Page 6 of Far from Home
3) Your mother has a brooch in the shape of an animal. How many diamonds are there on the brooch?
4) The pub opposite the church where you were christened – how many bells on the sign?
All my love
The letter was signed with an illegible scrawl.
Gavin read it carefully and then looked across at Amy and raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, he certainly wasn’t wrong about puzzling you! What the hell is this all about?’
She shook her head. ‘I haven’t the foggiest idea. Maybe he was trying to check that the stuff got given to the right person. But, if that’s what he’s trying to do, surely the questions should have been answerable in front of the notary? Could it be some sort of code or maybe he was just going a bit bonkers in his final years?’ She snorted. ‘Whoever he was.’
She took the letter back from Gavin and checked the date. ‘April last year, barely a month or two before he died. That’s when he wrote that, and it’s not as if he was even that old. From what the solicitor said, he would have only been sixty-five or so – hardly senile.’
‘So, what about your mum’s brooch? Did she have one in the shape of an animal?’
Amy looked up and met his eye, ever more struck by the surreal feel of all this. ‘In fact, she did. She had a rather fine brooch in the shape of a silver stag, complete with antlers, and she wore it to church every Sunday. She kept it in her jewellery box back home. There were quite a few little stones set in it, but I must admit I didn’t realise they were real diamonds. It’s in one of the cardboard boxes that came from her place that are stacked up in the cupboard at my flat back in London now.’
‘So, assuming that’s the brooch he’s alluding to, how on earth did he know about it?’
Amy was also thinking about this. There was only one logical explanation. ‘He must have known my mother, and she must have known him. Maybe he even gave her the brooch. But the funny thing is that she never mentioned him to me.’ She looked across at him and shook her head. ‘I can only guess that she didn’t want me to know.’
‘An old boyfriend, maybe?’
‘I don’t think she had boyfriends. After Dad’s death, to my knowledge, she never went out with another man.’
‘And before your dad?’
Amy hesitated. She, too, had been wondering about this. Might this mystery man have been a former boyfriend who, somehow, had never forgotten her mother? But how had he got to know her daughter in that case? She sighed with frustration. ‘I honestly don’t know. It would all have been so long ago.’
‘But your father was killed just before you were born, wasn’t he? Even allowing for some years of mourning, surely she must have got to know other men after his death?’
Amy sighed again. ‘I really don’t know. Nobody special, I’m sure, and certainly nobody while I was growing up.’
Thoughts of her parents, and now this other man, all of them dead and gone, made Amy begin to feel unexpectedly emotional and tears sprang to her eyes. She sat there for some minutes, trying to collect herself. After a minute or two, she heard Gavin’s voice again, sounding pensive.
‘Amy, I was thinking… Now look, the last thing I’d ever want to do is to malign the memory of your mum, but have you considered that this Mr Slater might have known her very well indeed?’
She caught his eye. ‘You mean he and she might have had an affair?’
‘It’s just a thought…’
‘And what you’re saying is that you’re wondering whether he might have been my father?’ The same thought had been occurring to her on and off for days now but hearing it out loud for the first time was bizarre. She did her best to sound expressionless. ‘You’re not the only one, Gav. I’ve been thinking along the same lines ever since I heard about him.’
‘And the way he addresses you in this letter as “dearest” and signs it “all my love”; that’s pretty intimate, considering the two of you never met.’
‘I know. That’s been bothering me, too.’
‘How did your dad die? It’s not something you’ve ever really talked about.’
Amy took another mouthful of water before answering. ‘He was killed on active service in the First Gulf War in 1990, the year I was born. He died in what they described as a friendly fire incident – a missile strike by an Allied warplane that went badly wrong. The really sad thing is that he never even saw me, nor me him. I was born five months after his death.’
‘And he would have been, what? Thirty or so?’
‘Thirty-one or thirty-two, I believe. I think Mum said he was a couple of years older than her, but I can check. Somewhere in all the boxes of Mum’s stuff there’s a load of old documents, including both of their birth certificates.’
‘The notary said Mr Slater died at the age of sixty-five. How old did you say your mum was when she died?’
‘Sixty-four.’
