the Dutch press had been at pains to uncover the identity of the mother and child ‘on the ice’ on the final stretch to the Elfstedentocht finish, but the aerial footage hadn’t captured their faces and no one had offered any information. ‘The last thing Jasper needs is some fanatical idiot yelling at him.’ Or some other fanatical idiot, rather.
They both looked over towards the little boy sitting cross-legged on the floor and watching Ben 10 cartoons.
‘Hmm,’ Pabe sighed sadly. ‘He’s not himself, is he?’
‘Hopefully he’ll perk up in a couple of days when he gets to open the mountain of presents under our Christmas tree.’ She had already ordered the outlandish super-blaster megatron Nerf gun of his dreams. To hell with her principles; she just needed her son to smile again. ‘I’ll go and get another load of logs in and that should keep you going till tomorrow evening. Have you got any Christmas Eve plans?’
‘Dinner for thirty. I was thinking haunch of venison.’ His eyes twinkled and she chuckled as she went through to the kitchen and outside again.
She jogged down the steps, taking care on the slippy moss, and walked over to the covered log store against the back of the house. It was over half empty now; he would need to place another order soon. She loaded the logs into the sack carefully and replaced the felted lid, her eyes catching on something bright in the long grass as she walked back to the house. She walked over and picked it up – a key. Not a Yale, not a front door one, but smaller, finely toothed, with a red dot on it, like nail varnish.
She frowned as she pocketed it.
‘Pabe,’ she said as she re-entered the living room a few moments later, he and Jasper watching the cartoons in companionable silence together. ‘I just found this on your lawn.’ She held out the key for him.
‘Mine? In the garden?’ Pabe examined it as best he could without his glasses. ‘But how did it get down there?’
‘No idea,’ she shrugged. ‘Could it have fallen out of one of your pockets perhaps?’
‘I haven’t been down there for months. Certainly not since summer.’
‘I guess it could have been there since then. It looks tarnished and it wouldn’t rust easily.’
He reached for his glasses on the side table and turned the key between his fingers. ‘Oh. No. Look.’ He pointed to the red dot. ‘It’s from downstairs. All the apartment keys have a red dot on them. My granddaughter let me use her nail polish to identify them so I wouldn’t get confused. I did once spend forty-five minutes trying to get in here with one of the downstairs keys.’
‘Oh, okay.’ Lee began unloading the final rounds of logs. She gave a small gasp as she suddenly remembered something. ‘Wait – it’s not for the back door, is it?’
‘I couldn’t say,’ Pabe shrugged. ‘One key looks much like all the rest to me.’
‘Because Gus was saying a while back that their back-door key had been lost and he was worried because it could constitute a fire hazard.’
Pabe jerked agitatedly. ‘Why does he keep saying that? I must have replaced that key five times already. He makes me feel like I’m going dotty. If they’re going to keep losing them, it is hardly my fault.’
‘Don’t worry about it, Pabe,’ she soothed, feeling bad for having upset him. ‘Jazz and I will stop and hand it back to them on our way past.’
‘No!’
Lee looked up at Jasper’s pinched face. ‘What?’
‘I’m not going back there! I didn’t like it!’ he protested forcefully, angrily almost.
Lee frowned. When had he been—? ‘Oh, you mean when they babysat you?’ She had all but forgotten about that.
‘I didn’t like it.’
‘Well, I know it may not have been . . . like home,’ she said diplomatically, remembering the black bin bag in lieu of a curtain. ‘But Lenka and Gus were kind to you, weren’t they?’ Her heart had begun to pound at the mere thought they hadn’t been.
‘She wasn’t Lenka.’
Lee felt a little chill ripple down her back. ‘. . . She wasn’t?’
‘Her name’s Natalia.’
Natalia? Could that be the woman Lee had seen with Gus on the bridge?
‘She was mean.’
Lee thought her heart was just going to stop beating and fall into her boots. ‘Mean how?’
‘She thought I didn’t hear but I did. I heard her shouting at the others.’
‘. . . Others?’ Lee looked at Jasper’s downturned mouth; at Pabe, who was looking bewildered, as