Leonie calls me early on a Saturday morning. “You’re still asleep?” She sounds incredulous.
“No, just pressed snooze on my alarm.” I sit up and swing out of bed.
“It’s nearly seven. I thought you’d have been up for ages.”
“The sun doesn’t shine into my bedroom the way it did before.”And some mornings it’s a struggle to find good reasons to get out of bed at all.I keep that last thought to myself.
“How are you?” she asks.
“Busy.” I pad barefoot into the kitchen and start filling the kettle. The narrow window above the sink shows the leaves beginning to turn. It’s October tomorrow.
“I have bad news, I’m afraid,” Leonie says.
Osian?
Water forgotten, it overflows the kettle and cascades over my hand and all over the sink. “Is it…?”
“Yes.” Her voice scares me; I’ve never heard her sound like this. “But not only him. All of us. You, too. Oh my God, Evie.”
The anxiety spills from her words just like the water splashing all over my sink and counter. I turn off the tap and leave the kettle on the side.
“What? Tell me.”
“We might lose everything.” She sounds utterly miserable.
“It started last week. Some men turned up, a couple of them with cameras, and they went around interviewing us and taking pictures of everything. We thought it must be some publicity that Evan had organised. One man came into the café and started asking me how long I’d been open and how much money I made in a week.”
My heart rate has slowed down a bit; this is not the kind of bad news I’d feared.
“Why?” I ask, going back to refill the kettle and switch it on.
“Alex was in here with the professor – you know how they use The Orange Tree as their office. Anyway, Alex came over and challenged the men. ‘Who are you and why are you asking all these questions?’ Which was when the guy said that he was the real owner of the property.”
“The property? Meaning Kendric House?”
“No,” she groans. “He didn’t mean Kendric House. He meant all of Kendric Park. Everything, including all the land.” Then she asks, “Evie, how much do you know about Evan’s ownership of Kendric Park?”
I cast my mind back to the maps that showed Darling Wood and the riverbank, all the way to the disused mine. “When he first showed me the house, I remember him telling me he’d inherited it.”
“No, he didn’t. It was meant to go to his older brother, Owen Kendric. He wasn’t interested in the restoration because the house was in a terrible state.”
My memory takes me back to the wall of photographs in Evan’s office. Pictures showing Kendric House before the restoration. “It was a dilapidated building with smashed windows, animal droppings a foot deep, horrible grime over everything. Wasn’t it?”
Leonie says, “Yes, that’s why Owen decided to sell it to some—”
“Some property developers,” I say, completing the sentence. “Yes, I remember Evan said they’d have knocked it down to build hotels or factories. It was on my first day after we had lunch in your café and he took me through the west wing to show me my apartment. We talked about it because what a shame to lose all those historic features.” I spoon coffee into a mug.
“That’s why Evan couldn’t bear to have it torn down. He agreed to a swap. The estate here was valued at just under two million because it was in such bad shape. He gave up his share of the big family house in London’s Belgravia, valued at nearly five mil, in return for Kendric Park and no cash.”
“So what’s the problem?” I stir boiling water into my coffee and go to sit at my small kitchen table. “It sounds as if his brother got the better deal.”
“The problem is Owen has seen all the publicity about the house and gardens. You know Amani and Ricky have been flooding the internet with stuff about the mosaics and the murals and bigging up everything. It’s not her fault – Amani thought she was helping with publicity. But as a result, Owensays Evan misled him about the true value of Kendric House and that it’s a goldmine now that we’re open to the public.”
“Nothisgoldmine.” I can’t believe this. “The valueweadded? That’s not part of any inheritance.” My voice rises with anger. “He can’t expect to profit from our own hard work. What does Evan say to all this?”
“He was incandescent. We all heard him shouting. ‘This is my house’,” she says, putting on a deeper voice and mimicking Evan’s public-school accent. “‘You have no permission to parachute in with surveyors. I’ll have you arrested for trespass.’”
The thought occurs to me that this sounds a bit like shutting the barn door after the horses have bolted.
