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He was perfectly polite, but something in his voice told her to back off. That was fine by her – she knew enough about families to understand that they were complicated. Her own, for example, was so weird you could make a sitcom about it. A lot of people came to Harte Farm for privacy, peace, seclusion. Which was a good job, as it was perched on top of a windswept hill overlooking the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean – not the place for a buzzing social life. If Mr Retallick wanted to be left alone, she would respect that. Even if he was the hottest thing in hotsville.
“How’s it going in there?” he asked, gesturing towards the bathroom, where her various tools lay scattered on the harlequin-tiled floor. Not the best of first impressions, she thought, gathering them all back up and stowing them in her dad’s old metal box. But then again, that’s what you got when you turned up two hours before check-in. Behind the exterior of every chocolate-box-perfect holiday cottage lies a potential plumbing disaster – one she couldn’t afford to pay a professional to deal with.
“Fine and dandy, I assure you,” she replied, wiping her oil-smeared hands down on her dungarees.
“I’m Pippa Harte, welcome to our farm,” she said. “I’d offer you my hand but – ”
“I don’t know where it’s been?” he finished, his face deadpan but his tone amused. He was one of those chaps, she thought. Not one for belly laughs and grin-fests, but dry and witty. She liked those chaps. Or she used to, back in the day when she had anything to do with chaps at all.
“Well, I think you know exactly where it’s been – that’s the problem! You’re staying for a week aren’t you, Mr Retallick? Lovely weather you have for it!”
As the skies had been lashing a steady drizzle for the last two days, slanted almost horizontal by the gale-force winds, she was obviously joking. A lot of guests would have complained – city types in particular seemed to think the countryside should come with guaranteed sunshine whenever they visited – but he just shrugged those actually-now-you-mention-it-pretty-awesome shoulders and made a “them’s the breaks” comment.
Pippa stared at him as he unzipped his coat, wondering if they’d met before. It wasn’t just the Cornish name – it was the face. The eyes in particular. They were pretty spectacular eyes, after all, and she had the uncanny feeling she’d looked into them before.
“Have we met?” she asked. “You look really familiar…”
His face changed as fast as a storm raging in from the sea, the already dark eyes shading even deeper, a frown marring the skin of his fine, strong forehead. She felt a rebuff coming on and prepared to handle it. She’d been running this holiday business practically single-handed for three years now and had learned to deal with all kinds of strange visitors and their foibles.
As he opened his mouth to speak, the front door flew open and Daisy ran in, blonde curls swirling in a wild, tangled halo around her face. Predictably enough Lily followed, hot on her heels and just as flustered.
Daisy screeched, “SpongeBob’s escaped again! She’s –” “– pooing all over the courtyard!” finished Lily. They were identical twins, nine years old, and never seemed to be able to complete a sentence without each other’s help. Which was at least an improvement on the secret language they’d used exclusively until they were seven. Pippa had been on the verge of calling in an exorcist when they suddenly stopped, although she still occasionally heard them gibbering together at night in their bedroom. Still, as long as their heads weren’t spinning round, she was happy.
“Oh…sausages!” said Pippa, vaulting over Mr Retallick’s rucksack and sprinting out and around the back to the courtyard. Sure enough, there was SpongeBob – that’s what happens when you let kids name cows – munching away on the hydrangeas. She looked up as Pippa approached, her wide mouth sliding slowly from side to side as she chewed, her long-lashed eyes placid. At least to the untrained eye. Pippa had tangled with SpongeBob one too many times to be tricked.
“Daisy, Lily! One to the left, one to the right!” she shouted. “Scotty – I know you’re out there somewhere – get the gate open!”
On cue, a little boy of about four, with the same long, wild blonde hair, appeared from behind the decorative water trough and ran over to a broad metal gate, reaching up on tiptoes to unhook the blue nylon string that tied it closed.
Pippa advanced steadily, hopping over the steaming gifts that SpongeBob had deposited on the cobbles, muttering the fake swear words she used in front of the kids – variations of “sugar”, “broomsticks”, “rubber ducks” and her personal favourite, “molluscs!” She noticed Mr Retallick coming closer from the corner of her eye and shouted out to him, “Don’t be fooled! I know she looks like a pin-up, but this is the Osama bin Laden of cows! Best stay away!”
