many secrets in my life already. I wanted my relationship with you to be without any.’
He closed his eyes briefly and groaned. Lifting the bottle, he went to refill our glasses.
‘No more Calvados for me, thanks,’ I said. ‘But I don’t understand. Why hide them from me?’ I asked, confused. ‘Are they the reason you’ve come to live on this particular farm?’
He considered me carefully, then lifted his glass and downed his drink in one.
Intrigued, I leant back in my chair, crossing my legs thoughtfully. I was missing something, but what?
Henri sighed heavily. ‘Jack was my father, Sera.’
‘What?’ I tried to make sense of it all. Henri was French. ‘I hadn’t realised he had a son.’
‘His real name was Jacques. J-A-C-Q-U-E-S.’ He spelled it out for me. ‘He must have wanted to fit in with his British friends and anglicised his name.’ He looked pensive.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘Henri, no.’
‘He left my mother when I was twelve,’ he said quietly. ‘Theirs was never a peaceful relationship, but he never forgot my birthday, or Christmas. On occasion he would turn up at Maman’s house to see me, usually bearing a gift. They fought. He left. Always the same scenario.’
‘So, you suspected something was wrong when he missed a birthday?’ I recalled how upset Katie was when her birthday came around and her father wasn’t there.
‘When I didn’t receive a birthday card or any contact from him on my eighteenth birthday, I suspected something was wrong.’
‘That’s heartbreaking.’ I felt the urge to hug him, but didn’t like to impose on his grief.
‘The need to trace him built over the years. Even as a detective I never gave up searching for a trace of him. Keeping my eyes open for any information that I could find, or news reports.’
I tried to put this into the context of Hazel’s life. ‘What date is your birthday?’ I asked, not sure how much I wanted to hear the answer. Perhaps I was about to open a Pandora’s box of chaos that could change everything for me.
‘Twenty-first of September.’ He waited for me to take this in.
I could barely catch my breath. How I wished now that I hadn’t looked at the newspaper cuttings. ‘So, you turned eighteen a month after Hazel went missing with Dee and Leo?’
‘Yes.’ He sighed, staring across the yard at the remains of the barn again.
I followed his gaze and we sat watching the burnt-out shell of the building in silent contemplation. A horrific thought dawned on me. ‘You think… the body in the barn was your father?’
He kept staring straight ahead. ‘I know it.’
Stunned as if he’d slapped me, I followed his line of vision to the blackened ruins. I pictured Jack singing and swinging Hazel round in his arms at the last party she’d held. My heart pounded in shock as I struggled to absorb what he had told me. They were incredibly passionate about each other. Could that passion have led to murder? The notion was too dreadful to contemplate.
‘But Hazel would never… I mean—’ I couldn’t imagine Hazel being capable of hurting anyone, least of all the man she loved. ‘Not Hazel.’
I looked at him. There was something else. What was he so nervous to tell me?
‘Henri?’ I squeezed his arm when he didn’t look at me. ‘Look, I know Hazel could never have killed your father. She just couldn’t, okay? She wouldn’t have it in her to do something violent. She was all about love and fun.’ He still didn’t say anything. I could see he wasn’t convinced. ‘Maybe you’ve got this wrong.’ Panic rose through me. ‘Or it could have been someone else? Have you considered that?’
He glanced at his hands then back at me, a haunted look in his dark eyes. I sensed he hadn’t finished confiding in me.
‘Go on,’ I said, terrified to hear what he was about to say, but needing to know everything.
He reached out and took one of my hands in his, resting them on the table in between us. His actions made me nervous. The tables had turned somehow.
‘Promise me you’ll listen to everything I have to tell you before making a judgement,’ he pleaded, his eyes boring into me, willing me to agree.
I frowned. ‘All right.’
He studied my face momentarily before speaking. ‘My father used to write small notes in birthday cards. His last one mentioned that he was living with a singer called Hazel on a farm in the New Forest.’ He hesitated and narrowed his eyes. He was waiting for me to react, but I wasn’t sure why. He continued, ‘I searched for her through a UK police contact over several years and tracked her down here. That was as far as her records went for many years – that I could find, anyway.’
‘Go on.’
‘A detective friend, an ex-police officer I’d met years ago in France, had been looking at a cold case in London for a woman who was trying to find out what had happened to her fiancé. I believe she was dying and wanted to resolve a mystery she’d lived with for many years.’ I couldn’t imagine why he would be nervous about telling me something this random, but waited for him to continue. ‘She had told him that the man, a Vincent Black, had travelled to Scotland with two women back in ’90.’
‘Right,’ I said, confused.
‘A singer called Hazel and a cocktail waitress and wannabe actress called Mimi. They travelled together to a house party. She doesn’t know where the party was and my friend has not been able to find out more about it. Apparently the two women had been sharing a flat.’
His words echoed in my head. I stared at him, but it was as if we were in a bubble and I was waiting for it to explode all around me.
