Leo now worked in an interior design company and was gloriously successful, but it had been a joy, he’d insisted, to help Ginger out. He’d been the one to find the exquisite old 1930s dressing table and helped Ginger strip it down and repaint it cream. He had had the idea of turning her ordinary bed into a four-poster thanks to poles her carpenter father had hand-carved. Painted cream and with muslins attached, the bed was a joy.
‘You see it’s very simple,’ Leo had said, wielding his staple gun as he stood on the stepladder and attacked the plain cross-beams in a cavalier way that would have had her father turning pale. ‘I think a few lights up here, what do you think, darling? White muslin, white lights: romance central.’
‘Can we have the lights twinkling, like stars?’ Ginger had asked.
‘Of course! I wish we’d been able to get one of those bulb-dressing table mirrors, but the proper ones aren’t cheap and the cheap ones look hideous.’
Ginger shut the door of her beautiful bower and turned down the lights. She was home, alone as ever. After what had to be one of the most horrible, horrible evenings of her life. Dad and the boys had begged her to leave the wedding early so they could celebrate her birthday, but she’d been firm.
‘No,’ she said, ‘tomorrow is fine. We can celebrate my birthday tomorrow.’
Tomorrow was going to be a family meal in the gorgeous old Reilly house in the countryside, with all the people she loved who would instantly divine if she was suffering.
She wasn’t sure if she could face them all, not after today.
Callie
Callie woke early the next morning to a faint scratching noise that she couldn’t quite identify.
‘Jason,’ she said, ‘what’s that?’ and then she became aware that there was nobody in the bed with her. She opened her eyes and sat up. Reality crashed in. She wasn’t in her and Jason’s bed: she was in the small guest bedroom of Brenda’s house, alone, and surrounded by suitcases that Brenda had plundered from her house, suitcases stuffed full of the only things she’d been allowed to take with her.
The horror of it all sank in again as if the whole catastrophe that was last night was happening once more.
Still the noise went on, accompanied by a faint mewing: the cats, that was it.
Callie got out of bed, feeling every joint in her body ache. It was as if she had been on a huge mountain hike the day before and every part of her was sore. Maybe this was her body’s reaction to the intense stress.
She opened the door and Brenda’s marmalade cat, Joe, crashed fatly in. Instantly, he wound himself around her ankles and began purring. Despite everything, Callie smiled. She loved the feel of his fur against her bare ankles, the sensation that this beautiful animal was happy to see her. In the midst of the chaos, it was a moment of simple, momentary happiness. She picked him up and crooned to him, and all the while Joe purred with a deep rich purr like something motorised.
‘Aren’t you wonderful,’ she said, burying her head in his fur.
‘Yes,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘I am wonderful and I’m allowing you to pet me and I might even allow you to give me some breakfast.’
He was like a baby, Callie decided.
‘Will you come with me to the bathroom before I get you breakfast?’ she said.
Joe didn’t reply, so she took that for a yes.
She popped the cat on the bed, riffled around in her many suitcases and found a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, shoving her feet into old tennis shoes, then she picked Joe up and went into the bathroom. Brenda’s own bedroom had a tiny en suite, so Poppy and Callie shared this little bathroom with its old bath and what had to be the original black and white tiles from the 1930s above the sink. There were ferns growing healthily, art deco prints on the walls advertising various French liqueurs, and towels with retro trim. Minimalist it was not, and Callie loved it.
Joe followed her in and waited slightly impatiently while Callie performed a high-speed toilette. She ran a facecloth over her face and brushed her teeth quickly, thinking of how usually she’d spend ages with her electric toothbrush and rub special moisturiser into her skin. Right now those things felt like such a waste of time. She pulled her unbrushed hair back into a ponytail and tied it up with a band she found on a windowsill. This would do.
She looked tired and drawn in the mirror, and without her base and undereye concealer, her face was blotchy, with deep shadows under her eyes.
Who would be looking at her? she thought wryly.
There was no noise from either Poppy’s or Brenda’s bedrooms, so she crept downstairs quietly, although the stairs creaked the way stairs in old houses always do. It made Callie think of her home in Ballyglen, in the old house where she had grown up. Callie had been brilliant at holding onto the banisters and swinging herself over the creaky steps if she wanted to sneak downstairs in the middle of the night – or sneak upstairs, for that matter.
In the kitchen, the other two cats blinked at her.
‘We need to go out, we need breakfast. Where have you been, slave?’ they seemed to be saying.
‘Am I going to have your voices in my head forever?’ Callie asked them and the cats stared at her serenely. ‘Right. You don’t care as long as you get out and get food, am I correct?’ she asked.
Callie let them out into the garden, boiled the kettle and poked around in the fridge for the cat food. Soon Joe and the white and grey fluffy cat were back and eating contentedly while the black cat sat on the windowsill and looked disdainfully down on her bowl as if food was for peasants.
‘On a diet, darling?’ said Callie and the black cat sniffed and looked away. ‘Fine, you can have it later.’
She made herself a cup of filtered coffee, knowing she couldn’t possibly face breakfast, and finally sat at the kitchen table, keying her phone into Brenda’s Wi-Fi. She couldn’t put it off any longer. She clicked onto the news sites and it didn’t take long to find the story in all its gory glory. There were no names mentioned, but it was a front-page story on several of the news sites – police had uncovered a multimillion-euro property fraud scheme and last night had raided two Dublin houses. No arrests had been made but the search for the people behind the scheme was ongoing.
So Rob hadn’t been found either, Callie thought as she read. At least none of the reports mentioned them by name, but that wouldn’t last long, would it? Brenda didn’t seem to think so. Brenda thought the TV cameras would be on to them at any minute, and then where would she and Poppy go? How could they hide this out? They wouldn’t have any money, nothing—
Suddenly, she thought of the jewellery Brenda had taken out of the house and felt both guilty and passionately grateful to Brenda at the same time. It was wrong to take something that perhaps had been bought with fraudulent money, but she and Poppy would need something to live on until this was all sorted out.