‘What do you mean?’
‘During one my many travels,’ he said, reaching into the pocket of his moth-eaten tweed jacket, ‘I happened upon some papers which made interesting reading for someone without a television to while away the hours.’
‘What is he blathering on about, the old fool,’ Mavis hissed. Evie silenced her with a furious frown.
Stig held up a sheet of headed paper and read the name aloud. ‘“MA Holdings”. Ring any bells with anyone?’
Cissy and Pip looked at each other. Pip said, ‘That’s the company we pay our rent to. MA Holdings. They bought our house a while back.’
‘Ding dong a bell is rung,’ Stig said with a buoyant smile. ‘And your house, if I’m not mistaken, is actually two houses knocked into one.’
Evie tightened her grip on the old man’s arm. The fabric of his jacket was stiff under her fingers. ‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’
‘That MA Holdings are part of McAllisters, my dear? Why, yes. I am indeed.’
Evie slapped her head with her palm. ‘Well, that makes perfect sense.’ She remembered seeing Stig rooting through the bins outside the McAllister tower block during one of her walks. ‘How did you happen to come by this information?’ she asked with a half-smile.
Stig tapped his nose with a grubby finger. He folded the sheet of paper in half and put it back in his pocket. He still held another wad of papers in his other hand. They looked like printouts of emails, but Evie couldn’t be sure.
‘We had no idea,’ Cissy said, looking up at Pip. ‘I mean, I’m really sorry. If we’d known who it was we could have said something sooner.’
Evie reassured them that it wasn’t their fault. She imagined MA Holdings must have gone to some lengths to keep their true identity secret. The question was, why?
Sarah had moved closer to Tim, but she was staring at Stig and Evie. ‘So that’s how Roy McAllister came to own two of the four houses. What about the other two?’
Eyes began to travel again, scanning faces and trying to ascertain who, if anyone, looked guilty. There must be some explanation, Evie thought. She did a quick mental recce and figured that the only houses still unaccounted for were Tim’s, Sarah’s, Zac’s and Stig’s. And her grandparents’, of course.
She turned back to Stig, whose expression was grave. ‘What’s wrong? Stig? What is it?’
His haughty demeanour was gone, replaced by a tone of weary disappointment. ‘We have, as I said earlier, a serpent in our midst. Zac, do you have nothing to say for yourself? Are you going to stand there and let these good people argue and accuse each other and do nothing at all?’
Zac pulled a face and shrugged. ‘I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘I think you know very well.’ Stig’s voice was sad. ‘There’s no shame in making a mistake, young man. Only in trying to hide it.’
‘Ok-ay. If you say so, old timer.’ Zac turned away and made funny little gestures either side of head. ‘He’s a bit, you know,’ he said to the blank faces of the other residents. ‘A bit doo-dah.’
Stig clutched at the sheets of paper in his hand and thrust his arm out in front of his chest. He unfurled a finger and pointed it at Zac, who recoiled in mock horror. ‘This is evidence, Zachariah. Electronic letters sent from you to your uncle Roy.’
Zac made a grab for the letters, but Evie was closer. She pulled Stig’s arm out of harm’s way and took the sheets of paper from his shaking hand. They were indeed emails, sent from the accounts of Zac Jones and Roy McAllister. Evie read the first one and her mouth dropped open in shock.
‘Uncle Roy?’ she said, staring at Zac. ‘
Uncle
Roy?’
‘Telling him everything we’ve been up to,’ Stig said, shaking his head in sorrow. ‘Laughing at us. Plotting against us. He’s a traitor. Although he is a very good painter,’ he added, rubbing at his stubbly chin. ‘And he did make a spectacularly good job of my roof.’
Evie looked at Stig, who turned away and carried on muttering to himself, then turned back to Zac.
‘Look, it’s not what you think,’ Zac pleaded. Frank loomed over him, and although Evie knew how peace-loving her granddad was, she figured he cut a pretty threatening figure when he decided to turn it on. There was strength in those wiry limbs, and steel in his eyes. As for Bob Peacock, he was perhaps even more terrifying, if only because his barely contained fury seemed so unpredictable. Tim had planted himself on Zac’s right side, while Alun Peacock and Pip and Cissy blocked off his escape to the left. Zac was cornered. It was time for him to talk.
