Chapter 3
Amy left the lawyer’s studio and spotted Gavin sitting under a parasol outside the bar across the square so she went over to report back. She found him sipping a glass of what looked like Prosecco, an empty dish in front of him.
‘Meringue and black cherry ice cream. It’s amazing. You have to try it.’ He must have noticed the shell-shocked expression on Amy’s face. ‘What did the man say, Amy? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘I’ve just been left a whole heap of money.’
‘As well as the house?’
‘Yup.’
Amy went on to outline the details of Mr Slater’s will and he looked delighted. ‘That’s fantastic! Looks like we’ve got ourselves a holiday home.’ She noted his use of the plural but didn’t comment as he continued, ‘We need to celebrate. Is it too early for champagne?’
A waitress appeared through the gaudy plastic fly curtains and Amy resisted the temptation to order a bottle of booze and just asked for ice cream and sparkling mineral water for herself and another glass of fizz for Gavin. After the woman had gone off, Amy recounted in more detail everything the lawyer had said and she saw a puzzled expression on Gavin’s face. This was the same expression she had been seeing in the mirror herself every time she tried to get her head around the identity of her mysterious benefactor.
‘So even the notary hasn’t been able to help you find out who Mr Slater was?’ He swigged down the last of the wine in his glass, ready for the next one. ‘Surely he must have been able to tell you something?’
‘He was as mystified as we are. It’s just plain weird.’ She had been using that word a lot recently.
‘What about the stuff he gave you? Did you say there was a letter?’
Amy nodded and reached for the bulky envelope. ‘That’s what he said. You never know – maybe that’ll give us the explanation.’
There was a brief delay while the waitress brought out a heaped dish of ice cream, a little bottle of cold mineral water, and another glass of Prosecco for Gavin. As she set it down in front of him he shot her a sparkling smile that actually made the woman’s cheeks flush. Amy sighed. He had always had a way with women – herself included. Relegating that can of worms to another time, she took a mouthful of the excellent ice cream and followed it with a big swig of water before locating a slim white envelope amid the package of documents the notary had given her.
Unusually, this envelope was securely sealed with a large blob of dark red sealing wax. On the outside was a single handwritten word: Amy. She broke the seal, slit open the flap at the top of the envelope with her finger and reached inside.
The letter, written in a shaky hand, was short and quite bewildering. If she had been baffled before, she felt even more confused by the end of it. She read it through twice before handing it across to Gavin without comment.
My dearest Amy
Initially this may puzzle you, but you will find that these are key questions. Keep them safe.
1) On what day was your mother born?
2) On what day were you born?
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.’
‘So when you were born, your mum and dad were both roughly the same age as you and me now, as was Mr Slater. So, how about this as a scenario? Your mum has an affair with Mr Slater – presumably while your dad was away on duty somewhere – and then she finds she’s pregnant. She decides to have the baby – that’s you – and either hopes to convince your dad that you are his or confess to him and get a divorce. In the meantime, he gets killed. I wonder how it would have gone down if he’d survived the fighting.’
By this time Amy’s head was spinning – even though she had already done these same calculations in her head over and over again all week. She reached for her glass of water and rather wished she had gone for wine after all. ‘In that scenario my mum doesn’t come out of this looking too good, does she?’
‘These things happen. We all make mistakes – besides, it’s just as much Slater’s fault, maybe more.’
Amy nodded reflectively. ‘But if that’s really what happened, what I don’t understand is why she and Mr Slater didn’t get together once my dad – the man I think of as my dad – died. Surely that would have been the obvious thing to do.’
‘There may have been a reason why he and she didn’t get together. Like him maybe being married to somebody else for instance…’
‘Or they had a major falling-out and that explains why she never spoke about him and never replied to the notary’s letters…’
‘Who knows?’
At that moment his phone started ringing and while he answered it, Amy folded the letter back into the envelope, wiped her eyes and set about consuming her rapidly melting ice cream. This was as delicious as Gavin had said but she barely tasted it. By the sound of it, his phone call was from one of his many friends and he was soon laughing uproariously at some funny story or other while she finished her ice cream and looked around. In the distance, behind the row of historic houses lining the far side of the piazza, she could see vineyards covering part of the hillside. The notary had talked of vines and she wondered whether some of these fields now belonged to her. In spite of her bewilderment, it was an exciting thought. She waited until Gavin’s call ended and then pointed up the hill.
‘What do six hectares of land look like?’
He followed the direction of her eyes. ‘A lot. A hectare’s roughly two and a half acres, two point four to be precise.’ This was his job, after all. ‘Two point four times six is around fourteen and a half acres, which sounds to me like what we can see up there, plus a bit more. Maybe you should give up the day job, move over here and take up farming.’
‘And what would you do if you came with me?’
‘Quality control for the wine, of course.’ He laughed and she laughed with him but, deep down, she found herself wondering not for the first time if they really were destined to spend the rest of their lives together. Determined not to let this rare weekend away together disintegrate into vain conjecture, she skirted around that subject and pointed across the piazza once more.
‘He said the house is a five-minute walk in that direction. I’ve finished my ice cream so shall we go and take a look?’
