Legacy Of Secrets
CRIME SHORT STORY BY GABRIELLE MULLARKEY
Rose’s client is not the only one seeking the truth about his biological mother . . .
Rose Cullen sat in her office, tapping pen on pad as she surveyed the list she’d made.
Things to be grateful for: My own teeth, no health issues, Dad is keeping well.
It was a bit sparse, admittedly.
She flicked over the page to where she’d written: Things to sort out, listing: Bills to pay, insecure job, prospect of dying alone.
She didn’t linger on that page, since most of it fell under the remit of needing to make more money.
Sighing, Rose swivelled in her chair to admire what she could see of the summer’s day beyond her grimy office window.
Truth be told, it was rather stuffy here in high summer – not just her office, but the whole building.
She flicked on her oscillating desk fan and put a striped pebble on her files to stop the top one blowing away.
For lunch, she prodded a Tupperware box full of uninspiring greenery.
Through her office wall she could just about hear the murmur of conversation as acupuncturist Hattie eased the muscle tensions of another client.
Rose chewed gloomily.
Hattie never seemed to be short of clients.
Maybe Rose should have gone into that profession instead of investing her life savings in a private investigation business.
It was the sort of business you “fell into”, her predecessor had claimed.
After 10 years as a PI, Alison Warner had been ready to spread her wings and hand over to someone younger.
Rose, at a loose end after being made redundant at a call centre, had leapt at the chance to be her own boss.
She’d taken a relevant course in investigation skills, applied for her licence and, six months later, here she was.
Alone in her tiny, top-floor office, she glanced around furtively before closing the lid on her Tupperware box and opening a desk drawer.
She drew out a cardboard box, flipped up the lid and extracted an éclair, which was when she heard a knock on the door.
Quickly returning éclair to drawer, she straightened up in her chair and called, “Come in!”
Her office door opened.
“Hello,” a tall man in a dark suit standing uncertainly on the threshold called. “Are you Rose Cullen, private investigator?”
“As advertised on the door.” She smiled patiently. “Please come in and sit down.”
He shut the door and approached, while she took the opportunity to give him the once-over.
He was tall, well dressed and, she surmised, at least fifty.
He wore a look of nervous excitement and highly polished shoes.
His fingernails practically sparkled.
According to Rose’s late mum, you could always trust a man with polished shoes and manicured nails, but Rose wasn’t convinced.
Her prospective new client also had sad, puppy-dog brown eyes.
Oh – and a definite Australian accent.
He sank into the chair opposite her desk.
“I need you to trace somebody,” he said abruptly.
She switched off the noisy desk fan and pulled her pink notepad towards her.
“I’d be happy to help. Let’s start with the basics. Your name?”
“Leo. Leo Foster.” He glanced around. “Positively Dickensian, this building.”
“It’s reflected in the peppercorn rent.”
He eased his finger around the collar of his white shirt.
“Has that window ever been opened?”
“Not to my knowledge,” Rose replied. “Sorry, I would turn on the fan but then we’d have to shout over its racket.”
Rose bided her time and waited, accustomed to new clients skirting around the issue.
Most of them found the very idea of visiting a PI outlandish.
“It’s complicated.” He sighed.
“Isn’t it always?” She smiled encouragingly. “Try me. I’m all ears.”
After Leo Foster had left, Rose read over her notes, carried out some essential admin and locked her office for the day.
She met Hattie on the landing.
They each had a set of keys and were the last to leave the building each day.
They were the only two self-employed businesses on the top floor of this rickety building in the centre of Middlethorpe, an outwardly unremarkable Midlands town.
But everywhere was pretty remarkable when you scratched the surface, Rose had found.
Hattie had changed out of her white coat and into a grey silk number.
“Hot date?” Rose asked for the sake of it.
Hattie was smart and beautiful and always had a hot date.
“We’ll see if it’s hot or lukewarm,” Hattie replied, descending the stairwell with Rose and locking the front door.
Rose knew Hattie, who was a good bit younger than her, would be hitting the club scene later that evening in her fruitless quest for Mr Right.
Rose was well out of the dating game.
Hattie claimed the “swipe right” culture created a level playing field between the sexes, but Rose was unconvinced, probably because she still missed Barry, her ex.
Back in the day, she and Barry had been joined at the rather flabby hip, lounging on a roomy sofa with bags of chips, giggling at couples who puffed past the flat in matching Lycra.
Until one of Barry’s work colleagues had made a comment about his love handles and he’d joined a gym.
That was fair enough, but he’d expected Rose to join, too, and become very disapproving of carbs and sugar.
No more midnight snacking or toasted cheese in bed with the crusts cut off.
And, eventually, no more Barry.
He’d fallen in love with Glenda at the gym, and much good it had done him.
