Jill Mansell - Falling for you

‘Oh well. Down to business.’ Pauline McKinnon ran a trembling wrinkled hand over her mouth.

Dwarfed by the armchair in which she was sitting, she looked frailer than ever and there was an unmistakable yellow tinge to her skin. ‘I need to see Den.’

Kerr shook his head. ‘I don’t know where he is.’

‘Then you have to find him. He’s my son and I need to see him again before I die.’ Vehemently Pauline said, ‘It’s important.’

Of course it was. Den had always been her favourite son, and he in turn had been devoted to his mother. Kerr hadn’t been jealous; their closeness had simply been a fact of life.

‘I’ll try,’ he said now. ‘No guarantees, but I’ll do my best.’

Pauline dug down the side of the armchair and with difficulty pulled out a silver flask. Her bony fingers shook as she unscrewed the top, raised the flask to her pursed lips and took a gulp.

‘And don’t look at me like that,’ she told Kerr coldly. ‘Why shouldn’t I have a drink if I want to?’

‘It’s your life.’ He rose to leave, keen to be out of this stuffy overheated room, thick with lavender air-freshener and alcohol fumes.

‘Just find him,’ his mother said brusquely. Fumbling for a tissue up her sleeve, her eyes unexpectedly swam with tears. ‘Please. Find my boy before it’s too late.’

Chapter 35

Back at the office, Kerr dealt with a stream of phone calls before turning, without much hope, to his computer. This wasn’t the first time he’d tried to track down Den; his last unsuccessful attempt had been just before Christmas.

Dennis McKinnon. He typed the name into a worldwide search engine and scrolled through the list of matches, most of them familiar to him from previous searches, none of them his brother. Kerr knew; he’d checked out each and every one.

There were two new entries, the first a seventy-six-year-old man from Louisiana. The second sounded fractionally more feasible, a member of a brass band in Wellington, New Zealand.

Mentally crossing his fingers, Kerr clicked on to the brass band’s home page. Could this be Den?

Had he moved to New Zealand and taken up trumpetry in his spare time? Anything was possible.

Scanning the page, Kerr clicked ‘photos’ and waited for them to pop up on the screen.

The third one down on the left was a photograph of Dennis McKinnon playing his trumpet. Black, bald and in his fifties, he looked like Louis Armstrong. Oh well.

Kerr exhaled wearily and leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes and rubbing his hands over his face. Everything that had happened was starting to catch up with him. Sleeping had never been a problem before, but these days it was beyond him. Tormented by wakefulness, he was unable to stop himself thinking of Maddy. When he did finally manage to doze off, he dreamed about her but the dreams never ended happily and when he woke he felt worse than ever. More exhausted too, which made it a struggle to come into work.

Forcing himself to get a grip, Kerr sat up again and opened his eyes. Life went on because it had to go on, but it wasn’t easy pretending everything was fine. His mother was dying, his brother was unreachable and he missed Maddy terribly, more than words could

‘Kerr? Catch.’ The door swung open and Sara, the receptionist, lobbed a cellophane-wrapped sandwich through the air at him.

Kerr caught it and looked at the label.

‘It’s egg and lettuce. I didn’t ask for egg and lettuce.’ More to the point, how could anyone in their right mind possibly want egg and lettuce?

‘Yeah, well, too bad, none of us got what we asked for Sara’s tone was as pointed as her pink Faith stilettos. ‘But we just have to make the best of it, don’t we?’

The Happy Hamper was supplying their sandwiches now, and happiness was in short supply. Aware that his staff all blamed him and were becoming increasingly mutinous, Kerr said, ‘OK, but they’re better than Blunkett’s.’

‘And that’s supposed to cheer us up? They’re not a millionth as good as the Peach Tree.’ Sara was looking as if she might be on the verge of stamping her pointy-toed foot. ‘The thing is, Kerr, we’ve done nothing wrong. I don’t know what happened between you and Maddy, but the rest of us liked her a lot, we liked her sandwiches even more, and we really don’t see why we should have to miss out just because you two have had some stupid little falling out.’

A stupid little falling out. If only that was all it was.

‘And I’ll tell you something else,’ Sara said accusingly, ‘the accountants from the first floor aren’t happy about it either.’

Kerr sighed. ‘The thing is, there’s nothing—’

‘You can do about it. Yeah, yeah, you say that, but we’re the ones who are suffering here and it’s all your fault." Sara fixed him with a look of disdain. ‘Which is why we’re strongly suggesting you sort it out.’

The door slammed shut, Sara flounced back to reception and Kerr returned his attention to the computer screen. Ordering himself to concentrate, he tapped his fingers against the mouse and gazed at the trumpet-toting Dennis McKinnon on the screen in front of him. With his shiny black face and dazzling white grin he looked happier than Den would ever look; throughout the grim years of visiting him in prison, Kerr had never once seen his brother smile.

Forget Dennis. Returning to the search engine, he typed in the words Den McKinnon instead.

Last time he’d tried this, the reply, ‘no match found’, had flashed up.

This time the search engine came up with a lone match. Kerr clicked onto the site, belonging to a rugby club in Sydney, Australia.

There was the name again, Den McKinnon listed as fly half for an amateur rugby club. No photographs. No further clues. Had his brother even enjoyed playing rugby at school? Kerr couldn’t remember.

It was a long and flimsy shot, but he may as well give it a go.

E-mailing the club secretary, Kerr wrote:

Dear Sir,

You have a Den McKinnon on your rugby team who may or may not be my long-lost brother. Could you please pass this message on to him, and ask him to reply letting me know either way? I urgently need to contact my brother as soon as possible. My address and phone number are .. .

Many thanks.

Kerr McKinnon.

When it was done, Kerr pressed send and envisaged the message popping up in the inbox of a computer in an air-conditioned office somewhere in sunny Sydney, Australia. After years of e-mailing, it still never failed to impress him that it was possible to make instantaneous contact in this manner, across the world.

Whether the reply would be instantaneous was another matter. Would he even get one? What if the club secretary mentioned it in passing to Den McKinnon, a grizzled sheepshearer from the outback, who said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll give the guy a call and tell him it ain’t me,’ then promptly forgot all about it?

‘Right,’ Sara abruptly announced from the doorway. ‘Got it.’

Kerr heaved a sigh. ‘Got what?’

‘That little newsagents on the corner of Tapper Street and Marlborough Hill, where I buy my paper every morning. The bloke who runs it is really friendly and nice.’

‘So?’ Kerr pictured Den McKinnon scratching his big grizzled head, going, ‘Strewth, mate, what’s an e-mail when it’s at home?’

‘So,’ Sara repeated with exaggerated patience, ‘I’m going to ask him if the Peach Tree can deliver our order to his shop every morning, and if he can look after it for us until one of us pops down there before lunch to pick it up.’

Kerr forced himself to pay attention.

‘Won’t that sound a bit weird?’

‘Of course it’ll sound weird. We’ll just have to tell him the truth,’ said Sara with a shrug. ‘That you broke the deli delivery girl’s heart and that’s why she refuses to bring us our sandwiches any more.’