Father Unknown (39 page)

‘She would have been paid if she was off sick, and she’d lived in Bristol a very long time, so why was she in such a hurry?’

‘People are often in a hurry to have an estate wound up, sometimes because they believe they will stop grieving once it’s all finalized.’

Aware she was putting his back up by asking so many questions, Daisy tried another tack.

‘I’m sorry if I sound pushy, I don’t mean to be.’ Daisy gave him a wide smile. ‘I’m just worried about Ellen. You see, Mrs Peters in Mawnan Smith who was a very close friend of Ellen’s told me she has estranged herself from all her old friends, and most people in the village think it’s because she came into so much money. But Mrs Peters and I can’t believe that. We think it’s far more likely she had some kind of mental breakdown after the tragedy.’

Mr Briggs nodded. ‘I would agree with you,’ he said. ‘She never struck me as being materialistic.’

‘If that was the case,’ Daisy went on, heartened by his agreeing with her, ‘it might help her deal with the past if I turn up. What do you think?’

The man’s face softened. ‘I think you are right. Now I know about you, Miss Buchan, it does cast some light on why Ellen left Cornwall so young, and went in for work which must have been very punishing. I had always got the impression from her father that it was more to do with the difficult relationship she had with his wife. I take it he never knew of your existence?’

‘No, the only people who knew down here were Mr and Mrs Peters.’

‘Ellen often spoke of them before the tragedy’ Mr Briggs nodded. ‘You see, she sometimes popped in here with messages from her father when she was down visiting him. I always used to ask when she was going to come back for good.’

‘What did she say about that?’

‘That she and Violet couldn’t live under the same roof, however much she’d like to run the farm with Albert.’ Mr Briggs smiled. ‘That’s what she was like, kind-hearted, realistic and straight-talking. Knowing how much she loved the place, it was something of a shock that she wanted to get shot of it almost the minute the disaster happened.’

‘Well, no one would be able to be objective about the future at a time like that,’ Daisy said.

‘True, that’s why I tried to persuade her to wait a while,’ Mr Briggs replied. ‘Maybe if I’d been able to speak to her face to face, I might have been able to offer a different solution. But she wouldn’t or couldn’t come down here, wouldn’t wait, and of course in the end I had to accept my place as merely her father’s solicitor and executor, and go along with her wishes.’

‘What would your different solution have been then?’ Daisy asked, relieved that Mr Briggs had warmed up.

‘To sell most of the farmland, keeping a small part for herself, and apply for planning permission to build herself a small cottage on it. There would have been no problem with that. She would have had enough capital left to live on, and there are dozens of schools in the surrounding area who would have been only too delighted to employ her. Apart from being good for her, it would also have made Albert very happy. He would have hated the farm to go entirely out of Pengelly hands.’

‘Now I’ve seen where the farm was, and been told so much about her, I really think she must have cracked up,’ Daisy said. ‘I just hope she wasn’t another casualty of that terrible fire.’

‘Me too,’ he nodded. ‘Let me look in the file. I don’t remember there being any contact number or address, but of course I couldn’t possibly remember everything in there.’

The receptionist interrupted them at that moment, announcing the arrival of his next appointment. Briggs frowned. ‘Could you possibly come back in a couple of hours, Miss Buchan? That will give me time to go through it. Let’s say at twelve?’

‘That’s fine with me,’ Daisy said, getting up to leave. ‘Thank you so much for your help, Mr Briggs. I’ll go and explore the town now.’

Daisy was a bit disappointed with Falmouth. Despite its great age and its having been one of England’s great ports, she found it surprisingly drab. It had too many tacky souvenir shops for her taste, and it didn’t help that it was such a miserable day. Even down at the harbour, the sea and sky were both dark grey, and the many oil tankers and container ships lying at anchor out in deeper water waiting to be unloaded had a desolate look about them. But she was glad to have had the chance to spend some time there.

At twelve she presented herself back at the solicitors’ and this time the receptionist welcomed her with a warm smile and sent her straight in to see Mr Briggs.

‘I’ve found one lead,’ he said, ‘a firm of London solicitors, who requested a reference for Ellen in relation to renting some accommodation. She may well have used the same solicitors later if she bought a property.’