Glenda had moved on quickly from Barry, and now Barry had started texting Rose again – testing the water, as she saw it.
He had updated her on his “terrible mistake” in thinking Glenda was “The One” and tentatively suggested that he and Rose meet for coffee whenever she felt like it.
So far, she hadn’t felt like it at all.
Having said goodbye to Hattie in the high street, Rose caught the bus home and let herself into her one-bedroom flat.
She put a casserole on a low heat and sat down to go over the details of Leo Foster’s search for a missing person – his natural mother.
Leo had asked Rose to find his birth mother.
“This has come as a huge shock to me,” he’d revealed. “But when my mother – the woman I’ve always thought of as my mother – fell ill a few months ago, she started opening up to me.
“My dad died three years ago. Mum was in a care home towards the end and I visited every day.
“Some days she was confused on her meds, but one morning she took my hand and told me I was adopted.”
He paused, clearly reliving the moment.
“I pressed for more details, but her confusion kicked in, or else she regretted the indiscretion, because she promptly shut up shop.
“Then, as I sat at her bedside just before she slipped away, she said, ‘Look for the three diamonds. In England’.”
At this point, Leo fell silent, Rose scribbling avidly in her notebook.
“I didn’t get any more than that.” He sighed. “For the past few weeks I’ve been up to my eyes tying up her affairs and grieving as best I can.
“My ex-wife stepped in to help, for which I’m grateful.” Here, Leo’s face darkened. “That was when I got to thinking that it stood to reason that the answer to my true identity must lie in England.
“I was born in 1974 and my adoptive parents emigrated from here as a young couple with me as a newborn baby.”
“So I came over to England as soon as I could, finding a reason to spend a few weeks here for work. My own two children are nearly grown-up, Ms Cullen.
“Ultimately, I want to know the truth of where I came from for them, as much as myself,” he explained. “So here I am, knocking on your door, asking for help.”
“Why have you come to a PI, may I ask?” Rose enquired.
“I thought an intermediary looking into it would be less emotionally bruising.”
She nodded.
“Why didn’t you try one of the bigger operations?” she asked him.
“I want the personal touch from a one-man – woman – band,” he explained.
He was good for the money, he added, asking her to quote her retainer.
“I have to take the assignment first,” she pointed out. “Your mother’s last words aren’t a great deal to go on. Plus, you mentioned confusion . . .”
“But she told me both those snippets of info in her lucid windows,” he said. “I’m sure of it. I’d come to know how to spot the difference.”
“The three diamonds,” Rose mused, prepared to take him at his word. “Could that be a piece of jewellery?
“Maybe your natural mother is an aristocrat who wears a tiara containing three diamonds?”
He smiled wryly.
“I’ve racked my own brains to consider the possible origin of that phrase. Because she mentioned England, I’ve wondered if it was her name for a constellation in the night sky.
“Mum grew up in Essex. Orion’s Belt consists of three bright stars in a line.
“My thinking is that she might have been referring to the location where she used to view Orion’s Belt from when she was growing up?”
Rose mulled over this now as she picked at her casserole and read her notes.
His parents, Maddy and Steve Foster, hadn’t been ten-pound poms, but had sailed to Australia as twenty-somethings with “their” baby.
It now seemed clear – both to her and to Leo – that they must have left English shores with someone else’s babe in their arms.
She sat back, rubbing her eyes tiredly.
Having accepted such an intriguing and emotional case, she now wondered if she’d bitten off more than she could chew.
From what he’d already told her, there was no formal record of adoption.
All they had to go on with were the names Madeleine and Stephen Foster and any other background info Leo had been able to give.
While Maddy had come from a small village on the Essex marshes, Steve had come from all over the place, having left home at sixteen and moved around the country working on building sites.
Eventually he’d encountered Maddy in the café where she’d worked, in the village of Fry’s Hollow.
This was the story of how they’d met that they’d passed on to Leo.
Rose sipped a glass of wine, brooding.
Was it possible that Steve might be Leo’s natural father, perhaps asked to take responsibility for his baby son by the angry father of a teenage mother?
If so, that could have happened at any one of the numerous locations where Steve had worked between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two, before he met Maddy.
And if that were the case, “adopted” would be a relative term, meaning that Maddy had taken in a child she knew wasn’t hers.
It was a conundrum and, for now, Rose needed to rest and let the possibilities take root and germinate.
Tomorrow was another day.
As she got up to go to the sink, she noticed one of the kitchen cupboard doors hanging askew.
She had a sudden flashback to Barry wielding a hammer with more optimism than competence, saying, “I’ll try anything once.”
Other things he’d tried once were probiotic yogurt, wearing a mankini to a stag do and staying by her side.