He nodded and instead headed towards the metal feed bucket that had been abandoned next to the gate. He picked it up and banged it with his fist so the contents rattled. SpongeBob looked up and over, her broad head turning towards the noise. Her eyes narrowed – Pippa swore they did – as she thought about it. Weighed up the pros and cons in her big cow brain.
Mr Retallick shook the feed bucket some more and walked through the gate towards the barn. Pippa walked closer to the cow, making gentle shooing gestures with her hands. Daisy and Lily edged in nearer on either side and Pippa could see their tiny blonde heads reflected in SpongeBob’s huge, liquid brown pupils. They patted her on the side and Pippa gave a delicate shove from the rear, careful to avoid clomping hooves and swishing tails that could catch you in the eye if the animal got her dander up.
Finally, the combination of carrot and stick worked and she lumbered slowly towards the gate, after one final defiant munch of bright-purple hydrangea petals. She still had one dangling from her mouth as she walked.
“Into the barn!” shouted Pippa, watching as her early guest nodded and strode forward, angling long legs over the muddy puddles, leading the evil cow genius right inside. He smacked her on the behind as she wandered through and SpongeBob turned to give him the evil-cow genius eye. He gave her the eye back before shutting and latching the barn door.
Then he stood, hands on hips, threw his head back and laughed. Laughed long and hard, and loud. Pippa looked on in fascination, drinking in the sight of this stunning male specimen standing in her farmyard in the rain. Drizzle dripped from his soaked hair, over his forehead, along the slightly aquiline ridge of his nose, down to the sensual curve of his wide mouth. He really was drop-dead gorgeous. And even better, seemed to know his way around a cow. Wow! The perfect man. Now, if he could iron school uniforms and turn into a pizza after sex, even better.
The children scurried closer, looking at him with similar curiosity, Scotty clutching onto her hand for security. The twins were fearless, but her baby? He always needed an extra layer of security. Which was fine by her – as long as he still wasn’t climbing into bed for cuddles when he was 16, she would always be available for hand-holding. She gave his fingers a little squeeze of reassurance.
“Thank you, Mr Retallick,” she said. “ I see you’ve spent some time in the company of cows before?”
“There are many answers to that, Miss Harte, but I’ll restrain myself – and it was my pleasure. Been a while since I was at the business end of a Friesian. This used to be a dairy farm, didn’t it?”
“Yes. 500 head. But my parents…aren’t here any more. It’s just us. So we converted to holiday lets. A working farm is – well, a lot of work. Too much for this gang of troublemakers, anyway.”
“By ‘us’, you mean…” he cast his spookily sexy brown eyes over the gathered crowd, which now numbered Pippa, Daisy, Lily, Scotty, a nanny goat called Ben Ten and a pair of Muscovy ducks known as Phineas and Ferb. In fact, Pippa thought, there was only one person missing. As usual.
“Yes. Us. These are my brothers and sisters, and our animal friends,” she said, introducing them all individually. “And there’s one missing. Patrick. He’s seventeen, and he’ll be the one hiding somewhere after leaving the barn door open.”
“Again!” said Lily and Daisy in unison, rolling their eyes in a way that spoke volumes about Patrick and his various misdemeanours.
“You look after all of…these?” said Ben Retallick, frowning as he looked at this slip of a girl, smudged in oil, crazy blonde hair escaping in corkscrew tufts from an elastic band, soaking wet in her torn dungarees.
He couldn’t quite believe that she was playing mother hen to this whole brood. She only looked about eighteen herself, which had been giving him some major fits of the guilts since he’d arrived. The minute he’d seen her leaning over that broken lav, pert butt in the air, he’d noticed the fact she wore nothing but a tatty hot-pink t-shirt beneath those dungarees. He’d been working very hard not to notice how tight it was – or the fact that she didn’t have a bra on – ever since. It had been difficult to know where to look. He had enough self-loathing going on as it was, without adding perving over a teenager to the list. And now it seemed he’d been wrong – she must be a bit older than that, surely, to have all this responsibility resting on those slender shoulders?
