‘If you’re not back in thirty minutes, we’re coming to get you,’ Joyce said.
‘She’s not dangerous.’
‘Isn’t she?’ Val looked mulish and I couldn’t help laughing as I made my way down the hall to Helen’s room.
I knocked but I didn’t bother to wait for an answer, I just opened the door and went inside. Helen was sitting in her armchair, Elsie’s book on her lap. She looked up with a start as I went in and shut the book with a thud. She looked guilty, I thought. Guilty and upset.
‘Did you take the book from the staffroom?’ I said, remembering how I’d stashed it in there for safekeeping.
Helen looked cross. ‘Yes, I did.’ She stared straight at me. ‘So what?’
‘Were you going to return it?’
‘No.’ She was defiant, but I didn’t know why.
‘Are you Harry Yates’s daughter?’
She breathed in sharply as though she’d not been expecting the question. Then she nodded. ‘Harry was my dad.’
‘So what do you want with Elsie’s book?’
‘I want to destroy it.’
Shocked, I lunged towards her intending to grab the book, but she predicted what I was going to do and pulled it away from me.
‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘Or I’ll pull my alarm cord and Blessing will come.’
‘You can’t destroy the book – it’s a piece of history. Why would you want to do something like that?’
She gave me a little sad smile. ‘Because it was the last thing my mother asked me to do before she died. She made me promise.’
‘Who’s your mother?’ I asked, though really I already knew.
‘Her name was Elsie Watson. Though of course she became Yates when she and my father got married.’
‘But you’re Helen Byrne? Are you married?’
‘I was for a while. I kept the name, ditched the husband.’
I sat down in the armchair next to her with a heavy sigh. ‘I think you’d better tell me everything.’
Helen nodded. ‘I think you know most of it.’
‘At the moment I feel like I know nothing. Can you start from the beginning?’
Helen got up and went to her bookshelf where she found a photograph album. She came back and opened it on her lap at a faded black-and-white photograph. I recognised the woman immediately as Elsie. She was holding a baby wearing a knitted cap and she looked happy.
‘That’s Elsie,’ I said. ‘Your mum. She was so young.’
‘She was only in her early twenties when I was born,’ Helen said. She flipped the pages and opened the album at the back, showing me a photograph of a small, elderly woman – Elsie again. She was sitting on a chair, wearing a party hat and she was surrounded by people, all smiling. I spotted Helen in the picture, standing just behind her mother, her hand on her shoulder.
‘This was at her ninety-fifth birthday,’ Helen said, her eyes shining. ‘She lived to be ninety-seven.’
‘Crikey.’ I looked at her. ‘You’ve got good genes. I thought you were too sprightly to be at Tall Trees.’
Helen gave me a little sideways glance but she didn’t argue.
‘My mother lived in Dublin for more than seventy years, but she always considered herself to be a Londoner and she kept up with news from home. She loved the internet. She used to readtheSouth London Echoonline. She was better with technology than I am.’