The following morning found her back in her office, sitting in front of her computer and scrolling through all the links yielded by typing “the three diamonds” into her browser.
Well, there were any number of leads.
Those three words could mean anything from a Tamil folk tale to a breathing technique in reiki.
It was all too easy to vanish down numerous exploratory rabbit holes.
Meanwhile, Leo – who’d come to England “on secondment” in his job – was working about 60 miles away, on probable tenterhooks for an update and immediate results.
She tapped her keyboard and opened another tab at the top of the screen.
Here was something of interest, though.
It was a trio of lounge singers from back in the early 1970s, called the Diamond Dazzlers.
They were three young women sporting glittery make-up and matching hotpants.
She clicked next on a link to a 1972 article about a London nightclub.
The article included photos of various acts posing with the nightclub manager.
Under a photo of the Diamond Dazzlers, Rose read a caption that made her sit up.
It said: A few months after this photo was taken, the founding member of the Dazzlers went on to form a new touring trio, the Three Diamonds, until the troupe hung up their mics for good in 1973.
That piqued Rose’s interest because a trio of touring singers might have crossed paths with Steve Foster.
Annoyingly, however, in all the online links she found, mentions of the Diamond Dazzlers and then the Three Diamonds only referred to the trio by their stage names – Glitter, Sparkle and Gem.
She dug deeper online and then caught her breath.
A Suffolk newspaper in 1973 contained a small news story – Diamonds Sparkle For The Last Time.
The Three Diamonds had had a brief shelf life, performing their final set
at the Pier Ballroom in Castor-on-Sea, Suffolk, August 1973.
There was a photo of them being presented on stage with a huge bouquet of pinks and lilies, the singer in the centre practically hidden by the blooms.
Then Rose did a double-take.
Was the woman hiding behind the flowers reluctant to be photographed?
The other two had no such qualms, beaming into the camera lens.
Again, no actual names were given, but Leo Foster had shared with Rose a few select photos of Maddy, ranging from when she was a young woman to her recent old age.
Rose looked up Leo’s photos on her phone and then looked back at the two women smiling into the camera.
Because they were wearing so much make-up and hair lacquer, she couldn’t be certain that either of the two was Maddy.
Rose bit her lip. So close and yet so far.
It might be a long shot, but if she had to guess, she’d bet that the camera-shy woman in the centre was the founding member of the original group.
Then again, it might be a massive red herring.
Maddy Foster might have seen the women perform before she and husband Steve left for Australia with their new baby.
That memory might be the last thing she recalled of her old life.
What were her exact words to Leo just before she died?
“Look for the three diamonds. In England.” It was hardly a smoking gun.
Still, Rose could start where the Three Diamonds had finished up – in
Castor-on-Sea, Suffolk.
Her caseload was otherwise wafer thin and she wouldn’t learn a lot by sitting here.
Rose got out of the car a few hours later, inhaling sea air.
The shoreline stretched out beside her along the Suffolk coastline, sparkling with its own diamond points of light.
The beach itself, darkly sandy, was dotted with striped beach umbrellas and several games of Frisbee were underway.
She headed for the town’s wooden pier and the Pier Ballroom where the Three Diamonds had made their final appearance.
She had read online that the ballroom was boarded up now, pending redevelopment, but she hoped to meet a local who might recall a useful nugget of information.
The pier was a gently shabby Victorian structure.
Rose walked a full circuit, passing several businesses, including a café and a dog grooming salon.
She spent a long moment gazing at the silent, peeling ballroom, its high windows covered in wooden slats.
Sad and desolate now, it must have been some venue in its heyday.
As she leaned against the side of the pier to watch two seagulls squabbling over a dropped ice-cream cone, her mobile phone warbled.
She looked at the number, sighed and answered.
“Hello, Dad.”
“That Barry’s rung here the odd time looking for you,” her dad Kevin told her straight off.
Rose prickled with annoyance.
“He’s no business doing that! He has my mobile number and knows where I live!”
“That’s my point.” Kevin snorted. “He wasn’t really looking for you. I reckon he was hoping I’d put in a good word for him with you.”
Rose bristled even more, turning fully into the sea air and staring across the waves.
“Oh, and Mrs Onjuti next door was asking after you,” Kevin added.
“Was she?”
Rose was glad that only the seagulls were around to witness her rolled eyes and facial grimaces.
Mrs Onjuti, her dad’s next-door neighbour, was a lovely person but took far too much interest in Rose’s love life, claiming to be doing so on behalf of Rose’s late mum.
She and Mrs Onjuti had been best friends.
“Last time I saw Mrs O,” Rose began, “she more or less told me I was a fool for letting Barry get away, as she put it.
“Next time you see her, just tell her I’m doing fine.”
