Hayley jumped as her phone began to trill, prompting a death stare from Angel.
‘Wait right here; I’ll find a place I can talk. Don’t move,’ she ordered, rushing to the door they had just walked through.
‘Hello? Yes, this is Hayley Walker… oh hello Sally-Anne, how did you get on? Can they do what I want with the lights?’
When Hayley returned to the reading room, Angel was sat at a table, a giant book open in front of her.
‘Is that a really big bible?’ Hayley joked, pulling up the chair next to her.
‘Actually it’s an encyclopaedia.’
‘This is what we used to use before we had Wikipedia,’ Hayley informed. ‘Does it have “aardvark” and “anteater” with pictures?’
Angel looked up. ‘Did you never get past the “A” section?’
‘“Bison” and “buffalo”. See if they have two separate entries for what’s basically the same thing.’
‘Who was on the phone?’ Angel asked, turning a page.
‘Sally-Anne from the lighting company. It’s a go for that effect I wanted.’
‘The oneIsuggested, you mean.’
‘OK, clever clogs, it was all your initial idea but I followed it through.’
‘And is the menu all done? You know, the ideaIhad about including food the family members loved?’ Angel batted her eyelashes at her.
Hayley folded her arms across her chest. ‘Icame up with the slogan.’
Angel patted her arm. ‘So how much else have you got to do?’
‘Not as much as I had to do yesterday.’
‘That’s good then,’ Angel responded. ‘So apart from Nanny being mad with you, everything is fine.’
‘How do you know Nanny’s mad with me?’ She coughed. ‘Not that she is or anything.’
‘Uncle Dean got a text this morning. It said something about a lifeguard and how could he have kept secrets about you from her.’
Oh God. Daytime television had definitely been sacrificed for diary reading.
‘She isn’t happy about us looking for my dad, is she?’ Angel stated. ‘I saw the other message she sent you. She called him “that man” again.’
Hayley closed her eyes, taking a second before opening them again. ‘I’ve never really listened to what Nanny had to say about most things.’ She sighed. ‘And about your dad… she’s wrong.’
The details about Michel were in her rucksack. She could pull them out now and tell Angel he’d been found. But she knew what would happen. Dancing would ensue, eyes brightening like a neon bar sign, mouth opening in wonder as if she was Dorothy inThe Wizard of Ozdiscovering the Yellow Brick Road. She had to play this carefully and protect Angel. Above all, she needed to tell Michel he had a daughter before they came face to face. A shiver ran over her.
‘Nanny’s met a man called Neville,’ Angel informed her matter-of-factly. ‘He plays bowls.’
‘What?’ Hayley shook her head, trying to get her mind back in the moment.
‘She told Uncle Dean that before she started getting mad about a lifeguard.’ Angel’s voice echoed around the cavernous room.
Dean was going to kill her for writing about the lifeguard. ‘Shh!’ Hayley said. ‘We don’t want to be chucked out of the library. They probably inform that scary man at the desk at the airport and he has our fingerprints.’
‘Did you know that the fingerprinting system for criminals was introduced in New York in 1906?’
‘I didn’t know that.’ She swallowed. Who was Neville? She knew she didn’t listen to everything her mother said but mention of bowls and a man would have spiked her radar. ‘So, anyway… about your dad.’ She cleared her throat as quietly as she could. ‘Nanny only says things like that because she worries about us.’