“Yes, Mr Retallick,” she said firmly, drawing herself up to her full height – which had to be all of five foot three in her ancient Hunter wellies – and fixing him with kind of withering look clearly intended to make parts of him shrivel up and die. “I do indeed look after all of…these. We live together in an old shoe on top of the hill. Now, thanks for your help, and feel free to take yourself right back to Honeysuckle and settle in.”
Her tone had changed – the easy humour and casual flirtation of earlier had disappeared – and instead she sounded wary, formal. Mightily huffy, in fact. He’d upset her without even trying – a specialist subject of his. He felt a shiver run through him: not fear, not quite, but a spark of something…admiration, he thought. That was it. This tiny woman, almost a child from the looks of it, was swollen up with pride and fury and protective instinct. He’d poked a stick at her family, and now she was preparing to shove it right where the sun doesn’t shine. Which, he thought, looking around him at the familiar farmyard, was pretty much everywhere in Cornwall right now.
“Right. I’ll do just that,” he said. “See you around, Pippa. Daisy. Lily. Scotty. Ben Ten. Phineas and Ferb. Give my regards to Madame SpongeBob.”
He nodded at each of them individually as he turned to walk away, and Pippa felt her anger soften down to mild irritation. He’d remembered all of their names. Even the animals. That was pretty much a first in her experience; even she forgot them sometimes, resorting to “You, there, with the feathers!”, or “Oi! Boy child!”
Maybe he wasn’t that bad after all, she thought. Possibly he was just one of those unintentionally rude people who doesn’t realise they’re being offensive. Or possibly, she admitted, she was just one of those unintentionally prickly people who don’t realise they’re being defensive. She’d had a lot to defend over the years, and when it came to the kids and her ability to care for them, defensive was her default setting. None of which was tall, dark and cow-handy’s fault.
She chased after him as he strode away, wellies squelching in the mud.
“Wait!” she shouted, tugging hold of his arm to stop him. “Where do I know you from, really? You’re so familiar…” she said, realising as she touched it that his arm was solid as the oaks shading the side of the farm driveway. He looked city, but he felt country. He felt good.
The shutters went down again and he glanced at her clinging hand, raising his eyebrow eloquently: Back Off, Broomstick, clear as day.
Ben sighed, watched as her hand peeled away from his arm. She was the same as all the rest. Just another stranger who felt she knew him. Not quite there yet, still piecing it together, but give it a few minutes – she’d match the face with the name, with the story, with the legend. And she’d assume she knew him inside out. They all did.
He felt the familiar sense of frustration rise within him. It had been over a year since his release from prison, but still people stopped him. Still people chatted to him, touched him without permission, slapped him on the back and tried to shake his hand. Congratulated him, told him well done, like he was a hero for having survived eight months in HMP Scorton. He hated it. The lack of privacy, the pictures in the paper, the feeling of having his whole life played out in public. In fact, he’d come here to try and escape exactly that – back here to this isolated stretch of Cornish coastline, where the cows outnumbered the people and the internet was patchy at best. He’d hoped to have a week of solitude, without any prying eyes or being expected to bare his soul to complete strangers. Which showed what he knew – even here, his face was known.
Pippa stared at him intently, rubbing her cheeks and smudging that oil patch even harder into the milky-smooth velvet of her skin. Huge, cornflower-blue eyes. English rose all the way, if English roses had taken to abandoning the need for underwear and had just trodden in a cow pat.
He waited the few beats he knew it would take, saw the confusion in her eyes clear as she finally recognised him. Never mind, he thought. He could leave in the night; find somewhere even more deserted. Somewhere his face wouldn’t be known. Somewhere they wouldn’t have him pegged as the UK’s most popular jailbird. Somewhere he wouldn’t have to face someone who thought they knew him, thought they understood his story.
She pointed one grimy finger at him, and said, triumphantly: “You! I’ve figured it out! I know who you are! You’re that bastard who threw me in the duckpond when I was seven!”
