Chapter 42
Briony was sitting in her grandmother’s car in the hospital car park when she saw the tall gentleman in the cream linen suit, Frank, stride out of the hospital entrance. He paused for a moment to put on a Panama hat. He had thick, silvery-grey hair and watchful blue eyes. She noticed he had a neat stack of letters in his hand – the ones she imagined Blythe had written to him, that he’d never received until now.
Briony didn’t know why she ducked down in the car as he stood in the hospital entrance, looking about him. He didn’t know her. It wouldn’t matter if he’d caught sight of her waiting in the car. He had no idea she was, and that she intended to follow him home.
Briony put her phone down. She’d rushed back to the car to call Clarissa. The nurse who had given her the good news had noticed her short visit, and Briony had made an excuse, saying that something had come up and that she’d have to see her grandmother later.
Something had come up alright. Something she couldn’t believe was true.
She’d phoned Clarissa the moment she’d got back to the car. She’d had to. The text she’d received about Frank couldn’t be right.
Clarissa had answered immediately, and had talked at length about what she’d discovered. She’d done some digging around but initially had not found Frank. Then she’d turned her sights on the solicitor’s letters. She had been disappointed that she couldn’t shed light on those either, and her dad had noticed that something was up. So she’d happened to mention to him that she was trying to find Blythe’s long-lost friend from years ago. She didn’t have a lot to go on, only that his name was Frank Cribbins, and he’d grown up in the music shop in Cobblers Yard, Aldeburgh.
Clarissa had no idea why it hadn’t crossed her mind to ask her dad. Peter had worked all his life in the boatyard, and she knew, from what Briony had been told by The Gossip Girls, that Frank had joined the Navy and gone to sea.
Would he have worked in the boatyard as a young man? Would that have given him the idea to join the Navy? It was a leap, but sometimes that’s what investigative journalism was, looking at something from all angles, and investigating possibilities, no matter how tenuous.
And so it had turned out that the answers Clarissa was looking for were a lot closer to home than she’d realised. Unbelievably, her father had known Frank. They’d known each other as young lads, and had worked together in the boatyard, Frank doing extra hours around helping his father in the music shop in Cobblers Yard.
Peter recalled that Frank had been saving money for when he asked Blythe for her hand in marriage. But that was not to be. He’d told Peter once that he knew her parents looked down on him. They were middle-class, with money, and The Beach House – where he’d met Blythe when the boatyard had delivered their new boat – was their holiday home.
Then one day, Peter had learned that all Frank’s plans were in tatters. He believed Blythe didn’t love him the way he did her. She didn’t respond to his letters. Then he heard she wasn’t returning for the summer that year, but was spending it travelling abroad on a grand European tour.
He left the boatyard, joined the Navy, and that was the last Peter had heard from him.
At first, Briony had been relieved to hear all this. But what Clarissa had still to explain was why on earth she thought Frank, the guy who’d loved Briony’s grandmother, was the person who was also after Blythe’s home.
‘Oh, no!’ Briony had exclaimed when Clarissa had told her that. She’d asked Clarissa if she was sure she had the facts right. It just did not make sense – not until Clarissa told her that her father had bumped into him soon after he’d returned to Suffolk a few years earlier.
Frank was unrecognisable. If he hadn’t introduced himself, Peter would not have imagined that the young lad who’d left to join the Navy could turn into such a distinguished-looking gentleman. If appearances were anything to go by, Peter’s immediate impression was that Frank seemed to have become quite wealthy in the intervening years – for a start, he drove a Bentley. That wasn’t all that had changed. Frank’s broad East Anglian accent had gone; he spoke with a clipped English accent, as though he’d had elocution lessons, even though it turned out he’d lived abroad for years, sending his son, Sebastian, to boarding school in Suffolk.
He”d even given Peter his card, in case he wanted to buy a property. That was how he’d made his money, apparently. Of course, Clarissa had Googled Frank’s company. The sorts of homes his company built, great sprawling mansions, were completely beyond Peter’s means. Her dad had commented that Frank appeared to have lost all sense of proportion; lost touch with how ordinary folk lived. Peter would have had to win the lottery to afford one of those properties.
Listening to all this on the phone, Briony still hadn’t understood what it had to do with the solicitor’s letters. Or perhaps she just didn’t want to make the connection. Clarissa made it for her. Still bitter, all those decades later, about Blythe’s apparent rebuff, when Frank had finally returned to Suffolk – having made good on the promise to himself that he’d become the person that nobody, not even Blythe or her parents, would ever look down on again – he’d resolved get hold of The Beach House by whatever means possible.
