The Daughter's Secret by Eva Holland

Author:Eva Holland [Holland, Eva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409157052
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2015-08-12T22:00:00+00:00

FIVE DAYS

‘Ros! Ros! Come and look at this.’ Dan’s hissed whisper dragged me into wakefulness. Our bedroom door was open and I could see him on the landing peering into the round window that overlooked the front garden. We had stayed up after Stephanie and Freddy had gone to bed. We had drunk a bottle of wine with grim determination as I tried once again to make him understand my fear of Temperley. He listened, or at least he let me talk. I told him about the letter. I nearly told him about my visit to the prison but realised just in time that the fact I had sneaked off to Wandsworth and failed to mention it for three years wouldn’t help my cause. Dan was torn, I knew, between believing what I told him – believing in my fear for Stephanie – and knowing how many times my fear had been misplaced. However reasoned my arguments were, they couldn’t erase his memory of the trip to Palma I had ruined by refusing to get on the plane because I was convinced that a woman glimpsed in the queue to board was a terrorist. He couldn’t forget the time he had arrived home from a week-long work trip to New York to discover that I had kept Stephanie and Freddy off school for four days because of a classroom shooting in Texas, or the fallout from the trip to Stratford-Upon-Avon. He couldn’t forget the times I had pulled Stephanie out of school because I was sure I had seen Temperley in the street, or the day I crashed my car into a bollard with Freddy in the back because a dark-haired road worker had looked so familiar. So Dan listened and he nodded, but I don’t know what he heard. Before we went to bed I made my case for whisking Stephanie away on holiday. The more I thought about it the more I was sure it was the right thing to do.

I felt the wine running thickly through my veins as I got out of bed and pulled on my dressing gown. The air was frigid and I walked through clouds of my own breath on my way to join Dan.

‘Look!’ He tapped the window. ‘What the hell is that? And what’s it doing on my lawn?’

I pressed my forehead to the window and let my eyes adjust to the gloom. A long, low shape had been carved out of a heap of snow in the front garden. Bathed in the orange light of the street lamp, it curved across the octagonal lawn, a head clearly visible at one end and a tail at the other. Four short legs spread from the body, giving the impression that the creature was frozen in the act of scuttling across the ground. It was Gaudi’s lizard scooped up from beneath the blazing sun of Barcelona and shrouded with snow in my garden. It was Cam, painted across the front lawn.

‘Oh! Why is that there?’ I said.

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