Past Secrets. Cathy Kelly

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       CHAPTER FIVE

      On Summer Street, the sun had shifted in the afternoon sky. Christie Devlin’s back garden was bathed in a golden glow that lit up the velvety roses and turned the cream-coloured trellises a glittering white. It was the sort of afternoon Christie loved.

      James had phoned to say he’d caught an earlier train and should be home by seven instead of nine. The postman had arrived with a late-afternoon bounty of the gadget catalogues Christie loved to devour at night, picking out useful things she’d buy if she could afford them. The dogs, too tired of the heat to clamour for another walk, were content to lie in the shade of the kitchen door, dreaming happily, two sets of paws twitching.

      Sitting on her tiny terrace with a cup of iced tea, Christie was supposed to be marking art history essays for tomorrow morning, but she couldn’t concentrate.

      The heat, the glory of her garden, James coming home early, none of it mattered. Nothing except the fear that sat hard and stone-like in the pit of her stomach, telling her there was something very wrong.

      In her kitchen seven houses away, Una Maguire was standing on a chair looking for a spare tin of baking powder in the larder cupboard beside the fridge. She’d decided to bake a Victoria sponge for the church fair and there had been only a scraping of powder in the old tin.

      ‘Dennis, have you been at my cupboards again?’ she yelled good-humouredly at her husband. It was a joke. As their daughter, Maggie, was well aware, Dennis Maguire barely knew how to open the cupboards in the kitchen and his only domestic duty was washing and drying. He never put away the dishes he’d dried. Una did that.

      For years, it had been Maggie’s job in the production line of washing and drying, but she was long gone with her own life, and the duty fell to Una again.

      ‘Never touched them,’ Dennis yelled back from the living room where he was putting the final touches to the model of a Spitfire that had taken two weeks to complete. The construction was entirely accurate: Dennis had checked in his Jane’s Aircraft Guide.

      ‘Don’t believe you,’ teased back Una, over-reaching past a pack of semolina because she was sure she’d seen the red metallic glint of the baking powder tin. With a swiftness that surprised her, the chair tilted, she lost her footing and fell to the floor, her left leg crumpling underneath her.

      The pain was as shocking as it was instantaneous. Cruelly sharp, like a blade neatly inserted.

      ‘Dennis,’ whimpered Una, knowing that she’d done something serious. ‘Dennis, come quickly.’

      In the comfort of her bedroom at number 18 Summer Street, Amber Reid lay in her boyfriend’s arms and heard the sound of the ambulance droning up the street to the Maguires’ house. Amber had no interest in looking out the window to see what had happened. The world didn’t exist outside the tangled sheets of her bed, still warm from their lovemaking.

      ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked Karl.

      She couldn’t help herself, even though every magazine she’d ever read said that this sort of question was a Bad Idea. She didn’t think she was a needy person, but there was something about this intimate moment after lovemaking, that made her want to know. She’d been a physical part of Karl. She wanted to be inside his head too, inside for ever, always a part of him.

      ‘Nothing. Except how beautiful you are.’

      Karl shifted, laying his leg over hers, trapping her.

      As fresh heat swelled in СКАЧАТЬ