Chapter 2 (#u01435c6e-b5a2-5214-8409-8c3629d7d4a5)
Ben stared back at her, wondering if he’d fallen into some kind of wormhole and landed in an alternative reality. Okay. She did recognise him – but not for the reasons he’d assumed. She hadn’t got a clue who Ben Retallick really was, had never heard of his case, never heard of Darren McConnell, and clearly hadn’t got any idea that he was one of the most famous criminals in the country. He’d assumed she would be like all the rest – about to quiz him, prod him, look at him with that familiar mix of admiration and fear.
Well…she hadn’t. She seemed to have him pegged for a far more historic crime – one he couldn’t even remember. Maybe he’d started to believe his own hype…
“It was a long time ago – fourteen years or something like it – but I know it was you, there’s no point denying it!” she said, almost jumping up and down in her excitement. Again, he studiously avoided looking at her upper half. She might be twenty-one, if he had the maths right there, but it was still a decade or so younger than him. It was still…wrong. And he’d worked very hard at avoiding women altogether since he’d been released. Since Johanna and her family made it clear they wanted nothing to do with a common-or-garden ex-con, no matter how justified his actions had been. Johanna – his fiancée when the incident that changed his life forever had occurred – had disappeared as fast as his career. She was engaged again now, he heard, to some corporate lawyer in Abu Dhabi. Good luck to her. And him, poor bastard – he’d need it.
“I’m sorry, but I’m not entirely sure what you’re talking about,” he replied, ragging himself back to the here, the now, and to Pippa – wondering if she’d accidentally sniffed some adhesive while she was fixing the loo.
She poked him in the chest with one finger – hard enough that it made him take a step back.
“You remember! Of course you do! It was ages ago, and you were here with your…grandfather, I think? Is that right? He was talking to my dad about some business thing or another, and you stayed here for a couple of nights. I was seven, so Patrick would have been, well, about three, and the twins and Scotty didn’t even exist then. You seemed really glamorous, all the way from London – don’t you remember, really?”
She gazed up at him expectantly, eyes huge and sparkling, and he realised he didn’t want to disappoint her, didn’t want to dismiss what was clearly still vivid in her mind – but he genuinely couldn’t remember.
“I know I came here,” he said, screwing his eyes up in concentration. “It’s one of the reasons I booked my stay. I was eighteen, I think, spending the summer with my granddad before I went off to uni. I was bored rigid. There were…yes, there were some kids, I remember now!”
He cast his mind back: eighteen. Jesus. A whole lifetime ago. His parents had just moved to Australia and he was packed off to his granddad for a few months, filling in time until he started his law degree.
It was a different world back then. A world of youthful arrogance and easy potential and the safe and certain knowledge that the whole universe was his for the taking. An endless summer of heat and rain and surfing; blonde-haired girls with skin that tasted of saltwater; of working on his grandfather’s farm and drinking cider and planning the rest of his life. His granddad, a wizened old man with a leanly corded body even in his seventies, had brought him to Harte Farm to discuss a joint venture with the vaguely hippy-ish couple who owned it. They were organic, he thought – ahead of their time.
And there were kids, yes, now he thought about it. A sulky brat of a boy, who had a habit of hiding and spying, and a hooligan girl with wild hair and a tendency to walk around naked. He looked at Pippa again. At the windswept tresses, roughly tied up into a boisterous ponytail. At the braless chest beneath the hot-pink jersey.
Really? Could that be her? All grown up, in ways you can never imagine when they’re seven and you’re eighteen? When that feels like a world of difference, the unthinkable rather than the inadvisable?
“You jumped on my head,” he said, smiling at the memory. He saw it now: he’d had a hangover, as was usual back then. Too much scrumpy the night before. He’d been trying to sleep it off in the fields, found a patch of shade beneath the spreading arms of one of the old oaks that dotted the place. Half asleep, dreaming of London and home and those sailing girls with the salty skin and dirty laughs.
She’d yelled, like Boadicea screaming out a war cry, and launched herself from the lower branches of the tree, landing straight on top of him. He’d never even noticed her – she’d been wearing camouflage paint, greened-up like Rambo, hiding in the dappled leaves. Twigs stuck in her hair, soles of her bare feet covered in mud from running wild all day.