*
‘It was for your own good. Uncle Roy, he promised me he’d keep half of the street. I thought that was better than nothing, that at least some of you could keep your homes. Sarah, you’d be fine, and you, Tim. And Bob had already decided to sell to Dynamite. Uncle Roy said he’d match their price.’
‘What about us?’ demanded Frank. ‘Where were we in this master plan of yours?’
Zac’s eyes glittered. ‘I was going to rent you number six. And I was going to stay in number four. Don’t you see, it would have been perfect? You could all have got rich and stayed living in your precious street.’
‘While your uncle got the office extension he’s been after for years.’ Evie reminded them that McAllisters had been behind the other failed attempts to buy out Cupid’s Way, and the mood darkened.
‘Okay, but that was always going to happen,’ Zac said. ‘He’s a determined man. He gets what he wants. I thought this was for the best. I thought I was helping.’
‘Was it your idea?’ Evie said. ‘To buy number four and number six? Or his?’
‘His. He bought them in my name, and we made up the story of doing up the other house for my mother.’
Mavis cried out at this, as though the idea of lying about your mother was the worst of his sins. ‘So there is no mother coming to live at Cupid’s Way?’ she said, horror-struck.
Zac shook his head. Mavis turned up her nose and shifted her body away from him. ‘And I tried to get my Evie to go out with you. The shame of it. Well, she had more sense than me. Maybe Evie suspected there was something dodgy about you all along.’
Evie watched for Eloise’s reaction to this comment, but the younger woman was staring out towards the river, the wind blowing her hair back from her beautiful face. Evie said, ‘I had no suspicions of Zac, Gran. He had us all fooled.’
‘Look,’ Zac said, ‘I’ve been just as taken in as you lot. My uncle, he lied to me too, okay? He used me. He said it himself in there just now – he’s going to build the medical centre
and
new offices. There will be no part of Cupid’s Way left standing. He lied to me,’ he repeated, as though only now was the reality of this sinking in.
‘Boo hoo.’ Tim’s face twisted as he mocked Zac’s confusion. ‘You expect us to believe that? You’re just trying to save face, save your own worthless skin. You’re in this right up to your neck.’
‘For what it’s worth, I believe him.’ Evie spoke slowly, watching Zac the whole time. ‘I saw his reaction in there. When Roy McAllister announced the plan to build on half the street, Zac didn’t seem surprised. Or disappointed. But when he said he was building on the entire site, he was stunned. I saw it with my own eyes.’
‘Could have been play acting, Evie,’ Frank said. ‘Doing it for our benefit.’
‘He didn’t know I was watching.’ Evie pictured Roy again, with his bullish head and bright blonde hair, and almost laughed out loud when she realised that the person he’d reminded her of was so obviously Zac. Their local builder. The serpent in their midst.
She turned to Stig now, and linked her arm through his. ‘And what about Stig, Zac?’
‘Pardon?’ Zac’s face was blank. He clearly had his mind on other things, like how to get back to the street and pack up without getting lynched.
‘Well, you mentioned everyone here and how you’d planned to give them all somewhere to live, including yourself, but you didn’t mention Stig. Wasn’t he important enough? Did you just ignore him like everyone else does?’
The others looked uncomfortable at this, and Zac began to bluster.
‘I did his bloody windows,’ he said. ‘I did what I could to make amends. But none of this was certain. It was just a plan, just an idea. We never … I never …’
‘Forget it,’ Evie said, turning her back on Zac and pulling Stig along with her. ‘Come on,’ she told the old man. ‘We’re going home.’ And they marched across the car park, arm in arm, with Evie just willing her gran to complain about having him in the car. After what Stig had found out for them, it was the least they could do.
Chapter 23
For the second time at Cupid’s Way, Evie woke with a hangover. This time it wasn’t down to Frank’s homemade cider, but copious gin and tonics downed at one of Bristol’s supposed hot-spots. Evie couldn’t even remember which one, a circumstance that reminded her so much of her wayward teenage years she didn’t know if she should be proud of herself or deeply ashamed.
It was all Eloise’s fault. Perhaps as an apology for her outrageous accusations, the youngest Peacock had proposed a mammoth blow-out. Evie hadn’t needed much convincing, but she had stipulated she’d only go if Sarah came along. Sarah, she figured, was sensible enough to at least make sure they all got home safely.
