Sara Foster - Beneath the Shadows

Ben put the trap down and knelt beside it. ‘I’ll just have a peek and see if I can spot where the little nuisance has been,’ he told her. He began checking the floor, and Grace watched him while she and Millie sat on the bed. He lifted up a piece of carpet. Then he paused.

‘Er… you might want to come and look at this…’

‘If it’s a dead mouse then I’d really rather not,’ she told him, staying put.

‘Well, there’s no mouse, but he’s left his mark,’ Ben said, and he lifted up a bundle of chewed bank notes.

‘Where the hell did that come from?’ Grace asked, beginning to understand what it was that she was looking at.

‘There’s a loose floorboard under here, with a space beneath it.’

‘Oh my god, that’s got to be the money Adam took out of the bank, the day before he disappeared. He told me he was going to get some cash to keep at the cottage, but he never told me where he was planning on putting it. And I could never find it… It was one of the reasons the police thought he’d run away…’

Ben sat back with his arms wrapped around his knees, studying her carefully.

‘But you don’t think he did run away now, do you, Grace?’

After Ben had gone, Grace didn’t even bother contacting the police, knowing Ken Barton was away. Instead she called Niall again.

‘It’s Grace Lockwood,’ she said in a rush as he answered. ‘I’ve found the thousand pounds that Adam took out of the bank. It was hidden under a floorboard – I came across it this afternoon while I was looking for a mouse. He must have put it there for safekeeping, and he just didn’t get a chance to tell me.’ She hesitated, then ploughed on. ‘It seems highly unlikely that Adam would suddenly decide to leave without any money on him… there’s got to be more to it. So how do I get the police interested?’

She waited for his answer, her heart thumping hard.

‘Look, you really need to have a word with someone at the station. I’m not back there until Monday, but if you haven’t got anywhere by then, come down while I’m on duty, and I’ll make sure you get some attention.’

Grace knew he was trying to help, but the lack of urgency in Niall’s tone was dispiriting. For the next few days it looked like all she could do was sit on her hands.

Niall sensed her disappointment. ‘I know the waiting’s hard, but although you’ve made some discoveries, I’m not sure there’s much that’ll give us any new leads.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Look, I might be in Ockton later today. I’ll see if I can do a bit of digging about Jonny Templeton.’

‘Thank you. His sister is called Josephine, if that helps – I don’t know her married name, but I think she still lives in Ockton.’

‘All right then,’ Niall said. ‘I’ll be in touch if I find anything.’

Grace hung up and went over to Millie, picking her up. ‘So what shall we do now?’ she asked her daughter. In reply, Millie screeched and pushed hard against her, struggling until Grace put her down. Grace sat and watched as Millie crawled over to a pile of books, picked them up one by one and riffled briefly through the pages before flinging them aside. Her daughter seemed increasingly unsettled of late. Grace wished Millie could tell her what she had seen on the day Adam had disappeared. That little mind might hold all the answers, if only Grace could access it.

She leaned deeper into the chair cushions, thinking. Adam couldn’t have met with an accident, or Millie would have been found with him. So either he’d run away and chosen to leave his baby behind, or he had been an unwitting victim of some sort. Everyone seemed to think that the first option was more likely, but what if something sinister had happened? In that case, Millie had been left on the doorstep by someone else. Which meant they had known where Grace and Adam lived. And they were probably aware that Grace was back here now.

Her thoughts flashed back to the word LEAVE, its spectral appearance on her car windscreen. Her throat constricted and her lungs began to heave, struggling to draw in oxygen. She looked at her car keys on the table, then towards Millie. Why wasn’t she going? She could make the decision right now; and it would all be over.

It will never be over while you have so many questions, she reminded herself. She just had to keep listening to the calm, rational part of herself and ignore the shrieking voice in her head issuing a stream of dire warnings. After all, she had been living here for a month, and nothing much had actually happened. Only that word written on her car windscreen, which might have been a twisted prank. The rest of it could be put down to chance, or paranoia.

Meanwhile, she was getting closer to uncovering some answers, she knew it. She could at least stay until Monday, and go to the station. In the meantime she would pack up the rest of the cottage; organise it so she was ready to leave whenever she wanted to.

She felt better after running things through in her mind. When Millie went for her lunchtime nap, Grace made herself a sandwich and brought the rest of the papers down from her bedroom to read at the small dining table. There were more letters in Rachel’s handwriting, and she leafed through them. They looked to be newsy – no mention of Jonny, though some lovely references to Adam as a baby which made her nostalgic for Millie’s early days back in London. She bundled all of them up together. She would take them with her as keepsakes for Millie.

As she picked up the final envelope, she found a stack of notes underneath, in handwriting she hadn’t seen before. They were written on identical sheets of white notepad paper, folded in half.

She picked up the first one.

If you go, I will die.

Grace was stunned. Quickly, she found the next one.

I can’t bear the thought of being apart from you. Please don’t go. We can work this out, whatever our parents say. I love you.

Jonny

Grace put it down and picked up another.

I love you.

Then another.

Don’t leave me.

And the last one.

Don’t make me hate you forever.

Grace frowned. In the accounts she had heard so far, it was always Jonny who had abandoned Rachel – but these notes told a totally different story. One with an unsettling undertone.

She wished now that she hadn’t jumbled up the contents in the boxes from the cellar by tipping them onto her bed together. If she’d gone through them one at a time, she would have known exactly which box these had come from, and what else had been in there. She was curious as to whether Adam knew about these notes. Surely if he’d read them he would reconsider what he knew of his father – and want to find him in order to learn the full story.

She fervently hoped Niall could uncover more information about Jonny. She was convinced that he was somehow important.

She couldn’t settle to looking through the more mundane papers after this. Instead, she went upstairs and grabbed the dog-eared copy of Rebecca , then lay down on the bed and tried to immerse herself in it. Soon she was engrossed, and she was just reaching the end of a chapter when Millie woke and began to call out to her. Maxim de Winter had faced his wife with the truth, and as Grace got up and hurried to her daughter, his final question still rang in her ears.

‘ Will you look into my eyes, and tell me that you love me now?’

Grace had expected to spend the whole of New Year’s Eve with only Millie for company, but in the afternoon Emma called around with a request. ‘My sister’s having a church jumble sale tomorrow, and she’s tearing her hair out trying to get enough donations. All the money goes to the homeless. You don’t have anything she can sell, do you?’