It amused him to think of it now, but he’d been a bit embarrassed at the time. Shocked out of his stupor by Stig of the Dump, caught out by a kid. A strange and slightly scary kid, who seemed to have made him the target of some kind of farm-based war game. God knows how long she’d been up there, watching him as he snored and drooled and sweated cider.
He’d picked her up by the skinny ankles and run all the way across the field, dangling her inches from the ground. She screamed and yelled and twisted herself up to try and scratch him, but he held firm until he reached the duck pond – where he’d swung her back and forth as if he was winding up for the Olympic discus, then let her fly through the air and land with a huge splash in the middle of the water.
His grandfather had given him a right telling off – what if she couldn’t swim? What if she’d banged her head? What if she’d squashed a duck? But her parents, they’d been cool. Just laughed and said it served her right – she was a little savage and deserved a bit of her own medicine. Yeah, they’d been cool, and from what she said a few minutes ago, they were gone now. They might have taken off for a commune in Marrakesh, but he got the impression that wasn’t what she’d meant. Rather that they were dead, like his grandfather. That the little girl he remembered had had to grow up very quickly, and way too soon.
“You remember now, don’t you?” she asked, laughing. “You remember my war cry?”
She let it out again and he heard Scotty, Lily and Daisy join in in the background. My God! A whole family of them! Savages, one and all.
“Okay, okay…I surrender!” he said, holding up his hands in the universal gesture of giving up. “I do remember now – but you can’t blame me for not recognising you. You have changed a bit, you know? You’re more…”
He floundered, trying to find a word that didn’t sound lecherous, curling fingers against his palm in case they accidentally made the equally universal gesture for “curvy-woman shaped”.
“Yes?” she said, hitching an eyebrow up at him suggestively. “More what, precisely?”
He looked awkward, less self-assured and arrogant. The tiny lines at the corners of his eyes crinkled up, showing white beneath his healthy outdoorsy tan. She’d had a terrible crush on him back then, Pippa remembered. He’d been this tall, handsome, exotic stranger and she used to sneak around following him. Obviously, she barely registered on his all-grown-up radar. The scream-and-jump routine had just been her way of getting his attention. Her pick-up techniques had improved…well, not significantly since then, she acknowledged. It’s not like she’d had much practice.
“Just…more,” he said, finally, gazing over her shoulder as though he was trying to avoid making eye contact with her. “Who’s that?” he asked, chocolate-drop eyes narrowing.
“What? Who?” blathered Pippa, who’d been slightly lost in thought as she looked up at his face. How could she not have remembered him straight away? He’d been the first love of her life, and had broken her tiny heart by dunking her in the duck pond – which, she had to admit, she thoroughly deserved.
She turned, following his gaze. Saw a plume of black smoke, then heard the bang. The scrape. The crash and grind of metal clashing on the gravel.
“Oh,” she said, the fun fading from her cornflower eyes, “that. That’s Patrick. On his bike. Or off it, perhaps.”
“Has he…just crashed it? Is he all right?” said Ben, watching as the gunmetal smoke funnelled up into the equally grey sky. This was all a bit surreal, as though he’d wandered into an episode of the Twilight Zone. And he’d thought his life was odd.
“Yes, he’s just crashed it,” she replied, setting off at a fast clip towards the scene of the accident, “and yes he’ll be all right. He crashes it at least once a day, just to keep me on my toes. Don’t feel obliged to follow – he’ll just be a pig to you. You’ll want to thump him and I’ll feel embarrassed.”
“Well, with an offer like that! How could I refuse?” he answered, striding to keep up with her. She seemed relaxed – if a little downtrodden – but he thought he’d better tag along, just in case this was the one time the crash-test dummy had taken his antics a step too far.
The younger children trailed behind them and he felt a tiny hand creep into one of his. The little boy. Scotty. The kid looked up at him, the same glowing, healthy looks as the rest of them. They all looked like adverts for Scandinavian log cabins, with their shining blonde hair and big blue eyes. Thoroughly disconcerting.
“Don’t worry,” said Lily – or maybe Daisy – as they passed. “Patrick’s just a bit of a mollusc,” said the other one, completing the sentence.
