The Whiskerly Sisters (18 page)

They got off to a shaky start when the first few calls went to voice mail. Charley agreed to try those again later. The old lady who answered call number eight was so deaf that Charley had to shout at the top of her voice just to get a response. She crossed her off the list in front of her. Wrong sex, wrong age. She then spent an anxious couple of minutes explaining to call thirteen why he had never heard of their organisation and why it didn’t have a website so that he could check their validity. She kept her nerve and eventually he hung up.

Call fourteen was answered by a lady named Katie, who was in the right age group and told them freely that she had two children. Tiffany circled her entry on the page. Call twenty-one was picked up by a child who told Charley that her mother was in the garden. Charley gently asked if she could go and get mummy and the child went off to find her but never came back. Distracted no doubt, thought Charley and marked it down for a second call. Call twenty-two was answered by a posh sounding lady with a broad Scottish accent. No, she didn’t need double glazing, a time share or car insurance, thank you and good afternoon. Another question mark. Call twenty-seven was picked up by a bloke on nights, who was not at all happy to be disturbed for such a trivial reason. He slammed the phone down. Tiffany made a note against his number to call him back again and make sure it was late afternoon or early evening.

By the end of the third day, the two women had managed to contact every one of the thirty-two names and had sifted them down to six possibles. Satisfied with themselves, they phoned Bex to report in. She congratulated them and told them she would update the others. She would be in touch when she had decided how to take the next phase forward.

In the meantime, it was time for a spot of sleuthing.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” announced Jax to Izza, as they sat in her parked car at six am the following Monday morning, a few yards from the home of the first possible on the list and with a very clear view of the front door.

“Can we get some bagels when the bakery opens, mum?” asked Izza.

“No, we cannot get some bagels when the baker opens missy. We sit tight until someone opens that door and then we watch. If needs be, we follow them,” Jax replied tartly. “There’s some coffee in a flask on the back seat and I’ve brought some fruit. If you’re lucky, there might be some mints in the dashboard, but Christ knows how long they’ve been there.”

Together they sat and waited while Izza fiddled with her hair and drank all the coffee. They waited a full hour and a half before the front door opened and a blonde woman, wearing a dressing gown, briefly put out some rubbish before shutting the door again.

“Well, at least someone’s home,” said Izza. “I was beginning to think they might be doing a bunk or something.”

“Doing a bunk? Why would they need to do that then?” asked Jax, more because she was bored than because she needed an answer. Her backside was beginning to ache and she needed to stretch her legs. She knew she would need to pee shortly too and felt a little distraction might ease her torment.

“I don’t know. Maybe they know we’re onto them.”

“Onto them?”

“Yeah, you know, they could have defaulted on the mortgage or something and be planning a moonlight flit.”

“Or they could be spies and think we’re MI5 and that they’ve been rumbled. Phone Q Miss Moneypenny and ask for some of that special chewing gum that explodes on contact with wood.” Jax had decided to join in the game.

“I’d rather Q brought bagels,” replied Izza, gloomily.

“Shut up,” replied her mother.

“Wilco M. Do you think they might have a huge pair of binoculars in the front bedroom and they’re watching us watching them.”

“No, I think she’s an early morning burglar, who broke in through the back a couple of hours ago, ransacked the place and now she fancies a quick cuppa before she nips off over the garden wall to sell the loot to her fence.”

“You think the loot is in the rubbish she put out?”

“Of course.”

“Let’s hope it’s not bin day then,” replied Izza, laughing.

They were both having so much fun trying to outsmart each other that they almost missed the suited gentleman with the briefcase, who came out of the front door and walked down the path. Closing the gate behind him, he turned towards the car and headed straight for them. Holy shit!

As one, Jax and Izza straightened up and then slumped back down again, trying to look nonchalant and failing miserably. Trying to appear as if they had every reason to be in the road at this time of day, that there was nothing out of the ordinary going on at all, that the last thing on their minds was staking out his property proved very difficult because, let’s face it, that’s easier said than done when you have never done it before and can’t help but wonder what might be about to happen next. Was the guy in the suit going to march up to the car, wrench open the door, poke his head through the gap and insist on knowing what the fuck they thought they were doing?

Jax was panicking – why the hell had she agreed to this? She forced herself to keep breathing and to try to remain calm. Both of them waited with bated breath; their hearts thumping so loudly in their chests that surely to god someone was going to complain about the bloody noise any second now. That’s if their hearts kept beating at all. The atmosphere in the car was so tense that there was a real possibility of a double cardiac arrest.

As it turned out, the suit walked straight past their car without seeming to notice them. He was simply on his way to work. “Who says there’s anything wrong with an anti-climax,” thought Jax, sagging with relief. Izza, wiping the sweat from her upper lip, watched the man’s retreating back from her passenger wing mirror. When she thought he had gone sufficiently far down the road, she glanced at her mother, who nodded. Izza got out of the car and began to follow the man at a distance. Jax remained where she was and continued to watch the house. About forty five minutes later, the front door opened and the blonde lady re-emerged, fully dressed now and with two young boys in tow. Jax tailed them to the local Junior School, then phoned Izza, who had followed the suit all the way into town on the bus. Jax reversed the car and drove off to collect her.

