Sue Moorcroft - The Little Village Christmas

She did recognise the voice. But it wasn’t Shane’s.

On jelly legs she trudged back downstairs to find Ben standing in the foyer beside Gabe.

Absently she noted that he didn’t smile. He didn’t step forward to greet her or express concern about what was going on. There was no air of awareness of last night or this morning.

In fact, it seemed to Alexia that his eyes were unfocused as if he weren’t quite looking at her.

That was the least of her worries right now though. She turned to Gabe. ‘Everything Shane stowed upstairs is missing.’ She slumped down on the bottom step. ‘And everything of any value. Every original feature – doors, radiators, even the cast iron toilet cisterns. Someone’s stripped the place. I presume the only reason they left the roof slates on the front was to disguise what they’d done for as long as possible.’

‘Someone?’ asked Ben. ‘Like who?’

Alexia shook her head. ‘I’ll try and ring Shane.’ Her voice seemed to echo in her ears.

Gabe began to speak but was interrupted by the ringing of his phone, which he answered with a ‘tsk’ of irritation. With fumbling fingers Alexia pulled up Shane’s name in her contacts list and pressed ‘call’. It went straight to voicemail. Trembling, she tried his mate Tim’s number too. Same result.

‘But how the hell …?’ she heard Gabe demand of his caller.

She paused to raise her eyebrows hopefully and mouth ‘Shane?’ at him. Gabe gave an abrupt shake of his head and held up a hand to indicate he needed to listen to the person on the other end of his line.

Desperately, she tried Jodie who did, at least, answer.

Alexia took a steadying breath. ‘Has Shane turned up?’

‘Not yet. I tried to ring him but—’

‘You got his voicemail,’ Alexia finished for her. ‘Does he have a landline number because—’

Then she dropped her phone, ending the call hastily as Gabe made a strangled noise and reached out to steady himself against the wall. Ben got to his uncle before Alexia could even begin to move and in an instant he’d lowered Gabe down to sit on the steps beside her.

Gabe was grey, clutching his phone with a shaking hand. ‘That was the bank. The money’s gone.’

The room seemed to do a huge swoop around Alexia’s head. She couldn’t force words past the lump of fear that had jumped into her throat at Gabe’s words.

‘What money?’ Ben crouched before his uncle, his expression granite-grim.

‘The money in the community account and the business account. It’s been moved out of the accounts in a series of transactions, raising a red flag with the bank.’ Gabe passed a shaking hand over his face. ‘It’s the money the village raised and the start-up money Jodie and I put into the partnership.’

Ben swung a grey gaze on Alexia before returning his attention to his uncle, his voice hard and rapid. ‘Who has access to the bank accounts?’

Gabe pressed his forehead as if forcing himself to think. ‘For the community account Alexia, Jodie, and Christopher Carlysle and me. Jodie and I for the business account.’

‘But it takes two of us to sign to get money out of the community account,’ Alexia croaked.

‘Not on Internet banking. We all signed that it was OK, if you remember.’

Ben’s face was a mask as he studied the evidence on Gabe’s phone. ‘The accounts are showing nil balances. And my uncle’s property has been stripped out and devalued with no means of refurbishing it.’ Slowly, he raised his gaze. ‘Can you shine any light on this?’

‘Me?’ Alexia’s eyes felt ready to pop out on stalks as she gazed at Ben in fresh horror. ‘ Me ?’

‘Well …’ Ben hesitated at the shock in her dark eyes, conscious that his thoughts hadn’t translated into quite the right words.

He’d been so angry at the grief and shock on Gabe’s face, this good and genuine man who’d always been on Ben’s side, that only half his thoughts had been on the current situation. The other half had been a shame-filled reflection on what Alexia must be thinking of him after his middle-of-the-night desertion. All day he’d been plagued with images of her in his arms. But they’d warred with images of Imogen until he wasn’t certain where he should lay guilt and over whom he felt regret. He tried to explain. ‘You have the knowledge of how much the original features are worth and where someone might sell them. You were telling me last night about your contacts.’

‘Ben!’ Gabe protested sharply. ‘You sound as if you’re accusing Alexia!’

Ben groped for better words. ‘No, I was asking for insight—’

But Alexia was already climbing to her feet, turning on Ben a look of dazed repugnance, lifting a shaking hand as if to keep him at a distance. ‘We’ll have to come back to that discussion. I have to ring one of my contacts and get a tarpaulin on that roof.’

Gabe clambered to his feet too, pulling her into a comforting, avuncular hug. He looked to have aged ten years in ten minutes but at least the torpor of shock seemed to be fading. ‘Are you OK to handle that? I’ve got to ring the police.’

Over Gabe’s shoulder Ben watched Alexia close her eyes as if she couldn’t bear to have to look in his direction. ‘I can do it. You report what’s happened.’

Then Ben ceased to exist – at least so far as Alexia was concerned, anyway. Her gaze didn’t rest on him once. She moved into the Bar Parlour to make her call while Gabe remained in the foyer to make his.

Ben found himself hovering between the two, unable to contribute and with plenty of opportunity to wish his words to Alexia unsaid. He cringed at what she must think of him – the man who last night had savoured her body and today sounded as if he were accusing her of wrongdoing.

Through the doorway he watched Alexia slide down the wall as if her legs wouldn’t hold her, pinching the bridge of her nose as she spoke into her phone. ‘Dion, I know it’s a huge favour –’

‘I’m afraid I have to report some thefts –’ Gabe said into his own phone from Ben’s other side.

‘– it’s not my property but it’s my project –’

‘– it seems like a finely calculated scam. Much of the property was removed last night under the guise of –’

‘– I’ll really owe you if you can get it tarped tonight. I hate to ask you on a Sunday evening but you can invoice me, obviously –’

‘– I know what was in the bank accounts but fixing a value on the rest at this moment is difficult –’

‘– and I need someone to put a temporary door on, too. Oh, would you? That would be fantastic.’

Gabe finished first. He came to stand silently with Ben while Alexia began another call.

‘Jake, a project I’m on has been done over.’ She hunched a shoulder as if feeling Ben’s gaze on her. ‘Can I list some of the stuff that’s been stripped out? Then if you could let me know if any of it’s offered to you … It’s all mid-Victorian. A load of roof slates, mahogany doors and screens with etched glass, two mahogany pub bars – probably dismantled – Victorian mosaic floor tiles, black and white with a border tile …’ She pushed herself up and began travelling from room to room, slowly listing what she could remember of what had been in them. She remembered a lot. Her voice went on and on, growing fainter as she progressed.

Gabe turned a steely gaze on Ben. ‘You must apologise to her.’

Ben felt slightly sick. ‘I will. I didn’t mean it the way it came out.’

‘Then you need to control the way things come out. She must think you’re a shit.’

Gabe almost never swore. In fact, Ben couldn’t remember seeing him angry before, but now his bushy brows were meeting over a sharp crease between his eyes. Like a naughty child, Ben squirmed through the only lecture, in fact the only criticism, he’d ever received from Gabe, who wound up with, ‘I know you’ve had a bad year, Benedict, but to say I’m mortified is understating the case. Alexia’s not only a dear friend, she’s donated all her work to this project . ’