Ending the call, Rose resumed her walk around the pier, regaining a sense of her bearings and the purpose of her quest.
Returning to her starting point, she walked by a busy amusement arcade and cast a second glance at a small shop stocked with buckets and spades and inflatables.
The red lettering over the front spelled out Sammy’s Seaside Essentials.
On impulse she ducked inside.
The shop was cool and dark, with no other customers.
“Be with you in a minute,” a disembodied voice called through a beaded curtain.
As she picked up and examined a ceramic lighthouse, a bloke appeared, pushing his way through the beaded curtain.
Probably in his late sixties, the man flashed a crooked smile through his white beard.
“What can I do you for?”
Rose returned his smile with interest.
“I was just wondering about the ballroom in its heyday. They must have had some great acts.”
“My mum and dad saw Arthur Askey there,” he confirmed.
“What about more recently? The ballroom, I mean. Perhaps you went along yourself, Mr . . . ?”
The man narrowed his gaze at her.
“You a journalist or something? Local historian?”
Rose had nothing to lose.
“I’m a private detective. I’m interested in tracking down a singing trio called the Three Diamonds.”
It worked. The man blushed to his temples and blinked rapidly.
“Never heard of ’em.”
“A pity.” She shrugged. “My client is longing to find his birth mother before it’s too late and thinks that she might be one of the Three Diamonds.”
“When you say before it’s too late,” the man asked uneasily. “He’s not ill or anything?”
“Well, no, but time is getting on. He’s already lost his adoptive parents, Maddy and Steve Foster. Do those names mean anything to you?”
“No,” the man replied tightly. “Nothing at all.”
“Was Maddy one of the Three Diamonds?”
“I told you, I don’t know anthing. Now do you want to buy something or not?”
Rose frowned.
“You did seem to know who the Three Diamonds were when I mentioned them just now,” she pointed out.
“I don’t. I want you to leave.”
Rose had to comply – for now.
“Here’s my card if you do recall anything.”
She laid it on the counter.
He stared at it as if it were radioactive, then shifted his gaze to the floor until she’d left.
She departed without purchasing anything, wandered up and down the seafront and eventually found a café.
Sipping a cappuccino, she googled the shop on her phone but nothing came up.
The waitress who came to clear her table was around the same age as the man in the shop, so Rose asked if she knew him.
“That’s Sammy Taylor.” The waitress nodded, stacking plates. “He used to manage the old building on the pier.”
“The ballroom?” Rose asked quickly.
The waitress nodded again.
“I went to a few dances there back in the day. They’d have travelling bands from all over, Sammy Taylor overseeing it all in his natty tux. But that was a long time ago. Why the interest?”
“I’m researching a group called the Three Diamonds. They played their last gig here in Castor.”
“I wouldn’t know about that.” The waitress shrugged and moved away.
“Wait!” Rose called. “What about a young woman called Maddy or Madeleine? Did she come in here years ago? Maybe she was pregnant?”
The waitress put her hand on her hip.
“Not a lot to go on, is it? This place only opened three years ago. You want a top-up coffee yet?”
Rose shook her head and sat on for another 20 minutes or so, sipping her drink.
Then she had a thought that made her start.
On impulse, she took out her phone and called the number Leo had left with her.
“You’ve found something?” he asked eagerly when he picked up.
“Not yet,” she admitted, still having to raise her voice amid the hubbub. “I was just wondering if you had a middle name?”
“I do. It’s Jake,” he replied.
“Jake?” she echoed. “Interesting.”
He was on to her train of thought immediately.
“You’d expect me to have the middle name ‘Steve’, for example, or even have that as my first name?
“I’ve thought about that as well,” he admitted. “The fact is, either Leo or Jake could be a nod to the name my natural mother gave me, with Maddy and Steve respecting her wishes.
“Or they could both be red herrings.”
“There’s another possibility,” Rose admitted, squinting against the light angling through the café window. “Your natural father might have been called Leo or Jake.
“It’s possible that we could find your mother by finding your father.”
Leo was silent for a moment.
“You could spend a lot of time going down the wrong rabbit hole. And I have to go back to Australia in a few weeks.”
“Hang on,” Rose said, peering through the café window.
Sammy was walking briskly along the seafront, talking rapidly into a phone.
In his free hand, he held a small, blush-coloured square that could only be her business card.
It looked as if he was reading it aloud to whomever was on the other end of the phone.
“I’ll call you back later today,” she told Leo.
Rose followed Sammy as closely as she dared along a winding coastal road for at least 20 miles, always hanging at least two vehicles back to ensure she wasn’t seen.
Eventually, Sammy turned inland, down a plunging side road, then turned right into what seemed like an empty patch of land.
Stopping alongside a nearby high hedge, Rose got out and peered over it.