The Sunday morning sounds of work on the allotment roused Evie from a fitful sleep. Last night she’d talked about stuff from her childhood she hadn’t even shared with James, and hearing herself say the words out loud had produced an odd reaction. Instead of the usual mixture of anger and resentment, Evie found herself feeling just a little bit sorry for her mum. Eloise, with her breezy but poignant tales of single-parenthood, had grounded Evie’s childish impressions of Angela’s parenting. She’d gone to sleep with the drunken intention of phoning Canada the following morning. Now, with a banging head and a mouth so dry she could barely peel her tongue off her lips, she was astonished to find that the urge hadn’t left her.
Yet.
But first there was another misunderstanding to address. After brushing her teeth and dragging on a pair of jeans, Evie headed down to the kitchen, following the sounds and smells of Sunday breakfast in the Stone household.
Her gran was buttering a mound of bread while Frank stirred a pan of baked beans. Neither of them spoke, to each other or to her. The tension in the room was palpable.
‘What’s going on?’ she said. She reached for the medicine cupboard and filled her glass with water from the tap.
Frank looked across at Mavis. He said, ‘Your gran and I are arguing, Evie. We’re having a disagreement.’
Evie grimaced. ‘Right. Well, I hear you arguing all the time and it doesn’t sound like this. This sounds like …’ She frowned and lowered her voice. ‘Oh. You really are arguing. What you usually do, that’s just normal behaviour for you two, isn’t it? This is the real thing.’
Mavis answered with a sniff, and Frank paused in his stirring. He looked at his wife for a long time before putting down the wooden spoon and turning to Evie.
‘I might as well tell you, Evie, that I want to sell up and get out of this whole mess right now. I don’t like what the stress is doing to your gran, and I don’t like what’s happening to this street. It’s not the same,’ he said, looking out of the window at the back yard with the glittering roofs of the shopping centre beyond. ‘And it won’t ever be the same again. No matter what.’
Evie slumped down into the single chair, staring at his slippered feet. She knew this was the part where she was supposed to jump in with counter arguments – she could sense her gran waiting for her to do that very thing – but she couldn’t think of a single thing to say. She swallowed her painkiller and waited. She had a feeling Frank wasn’t done yet anyway.
‘I know,’ he said simply. ‘About Tommy. I mean, I know that you know about him and that your gran has been struggling with it all these years. Alone.’ He glanced across at Mavis again, who sensed his gaze and whipped her head away. ‘But still. I still think we should cut our losses and get out while we can get a good price for the house and a nice retirement place on that new development.’ He stopped speaking until Evie looked up and met his eyes. ‘That Michael of yours, he seems like a fair man. His offer is certain to be better than anything that crook Roy McAllister will give us. The money, it’ll make life easier for your gran. It’ll make it–’
‘I don’t want an easy life,’ Mavis cried, throwing the knife to the floor. ‘I want to stay here with Tommy. My baby needs me. He needs me. I can’t abandon him. I can’t.’
Frank pulled her into his arms and held her while she wept. Evie looked away. She knew she shouldn’t be here for this. Her announcement would have to wait. But when she stood up to leave, Frank called her back.
‘Evie, is there anything we can do? I mean, if you tell me there’s a real chance that we could save the street then I’ll think again. But now there are two developers vying for the land, there doesn’t seem much point in hanging on.’
Evie nodded. There was no point denying it – the same thought had been playing out in her head all week. Her granddad had summed up the situation pretty well, and Evie’s only hope now lay in the hands of English Heritage. If they listed Cupid’s Way, the street would be saved. If they didn’t, it would go to the highest bidder. There was nothing else she could do.
‘We’ll know tomorrow morning,’ she told them. ‘I had an email to say the decision had been made and the response mailed on Friday. It didn’t come in yesterday’s post, so I’m expecting it first thing.’
‘And are you still hopeful?’ Frank asked. He was regarding her over the top of Mavis’s head, and his eyes said
Level with me
.
Evie dropped her gaze to her gran, then looked back up at her granddad. She said, ‘Sure. There’s always hope, right?’ and then she shook her head firmly from side to side, her mouth dipped into a grim frown. He nodded, and smiled.
‘Thanks for being honest, my girl. We can always count on you for that.’
Evie swallowed. This might not be the time, but she couldn’t let the comment go without saying what she was here to say. There had been too many secrets and misunderstandings and things left unsaid around here to last a lifetime.