Chapter 39
Teddy couldn’t understand why Sabrina hadn’t come in to work. He’d been thinking about her all night, and after their chat,
he couldn’t wait to see her, be in her orbit, know she was close by. It was enough for now. He rang his mum to ask if she
knew where she was, but he couldn’t get hold of her either. He was debating whether to take a quick drive up to Big Moon when
he saw Marielle walking toward the restaurant, and he went to unlock the door for her.
“Teddy, can I have a word in private?” she said, her expression dark, and she swept past Flick as if she hadn’t even seen
her on her way to the office. Teddy followed her.
“Just shut the door, will you.”
“Okay.” Baffled, he asked, “What’s up?”
“Has Flick said anything to you?”
“Anything to me about what? She’s been like a bear with a sore culo for days. I had to send her home yesterday.” His puzzlement segued into concern. “What’s the matter with her?”
“It’s not Flick; it’s Sabrina.”
“Sabrina isn’t in. Where is she?” Teddy felt his heart give a thump of worry. “Mamma, what’s going on?”
Marielle let out a long breath. “Oh, where to start?”
“Mamma?”
“Just listen to me, Teddy, because this is going to come out in a jumble. My purse went missing at home. I thought it could only be Sabrina who took it, but I never said a word to anyone about it. But then Cilla told Flick that I’d confided in her about it.
But I didn’t; I couldn’t have. My purse wasn’t even missing when I last saw her.
She came round to the house to tell me how stupid I was for having someone stay in the flat, but it was only later on that day when I discovered it was gone. ”
Teddy went over her words in his head, putting the info in order.
“You’re sure you didn’t have that conversation?”
Marielle humphed. “I’m sixty-three, Teddy, not a hundred and three. As if I’d take Cilla into my confidence about anything,
for a start. I couldn’t find my purse when Sabrina and I were going out to the theater, and that was hours after Cilla had
left.”
Teddy was straight on it. “So how did she know then? Unless...”
“Unless she had a crystal ball, and I think we can safely discount that. There is only one way she could have known.”
He knew what she was saying, but he shook his head, unable to understand the motivation behind such an action.
“Why would Cilla take it?”
“To frame Sabrina. So she could then say she was right and Sabrina was taking me for a ride.”
Teddy screwed up his face. “But that would be really twisted, Mum.”
“I’ve gone over it and over it and I can’t think of any other explanation. And sadly it’s entirely believable.”
“Where’s Sabrina? Have you spoken to her about any of this?”
Marielle sank to a chair. “Oh Teddy, it gets worse. Flick, our darling Flick, worried sick about me, told Sylvie, who whisked
me out for breakfast this morning to keep me out of the way while my caring, misguided friends went over to Little Moon and
threw Sabrina out. I have to find her, Teddy. I feel terrible. They told her to go to the women’s refuge in Slattercove. I’m
heading over there now.”
Teddy unbuttoned his white chef’s tunic and hung it up on a peg. “I’ll drive you,” he said.
Flick moved quickly away from outside the office where she’d eavesdropped on their whole conversation, into the loo next door, and sat on the seat with her head in her hands. She didn’t think she had ever felt so bad in her whole life.
Few people knew the address of the women’s refuge, but Marielle did because of her hospital work. It was only because they
knew she was a person of trust that the manager there gave her the carefully worded discreet information that they had taken
no new woman in for days.
They walked along Slattercove front and up the small side streets looking in café windows. On a horrible rainy day like this,
Sabrina might have gone in to shelter and think, if she was even here. Maybe she’d holed up in one of the many boardinghouses,
even though signs in nearly every window said “No Vacancies” and the hotels would surely be too expensive. Marielle wiped
her wet cheeks with the heel of her hand.
She hadn’t stopped crying since she’d gotten in Teddy’s car. This was finding-a-needle-in-a-haystack territory.
“What about the hospital?” asked Teddy. He didn’t want to think it was a possibility, but at least they could rule it out
before they tried any other avenues.
Marielle pulled out her phone. She had Sister Tessa’s direct number. She answered after three rings. As luck would have it,
she was on duty and said she’d ring down to Emergency and call straight back.
Marielle sat in a bus shelter waiting while Teddy checked out a couple of cafés to ask if a lone woman of Sabrina’s description had been in.
The thought of Sabrina trailing a black bin liner around not knowing where to go made Marielle’s heart feel as heavy as a rock in her chest. Then her phone rang in her hand and she almost dropped it in her eagerness to answer it.
“Marielle, she’s in Emergency waiting to be seen. Apparently she fainted when she got off the bus in Slattercove and someone
called an ambulance.”
Marielle waved Teddy over and told him. “Come on then,” he said. “Let’s go and get her.”
“I’ll be back in half an hour, tops,” said Flick, grabbing her jacket and rushing out of the restaurant. Antonio and George
exchanged looks that said, What the hell is going on this morning? First Marielle had rushed in with her face drained of blood, and then she and Teddy had taken off, and now Flick had gone
AWOL.
Cilla lived in one of the bigger houses on a nearby estate up the hill from the center of town. Flick ran all the way there
to expend some of the excess energy her body was churning out. She wasn’t even breathless by the time she got to her mother’s;
if anything, her energy had grown. It wasn’t a nice energy either: it was full of anger and it needed an out.
