‘Dr Broughton took us. Or at least, he got someone he knew to take us. Dr Broughton seemed to know everyone. He was one of those people – a facilitator, I suppose you’d call him. He always had a number he could ring, a favour he could call in, a man who knew a man. He was the private physician to some very high-profile criminals. I think he’d been woken in the middle of the night before, stitched up some gunshot wounds in his rooms.
‘And once he saw that we were on the news he just wanted us gone and away. A week after I’d knocked on Dr Broughton’s door, he said we were well enough to leave. A man called Stuart squashed us into the back of a Ford Transit van and took us through the Eurotunnel, all the way to Bordeaux. He took us to a farm, to a woman called Josette. Another contact of Dr Broughton’s. She let us stay for months in return for working the farm. She didn’t ask who we were or why we were there.
‘Phin and I, we didn’t … you know. What happened between us, before, it was only because of the situation we were in together. Once we were free from all of that we fell back into being just friends. Almost like brother and sister. But we talked about you all the time, wondering how you were, who was looking after you, how pretty you were, how good you were, how amazing you’d grow up to be, how clever we were to have made you.’
‘Did you ever talk about coming back for me?’ asks Libby, pensively.
‘Yes,’ replies Lucy. ‘Yes. We did. Or at least, I did. Phin was more circumspect, more worried about his future than the past. We didn’t talk about the other stuff. We didn’t talk about our parents, about what had happened. I tried to, but Phin wouldn’t. It was like he’d just completely blanked it all out. Shut down. It was as if none of it had ever happened. And he got so well over that first year. He was tanned and fit. We both were. And Josette had an old fiddle she didn’t play, and she let me use it. I’d play for her, in the winter, and then in the summer when her farm filled up with students and itinerants, I’d play for them too. She let me take the fiddle into the local town and I’d play on Friday nights and Saturday nights and I started to earn some money. I saved it up thinking that I’d use it to get Phin and me back to London, to come and find you.’
‘Then one morning, about two years later, I woke up and Phin was gone. He left me a note that said, “Off to Nice”.’ Lucy sighs. ‘I stayed in Bordeaux for the rest of that summer, saved up until I had enough money for a coach to Nice. I spent weeks sleeping on the beach at night and trying to find Phin by day. Eventually I gave up. I had Josette’s fiddle. I played every night. I made enough money for a room in a hostel. I turned nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. And then I met a man. A very rich man. He swept me off my feet. He married me. I had a baby. I left the very rich man and met a very poor man. I had another baby. The poor man left me and then—’ She stops then and Libby studies her expression. There’s something unknowable, almost unthinkable in it. But the look passes and she continues.
‘And then it was your birthday and I came back.’
‘But why didn’t you come back before?’ Libby asks Lucy. ‘When you turned twenty-five? Did you not know about the trust?’
‘I knew about it, yes,’ she says. ‘But I had no proof that I was Lucy Lamb. I had no birth certificate. My passport was fake. I was in a terrible, terrible marriage with Marco’s father. It was all just …’ Lucy sighs. ‘And then I thought, you know, if Henry doesn’t come for the house and I don’t come for the house, then it will automatically go to the baby, to you, because everyone thought you were my parents’ baby. And I thought that’s what I’ll do. I’ll wait until the baby is twenty-five and I’ll come back for her then. When I got my first smartphone a few years ago, the first thing I did was put a reminder into the calendar, so I wouldn’t forget. And every minute of every day since then I’ve been waiting for this. I’ve been waiting to come back.’
‘And Phin?’ says Libby, desperately. ‘What happened to Phin?’
Lucy sighs. ‘I can only assume he went somewhere that he would not be found. I can only assume that that is what he wanted.’
Libby sighs. There it is. Finally. The whole picture. Apart from one piece.
Her father.
IV
66
Libby sits with her thumb over her phone. She’s on her banking app where she’s been refreshing her balance every fifteen minutes, since nine o’clock this morning.
It’s completion day on the house in Cheyne Walk.
They sold it a month ago, finally, after months of no viewings and then a flurry of offers when they lowered the price and then two abortive attempts at exchanging contracts until, at last, a cash buyer from South Africa, all done and dusted, signed and sealed within two weeks.