‘Mimi?’ I felt sick. Was he about to fill in some of my mother’s mysterious past? ‘Go on,’ I said, barely able to breathe, my heart was pounding so hard in my chest. I couldn’t imagine Mum and Hazel being flatmates. How did I not know this? Did Dee know?
‘Alice said that the three of them disappeared. Never returned to London.’
‘Sorry, what?’
‘She suspected Vincent had set up home with one of them, but wasn’t sure which one.’ He exhaled slowly. ‘It seems that she didn’t like the two women very much at all. Which I suppose is understandable if you think one of them has run off with your fiancé.’
‘You are talking about Mum and Hazel, aren’t you?’ I knew it was a bloody stupid question, but I needed to be completely certain I’d heard right.
‘I am.’ He gave my hands a squeeze and let go of one of them to massage his temple with his free hand. ‘I do not have to continue, if it upsets you.’
‘You can’t stop now,’ I snapped. ‘Not now you’ve told me this much.’
He rubbed his chin and took a deep breath. ‘
‘Was anyone else travelling with them to Scotland, do you know?’
‘He had a driver. No one can recall his name, so my friend has been unable to trace him.’
I had always known my mother had worked in London for a short time before moving to the New Forest to have me. I’d always suspected she’d run away from something there, but had assumed my father had been married and the wife had warned Mum off, or a similar scenario. But this seemed much darker than I had expected.
‘I had no idea Mum and Hazel were ever close.’ The revelation stunned me. ‘Please, carry on.’
It was strange hearing him refer to her as Mimi. I’d only ever heard Mum referred to as Maureen, except for Katie calling her Nana Mimi, and that had been Mum’s suggestion. I had assumed it was something she’d come up with as an affectionate name between herself and Katie, not a name she’d used in her past.
‘What else do you know?’
‘The trail went cold,’ Henri added, raising a shoulder in a lazy shrug. ‘I could not find anything further about these women. I did find the farm several years ago and enquired after her. The tenants told me she had disappeared with her family and, I assumed, my father, but they could tell me nothing more. I thought my search was over. I returned here a few months ago to try and look for Hazel again. In case she had returned here.’ He hesitated.
‘Go on.’
‘I discovered that the elderly tenants who moved in after she left had died leaving the farm vacant for some years. I enquired about leasing it.’ He looked concerned by my silence.
‘Makes sense,’ I said, forcing myself to appear calm. My stomach churned. I needed him to tell me every detail.
‘I thought if I could move in to my father’s last known address then maybe I might discover more about what happened to him.’
No wonder he kept himself and his business private. If anyone around here suspected he was investigating their lives, or those of their neighbours, he’d be even more unpopular than he was already.
I studied my nails as the enormity of what he’d confided in me took root. ‘As sorry as I am about your father’s disappearance, Henri…’ I said, closing my eyes to try and regulate my rising temper. ‘And I truly am… Why wait this long to tell me you’ve been investigating my mother’s past?’
‘Sera?’ he began, closing his eyes and shaking his head. ‘I am a fool. I should not have told you.’
I held my hand up to stop him. ‘Rubbish. You should have told me before,’ I said, hurt that he couldn’t confide in me. ‘I don’t understand why it had to be a secret?’
He rose slowly, wincing as he straightened his leg. ‘I had to know what happened to my father. I wanted to investigate without anyone becoming suspicious. People are rarely open if they suspect you are trying to find out information. You must surely understand this?’
I probably would have if one of the people he had been researching hadn’t been Mum. ‘You’ve been tracking my mum like she’s some sort of villain. She’s not. Are you implying that she had something to do with this man’s disappearance?’ I shivered despite the heat.
‘Sera, I…’
I was furious at him. How dare he investigate my mother behind her back? Behind mine?
‘She might have known Hazel in the eighties,’ I said, still finding this nugget of information, that they were ever remotely close, a bit odd. I hesitated. Something niggled in my mind. I struggled to bring the memory forward. Yes. Hadn’t Mum told me I didn’t know Hazel as well as I thought when we’d argued once? Maybe if I hadn’t been in such a mood with her I would have realised the significance of what she was saying. That they had been friends previously and fallen out over something big enough to stop them talking for years despite their daughters being best friends.
My fury returned. ‘What exactly are you accusing my mother of doing? Shacking up with someone else’s bloke? Seriously? Is that it?’
‘Sera.’ He went to comfort me.
‘No,’ I pushed him away. ‘I’m going. My mother was right about you hiding things. I stupidly thought we could be friends.’ He grabbed my arm as I turned to leave, holding me back. ‘Let me go.’
‘No. You will listen to me, or I will come to your house and tell you.’
‘No. You won’t.’ I snatched my arm away from him. I ran to the car, aware he couldn’t catch up with me before I got inside.
‘Sera, please stop.’
I ignored his pleas. If anyone was going to tell me what happened, it was going to be Mum. I’d had enough of his revelations, and her secrets. I needed to confront her and find out what had happened all those years ago.