Well, after that bombshell, I begged Mum not to rush into anything, but she seemed adamant that she wanted to sell the house—apparently she and Dad had been planning to do it before he died and had already put in the offer. If I’d learned anything about bereavement from my sessions with Miss Dawson, it was that you shouldn’t rush into making any major changes. Such as selling your house.
‘The new place is just around the corner,’ Mum said, batting away my concerns like lazy bluebottles circling her face. ‘Your father liked it a lot and I don’t want to lose it. It’s a much smaller house—more manageable and cheaper to run, especially now I’ll be on my own—but it’s in a better location? In the conservation area?’ Her intonation rose at the end of each sentence, as if she were asking my approval. ‘I’ll show you tomorrow, if you like? We can take a walk by. House prices there are just going up and up, and they do say “location, location, location”, don’t they?’
She stopped talking and I didn’t fill the silence.
‘Anyway, they haven’t accepted my offer yet,’ she said eventually. She wasn’t looking at me; she was examining the paintwork of the doorframe intently, running a finger over it.
I thought of the £22,000 debit from Dad’s account. That must be what it was for. ‘So had you and Dad put money aside for the deposit?’
Mum looked at me. ‘No …’
‘Oh … how about legal fees? Have you had to pay anything yet? For surveys?’
‘Why do you ask?’ Something in Mum’s voice warned me not to go further.
‘Oh … no reason.’
There was another silence. To be honest, I was too tired and too shell-shocked by the events of the last forty-eight hours—not to mention by the lack of sleep—to be in a position to talk further about it. Mum and Dad had lived in our house for nearly thirty years; it was the home into which I’d been born. I couldn’t understand how or why Mum would want to move so fast. But exhaustion rendered me incapable of expressing even that much.
‘Can we talk about it in the morning?’ I yawned, looking pointedly towards my bedroom door.
I woke the next day with Dad on my mind. I’d dreamed about him in the night, knowing in the dream that something was vaguely wrong, but not understanding what it was. For a few seconds, in that hazy state between sleep and wakefulness, I was unable to place where I was, or why. There was something I needed to do for Dad but where was he? Then, as the morning sun streaked through my curtains, it all came back. I resolved to spend the day clearing out the attic and going through Dad’s papers. The missing £22,000 made me feel uneasy and I was determined to get to the bottom of it.
Downstairs, I found a note from Mum saying she’d popped up to the High Street, so I grilled the life back into a couple of croissants I found in the freezer, made myself a coffee and heaved the first of Dad’s box files onto the dining table, where I spent the best part of the morning painstakingly matching up each receipt from the ‘Receipts’ file with each debit from the account, credit card bill or cheque stub.
Kudos to my father, every single one matched—except the most important one; the one that had piqued my curiosity. I could tell the missing £22,000 had been transferred to another bank account—the logical assumption was that it was a savings account—but I couldn’t find a record of the recipient bank account in any of the files. I slammed my fist against the table in frustration, figures dancing in front of my eyes. Dad had receipts for new windscreen wipers at £14.99 a pair, for heaven’s sake. How could he forget to document where £22,000 went?
Furthermore, I was now in an even worse position than I had been when I started. Instead of finding a solution, going through the papers like a penny-pinching accountant had thrown up a new problem: I’d now found a payment of £1,000 that had gone to the same bank account every single month as far back as Dad’s statements went. It, too, was lacking receipts; unexplained. There was a printed screenshot to show that Dad had stopped the payment just before he died, but I couldn’t find any further details about it. ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ I said, staring at the statements, as if burning the digits onto my retinas might yield an explanation.
If it wasn’t for a home deposit, what could it be? A deposit on a new car? A holiday? Garden landscaping? Some sort of investment? A shudder ran through me. James had always been telling me about the dodgy investment scams that people—especially the elderly—fell for: Ponzi schemes, non-existent companies, prime banks and so on. Had Dad been conned into handing over money for something like that? I’d almost rather not know.
Mid-morning, my thoughts were interrupted by Mum bustling back into the house with bags of shopping.
‘Morning, darling!’ she said. ‘It’s a gorgeous day! Sorry I took so long! I bumped into Lily and we stopped for a coffee. What have you been up to?’ She peered at the table, barely pausing for a reply. ‘Ooh, the files. Thank you! Do you think you’ll be able to go up to the attic today? I dread to think what’s up there—I haven’t been up since …’ Finally, she tailed off, her attention focused intently on the marmalade jar that still sat on the dining table—the same cut-glass jar I remembered from my childhood. A tiny shake of the head, then, ‘Do you have any other plans for today?’
I shook my head.
‘You should go out while you’re here,’ Mum said. ‘You haven’t seen your friends for so long. Whatever happened to that nice girl who was at junior school with you? You know, the one you shared a room with on the school trip to France?’
‘Oh … goodness knows. We were never really friends.’
The phone rang.
‘Who’s that?’ Mum leant over to pick up the clunky handset of her new retro phone. ‘Oh hello!’ she chirped. I listened as she made plans to meet whoever it was on the phone that evening.
‘That was Richard,’ she said when she hung up. ‘He’s got a voucher for a free curry down the road and he’s just noticed it runs out today. He’s asked me to go out for dinner with him. You don’t mind, do you?’
Did I mind? With my father not even buried, I didn’t really know what to think. I shook my head, confused. Mum smiled.
‘Thanks, darling,’ she said. ‘He’s really quite harmless. And it’s only a curry.’
‘And how do you feel?’ Miss Dawson asked. ‘Are there times when you forget that Graham’s no longer here?’
How did she know? The headmistress must have told her about the day of the school photos. I wished the earth would swallow me up when I thought about that day.
My teacher had been stressed. I could tell by the way she was rubbing her forehead and circling her fingers around her temples as she tried to mark our maths tests. Every now and then, her head would pop up. ‘Quiet!’ she’d say, but it was more of an exasperated sigh than an instruction.
It had been a rainy morning and the class, like the weather, had been particularly disruptive—aside from the novelty of arriving at school in wellington boots for the first time that autumn, we’d all been excited because it was school-photo day, and that meant a break in routine; something different to working on our never-ending history projects.
At 10 a.m., I’d asked my teacher if I could go for my photo.
‘Sure,’ she’d said and there’d been a micro-pause as she’d struggled to remember my name. She was new and she always got me mixed up with Emma. Then Adam had howled in pain and her attention had flipped to him and Jason, locked in a battle.
I’d slipped quietly out of the classroom and headed for the main hall, my plimsolls