Seven million, four hundred and fifty thousand pounds.
But her balance still sits at ￡318. The last dregs of her last pay cheque.
She sighs and turns back to the screen of her computer. Her final kitchen project. A nice little painted Shaker-style one with copper knobs and a marble worktop. Newlyweds’ first home. It’s going to look beautiful. She wishes she’d still be around to see it. But she won’t ever see it. Not now. Today is her last day at Northbone Kitchens.
It’s also her twenty-sixth birthday. Her real twenty-sixth birthday. Not 19 June after all, but 14 June. So she’s five days older than she thought. That’s fine. Five days is a small price to pay for seven million pounds, a mother, an uncle and two half-siblings. And now she’s not climbing some spurious ladder in her head to some arbitrary birthday, who cares if she gets there five days ahead of schedule?
She presses refresh again.
Three hundred and nine pounds. A PayPal payment she made a week ago has come out of her account.
It’s a beautiful day. She glances across at Dido. ‘Shall we go out for lunch? My treat.’
Dido looks up at her over the top of her reading glasses and smiles. ‘Absolutely!’
‘Depending on whether this payment comes through by then or not, it’ll be either sandwiches and Coke, or lobster and champagne.’
‘Lobster’s overrated,’ Dido says before lowering her glasses and returning her gaze to her computer screen.
Libby’s phone buzzes at 11 a.m. It’s a text from Lucy. She says, See you later! We’ve booked it for 8 p.m.!
Lucy’s living with Henry now in his smart flat in Marylebone. Apparently they are not getting on at all. Henry, who has lived alone for twenty-five years, doesn’t have the stomach for sharing his space with children, and his cats hate the dog. She’s already been house-hunting. In St Albans. Libby herself has her eye on a beautiful Georgian cottage in half an acre just on the outskirts of town.
She presses refresh again.
Three hundred and nine pounds.
She checks her email, in case there’s been some kind of notification of something having gone wrong. But there’s nothing.
The money will go three ways once the inheritance tax has been taken care of. She’d offered to forgo any of the inheritance. It’s not her house. She’s not their sibling. But they’d insisted. She’d said, ‘I don’t need a third. A few thousand will be fine.’ But still they’d insisted. ‘You’re their granddaughter,’ Lucy had said. ‘You have as much right to it as we do.’
At 1 p.m. she and Dido leave the showroom.
‘I’m afraid it’s still sandwiches.’
‘Good,’ she says. ‘I’m in the mood for sandwiches.’
They go to the café in the park and take a table outside in the sunshine.
‘I can’t believe you’re leaving,’ says Dido. ‘It’s going to be so, well, I was going to say quiet, you’ve never been exactly loud, but it’s going to be so … utterly devoid of Libby without you. And your lovely hair. And your neat piles.’
‘My neat piles?’
‘Yes, your …’ She mimes a squared-off pile of paper with her hands. ‘You know. All the corners aligned.’ She smiles. ‘I’m going to miss you. That’s all.’
Libby glances at her and says, ‘Didn’t you ever think about leaving? After you got left the cottage? And all the other stuff? I mean, surely you don’t have to work, do you?’
Dido shrugs. ‘I suppose not. And there are times I’d just like to chuck it all in and spend all day at the stables with Spangles before he cops it. But, ultimately, I have nothing else. But you – now you have everything. Everything that kitchens can’t give you.’
Libby smiles. There is a truth to this.
It’s not just the money. It’s not just the money at all.
It’s the people whom she now belongs to, the family who’ve encircled her so completely. And it’s the person she discovered she was underneath all the neat piles and careful planning. She was never really that person. She’d made herself into that person to counterbalance her mother’s inconsistencies. To fit in at school. To fit in with a group of friends whose values she never really shared, not really, not deep down inside. There is more to her than arms’ length friendships and stupidly proscriptive Tinder requirements. She is the product of better people than her fantasy birth parents, the graphic designer and the fashion PR with the sports car and the tiny dogs. How unimaginative she’d been.