Daisy was disappointed, she had hoped so much that he was going to come up with an address. Perhaps he saw that in her face for he looked sympathetic. ‘I’ve photocopied the letter and written her old address in Bristol on the back. You could try calling there and ask if she left a forwarding address. Let me know how you get on,’ he said with real warmth. ‘I liked Ellen very much, and I’d like to hear you became reunited.’

Daisy was just about to leave when she turned at the door. ‘Did Albert leave anything to Josie or Violet in his will? I know it hardly matters seeing as they died with him, I’m just curious.’

‘No, he made no provisions for either of them, everything was to go to Ellen.’

‘That was a bit hard on Violet,’ Daisy said.

‘I think he trusted Ellen to make sure she was taken care of,’ Mr Briggs said. ‘He altered his will at the time there were allegations in the papers that he’d been cruel to Josie. He vowed then she would never set foot on his property again. I think the reason he left Violet nothing was all tied up with that, he said Josie could wind her mother round her finger and that Violet hadn’t got the sense to see it.’

‘Were Josie and Violet aware of this?’ she asked.

‘I doubt it. Albert wasn’t the sort to divulge his business to anyone.’

‘And the police didn’t find it suspicious that Ellen was the sole beneficiary?’

‘Why should they be? Firstly, that will was made many years before the fire. And everyone knew how Albert felt about his farm; it was common knowledge that Violet and Josie had no interest in it other than the money it would raise. He had always hoped that in the event of his death Ellen would want to farm it.’

‘But she let him down!’ Daisy said.

‘Yes, I suppose she did. But don’t judge her for that, Daisy. Think how hard it would be for anyone to settle in a scene of so much tragedy.’

The weather improved again over the weekend, and Daisy spent it taking long walks with Fred and thinking over everything she had learned about her mother.

She telephoned Joel on Sunday afternoon when she knew he’d be at home. He seemed delighted to hear from her at first, but as soon as she started trying to tell him what she’d found out about her mother so far, he seemed to clam up. She hadn’t really expected him to share her excitement, but she was dismayed when he began throwing up objections to her continuing the search.

‘If she’s had a mental breakdown, she could be very needy. I don’t think you could cope with someone leaning on you.’

‘Why do you have to be such a downer?’ she asked, intensely irritated that he didn’t want to know every little detail.

‘I’m not being a downer; I’m just trying to make you think things through before you rush off half cocked. Even if she isn’t in need, she might have married; she could even have other children now. She might not welcome you turning up out of the blue and exposing a past she’d never spoken of to anyone.’

‘I haven’t even found her yet,’ Daisy said, exasperated. ‘Can’t you just offer to help? Couldn’t you contact the police down here and see if they kept any tabs on her?’

‘No, I can’t,’ he said curtly. ‘Just because I’m a policeman doesn’t mean I can get access to files for my personal use.’

‘Well, stuff you,’ Daisy snapped, and flung the phone down.

She was far too angry with Joel to phone back later, even though she could see he had a point about Ellen maybe not wanting her past churned up. The more she thought over their conversation, the more she read into it. He didn’t want her having anyone else in her life, in fact he didn’t want her to have a life of her own, he wanted to be the centre of her world.

As she lay in bed that night listening to the sound of the waves on the harbour wall, she forced herself to remember other times when he’d objected to things she wanted to do. There were the parties for one thing, raves in old empty houses. She had loved them, it was fun having a party somewhere you shouldn’t really be. But he said he didn’t think it was much fun paying inflated prices for cans of beer and drinking them in a dirty old house with a mob of head-bangers.

He objected to driving to Newquay in her Beetle for the annual Run to the Sun too. He said obsessive Beetle owners with surf-boards strapped to the roofs of their cars weren’t his kind of people.

She had come round to his way of thinking because he was good at surprise outings like a booze cruise on the river, or a night away in a pretty country village. But that wasn’t the point – however good his ideas were, he stopped her making decisions. It was always him who decided what they were going to do on a night out: films, concerts, it was always his choice, and she’d gone along with it because she was easy-going.