Across town, Charley and Sly were sitting outside a garage, having tailed another one of the possibles to his place of work. They had agreed to park up nearby and wait another half an hour before Sly exited the car, leaving Charley to drive into the workshop to enquire about the price of a service. Striking lucky, she found their quarry sitting behind the information desk. Deftly flirting with him, it didn’t take her long to know for certain that this was a seasoned divorcee, hoping for a chance pick up with an attractive woman. Mentally, she crossed him of the list. The man they were looking for was definitely married.

Tiffany and Celia drew a blank from the house they had under observation. They waited three hours, gave up and took themselves off for a calorifically high breakfast.

By close of play that evening, the girls had information on four of the people on their list with only two left to go, but it was more than a painstaking week later that they felt certain they had narrowed it down to one of two possibles and, by that time, Verity had arrived back in the country.

It was time for Phase Three.

“Am I doing the right thing, Samantha?” asked Verity for the umpteenth time that morning. “I could be opening up a whole can of worms.”

“That’s what I love about you, kitten,” came the reply and then Sam began to sing, “Always look on the bright side of life, te tum, te tum, te tum, te tum.”

“Shut up. This is serious,” whispered Verity. “I’m scared.”

“Look, we’ve been over this before. I have a ream of paper at home with a list of things that could go wrong scrawled all over it, but we’re still here. Now, get out of the car, walk up the drive and knock on the flaming door,” instructed Sam sharply.

Verity stood outside the door of number fifty-seven and paused to reflect. Just how should she approach this? What was the right thing to say? “Erm, excuse me, but I think you might be my step-brother. How about I come in and we bridge the forty-five year gap? And, yes please, I’d love a chocolate hobnob.”

Which strangely enough was almost exactly what happened, but not because Verity found any of the right words, but because the man standing in front of her on his own doorstep was able to look into her eyes and see his own father. After that first meeting, John quickly organised a second and, only a couple of weeks later, Verity, along with her mother and a highly intrigued Sam, were invited to sit down with their brand new step family and hear a very different version of events.

Well, there are always two sides to every story, aren’t there?

Neither John nor Ben knew anything at all about a long lost step sister, but they were unsurprised to find that they had one. It seemed that the affair had been glossed over before they were both born and had never been mentioned again. John and his parents had settled into cosy domesticity and, a little while later, Ben had come along. However, it wasn’t long before Alex began his philandering again. To the best of their knowledge and belief, there were no more itinerant siblings littering the planet, but John told them that, as far as he and his brother were concerned, their lives had been marred by the constant arguing of their parents. They were never without a marital storm on the horizon, usually followed by a short summer and then the skies would darken once again as the thunder began to rumble; sometimes in the distance, sometimes directly overhead. Still, the couple stayed together for the sake of their boys. Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, Ben felt unable to say.

There seemed to be a period of peace as the boys entered their late teens and, in turn, left home, but that might have been because they had found their independence and were moving on. John had followed his father into the insurance business, but worked for a different outfit. Ben went to University. Both boys developed interesting lives outside the family and seldom felt the need to return home. They both remained close to their mother, telephoning her weekly and dropping by to take her out to lunch every now and then. However, there was a definite gulf between father and sons, which time only widened.

It was about seven years ago that it had happened. There were some discrepancies in Alex’s accounting. Money had gone missing from the firm. During the inevitable investigation into alleged theft, it transpired that Alex had been less than honest with his figures and, as it turned out, had been defrauding the company for several years. Although the Police had been involved, it was agreed, after a prolonged and somewhat heated debate, not to press charges on the condition that Alex left quietly. He was to clear his desk immediately, leave the building and never return. He would forgo his pension.

The shame was more than their mother could bear. Despite everything happening behind closed doors, Alex was suddenly and inexplicably out of a job. Tongues had begun to wag and rumours were flying up and down the street. Humiliated once more by her treacherous husband, their mother took things very badly and withdrew into their home, feeling unable to face former friends and neighbours. She even refused to open the door to the window cleaner and, in a very short space of time, went from an outgoing, gregarious woman to a thin, fragile recluse. An emergency family meeting was held at which both brothers agreed that the only option was for their parents to start afresh somewhere far away. Twelve difficult months later, the house was finally sold and, with what little savings they had left, husband and wife retired to Northern France. Far away from the gossip of the neighbourhood, the two boys hoped their mother would slowly recover from the shock.

It was not to be. Within a year, she was informed by a kindly doctor in a French hospital that she had developed ovarian cancer. Despite the benefits of a good health system, she failed to rally and, over time, the cancer spread. It was almost as if the trauma she had endured on the outside had finally begun to eat away at her on the inside. Disgraced by her dishonest husband, she found she had little fight left. Just before the end, she chose to return home alone to die in the local hospice with her children and grandchildren around her.

Besides themselves with grief at the loss of their much loved mother, the boys blamed Alex. They were cold with fury and, as one, refused to let him put so much as a foot over their thresholds. They wanted nothing to do with him. As far as they were concerned, he was an utter turd; an adulterous, thieving, manipulative turd and he had murdered their mother. True, he might not have put the knife to her throat and sliced, but he had killed her all the same with his disgusting behaviour. They would have none of him.

And, they told Verity, that if she knew what was good for her, she would have none of him too.

P
atrick was panicking. A delegation from Head Office in Dusseldorf was due to arrive shortly and the pack he had promised would be ready for discussion on their arrival still needed photocopying, but the bloody machine was jammed. Patrick was no use whatsoever with technical things. Lydia had tried her best to clear it and several members of her customer services team were crowding round it, scratching their heads and trying to work out what to do next. No one seemed to know where the handbook was kept. No one seemed to know how to contact the repair man.