The mollusc in question was sprawled on the path, one of his legs trapped beneath what looked like an old Kawasaki. He wasn’t wearing a helmet and his hair – predictably blonde, but a lot dirtier than the others’ – was splayed across a face that was scratched raw with gravel burn. It had to hurt and would be a swine to clean with all those tiny scrapes pockmarked with even tinier stones.
Pippa paused, her lips twisting into a grimace, then walked over without a word. She leaned down, picked up the bike and threw it to one side. It bounced, the spokes whirring in the wind. Wow, thought Ben, she was stronger than she looked. Or maybe, he realised, it was just that she’d had a lot of practice – nobody was reacting as though this was an unusual occurrence, not even the younger kids. In fact, Daisy and Lily had their arms crossed over their chests and were mimicking the exasperated expression their big sister was wearing. Lord help the local boys with those two when they were older!
“This,” she said, kicking her younger brother in his good leg with her mud-coated wellie, “is Patrick. Patrick, this is Ben Retallick. He’s staying in Honeysuckle for the week. If you could try and avoid hitting him with the death machine, blowing up his belongings or stealing his car, I’d really appreciate it. What do you say?”
The teenager gazed up at them all, looking from his stern big sister to a confused-looking Ben. His sullen face, seared red by his scrapes, broke into a huge grin.
“Wow, sis!” he said, brushing himself down and standing up. “Do you know who this is?”
“Yes, Patrick, I do,” she replied, sighing. “It’s Ben Retallick. The boy who threw me in the duck pond when I was seven.”
“Nah,” he replied, staring at Ben as if he was the only interesting thing he’d ever seen in his whole existence. “This is Ben Retallick – that posh lawyer who got sent down for beating the shit out of some loser who got off with it. You remember? Bad Boy Ben, they called him – it was all over the bloody newspapers! Put the bloke in hospital for weeks! You treat me like I’m dirt ‘cause PC Plod in the village has a whinge about me, sis, but you’ve gone and invited a proper ex-con into the family home – what will people say?”
Chapter 3 (#u01435c6e-b5a2-5214-8409-8c3629d7d4a5)
Pippa couldn’t sleep, for about a million and one reasons, not all of them involving caffeine. After he’d dropped his bombshell – thrilled that he’d got one over on her – Patrick had limped off to the village saying he was going butterfly-hunting. That was a lie, clearly, and not even a good one. He was going to the pub. Everyone knew he was under-age, but as his birthday was only a few weeks off, the eyes of the staff were well and truly turned. They didn’t see the harm – mainly because they didn’t have to deal with the fallout. She was lucky enough to have that plum job.
He still wasn’t back and she knew there was a strong possibility he wouldn’t be – that he’d spend the night crashed out on a pal’s sofa, in the nearest hay barn, with one of the girls who seemed smitten by his small-town Steve McQueen routine, or even on the beach. At least he wasn’t on his bike this time, she thought. They’d played out this particular drama a hundred times before, and she knew it called for deep breaths and calming thoughts. He was a big boy – too big for a spanking. Too big for a cuddle. Although she suspected he’d probably needed both on regular occasions over the last few years, and she hadn’t been parent enough to provide either. Possibly because she was only a few years older than him herself – physically, at least.
She’d tossed and turned so many times in her bed, worrying about him, about what he was doing. About what she wasn’t doing. About how she could try and reach him. About how she’d quite like it if he just buggered off and lived somewhere else.
That last one was usually the final stop on the late-night train ride through her brain. She knew Patrick – she loved Patrick. She understood why he was the way he was – but it didn’t make it any easier to deal with.
That’s when she usually reached the point where she had to try and talk herself down, get some rest so she could deal with the challenges of the next day. With the needs of the kids still young enough for her to matter to them – the ones she could still save, if Patrick was determined to plough his own destructive path.
The calming thoughts, though, just weren’t coming that night. They were being chased away by all the anxious thoughts instead. And the anxious thoughts were bigger, nastier and came equipped with badass stun guns.
