That was terrible! He had exactly her silly sense of humour!
The pain between her eyes eased a little.
Nick was up and at ’em two hours before she woke – he needed to be at his desk early so he could get up to speed with developments in the markets – but he always left something for her to find, whether a silly joke or quote or a beautifully arranged fruit salad or, one morning after she’d had a particularly bad case of the runs, a single red rose. But this was Nick and Lulu, so it wasn’t on her pillow or the chaise longue, it was on the toilet seat!
Today, there was another sticky note on the framed montage of photographs by the lift that documented their relationship, from a fuzzy snap of Lulu in a lounger on the terrace of the villa in Ithaca, to a selfie taken on their first night in the apartment, both of them raising a glass of champagne, to their wedding in Leonora （Dad: ‘Well, if you’re sure, love.’ Mum: ‘He’s an absolute dreamboat!’）。
Nick had stuck the note on a photo of Lulu paddling in a pond on Hampstead Heath. My gorgeous girl! Love you forever!
The soppy idiot.
On the other side of the lift was a wall of memories of his dad, Duncan. Her favourite was one of the two of them playing football: Nick a tiny, tousle-headed child of three or four, Duncan a tall, dark, handsome man with long legs who looked spookily like Nick. There was another which was almost professional in quality, a candid shot of Duncan’s face in profile, in repose, a slight smile on his lips, his eyes focused on something off camera. A really good-looking man. Completely different in mood was a snap of him being a silly dad, wearing a back-to-front baseball cap and crossing his eyes, one arm slung around teenage Nick. Nick must have been about sixteen in that one, so the photo had probably been taken not long before it happened.
Before they all disappeared.
His father, his stepmother, his baby sister.
Nick had told her tersely when she’d asked about his family, one hot night in his villa in Ithaca soon after they’d met, that his stepmother had murdered his father and his baby half-sister and disappeared. And of course Lulu had immediately Googled Clyde family murder, Scottish Borders and discovered that this was only Nick’s interpretation of what had happened.
There’d been a documentary made a few years ago, ‘The unexplained disappearance of the Clyde family’， and Lulu had found it on YouTube and secretly watched a bit of it, fascinated to see a photograph of Maggie, Nick’s stepmother, in her wedding dress – a tiny woman with a strong face, smiling so happily into the camera – before stopping because it felt like a betrayal. She didn’t want to go rummaging around in his trauma without his permission. But basically, it seemed that the police had decided there was ‘no evidence of a crime’。 It looked like Duncan and Maggie had taken little Isla and just up and left one day, leaving Nick behind. There was something about a murder at Duncan’s workplace a few weeks before involving dubious characters which could, it was suggested, have caused them to panic and run. One unexplained thing was that there were three mugs and three bowls left on the table, not the two you’d expect, but the police had explained that by postulating that Maggie might have started unloading the dishwasher （her fingerprints had been all over it） and collecting dirty crockery from around the house, but Duncan had told her to just leave it, they didn’t have time for housework. Lulu had shaken her head over such gender stereotyping. She supposed DNA technology must have been in its infancy in 1997, and it hadn’t been possible to get DNA profiles from the tiny traces of saliva on the mugs. Duncan and Maggie’s fingerprints were on two of the mugs, but the third one had yielded nothing, which seemed odd.
When she tried to talk to Nick about it, all he’d say was that the police were useless and everyone knew Maggie had killed them. No way would his dad have abandoned him like that.
‘She was convicted of GBH when she was seventeen after she attacked a girl and left her brain-damaged,’ he had half-shouted at Lulu, his mouth contorting. ‘She spent three years in a fucking young offender institution! She was still dangerous. She was still violent – had been on a number of occasions since she moved in with us. She was a suspect in a murder. She was a fucking psycho! What other explanation is there that makes any sense, other than that she killed them? I don’t know why there was a third mug and a third bowl. Maybe she had an accomplice.’
‘It must be so awful, not knowing –’
But, as he always did when she tried to get him away from the subject of psycho Maggie and into the more difficult area of his feelings about his dad and sister, he had clammed up. She saw this all the time with her PTSD clients: anger was so much easier than pain.