Annabel Kantaria - Coming Home - A compelling novel with a shocking twist

I looked at my knitting, my eyes blurring with tears. I’d heard people say that I probably couldn’t remember the day—that the shock would have blunted my memory—but it wasn’t like that at all. I remembered it too well. It was just hard to find the words .

‘We had some biscuits when we went back in.’ I stopped. Until I said it, it might not have happened. I took a deep breath. ‘After a while, there was a knock at the door. It was the police.’

I remembered how funny I’d thought it was that policemen were calling: we hadn’t been burgled. ‘Perhaps they heard about the lemonade!’ I’d joked to Mum but she’d shoved me into the sitting room and I’d crouched with my ear to the door. I hadn’t been able to hear much. I’d heard only bits .

‘Very sorry … pedestrian crossing … didn’t stop … thrown thirty feet … nothing they could do …’

Then I’d heard Mum. She was stern. ‘No, you’re wrong! It can’t be! Not Graham! You’ve made a mistake!’

I’d heard her shoes clomp hard across the hall, like she was running, and I’d got away from the door just as she’d shoved through it. ‘Evie!’ she’d called. ‘The police are saying Graham’s been run over! Obviously they’re wrong because he was with Daddy! I’m going to the hospital to sort it out.’

‘Mum went with them,’ I said to Miss Dawson. ‘She put on her lipstick and went.’ I jabbed my needles into the wool. ‘The police were right … they were right.’ My voice cracked and I took a breath then carried on, my eyes on my knitting. ‘Graham had been hit cycling across a pedestrian crossing . Dad had seen the whole thing. They put him in hospital, too; they had to knock him out.’ I stared at the window. ‘They should have kept Mum in, too.’ I turned to look at Miss Dawson. ‘I wouldn’t have minded. But they didn’t. Mum had to come home on her own and look after me.’

It turned out that Mum had a pretty good idea where Dad’s will might be, after all. As I sat downstairs the next morning, knitting my way through the East-to-West jetlag that had had me up at 4 a.m., I heard her clomping awkwardly down the stairs.

‘Uh,’ she grunted, kicking open the living room door and depositing four sturdy box files on the dining table. Despite the early hour, she was already dressed, coiffed and scented while I—having been up for half a century—was still in my dressing gown.

‘I think the Will might be in here,’ she said. ‘Your dad kept all his papers in these. It’s a blessing that he was such an organised man. Now. Have you had breakfast?’

Before I could reply, she carried on.

‘We’re due at the funeral place at eleven. We can’t sort this out too quickly as there are waiting lists. Poor Lily had to wait two weeks for her brother’s funeral.’

And so, after taking a shower, I hunched over the dining table and, feeling as if I might be about to open a Jack-in-the-box, released the catch on the first box. I didn’t share Mum’s confidence in Dad’s organisational skills, but no horrors jumped out; there was no explosion of random papers, just a series of fat folders, each containing what looked like the year’s statements from various bank accounts and a couple more folders of credit card statements.

Encouraged, I opened the second box and found another series of neatly labelled folders, these appearing to contain receipts and guarantees for everything that my parents had bought in the last few years, from clothes and electronics to work done on the house and car.

The next two boxes told a similar story. Dad had meticulously filed all of the paperwork essential to keep my parents’ lives running smoothly, from utility bills and insurance papers to the tax returns, invoices and payment slips for every little piece of work he’d done.

I smiled a thank you to the sky. It could go either way with historians, I’d found—some of Dad’s colleagues had been so disorganised I used to wonder how they managed to dress themselves in the morning, but others, like Dad, got pleasure out of documenting their lives; creating their own historical records, I suppose.

Flicking through the folders, I stuck a Post-it on each thing I thought needed attention—companies that needed to be told of Dad’s death; accounts and bills that needed to be transferred into Mum’s name; and those that could be closed down. As I put the most recent bank statement back on top of the pile, something caught my eye. A debit of £22,000 made just last week. Strange, I thought, sticking a Post-it on that too. I’d look more closely at it later.

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