Briony had asked Clarissa if that was what he’d told her dad.
‘Of course not,’ she’d replied, ‘not all of it, at any rate.’ He’d said enough, though, that when Clarissa had chatted to her father, and they had shared what they both knew, it wasn’t much of a leap to come to the obvious conclusion: he’d been driven by revenge, pure and simple.
It had sounded to Peter as though Frank’s move back to Suffolk had just opened up a festering emotional wound, and the only way he’d thought he could heal it was to get his hands on The Beach House.
‘But he must have known Blythe was living there,’ Briony had said, shocked that after all those decades, Frank still harboured such ill-feeling towards Blythe and her late parents.
‘His heart was broken.’
‘He’s still in love with her,’ they’d both concluded before ending the call.
And now, as Briony watched the old man getting into his Bentley, she thought, I’m still going to have it out with him, because he put her in that hospital. She recalled finding one of those solicitor’s letters open in Blythe’s car. She’d had a stroke right there in the hospital car park because of it – Briony was convinced of it.
Briony’s expression clouded. She said out loud, watching him cross the hospital car park, ‘Don’t you think you’re getting away with it! If you still love her, you have to tell her the truth – it was you.’
Briony had her fingers on the car key, ready to switch on the ignition and get going as soon as he passed her in his great big Bentley. As soon as the green Bentley passed slowly by, Briony turned the key in the ignition. Nothing.
‘No, no, no! Don’t die on me now!’
She tried again. Still nothing.
She slapped the steering wheel angrily, then tried once again. The engine started. ‘Thank goodness!’
Briony wasn’t thanking her lucky stars for long. She had to stop abruptly for someone backing out of a parking space in front of her. By the time she turned into the high street, the Bentley was nowhere to be seen. ‘For god’s sake!’ Briony slapped the steering wheel again in frustration. She pulled over to the kerb.
Briony frantically rang Clarissa back. She said, ‘Tell me you know where he lives.’
‘Who?’
‘Frank – of course. I was going to follow him, but I lost him.’
‘What do you mean – follow him? You don’t know who he is, what he is capable of. Actually, scratch that, you do know who he is, and what he’s capable of.’
Briony raised her eyebrows. So she did know where he lived. ‘Clarissa, just give me the address!’
After another argument, Clarissa relented. ‘At least let me come with you.’
‘There isn’t time.’ Briony had to be back at The Beach House that afternoon for when Emily arrived to collect the kittens and dogs. She didn’t want to think about that right now – the heart-rending moment when she’d have to hand them all back. However, her grandmother was alive and well; that meant she’d hand Luna over to Emily just for a little while until her grandmother was well enough to return home and look after her.
She had no doubt that the playful kittens would find loving homes, although Willow would be so upset about that. She knew the little girl really wanted to keep them for herself.
But it was Wilbur, the little sausage dog, who had been given up by his elderly owner, and who’d had no luck finding a home before she’d come along, that bothered her the most. I could take Wilbur back with me if I went home to Oxford. But it wasn’t Briony’s plan to return to Oxford.
Briony tried to focus on one problem at a time. First, she would deal with Frank. Somehow, he’d found out that Blythe was in hospital. Briony drove along, following Clarissa’s directions, which she’d had to commit to memory because her phone map just wasn’t playing ball. She wondered how Frank had found out. When it came to her grandmother’s whereabouts, she’d taken Joss’s advice and had told very few people. The only people who knew were Joss, Reggie, Troy, and the Wolf Girls Club. So how on earth had Frank found out?
She scowled as she turned into the driveway of a large new mock-Georgian house, thinking that if Frank had assumed he could just turn up and make like everything was okay, and sweep under the carpet what he’d done, or what he intended to do, taking Blythe’s property, then he could think again.
The gardens leading up to the massive house were manicured and impressive. She was lucky that the wrought-iron gates were still open. After making a couple of wrong turns, and getting lost, she’d finally arrived.
She didn’t see the Bentley, but then she saw that the driveway led to a triple garage and imagined he’d parked the car in there.
Briony parked, stepped out of the car, and walked past the fountain in the middle of the driveway to the front door. Clarissa was right: she didn’t know this man. And she was there on her own. Clarissa would have been on her way – she wasn’t at work, as it was Sunday – but Briony had insisted she wanted to go on her own. Now she was there, though, she wondered if it was a mistake.
She rang the doorbell before she could change her mind.