She couldn’t stop the anxiety flooding over her, dozens of tiny and not-so-tiny concerns drowning her in a crushing wave. Like the fact that the second instalment of the tax bill was due at the end of the next month. That the dishwasher in Primrose needed replacing. That their account at the vet’s was bigger than the national debt of a small African republic. That Social Services were due their quarterly visit in a few weeks’ time, and they’d all need to scrub up, shape up and pass muster. Four times a year she had to prove that she was a suitable person to be raising the kids. That Patrick’s problems weren’t dragging them all down; that Scotty’s issues at school were just due to shyness; that Daisy and Lily were communicating properly with the outside world.
She’d been doing this for years now, since she’d managed to convince them to take a risk on her after the car crash that claimed their parents. She was eighteen at the time and expected to head off to Oxford to study history. One drunk driver changed all that and instead she found herself playing mother to the other four, including baby Scotty. It wasn’t what she’d planned for her life – but she couldn’t stand by and watch them all get split up and packed off into foster care, could she? Not that the thought hadn’t crossed her mind – she was eighteen. Nowhere near old enough to become a mother, she knew. And maybe, she thought, when Patrick was playing up and her self-esteem was hiding somewhere round her ankles, they’d all have been better off if she’d thrown in the towel.
But…well. They’d survived so far and they’d carry on surviving.
She kicked the covers off her with her feet, lying in the dark and staring at the shadowed ceiling, criss-crossed with wooden beams. She glanced at the clock and didn’t like what she saw. Tomorrow was going to be an absolute bastard.
Her brain was just too busy to let her body go to sleep. It was all twisting and turning in there, like a barrel of angry snakes. Patrick, the money, Social Services – and, if she was honest, the man in the cottage across the way. Ben Retallick. Duckpond-slinger, cow-wrangler and convicted criminal.
Patrick’s revelation had shocked her, but not Ben – his face had fallen into a well-worn mask, almost as though he’d been expecting it. As though he’d played this scene out before. No replies, no response to her brother’s mockery or to her perplexed look. He gave them all a polite smile as he backed off, traipsed down the hill and retreated into Honeysuckle. No explanations. No comment at all, in fact. He’d shut the door behind him and never emerged again, not even when the rain cleared up and the sun started to shimmer gold onto the blues and greens of the Atlantic. He looked mega-fit, active, the type who went fell-running or surfing or at least cliff-walking. But he stayed in, presumably Minding His Own Business.
Which was certainly more than she’d managed. As soon as the kids had been packed off to bed – a long, multi-tiered process that involved stories, games of I-Spy, the forcible brushing of teeth and the collection of discarded underwear from the bathroom floor – she’d settled down with too much coffee and hooked up to her patchy internet access. It was frustrating, constantly having to reconnect, but she was used to it. All part of the charm, she told her guests, while swearing silently as she waited for pages to load. All she really wanted to do was watch an hour of crap telly and pass out, but she needed to know more about Ben Retallick. About Patrick’s comments and about the kind of man who was staying in a cottage just a few short steps away from her and her family in the main farmhouse.
The online newspapers were full of stories about him – so much so that she couldn’t believe she’d missed it. He must have been on the TV, on front pages, on billboards. Huge news in the local press. All over the known universe, in fact, and still it had slipped her notice. That’s what running a business and raising four kids did for you, she thought. You lost your grip on the world at large – all that mattered were the concerns of daily life, getting through every blocked toilet and piece of homework and dentist’s visit and random call from the local police. Feeding five humans and a menagerie of animals. Cleaning a farmhouse and three cottages and a barnyard and washing clothes for the whole tribe. Ironing school uniforms and plaiting hair and mowing the lawn and watering the plants and dealing with bookings and bills. It was endless and left approximately zero minutes per day for watching the news or reading tabloids. Frankly, she’d probably have missed a zombie apocalypse until the undead trudged over the hill looking for the next human limb to chomp on.
Now, though, she knew it all. Or at least knew what had been reported. She knew that Ben Retallick, up until two years ago, had been a celebrated criminal prosecution barrister living and working in London. He’d come a long way from the days of hangover recovery on a Cornish hillside.
That had all changed when he accepted a case involving Darren McConnell, a man who was accused of swindling pensioners out of their life savings. One of them had been so overcome with guilt at losing his and his wife’s nest egg that he’d committed suicide, leaving evidence for the police of McConnell’s involvement.