No sign of Sammy and his car.
She locked her own car and followed furtively on foot.
The apparently empty patch of land seemed to stretch as far as the horizon.
Then it dipped suddenly and spread out into a car park, fronting a Suffolk longhouse with diamond-paned windows and traditional shell-pink walls.
As she drew closer, she saw the house was actually a pub, a creaking sign swinging gently outside saying The Garter.
The pub sign illustration showed a leg encased in a white satin stocking adorned with a purple garter.
Along the garter’s edge twinkled three diamond-shaped jewels.
The car park was mostly empty, but she spotted Sammy’s car tucked in at the far end.
She looked at her watch – 3.30 p.m. in the afternoon. The pub could be open.
Rose hedged her bets and approached.
She walked to the pub door and, finding it unlocked, pushed it open carefully.
Suddenly a heavy hand fell on her arm.
“What do you think you’re doing, following me here?”
Rose realised straight away that the speaker was Sammy.
She’d expected him to be angry, but instead he looked agitated – no, more like flat-out frightened.
And that unnerved her.
“Sammy, let her go!” another voice said, and a woman appeared from behind the bar, wiping her hands on a bar towel.
Rose sucked in her breath.
The woman, who looked to be in her early seventies, had familiar brown eyes with a puppy-dog sadness.
She had to be Leo’s mother.
“You’d better sit down.” The woman shrugged. “Sammy’s already shown me your card. It’s Rose, I believe. Hired by my son to find me.”
Sammy sucked in his breath at the woman’s casual revelation, while Rose sat in the chair the woman indicated.
“And you are one of the Three Diamonds?” she checked.
“Their founder, Callie Houghton.” The woman nodded, ignoring a despairing look from Sammy.
She sat down opposite Rose.
“There’s just me and Sammy here at the moment. Trade’s quiet on a weekday afternoon, even in summer.
“And yes, I recognise the irony of the trio of jewels on the pub sign, although that’s just a coincidence.
“The pub was here long before the Three Diamonds got together.” She finally took a deep breath. “I realise you followed Sammy here, but how did you track me down to begin with?”
“Don’t tell her anything!” Sammy pleaded, but Callie Houghton just sighed.
“The cat’s out of the bag, I think. So how did you find me?”
Rose told her about the photo online showing a woman hidden by an enormous bouquet during the trio’s farewell gig at the Pier Ballroom.
“I could only find your stage names – Glitter, Sparkle and Gem. Which one are you?”
Callie rolled her eyes.
“Glitter, for my sins. Our first manager thought it a nice gimmick.”
“Was Maddy Foster a Diamond, too?” Rose asked.
Callie nodded, eyes suddenly bright with tears.
“She was Gem. How young we were! Young and full of big dreams.”
“What happened?” Rose asked after a moment.
“I fell pregnant,” Callie replied. “That’s why we really wound up the band. We played the whole of August in Castor-on-Sea – a six-week booking.
“I fell in love with a local lad and, well, you can guess the rest.
“I told my boyfriend Jake, and he said he loved me and he’d stand by me and the baby.
“But unbeknown to me, he entered a boxing tournament to win a big cash prize to support me and the baby. There was a terrible accident and he was killed in the ring.”
As Callie wept silently, letting the tears stream down her face, Rose gazed at her, aghast.
“I’m so sorry, Callie. So you gave up your son to Maddy because she was emigrating.”
“The other two girls blamed me for calling time on our act,” the woman said. “What choice did I have once I knew I was expecting?
“At the end of August, the girls went back to their own hometowns, while I stayed on in digs in Castor.
“It was back in Essex that Maddy met her Steve, while she was working shifts in her parents’ caff.
“I kept in touch with both girls for a while, but I always got on better with Maddy.
“Then the worst happened in that boxing match. With Jake gone and the baby on the way, I had to make decisions as a soon-to-be single mother.
“I went home to my dad in Nottingham. He wasn’t best pleased, but he stood by me,” Callie explained. “For a while I thought things might even work out; that I’d be able to keep my baby and build some sort of life.
“But it was a pipe dream.” She clutched her hands in her lap, keeping her gaze downcast.
“When Maddy wrote to tell me that she and Steve were set on emigrating as soon as they wed, I put the idea to her of taking my baby, too, as soon as he or she was born.
“Maddy adored babies, but she’d been worried sick by a tarot card reader she’d visited who’d told her she might never have children.”
“But why such a drastic decision?” Rose cried out without thinking. “You said your dad stood by you. Was there no other way?”
“I can tell you why it happened,” a deep voice boomed out of the gloom.
Rose, Callie and Sammy all turned in unison to greet the figure who’d crept silently into the pub.
Sammy gave a low gasp of pure fear, which made Rose’s spine tingle.
