“You’re reading too much into it,” said Nikki, but she looked uncertain, all the same.
“I don’t know if I am. Because there’s clearly loads of stuff about my mum I never had a clue about. It’s like I’m being shown a whole other side of her now.” Heather sighed. “Maybe I’ll find out more tomorrow.”
“You’re going to see this Anna woman?”
Heather nodded. She had phoned the number Pamela Whittaker had given her and spoken to the receptionist of the Twelve Elms Centre. Heather had sensed a fair amount of surprise from the woman that Anna had a visitor at all, but they had been eager enough to book her in.
“She might have known my mum, so it’s worth a try.”
Nikki swirled her wine in her glass thoughtfully. “Hev, do you really think Fiddler’s Mill is the key to all this? That something that happened so long ago could have caused your mother to … do this to herself?”
“I do.” As soon as she said it out loud, she realized it was true. “I really do think something happened at this place, something mum kept secret for the rest of her life.”
Heather stood up and left the living room, heading for the kitchen with the pot still in her arms. She was halfway across the tiled floor when a memory dropped into her mind like a blade of ice, and she jumped, the terracotta pot slipping from her arms. It shattered, scattering shards of orange clay all over her feet and sending pieces skittering under the fridge and the oven, but Heather hardly noticed.
The card.
“Heather?” Nikki appeared at the kitchen door, her eyes wide. “Are you all right?”
It had been left outside their door when Heather was thirteen or fourteen. She had found it as she’d stepped out to nip to the shops, and she remembered the weird combined feeling of embarrassment and pleasure as she’d knelt to pick it up. At the time, she had been nursing a crush on a boy called James Thurlow, who was in her science classes, and thanks to a wild combination of hormones and optimism she had been dropping huge hints about Valentine’s Day for the last few weeks. The card itself had been quite a classy one; simple white background traced with gold lines, a big red heart in the middle. Inside, somewhat disappointingly, there were just the printed words “always thinking of you” with a heart hand drawn in ballpoint pen underneath.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Nikki took her hand and squeezed it, and with some difficulty Heather dragged herself back to the present.
When I was a teenager, someone left a Valentine’s card on our doorstep. I thought it was for me, but … Mum saw me pick it up, and Nikki, she went batshit.”
Her mother had grabbed her by the shoulder, yanking her back into the hallway and slamming the door shut. Her face had been so pale, and Heather could clearly picture the dark smudges that had appeared under her eyes, almost like bruises.
“She yanked the card out of my hands and she tore it up, just like that. When I shouted at her, said that it was mine, she had asked me if it had been addressed to me, and it hadn’t, but you know, I was a kid, it never occurred to me that anyone could have been sending my mum a Valentine’s card. She was old, and married, and to kids that basically means dead, right? But …” Heather looked at the shards of the pot littering the floor. “When she was done shouting at me, she started crying. Locked herself in the bathroom. We never spoke of it again.”
“What do you think it means?’”
“I don’t know.” Heather rubbed her hands over her face. They smelt like the dirt that had been inside the pot. “Probably nothing. Come on, I can’t be bothered to clean this up now. Let’s go and finish our wine.”
Heather watched Nikki walk back into the living room. It was cold, too cold. She rubbed vigorously at her arms, and a violent shiver worked its way down her spine.
The card didn’t mean anything, except that her mother was paranoid about something, even at a time when Michael Reave himself had certainly been in prison, and in no position to leave cards on doorsteps—unless there was someone on the outside, performing little tasks for him. Tasks like romantic gestures. And murder.
Heather kicked one of the bigger shards of pot under the fridge, and went to join her friend.
CHAPTER24
THE TWELVE ELMS Centre was a pleasingly gothic building, with white windowsills shining against dark gray brick, and all the more imposing under a sky filled with rain clouds. Heather walked up the path through the gardens, noting that they were well kept and neat, while the sign outside the building was narrow and discreet: Twelve Elms Centre for the Treatment of Anxiety Disorders and Trauma. Inside a cozy reception area she spoke to a sturdy looking man with kind eyes, who shortly introduced her to Doctor Parvez.
“You’re here to visit Anna Hobson?”
Dr Parvez was a tall willowy man with an advancing bald patch and large, old-fashioned glasses. He wore a beige