She rang the bell to be polite, but when her mother didn’t answer straightaway, she used the key she still had on her key
ring. Cilla was just coming down the stairs in a pink satin peignoir as she barged in.
“What on earth is the matter?” Cilla asked her. From upstairs a male voice shouted, “Everything all right there, Cilli?”
Silly. The word didn’t even come close, thought Flick.
She tore into the lounge and opened the top drawer of the dresser in there.
“Where is it then?” she demanded.
“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” said Cilla. “Stop that immediately.”
Flick ignored her, moved to the next drawer, then the cupboard beneath where Cilla kept her box of important documents.
Nothing. She skirted past her mother and into the next room, the pink parlor.
It had been a dining room originally, but for some reason Cilla had redecorated it into a place she might receive friends and take tea as if she were the Duchess of Devonshire.
Flick made to open the drawer in the antique cocktail cabinet. Her mother grabbed her arm hard.
“I don’t know what your game is, Felicity, but—”
Flick rounded on her. “My game? My game, Mum? Your game, you mean.”
“You’re talking gibberish. I think you need to calm down.” Cilla’s grip was tightening.
“Open that drawer, Mum.”
Cilla slapped her arm hard. “Felicity, get out of my house.”
Flick shook her mother off and pulled the drawer so hard that it left its housing. She knew it was where her mother kept her
fripperies and pretensions. She tipped the many contents out onto the carpet: old love letters, boxed jewelry, posh invitations
she’d been sent in the past, her envelope of emergency money, her checkbook in its gold, monogrammed casing. And, looking
quite out of place among them, a battered brown purse. Flick knew it instantly because she herself had bought it for Auntie
Marielle. She snatched it up.
“I think you should go, young lady,” said Hugo, appearing in the doorway, clad in a ridiculously showy maroon velvet smoking
jacket.
“I think you should keep your fucking nose out,” Flick snarled.
“Disgraceful language,” said Hugo.
“Felicity, don’t show me up,” said Cilla.
Flick rounded on her mother. “Oh my God. You, you, it’s always about you being affected, isn’t it?”
Cilla made a grab for the purse, but Flick was much quicker and taller and held it out of her reach. She opened it and took
out the bank card that sat in one of the slots. The name on it was Mrs. Marielle Bonetti .
“It’s not what you think,” said Cilla, patting her breathy chest.
“It’s exactly what I think,” replied Flick, her eyes narrowed with disgust. She couldn’t look at her mother; she had to get
out of there.
“How dare you talk to your mother like that?” said Hugo, as she flew past him and headed for the front door, hot, furious
tears sploshing out of her eyes. Behind her she could hear her name being shouted on an exasperated, continuous loop: Felicity, Felicity. She’d always hated it. And at the moment, she hated even more so the woman who had given it to her.
As Teddy and Marielle walked across the hospital car park, they saw an unmistakable figure carrying a bin liner, heading for
the bus stop. For a few seconds Teddy doubted his own eyes because the woman seemed so much smaller than Sabrina, and as fragile
as eggshell. He wanted to bound across, pick her up, and take her home, but it was his mother who first broke into a run,
calling her name, reaching her, throwing her arms around her.
“Oh my darling Sabrina.” She couldn’t say any more because her throat was clogged with a lump of tears and explanations and
apologies.
Teddy took the bin bag from her, and the weight in his hand was significant. This was a woman’s whole life as she knew it,
right here. He felt a rush of emotion and couldn’t have unpicked the various strands that made it up if he’d tried, but he
knew that pity and anger and relief were heading up the list of dominants.
“Let’s get you home,” said Marielle. She took a firm hold on Sabrina’s arm, guiding her forward. She looked broken, thought
Teddy. He couldn’t even guess at what was going through her head.
They walked to the car, barely saying anything.
Marielle thought that if she started talking, she wouldn’t be able to shut up, and maybe that was better done when they got home.
Teddy drove in silence; his mother was sitting in the back with Sabrina, sniffing, beyond upset at the turn of this morning’s events.
He could almost hear the what-ifs coursing through her mind.
What if they hadn’t found her? What if she’d disappeared from them without a trace?
What if she’d been so disorientated that
she’d had a worse accident? They were the same what-ifs that were racing through his own brain.
Teddy followed them into Big Moon. He put the bin bag down, then switched the kettle on while Marielle fussed around Sabrina,
pushing her onto the sofa, placing a throw over her shoulders because she was shivering. She was so pale. Marielle couldn’t
believe they had said she could go home at the hospital; if she’d still been a nurse, she would have made a strong case for
admitting her.
Teddy put a mug down on the coffee table in front of her and sat down next to her. He took her hands in his own much larger
ones and held them, warming them to rid them of the trembling.
“Tessa said you fell getting off a bus,” said Marielle, her voice quiet, as soothing as she could make it.
“I saw someone I thought I recognized,” said Sabrina eventually, imagining him, the scarecrow man who’d been at the beginning
of it all, and now at the end. She raised her head.
“Marielle, Teddy, I know who I am.”