worth about a thousand pounds. He just took it into town, sold it, then pretended he’d seen “someone” break into the house and steal it. Kept the money hidden away. The father found out through the grapevine. All hell let loose. We were turfed out the next day.’ He shrugged. ‘And other stuff too. But that was the main thing.’
I suddenly understood his lack of guilt about taking his father’s money.
David claimed to be making a lot of money running his exercise classes, but really, how much money could you make out of a handful of hippies in a church hall twice a week? Could he have sold something of ours from under our noses? He’d already brainwashed my mother into letting him handle our family finances. Maybe he was taking money directly out of our bank account. Or maybe this was the money that my mother thought was going to charity to help poor people.
All my vague misgivings about David Thomsen began to coalesce into something hard and real.
‘Do you like your dad?’ I asked, fiddling with the cress on the side of my plate.
‘No,’ he said simply. ‘I despise him.’
I nodded, reassured.
‘How about you?’ he said. ‘Do you like your dad?’
‘My dad is weak,’ I replied, knowing with a burning clarity that this was true.
‘All men are weak,’ said Phin. ‘That’s the whole bloody trouble with the world. Too weak to love properly. Too weak to be wrong.’
My breath caught at the power of this statement. I immediately knew it to be the truest thing I’d ever heard. The weakness of men lay at the root of every bad thing that had ever happened.
I watched Phin peel two ten-pound notes from his wad to pay for the expensive sandwiches. ‘I’m really sorry I can’t pay you back,’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘My father’s going to take everything you own and then break your life. It’s the least I can bloody do.’
27
Libby, Dido and Miller lock the house up behind them and go to the pub. It’s the pub Libby saw from the roof of the house. It’s heaving but they find a high table in the beer garden and drag stools across from other tables.
‘Who do you think it is?’ says Dido, stirring her gin and tonic with her straw.
Miller replies, ‘It’s not someone homeless. There’s not enough stuff. You know. If he was actually living there, there would be lots more things.’
‘So you think it’s someone who just comes occasionally?’ says Libby.
‘That would be my guess.’
‘And so there was someone up there when I was here on Saturday?’
‘That would also be my guess.’
Libby shudders.
‘Look,’ says Miller, ‘here’s what I think. You were born around June 1993?’
‘June the nineteenth.’ A chill goes through her as she says the date. How does anyone know? Maybe it was just made up. By the social services? By her adoptive mother? She feels her grasp on the certainty of herself start to slip and slide.
‘Right. So your brother and sister would have known your date of birth given that they were teenagers when you were born. And if they somehow knew that the house was being held in trust for you until your twenty-fifth birthday, it would make sense that they might want to come back to the house. To see you …’
Libby gasps. ‘You mean, you think it might be my brother?’
‘I think it might be Henry, yes.’
‘But if he knew it was me, and he was there, in the house, why didn’t he come down and see me?’
‘Well, that I do not know.’
Libby picks up her wine glass, puts it briefly to her lips and then puts it down again. ‘No,’ she says, forcefully. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Maybe he didn’t want to scare you?’ suggests Dido.
‘He could have left me a note?’ she says. ‘He could have got in touch with the solicitor and let them know he wanted to meet me? But instead, he’s hiding out in the attic like a weirdo.’
‘Well, maybe he is a weirdo?’ says Dido.
‘What did you find out about him?’ Libby asks Miller. ‘Apart from him being my brother?’
‘Nothing, really,’ says Miller. ‘I know he went to Portman House School from the ages of three to eleven. His teachers said he was a clever boy, but a bit full of himself. He didn’t really have any friends. And then he left in 1988, had a place offered to him at St Xavier’s College in Kensington but didn’t take it up. And that was