In the hall she stood by the study door. Her hand hovered above the doorknob, as though it might burn her if she touched it, and then dropped back down by her side. She was desperate to see what secrets it might hold, but the study was Anthony’s private kingdom, and one which she had never been invited to enter. She couldn’t yet decide if his death had changed that or not.
Daring herself, she stepped outside through the kitchen door and into the garden. It was late summer and the roses were beginning to shed their petals like fragile, worn-out ball gowns coming apart at the seams. The lawn was perfect again. It bore no imprint of a corpse. Well, what had she expected? Not this. As she stood in the middle of the grass in the ebb and flow of the sun-warmed, rose-scented air, she felt lifted; strangely reassured.
On her way back down to the house, the glint of setting sun on tilted glass caught her eye. It was the study window, left open. She couldn’t leave it. The house would not be safe. Now she would have to go into the study. She had no idea where Anthony kept the key when it wasn’t in his pocket. As she tried to think where it might be her fingers closed around the cool wooden handle. It turned easily at her touch and the door to the study swung open.
CHAPTER 12
Shelves and drawers; shelves and drawers; shelves and drawers; three walls were completely obscured. The lace panels at the French windows lifted and fell in rhythm with the evening air which breathed gently through the crack in the frame. Even in the half-light Laura could see that every shelf was packed, and without looking, she knew that every drawer was full. This was a life’s work.
She walked around the room peering at its inhabitants in astonishment. So this was Anthony’s secret kingdom; a menagerie of waifs and strays meticulously labeled and loved. Because Laura could see that these were so much more than things; much more than random artifacts arranged on shelves for decoration. They were important. They really mattered. Anthony had spent hours every day in this room with these things. She had no idea why, but she knew he must have had a very good reason, and somehow, for his sake, she would have to find a way to keep them safe. She slid open the drawer nearest to her and picked up the first thing she saw. It was a large dark blue button which looked as though it belonged on a woman’s coat. Its label noted when and where it was found. Memories and explanations began to coalesce in Laura’s consciousness; tentacles grasping for connections that she could sense but not yet substantiate.
Laura reached for the back of a chair to steady herself. Despite the open window and the drafts, the room was stuffy. The air was thick with stories. Was that what this was all about? Were these the things that Anthony had written his stories about? She had read them all and she distinctly remembered one about a blue button. But where had all these things come from? Laura stroked the soft fur of a small teddy slumped forlornly against the side of a biscuit tin on one of the shelves. Was this a museum for the missing pieces of people’s real lives or the furnishings for Anthony’s fiction? Perhaps it was both. She picked up a pair of lime-green hair bobbles on a loop of elastic that lay next to the teddy on the shelf. They would have cost only a few pence when new, and one of them was badly chipped, and yet they had been carefully kept and properly labeled like every other object in the room. Laura smiled at the memory of her eleven-year-old self with swinging plaits adorned with bobbles much the same as these.
LIME-GREEN PLASTIC FLOWER-SHAPED HAIR BOBBLES—
Found, on the playing field, Derrywood Park, 2nd September . . .