frantically from side to side to check if anybody was watching. And there I was. Perhaps for now we’re keeping each other’s secret, but for how long?
Abbie can tell nobody.
But the driver knows who I am, and can’t be allowed to expose me.
There were plans to be made, and there was one person who was going to help. She wouldn’t like it, but she wasn’t going to be given any choice.
22
Day Four: Monday
To Leo’s disappointment, Sunday had never settled back into the peaceful and harmonious atmosphere of that brief period before lunch. The more Ellie insisted that somebody had been in the house, the more Max had told her that it was her imagination. Not only had she thought that the bathroom cupboard had been tampered with, but she was sure somebody had been through her drawers. Max had joked about the intruder probably being after her knickers, but Ellie had been furious with him for taking it so lightly.
The trouble was, Leo was fairly certain that somebody had been looking at her computer. But nothing had been stolen, and surely they would have taken her laptop if they were so interested in it? If Max had left the door open by mistake and some kids had come in - the obvious answer as nothing was missing - he wouldn’t be doing it again in a hurry. So it had felt better not to add fuel to the fire.
Now it was a new day, and much as she was dreading it Leo thought it was time she faced up to another of the traumas of her childhood. She was going to walk into the village, and hope and pray that she could replace the old memories that still haunted her with new ones, much as she had done with Willow Farm.
She had driven past the shops on Friday evening for the first time in years. Ellie and Max had always lived on the other side of the village and it had been easy to reach their house by coming down the back road, but to get to Willow Farm she could no longer ignore Little Melham, so it had to be dealt with.
She stopped outside what used to be the sweet shop, and gazed at its old-fashioned facade. It had always looked like a shop out of a fairy story, with its semi-circular bay window made up of over a hundred small panes of glass. She had counted them once. On the outside not much had changed, but Leo could see that now it was a newsagents too. Sweets alone would be unlikely to sustain a shop in a village these days, particularly as she could bet money on this being the sort of place where health conscious parents frowned upon their precious offspring eating sugar in any form.
Right Leo, in you go.
She didn’t allow herself time to think as she purposefully pushed open the door and walked inside. This shop had the worst memories of all, so it was the best place to start. For most of the other shops, she had merely been a customer as part of her three times weekly grocery trip. The shopping was one of her chores, and the hardest. The only good thing was that it kept her out of the house. If there was too much to carry in one journey, she had to make several. She was known for having the biggest muscles ever seen on an eleven year old girl’s arms, but if Ellie ever offered to help - which she often did - she was told it wasn’t necessary. Ellie had to get on with her piano practice, or her homework. Leo, on the other hand, had to do her homework after dark when everybody was in bed, sitting on the floor of her room with a piece of fabric over her lamp in case anybody was walking the corridors.
But the sweet shop was the scene of her most degrading experience. On the day in question, she had already completed her second trip to the village. There had been potatoes to buy, and onions, carrots and other heavy vegetables. And then there had been the meat and the bread. Leo thought she’d finished but was sent back one more time to get some aspirin, which she could easily have managed on either of the previous journeys.
And that’s when she did something stupid.
Most days as she walked through the village, kids from school would be hanging around the church or