sixteen

I left Monica with the promise that I’d return the following evening, and drove back home. I couldn’t be bothered to assemble dinner and took a fish pie straight from the freezer and shoved it in the oven. While it heated up I called Luke and told him everything Monica had said. He listened without interruption.

“Do you believe her?” he spoke, finally.

I wasn’t certain and said so.

Luke was more forthcoming. “Dad was certainly capable of it. God, if even a fraction of what she describes is true, we’ve all been living a lie.”

“But dead men don’t talk, Luke, and without Dad around, we can’t check her story.”

“So your gut reaction is?”

I was uncomfortable at being put on the spot. How could I form a judgement based on so little hard information? “It’s possible she’s telling the truth.”

He went silent for a few seconds. “We’re in the middle of a massive audit at the moment. Soon as it’s done, I’ll get the next available flight back. Can you take care of things your end?”

“You mean look after her?”

“I guess.”

“Sure,” I said. Shit, I thought. Once we’d exhausted conversation, Monica was bound to ask questions about me. I didn’t fancy taking a trip into the darkness of my past.

“Luke, do you know about something hidden under the floorboards in the attic?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, nothing, I probably got the wrong end of what she was saying.”

I signed off, ate supper, and felt unaccountably chewed up. On the verge of collapsing in front of the TV, my thoughts swivelled to Georgia and her revelation about Otto Vellender. Why would a father row with his daughter when she was so ill? Had Otto got wind of Paris Vellender’s accusation? Was he denying it, putting the record straight, or what?

I ploughed through a programme on property and another on a food show featuring a trio of international judges with a keen script of one-liners. About to flick to the news, my mobile phone rang. I leant across, scooped it up, and clocked the number with a fresh flood of unease.

“Hello, Troy.”

“Sorry I haven’t been able to get in touch. Things have been …” He paused. “Difficult.” I listened hard. Background noise suggested that Troy was outside, in traffic, walking down a busy street. “I told you Paris is lying.”

I didn’t respond.

“He’s far from dead, or even disappeared,” he insisted.

“Nicholas?”

“She’s protecting him.”

“From what?”

“Depends who you believe.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Paris says Otto is to blame.”

“For driving his son away?”

“Worse, she reckons that Otto posed a serious threat.”

I thought of my father, my mother’s claim. “To Nicholas?”

“Right.”

“You mean to his life?”

“That’s what I figure.”

I wasn’t interested in what Troy figured. I needed facts, the same as I needed them to back up my mother’s story. “What does Otto say?”

“Believe it or not, he’s not high on my talk list.”

Smart-mouth. “All right,” I said slowly. “Are you saying that Paris is actively in touch with her son?”

“You bet.”

“How do you know?”

“I caught a text on her phone.”

“Caught?”

“Read. It was definitely from Nicholas.”

Why was Troy snooping? What was it to him? “What did it say?”

He paused. “That they needed to meet up.”

“Why the elaborate deception? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Like I said, Paris believes her son is in danger.”

I glanced down, felt a sly shadow crawl across my feet. Tired, strung-out, my concentration wandered.

“Thing is,” Troy said, ebullient now. “I believe Nicholas is right here in Cheltenham.”

I snapped back to attention. Why remain in a place where you could be discovered? Answer: the best place to hide is right under the nose of those you are trying to escape. Recently, wasn’t a hard-core terrorist found hanging out two streets away from his childhood home? And if Paris Vellender were protecting her son, as Troy inferred, it made sense for her to keep him close.

“Son-of-a-bitch,” Troy said. “Paris is calling me on my other phone.” I’d never got my head around two-phone syndrome. Unless you were running an empire, having an affair, or engaged in criminality, it seemed like an expensive waste of money and energy. “I’m going to send you something,” he said, speeding up and keen to wrap up our conversation.

I didn’t care for the sound of that. “Why are you involving me?”

“Because you care. I recognised it the moment we met.”

“I cared about Mimi. Now she’s gone—”

“It’s a newspaper article,” Troy cut across.

“I’ve already checked it,” I began, but Troy had hung up.

I sat still for many minutes running through the conversation. If what Troy said was true, Nicholas Vellender had deliberately missed Christmases and birthdays and other important occasions to lead a life of lies. Effectively, he was playing dead. I couldn’t help but wonder why Troy had latched on to me when Georgia was a more obvious choice. Again, what was in it for him?

I switched off the TV, washed and changed into my dressing gown, and hung around. The link to the article came through on my phone five minutes later and it wasn’t what I was expecting.

Sixteen-Year-Old Receives Six-Figure Sum for Publishing Deal. Surprised, I read on, scanning the whole five-paragraph puff-up. As a result of Nicholas Vellender posting sections of his fantasy novel online, he’d attracted such a massive global audience that publishers had contacted him, offering a three-book deal with a six-figure price tag. I knew nothing about the publishing industry other than what I’d heard anecdotally. It boiled down to a writer standing more chance of winning EuroMillions than securing a chance of mainstream publication. So what had happened with that? Had Vellender’s work sunk without trace? I switched to Amazon to check and found three books listed with moody covers involving blood, masks, and sensationalist titles. Reviews were mostly impressive apart from the odd vicious one-star offering, which was standard fare for anyone raising their head above the artistic parapet. Similar occurred in academic circles. Judging by release dates, it seemed that Nicholas’s embryonic career had vanished without trace in much the same way as the writer. Unsurprisingly, a later headline read Fantasy Writer Vanishes followed by an article suggesting that Nicholas had not lived up to his early promise. Had he crashed and burned?

If Troy’s belief that Nicholas had voluntarily gone into hiding and lived locally were correct, how had Otto failed to notice or even run into his son? Cheltenham was not a particularly big town. Yes, there were enclaves, but it seemed inconceivable to me that in almost five years their paths had never crossed, or that someone, a friend, hadn’t run into Nicholas. I wondered how that had come about. I wondered if it were even true.