The image of Blair with her hand on her stomach is burned into my retinas. The only words I’ve exchanged with her since have been business like, courteous. Ben and I haven’t spoken about it, or about Blair. The distance between us is great and I don’t know if we can survive what’s happened and what we don’t know.
My father’s study is as you would expect: leather chesterfield sofas and furniture that all has a history. I don’t bother with the desk, he isn’t that obvious. There’s an old fashioned bureau at one end of the room, tucked away behind a huge chair that I only ever remember my grandfather sitting on.
The bureau’s locked, a small hole for a key empty, but given I learned lock picking better than my times tables when I was nine, it takes me all of about thirty seconds to have it open.
The bureau has a tilted top that folds down to make a desk and three drawers underneath. I search round, pulling out old letters from decades ago, a school report that was my father’s, photos of him and his wife. It’s disorderly and clearly where he’s just stuffed crap that he doesn’t want out on view.
There’s nothing that ties him to anyone who’s worked for the Scottish monarchy and I feel my energy being stolen by the lack of anything to go off. I need proof; something to give us a push in the right direction so we can be free of this demon that won’t leave us. So we can make Blair safe.
So we can ask the questions that we’re all thinking.
I stand up, stretch. Debate leaving or searching the rest of the house but I don’t think there are many places to look. I can easily get into the locked drawers of my father’s desk but it’s too ordered in there and he wouldn’t keep something that could tie him to a potential disaster. It would be something he kept because it would hold sentimental value.
It’s then I remember what I learned about furniture from the turn of the nineteenth century. People hid things. Furniture was designed to hold its owner’s secrets.
I pull out the bottom drawer again and realise it’s a shade too short to actually fit flush against the back, which meant there was a false back.
The chair is kicked away by my feet and I lie on my belly, using my phone as a torch to see the back of the bureau. A wiggle of wood and a splinter later and I have a handful of photographs. Polaroids.
Hidden because not only do they provide evidence for my father’s wife to handsomely divorce him, they tell me exactly who has been sharing information with my father so he could pass it on, for a price. For the crown.
I take one picture, fold it, and tuck it into my back pocket. Then I start to replace them, stuffing them at the back of the hidden compartment, putting back the wood and then the drawer. The boy in me checks the bureau out one last time because I doubt I’ll be back here and I like furniture, like its stories.
That’s when I lose my awareness of what’s around me.
That’s why I don’t see anything coming.
It just turns to black.
Chapter 19
The study is in disarray when I come to. A siren blares outside and there are voices that are too loud, too invasive.
My head hurts and as soon as I sit up, I vomit over my father’s Persian rug.
“You have a concussion. Don’t try to stand up.”
There’s no way I’ll be standing up any time soon.
“I’m Rose and I’m a paramedic. Can you tell me your name?” She sounds firm and focused which feel a bit of a relief.
“Isaac Everleigh.”
“I’d ask you the name of the Prime Minister but that’s probably a stupid question.”
I manage to laugh, followed by more vomit, this time into a paper bowl.
“Do you know what happened?”
My head pounds, the light is too bright but I can remember everything. I reach a hand into my back pocket and find the picture still there so I know I haven’t dreamed everything or forgotten what’s happened.
I just need a story.
“I came to check on my father’s house while he’s away. I knew there had been some break ins in the area and I was nearby. A light was on,” I paused to be sick again. “So I used a spare key to get in.” I could just about get away with the lie. There was a key safe at the front, hidden in bushes and I knew the cameras around the house were off. “I came in here and I don’t remember anything else.”
It will have to do.
“Okay.” It’s another voice.
