Gabi got to her feet and pulled Anna’s arm to help her sit up. ‘Which is?’
Anna looked around at the clothes strewn everywhere and the piles of black sacks around the room. ‘Like you said, this is a job one needs to be “present” for. I vote we leave this for now and open a bottle of something cold, crisp and alcoholic.’
‘Nowthatis a plan I can support,’ Gabi replied.
Chapter Forty-Nine
ANNA WAS WAITING for the lift in the multi-storey car park. Now it was November, the shopping centre was open until nine most nights for Christmas shopping. With her trip to Canada looming, Anna had decided to get a head start. While she was watching the numbers on the display above the lift door count down, her phone rang. She grabbed it out of her handbag but dropped it immediately when she saw the caller ID.
Oh, hell! It seemed to have gotten buried under everything else. She rummaged around in her bag, silently praying it wouldn’t go to voicemail before she could get to it. Finally, her stiff and uncooperative fingers grasped it. She pulled it up to her ear. ‘Brody?’ she said breathlessly.
‘Anna.’ He sounded… different. Not good. ‘We need to talk.’
‘I know,’ she said, just as the lift pinged and the doors opened in front of her. She’d known they needed to talk for one week and six days now; she was just very glad that Gabi had been right and he’d come around to realizing that on his own.
She squeezed into the lift, which was already filled with people with bulky shopping bags. ‘Brody… Are you okay?’
The lift doors slid closed. Brody said something, but it sounded a bit like he was speaking underwater,and the signal kept cutting out. Damn lift!
‘I can’t hear you,’ she tried to say clearly but without actually shouting, because it suddenly seemed as if all ears in the confined space were trained on her conversation.
His reply was just garbled rubbish.
‘Don’t… Just don’t go anywhere. Okay?’ she said more loudly, not caring now who was listening. Let them have their show. ‘I’ll call you back in a minute, I promise. Just please, please pick up when I do.’
She started dialling Brody’s number the moment the lift doors opened. Seconds later, she was striding across the car park, phone pressed to her ear as it continued to ring. What was taking him so long? He must have had the phone in his hand when he’d called her, and she’d hung up less than a minute ago.
It seemed to take an age, but finally she reached her car, unlocked it and slid into the driving seat. She slammed the door closed with her free hand, cutting off the noise of other vehicles and the whirring fans of the air-conditioning units of the shops below the car park. She was staring ahead at a concrete post when he finally answered.
‘I’m going to tell you about a day in my life from just over nine years ago,’ he began. ‘I know you’re going to have questions, Anna – you always do – but I’d really appreciate it if you just let me get through it before you ask anything.’
‘Okay,’ Anna replied quietly. She became aware of her pulse drumming rhythmically. This was serious. Really serious. Beyond the concrete pillar, the sky was dark and impenetrable.
Brody exhaled. ‘That day, I travelled with my ex-wife,Katri – she’s Finnish – to my parents’ house in the Lake District. They’d moved there about five years before. We were living in London at the time, in Richmond…’
Not a million miles from here,Anna thought. It was strange to think of Brody living less than twenty miles away at some point in the past, unreal almost.
‘It was a long drive, made worse by an accident on the M6, and it took us about seven hours to get there.’ He paused for a moment, as if readying himself. ‘Our two-year-old daughter, Lena, was in the car with us.’
Brody had a daughter?
Anna’s mind reeled. How had she been talking to him all this time without knowing this? But she didn’t have time to ponder that question, because Brody carried on, his tone flat like a newsreader’s.
‘Katri used to get migraines, and all that time stuck in traffic had set one off, so she went to have a lie-down as soon as we arrived at my parents’ house. They lived in a tiny hamlet, not quite as remote as where I am now, but almost. They’ve sold the house since, but one of the reasons they bought it was that it had a beautiful garden enclosed with dry-stone walls. At the back of the house there was a patio, and then a lawn that sloped gently down to a large pond, maybe thirty feet across. It was beautiful that day,’ he added wistfully, ‘full of spring colour.’
He painted the picture so skilfully that Anna could see it in her head: the climbing roses, the neatly clipped grass, the bright, fresh leaves on the trees.
‘Mum put the kettle on, as she always did when we arrived, and she suggested that after being cooped up in the car we went and sat outside and got some fresh air.I took Lena out there, and I sat at one of the large benches that flanked the oak patio table. She started off on my lap, but it wasn’t long before she was wriggling. There was a ladybird on the back of the chair at the end of the table and she got up to investigate.’ He paused for a moment. Anna could sense him revisiting that memory, letting it play in his head.
‘She was fascinated. She put her face right up to it and watched it crawl around. Poor thing only just managed to fly away before she tried to pick it up. Once it was gone, she skipped around the table, singing to herself. She used to do that all the time, just making up the words as she went along. It was the most beautiful and honest creative expression I’d ever heard. And it made me think about Pip, the main character in my novels, and how she’d lost that same kind of innocence and innate joy, how she’d had to grow up fast and leave her childhood behind.
‘I was about to start the last book in the series at that point, but I was stuck, struggling with her character development – what sort of person she’d end up being at the end of her journey. And listening to Lena sing about the “ladybud” that had flown away, I knew that I couldn’t leave her so fiercely independent, almost adult in her thinking. I realized I had to return her to some of that joyful childishness she’d lost. She needed to be just a girl again. She needed to have fun.
‘I was lost in thought, just staring out over the garden, when I suddenly realized the singing had stopped. I couldn’t hear Lena anymore.’
Brody paused then, and Anna could hear him dragging in a few ragged breaths, but she kept her promise. She let him talk.
‘I stood up and looked around, expecting to see her bending over a flower or grinning at me from under the table, but she was nowhere. I called her name, started to walk down the lawn, looking for a flash of her red T-shirt, which should have stood out wonderfully against all that green, but I couldn’t see anything but flowers and grass and shrubs.’ His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘And the pond…’