Callie stood up bravely, but Rose could see she was shaking.
“Hal Wheeler,” she said. “I’ve seen your photo in the papers talking about your latest business venture.
“And now you’ve found me.”
The man who stood before them was at least as old as Sammy but tall, bulky, wearing an expensive coat and highly polished shoes.
Oddly, he reminded Rose fleetingly of Leo.
Now he waved a hand at the trio before him.
“This all looks very cosy. Long time, no see, Sammy.
“This is my first time to meet you – Callie, is it?” He turned to Rose last of all. “You I don’t know, but guesswork leads me to suspect some kind of dirt-digger. Am I right?”
Rose, hoping she was hiding the tremor in her hand, stood up and reached slowly into her pocket.
She produced a business card, passing it over to Hal.
He studied it silently, then handed it back.
“You shouldn’t speak so loudly in a public place, Ms Cullen. The café back in Castor-on-Sea, I mean.
“I had a friend report back to me that you were asking about a pregnant girl from long ago, plus someone called Jake.
“You were following Sammy here, but I was able to follow you. Don’t worry. We won’t be disturbed here for the foreseeable.”
Rose deduced from this that Hal had not come alone and had probably posted a lookout outside.
He wanted them to know that.
Who was he?
The man sat down casually in a nearby banquette while the three of them stood before him like naughty schoolchildren.
He exuded a natural air of authority and menace.
“I’ve been looking for you for a long time now, Callie,” he said mildly.
“Little did I know . . .” he added, glancing at Sammy, “. . . that you were this close all the time, with someone from the old days keeping an eye.”
“Hal,” Sammy began anxiously, but the bulkier man held up his hand.
“I only wanted to help you,” he said, “whoever you were, Callie. You had no reason to run away. You were family, after all.”
“No!” Callie cried passionately. “Jake warned me! He said that if you – especially your father – knew about the baby, your family would take him or her away from me.
“And then, when Jake died, I was doubly at risk, I knew that. Your family would want the only connection left to Jake. You’d see my baby as your property!”
Hal’s face had hardened.
“I think you owed us that, Callie. If it hadn’t been for you, my big brother would never have gone in that boxing ring.
“If only he’d come to see me instead, like all the times he had before, his little brother who knew best how to get out of tight scrapes.”
Hal’s face blanched suddenly with grief and Rose realised there was more to him than thuggish intent.
But perhaps that made him even more dangerous.
“You bewitched him, Callie, took him away from his family and then we lost him altogether.”
“He wanted to get away from your family,” Callie said miserably. “Your dad had him collecting protection money from the music and entertainment venues along the coast.
“Sammy knows all about that!” she added, to Sammy’s clear discomfort. “Do you think I’d have fallen in love with Jake if he was anything like the rest of your family?
“He would never have gone near that boxing ring if he felt he could have turned to any of you when I realised my predicament.
“But he knew this was his one chance to get away from you all.
“We were going to make a fresh start.” Callie’s tears fell again, pouring unchecked down her cheeks. “I didn’t know about the boxing tournament, either. He knew I’d have tried to stop him!
“I waited for him in my digs, and when he didn’t come for me the next day like he was supposed to, I went down to the pier to see if he was at the ballroom.
“I ran into Sammy, who told me the terrible news.”
She paused for a moment to catch her breath.
“Once I poured out the truth to Sammy, he gave me what cash he had and told me to get away while I still could.
“The Wheeler family were soon going to put two and two together about why Jake had been trying to make money on the side,” she explained, “so I went back to my dad, who took me in and cared for me as best he could.
“But then he had a stroke and needed help all the time.
“I had to choose what would be best for my son, so I told Maddy the story in a letter and her emigrating to Australia seemed to offer the best way out.”
Callie gave a deep, shuddering breath and sat down in a chair, Hal staring at her with a strange look on his face.
Then he turned to Rose.
“I want to talk to him. I want to talk to my nephew.”
“That’s not up to you or me,” Rose replied. “It’s up to Callie whether or not she even wants to be found.”
Rose turned to Callie, wishing she’d played no part in digging up her traumatic past.
“Just say the word and I’ll be gone, never to be seen again.”
She regretted those words almost at once in case Hal decided to act on them.
There could be no doubt about it – his family must be local mobsters.
Their tentacles reached far enough for Callie to have decided, ultimately, to send her baby across an ocean to escape their influence.
Callie flung up her head at Rose.
“Why has Maddy given up my secret now?”
Rose sighed.
“I’m sorry, Callie, but Maddy died a few months ago. Towards the end, she let a few indiscretions slip while on medication.
“That’s why your son came over here looking for you –”
“He’s here and not in Australia?” Callie cut in.
As Callie gazed at her in consternation, Rose could have kicked herself.