They settled up and, leaving the car in the shade of the trees, walked over to the far side of the square. Tree roots had done an effective job of breaking up the surface in places and they both had to keep their eyes trained on the ground to prevent themselves from tripping. Leaving the piazza, they turned left and then right as instructed. The roads here were even narrower and completely deserted. Barely three or four minutes later, as predicted, they found themselves on the edge of the town and came to a huge pair of ornate iron gates. They crossed the road towards l’Ospedaletto and peered through the bars. The fine stone building was surrounded by trees and an overgrown garden, and it was simply enormous. The name of the property translated as the Little Hospital but the building was far from little. It was hard to believe that all this was now hers.
‘Wow, what a place, Amy. It looks seriously old, and very, very lovely.’ Gavin sounded impressed – and it took a lot to impress him.
Before she could comment, Amy heard a voice behind them and they both wheeled around.
‘Good afternoon, can I help in any way?’
The voice came from the shadowy garage belonging to an old stone house directly opposite. Inside they could just make out an ancient Fiat and an even more ancient lady in the gloom. The elderly lady rose to her feet remarkably nimbly and set down her knitting. An equally elderly-looking black and white cat immediately jumped onto the chair and settled down on top of the knitting. The lady came across the road towards them, her hand outstretched, and Amy and Gavin met her halfway. The fact that they were now standing in the middle of the road didn’t seem to matter to the lady in the slightest and Amy reflected that she hadn’t seen a single car since leaving the piazza. Clearly this was not a major thoroughfare.
‘Buongiorno, mi chiamo Grande.’ Her accent when she introduced herself was strong Tuscan but Amy understood her well enough. She had already worked out in conversation with the lawyer that in Tuscany the locals often pronounce a ‘c’ as an ‘h’, but she was getting used to it.
‘Good afternoon, Signora Grande. I’m Amy Sherwood and this is my friend Gavin.’ It occurred to her, after she had spoken, that back home she normally introduced him to people as her ‘boyfriend’. The fact that she had just chosen to just call him ‘a friend’ wasn’t because she didn’t know the right vocabulary. Maybe, subconsciously, it marked a change in the way she was starting to think about him, but Signora Grande didn’t give her time to dwell on the subject for now.
‘Welcome, welcome. Signor Lucchese, the notary, told me to expect you today. I’ve been keeping an eye on Martin’s house.’
‘You knew him well?’
Signora Grande paused for thought, idly scratching the back of her head. ‘Giovanni, my husband, knew him better, but I lost him to a coronary in January this year.’ Her voice broke momentarily but she rallied. ‘Mind you, I knew Martin well, too, maybe as well as anybody around here. He was very sociable and he had a lot of friends. At least, until the illness struck him.’
‘I’m so sorry to hear about your husband. The notary said Mr Slater had a serious heart condition and that was what killed him.’
‘That’s correct. But he also contracted an illness of the mind. In his final months, he changed completely. He started to fear he was being watched. He thought everybody was against him. He didn’t trust anybody, even me.’ She caught Amy’s eye and shrugged. ‘I knew it was an illness, but it was hard, after so many years of friendship.’
Amy turned and gave Gavin a brief translation. Presumably this explained the cryptic nature of the letter.
A strangled yelp followed by furious scratching came from the old lady’s house and she excused herself. Amy watched as she hurried back to her house and opened the door. No sooner had she done so than a large black dog came rushing out, its tail wagging furiously. As it did so, the cat leapt surprisingly athletically from the knitting to the top of a tall cupboard at the back of the garage. Ignoring the cat, the dog came charging across towards them and almost knocked Amy over with its enthusiastic greeting. Signora Grande hurried after it, doing her best to sound authoritative. ‘Max, Max, come here. Bad dog. Leave the nice people alone.’
Amy bent down to make a fuss of the dog and looked up to reassure the old lady. ‘It’s perfectly all right. I love dogs. He’s quite young, isn’t he?’
Signora Grande sighed. ‘Yes and he’s got so much energy. I just can’t cope. Taking him for a walk is getting impossible. He almost drags my arm out of its socket.’ She explained. ‘He’s barely two years old and he’s a lovely friendly dog, but I just can’t manage. My husband, God rest his soul, got him as a puppy but then, of course, he passed away four months ago.’ She produced a handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped her eyes. ‘I’ve been struggling to look after Max ever since. It hasn’t been easy. Anyway…’ She reached into the pocket of her apron. ‘Did the notary give you the keys? I have one here if you’d like it back.’
Amy shook her head. ‘No, please hang onto yours.’ She pulled out the envelope the lawyer had given her. ‘I’ve got a load of keys here.’
‘Knowing you were coming, I went into the house this morning and turned the electricity and water back on. Take a look around and if there’s anything you need, you know where I am.’ She glanced up at the cloudless sky and fanned herself with one hand. ‘Never seen anything like it. It’s still only the beginning of June and it’s almost as hot as August. I think I’ll go back to the shade.’ She called the dog, who had been occupying himself marking all the trees along the pavement, and Amy was pleased to see him return obediently, although his tail had stopped wagging as he realised he was going back into the house. ‘Goodbye for now.’
Amy thanked her warmly and watched as Signora Grande shooed the reluctant dog back inside and then made her way slowly back into the relative cool of her garage, presumably to engage in a struggle for territory with her cat. Evidently, this was the most comfortable place for her to sit and do her knitting. No doubt, the garage also had the advantage of giving her a good view of any passers-by and the opportunity for a chat. Amy was turning away when she had a thought and glanced back.
‘I’ll be here for a few days. If you like, I can come and collect Max and take him for walks.’
‘That would be wonderful, thank you, my dear.’
Amy smiled back at her. It would appear that she had made a friend – two, if she included the Labrador.