Free Letters to the Lost by Iona Grey Page A

banish the spectre of her own inadequacy, and the shameful fizz of thwarted longing deep inside her.

5
    2011
    Will was woken, as always, by the alarm on his upstairs neighbour’s mobile phone. At 6 a.m. exactly, its electronic musak jingle, set at maximum volume, jerked him violently out of sleep. Unfortunately it didn’t have the same effect on Keely upstairs who, in addition to a laugh that could shatter crystal, was blessed with an ability to sleep like the dead and always took at least fifteen minutes to turn it off. Consequently Will’s day started, as usual, in a rush of adrenaline and impotent fury.
    It wasn’t likely to improve much either, he thought, staring up at the brown stain on the ceiling. (The stain looked like spilled coffee, and he often found himself unwillingly imagining scenarios where coffee could be spilled on a ceiling.) At least it was Friday. Not that he had anything to look forward to at the weekend, but the good thing about Friday was that it wasn’t Thursday any more, and it would be almost a whole week before Thursday rolled round again.
    As the electro-jingle notched up a level in volume and urgency he thought back to a time when Thursday had been just another day of the week. He could actually remember enjoying Thursdays at one point: in his second year at Oxford, when he’d taken Dr Rose’s course on Nineteenth Century Ireland his weekly supervision had been on a Thursday. She was the only lecturer who never made any reference to the fact that he was the son of Fergus Holt, never made a comparison or a joke, never asked to be remembered to him because they’d once shared a lift at some European conference or other. She listened to Will’s thoughts, challenged them, often exposed the flaws in their logic. Those had been good Thursdays.
    In those days if anyone had mentioned the words ‘Bona Vacantia’ he probably would have thought it was some new tapas bar in town. At his interview for the job at Ansell Blake, Mike Ansell had said (in the swaggering, know-it-all way that was his hallmark), ‘So, Bona Vacantia, Will. That’s what we’re all about here,’ and Will had felt the spark of optimism that had been all but snuffed out by the dingy office, the fluorescent strip-lighting and Mike Ansell’s overpowering aftershave, flicker bravely back to life. He’d thought he meant good holidays.
    In fact the Bona Vacantia list was the government’s register of unclaimed estates, published weekly. On Thursdays. It recorded the names of people who had died without leaving a will and whose money and assets would go to the Treasury if no living relatives came forward to claim them. Ansell Blake were one of a growing number of firms who circled like sharks, waiting to snatch the largest and juiciest estates, trace heirs and pocket a fat commission by uniting them with cash to which they didn’t know they were entitled from relatives they’d never met.
    The work, the scramble for heirs and commission, was keenly competitive, hence the feeding frenzy on Thursdays. That alone Will could have coped with; he actually enjoyed the process of sifting through the records, piecing together information and conjecture to put together a family tree and a picture of someone’s life, but the cruel, combative streak it brought out in Ansell the Arse was harder to bear. It reminded Will uncomfortably of his father.
    Upstairs the alarm was suddenly silenced. With a sigh Will levered himself upright and sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing a hand through his hair. At least this morning he didn’t have to face The Arse straight away. This morning he had the solid twenty-four-carat, bona fide excuse of going to see Mr Greaves on Greenfields Lane to keep him out of the office and away from Ansell’s blistering sarcasm for an hour or so.
    Tonight, he thought. Tonight I’ll go online and have a look to see what else is out there. Who knows, maybe I’ll be dazzled by the world of opportunities available to