Now Hal Wheeler knew that, too.
“Then what are we waiting for?” He had risen decisively.
“It’s nothing to do with you,” Sammy said angrily to Hal. “The investigator’s right.
“The only one who has any say in what happens next is Callie.”
Callie looked deeply at the floor for a moment, then raised her red-rimmed brown eyes.
“It’s always been about what’s best for my little boy.
“When Maddy took him, I said it had to be a clean break so that my heart could only be broken once, not fractured over and over again.
“But now I think the time has come for healing,” Callie added.
“I still want to see him,” the insufferable Hal said, puffing out his chest. “He needs to know who he really is.”
“You might want to rethink that, Mr Wheeler,” Rose warned him. “I mean, once you know what line of work Callie’s son is in.
“Perhaps he’s not such a chip off the old block after all.”
Rose sat and sipped her cappuccino in a discreet corner of a London café, behind a pot plant.
Peering through the shiny leaves, she could just about see Callie and Leo sitting at their little, white-clothed table as they shed tears and reached for each other across the years and decades they’d been apart.
It was three days since that showdown in the Garter.
Three days of momentous events, starting with Rose getting in touch to tell Leo she’d traced his mother through “one of her contacts on the ground”.
Now it was up to him.
“Tell me when and where, and I’ll be there,” Leo
had merely said, stunned and elated.
It felt intrusive to be at the mother and son reunion, but Rose had agreed to attend because both had asked for her discreet presence.
After an hour and a half, Leo got up reluctantly and put on his coat.
Callie stood, too, and they spent a long moment with arms wrapped around each other before he left, looking back longingly as he exited the café.
Callie sat down and rubbed her forehead, Rose creeping over to join her.
“You OK, Callie?”
Callie looked up with a soft, careworn smile.
“I can’t describe it. It’s the most amazing feeling.
“We thought this would be long enough for a first meeting, but we’re going for dinner tonight.
“There’s so much we have to tell each other!”
Her eyes shone.
“And he wants me to come over to Australia as soon as he gets back and meet my grandchildren . . .
“Well, best not run before we can walk, I told him. But I do want to run – that’s the thing. Straight into his arms and never let go.”
Rose felt a lump form in her own throat as she looked into Callie’s shining eyes.
Then another figure appeared from a different corner of the café.
Hal stood before Callie.
“What did you tell him about his father?” he asked heavily.
Callie flung up her chin.
“That he was a dear man who I loved deeply, a session musician called Jake who I met while touring that summer.
“I also told him that I never found out his last name and, by the time I knew I was pregnant, I had no way of tracing him.
“All I knew was that he was from America and planning to return there when he’d finished his contract in England.”
“Not very convincing,” Hal muttered. “Especially to a bloke like Leo Foster.”
Callie took a deep breath.
“You’re right. I don’t know if he bought it, but if he thinks I’m being deliberately vague, he’ll know it’s for a good reason.
“He doesn’t blame me, you know,” she added with a gulp. “He says he understands why I did what I did.
“I told him how sorry I was to hear about Maddy and Steve.
“They were good people. I chose well.”
Rose nodded.
Naturally, Callie had left the menacing presence of the Wheeler clan out of her sad story to Leo.
She’d also omitted any reference to Sammy, sticking to the story of Rose tracing her through a “contact on the ground”.
Leo hadn’t known that his uncle had also been lurking in the café, watching the reunion with his mother from a distance.
Hal had insisted on being present as the price for keeping that distance.
Leo believed that Callie had given him to Maddy and Steve because she couldn’t provide the care he deserved while looking after her bedridden father.
That, after all, was true. Leo must have recognised that instinctively.
“Will you send me the odd photo if you meet up with him in Australia?” Hal asked Callie gruffly. “To keep me in the loop?”
Callie nodded, meeting Rose’s eye briefly.
Hal Wheeler was still not a man to cross. That said, he’d shown a surprising amount of delicacy in this matter, even if it was motivated largely by self-interest.
Callie picked up her shoulder bag, in a hurry to go back to her hotel and prepare for dinner with her son later.
She had two bright pink spots in her cheeks. The tired, haunted expression had gone from both her eyes and Leo’s.
After putting Callie in a taxi, Hal turned to Rose on the pavement.
“My driver can drop you at your office, Ms Cullen.”
“It’s all right,” Rose replied. “I’m taking the train back to Middlethorpe and it’s a bit out of your way.”
His eyebrows flexed.
“I do know where your office is located.”
“Obviously,” she conceded, then stuck out her hand. “Goodbye, Mr Wheeler. Give my best to Sammy. I trust he’ll remain in good health?”
Hal rolled his eyes.
“What do you take me for, Ms Cullen? I think you’ve watched too many films.
