And yet that wasn’t completely true. There had been that one special friend. BB: Beautifully Broken. Should he let her know about Helen’s death? He felt that he should, and yet wouldn’t it be awful just to message her via the Galleria website? What on earth would he say?
Hi there. You were online friends with my wife. But I thought you should know that she’s dead.
It seemed so cold and heartless and he knew right away that he couldn’t do that to someone. He checked Galleria on his own phone, quickly finding Beautifully Broken’s page. He took a look around, hoping there’d be a link to a website or an email address or something, but there was nothing. He didn’t even have a name to go on. Luke wasn’t used to social media. He had a Facebook account, but he only really used it for his business page, which had a modest following. He wasn’t sure how these things worked. Should he message her for contact details? He felt decidedly uncomfortable about doing that. This was the sort of thing one did in person or – at the very least – on the phone.
Then there was the issue with the unsent gift. Luke put his phone down and returned to the spare room, searching the box and the bubble wrap for BB’s address, but there was nothing there. Had Helen even had it? He returned to the living room and flipped through her journal again, but there was no address written down there. Maybe she’d been about to ask BB for it and, if Luke could find it, he could send Helen’s gift. The idea really appealed to him. He felt it would be something he could do to make up for not always seeing what Helen was thinking or feeling. This, he thought, might go some way towards helping him feel just a little bit better about that.
Luke picked up his phone again, looking at BB’s page, but there were definitely no contact details there. He could message her, asking for her address, but it wouldn’t be easy or honest without him first telling her that Helen had died, and that felt wrong somehow. If only there was a way of finding her and giving her the gift and telling her about Helen. That, he felt, would be the human thing to do – the thing that Helen would want him to do.
Luke scrolled through BB’s gallery. He couldn’t help feeling a little stalkerish as he looked for clues about her, but there wasn’t really much on her page that gave anything away.
Ah, wait a minute.
He scrolled back.
The sea. That was definitely the sea. But was that where she lived or a day trip or holiday shot?
Slowly, an idea began to form. If he could find out where she lived, he could visit her, couldn’t he? She was definitely in the UK, judging by the photos of the countryside. It didn’t look hilly so it probably wasn’t the north or anywhere like Devon or the South Downs. He glimpsed a few blurred images of red-bricked cottages and, crucially, flint. And there was a round-towered church. Very idiosyncratic. Drawing on his builder’s knowledge and passion for vernacular architecture, Luke would hazard a guess that those clues led to East Anglia. Not terribly helpful seeing as East Anglia was comprised of several large counties, most of them with a coast, but at least he’d made a promising start.
He glanced up from the phone and rubbed his eyes. It wasn’t healthy to look at these screens for so long. He never knew how his wife did it – moving from PC to laptop to phone with such ease. It would drive him crazy. But it was the modern world, he realised, and it was one his wife had embraced.
Sighing, he continued to scroll, ignoring the plethora of teacups and floral displays in chipped vases and focusing on the few interspersed images of landscape. Now that he’d got his eye attuned, he definitely thought it was East Anglia, possibly Norfolk, or Suffolk, which was famous for its brick and flint cottages. If he could find one particularly striking image that he could use to do a reverse image search, that might just help him pinpoint where she was.
Sure enough, a round-towered church seemed to be a recurrent theme with BB. Taken from different angles and in different seasons and weathers, it was never photographed as a whole, but the little sections she captured of it were very distinct and might just be enough to help Luke in his search.
Carefully, methodically, he searched Google for a little while longer, examining image after image of round-towered churches, comparing the flint work, the porches and the shapes of the windows, and he soon had a result. The church he was looking for was St George’s in a village called Lorford on the Suffolk coast. He googled Lorford, recognising some of the cottages he’d seen in BB’s photos and the stretch of lonely beach too.
Then he went back to her account, looking at the still-life photos, seeing what he could learn about the rooms they were taken in. One thing was certain – they were no ordinary rooms. He saw great grey flagstone floors, deep stone windowsills and – wait a minute – was that an arch flanked by a column? This was definitely not a modern home, Luke thought.
He looked at a few more images and smiled as realisation dawned.
BB lived in a castle.
Chapter 4
‘Luke? Take a