He’d even changed the way she dressed. When she first met him she used to wear outrageous clothes, tight skirts split to the thigh, low-cut tops, but although he never actually said he disapproved, she felt he did. So she changed, just to make him happy.

Well, she vowed she wasn’t going to bow to his wishes any more. She wouldn’t phone him or go round to his place when she got back to London. He could get stuffed permanently.

Chapter Nineteen

Daisy left Cornwall on Thursday, a week after she’d been to Mawnan Smith, and arrived home in Chiswick in the evening for the Easter weekend.

‘Daisy!’ John Buchan shouted out joyfully as she walked through the door, and without even stopping to pat Fred he scooped her into a bear hug. ‘It seems like you’ve been gone for months. We’ve all missed you so much.’

Over his shoulder Daisy could see into the sitting-room which was very untidy. She dreaded to think what the rest of the house was like.

‘It’s good to be home,’ she said, hugging him back, and despite her anxieties, it
was
good.

Lucy and Tom came running down the stairs and their welcome was just as warm. They all fired questions at her at once. What was the cottage like? The weather? The scenery? But it was Lucy who asked if she’d found Ellen.

‘I’ve got a photograph and a solicitor’s address here in London, but that’s all,’ Daisy said, her voice shaking with emotion because she hadn’t expected such warmth from them all. ‘But you aren’t going to believe some of the stuff I learned about her and her family. It’s all too amazing.’

The kitchen was a mess, with a fetid smell coming from the sink drain-hole. The dining-room table had got white rings on it and someone had yanked the curtains too hard in the sitting-room and partially pulled them off the rail. Yet none of that mattered to Daisy, for as Lucy and Tom hastily prepared a chicken salad for them all, Dad sat her down, made her a cup of tea and insisted she started right at the beginning of the story without missing anything out.

Daisy was no stranger to being the centre of attention, but she couldn’t remember a time before when she had the whole family hanging on her every word. Their rapt faces spurred her on, and she put a lot of drama into parts of the story, embellishing the tale of her mad grandmother jumping off the cliff, her grandfather being a surly Worzel Gummidge, Violet the vicious stepmother, and her real father a smooth operator in a spangled suit. She could sense their excitement growing even greater as she told them that Josie became a famous model and later slid into drug-taking.

But when she finally got to the part about the fire, and how they all died in it except Ellen, they looked completely stunned.

‘I don’t believe it, you’ve made it all up,’ Tom said, looking at her doubtfully. ‘Come on, Daisy! This is a wind-up, isn’t it?’

Daisy shook her head. ‘I promise you it’s all absolutely true. That’s why I didn’t phone you while I was down there. I would have told you it all garbled, left bits out. So I thought I’d wait till I got back when I’d had time to put it all together properly.’

‘Good God, Daisy,’ her father sighed. ‘When you didn’t phone I thought you must have drawn a complete blank, then made some new friends and forgotten what you’d gone down there for. That would have been completely in character. We even laughed about it!’

‘I said you’d come back with a taste for rough cider, or maybe a mania for sailing,’ Tom admitted with a chuckle. ‘We really thought that you’d got into something else.’

‘I even thought you’d found a new man,’ Lucy said, and had the grace to look sheepish. ‘Sorry about that, but we
were
all glad you seemed to be having a good time.’

‘I did have a good time,’ Daisy grinned, ‘but nothing like you imagined. My head’s been whirling with all this information. It still is, and I’ve still got to find Ellen.’

They fell into silence for a while, Lucy staring at the photograph of Ellen and Tom gazing into space.

John got up from the table and went out into the hall. He came back with the telephone book. ‘I wonder how many Pengellys there are in London?’ he said. ‘Anyone want to make a guess?’

‘More than fifty, I expect,’ Tom said. ‘Too many to try ringing them all. Besides, she might have changed her name.’

Lucy looked up from the photograph. ‘You are like her,’ she said. ‘But she looks a bit serious and po-faced.’

‘She does, doesn’t she?’ Daisy agreed. ‘I’ve been told so much about her, but I still haven’t got a real fix on her. Everyone else, even Violet the wicked stepmother, seemed so vibrant, so real. But not Ellen. She sort of wafted in and out of the stories. A pleasant, do-righting kind of person, but a bit shadowy somehow.’