“Mind you . . .” He rubbed a hand across his chin. “As scripts go, I’ve had to give some thought to the irony that my nephew is a chief inspector in the Aussie police.
“It might even pay off to have someone on the inside of a police force.”
Then he saw her expression and snorted.
“Don’t worry. Something tells me he’s too much like both his parents to ever turn to the so-called dark side.
“Thank goodness Mum and Dad have both passed on, though,” he added with a slight shudder. “A nephew who’s a rozzer!
“They’d both be spinning in their graves, Ms Cullen. Spinning!”
And with that, Hal Wheeler stepped into his black SUV with tinted windows and sped silently into London traffic.
Rose headed for the nearest Tube station to take her back to the railway station and catch her train home.
Leo was due to return to Australia in a matter of days, but he’d promised to come by her office in person before he left.
She’d welcome that, and an update on how things were going with Callie.
Emerging from the Tube station half an hour later, her phone warbled.
She stepped under a shop awning to read the text.
Thanks for everything.
If you e-mail your details when convenient, I will pay my outstanding invoice by electronic transfer. Leo.
Rose smiled as she slipped the phone into her pocket and headed for the station.
Her phone warbled again.
It was a text from Barry this time.
Hi, Rose. If you’re about next week, how about meeting for that coffee?
There are things I want to say in person.
Let me guess, she thought grimly – a lengthy “mea culpa”, followed by “How about we give things another try?”
But that got her thinking. Was she being too hasty in writing him off?
“Hey!” a voice suddenly shouted.
“Sorry!”
She and the man she’d bumped into glared at each other.
“You made me nearly drop my chips!” he complained.
“I said I was sorry.”
“No harm done.” He shrugged, then saw her expression and held up the steaming paper cone. “Want one?”
His other hand rested on the handle of a small suitcase on wheels.
Rose took a hot, fragrant chip by her fingertips, thanked him, then hurried on.
It was only when she boarded her train 20 minutes later that she noticed the same man again, sitting across
the aisle.
An uneasy thought intruded. Had Hal put a tail on her? But to what end?
He’d said himself that their business was concluded to his satisfaction.
The man looked straight at her.
Next thing she knew, he was sitting on the empty seat behind her.
“I’m afraid I’m out of chips,” he said.
No, he couldn’t be one of Hal’s henchmen. He was far too unsubtle.
However, there was something familiar about his looks . . .
Had she met him somewhere before?
To avoid falling into conversation with him, she smiled vaguely, took out her phone and busied herself scrolling through it.
When she got off the train at Middlethorpe and left the station, a sudden, intense rain began to fall from a sultry summer sky.
She gasped as the warm raindrops soaked her top, only to hear a voice at her elbow.
“Care to share my brolly? I never leave home without it.”
It was the man again, deftly unfolding a telescopic umbrella he must have had in his jacket pocket.
“It depends where you’re going,” she pointed out, as water bounced off her nose.
“Will the town centre do you?”
She nodded.
She had a bit of paperwork to sort at her office before heading home to her flat.
They walked in silence because of the noise made by passing car tyres swishing through the rain.
“It’ll stop soon,” her companion said, nodding up at the sky. “I’m Barney, by the way.”
“Rose.”
“Nice name.”
To her surprise and consternation, his footsteps turned off the high street and towards the rickety building where she had her office.
She stopped abruptly at the front door.
“Well, this is me.” She sniffed. “Thanks very much for the shelter of your umbrella.”
He stared at the door, then at her.
“Hang on – you’re that Rose? The one Hattie never shuts up about? Gosh, this is funny!”
At which point the door opened to frame Hattie, breathless from running down the stairs.
“I saw you both coming down the street. You were supposed to meet me back at the flat, Barney!
“Do you two already know each other?”
“Absolutely.”
“No, of course not!”
Barney and Rose replied in unison, Hattie looking from one to the other.
As the rain eased off, Barney turned to Rose with extended hand.
“Barney Lockhart, Hattie’s cousin. I’m here for a job interview.
“Pleased to meet you – formally.”
“Barney’s stopping with me while he has his interview tomorrow,” Hattie revealed. “If you get the job, you’ll be moving here, won’t you, Barn?”
“That’s the idea.” Barney grinned. “I’m a vet, hoping to join a practice here that Hattie e-mailed me the details of.
“I’ve got to do final prep for my interview tonight, but how about all three of us meet up tomorrow to go out for a meal?
“I’m sure you’ll both be keen as mustard to hear how it went.”
Rose debated her reply as she thought of Barry still waiting for a response.
Finally, she thought of all the time she’d wasted on a man who hadn’t wanted her just as she was.
She glanced up to see a patch of bright blue chasing away the last rain cloud and found she was ready with her answer.
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