Free The Vows of Silence by Susan Hill

given him a look and said he’d got something there. What was all the fuss about? Right.
    Then he had met Alison, introduced by Stephanie’s fiancé, as he was then. Soon to be husband.
    And everything had changed. Alison.
    He sat nursing a pint, on his own, remembering, because there was a new girl on the front desk and her name was Alison and it had all clicked into focus again. Vivid. Seeing Alison. Hearing her. Watching her. The tiniest things. He could rerun it like a film going through his head.
    Not that he’d ever forgotten. But when something happened, the same name, a little link, it went full on. Colour. Vivid.
    He drank the rest of his pint slowly and steadily to slake the anger that always blazed up. Sparks. A breath of wind. A fire, running out of control, and for years nothing would dampen it down.
    But then he found it.

Fifteen
    Hallam House. It was dark when he approached it down the lane. The lights shone out onto the drive.
    Simon stopped. It was still hard. He still hated coming to the house knowing that he would not see his mother, that Meriel would not be pruning or weeding or cutting something back in the garden or else visible in the kitchen or at her desk in the window of the small sitting room. He saw her now. The shape of her head, the way her hair was done, the way she glanced up and her expression when she saw him.
    She had not always been there if he had called unannounced. Even though her busy life as a hospital consultant was over and she had stood down from several committees, she was still on the board of this and a trustee of that, often out. But when she was there, she made time for him at once, sat down, listened, caught up with news. Family first, last and always, she had said.
    Simon missed her with a strength of sadness that was still raw and painful. He thought about her, had meant to say this or that to her, ask about someone or something.
    He looked again at the house. The lights on and welcoming. But his father had never learned the knack of making his family feel especially welcome.
    The kitchen curtains were not drawn and as Simon got out of the car, his heart lurched because she was there, he saw her, saw her standing beside the dresser, her arm raised to take something down, saw her as clearly as he saw the two stone urns filled with the white geraniums she had always planted in them, beside the front door.
    He looked away quickly, terrified. How could his dead mother be there?
    And when he looked again of course she was not.
    “Simon? Have I missed a message from you? I don’t remember your saying you were coming.”
    “I wasn’t far. Thought I’d drop by and see if you enjoyed your holiday.”
    “I did indeed.”
    As he followed his father into the kitchen, Simon caught a glimpse of her again, her back to him. Only the way she had done her hair was new. Meriel had always worn her hair upswept. Elegant. She had always been elegant. Even in old gardening clothes, elegant.
    Meriel was dead. Meriel had been dead for—
    “Hello.”
    She turned round.
    Her hair was quite different and she was far younger. But she was tall, like his mother, and with the same way of speaking. Odd.
    “I don’t think you’ve met. Judith Connolly: my son Simon.” Richard paused and his voice took on its usual faint edge of sarcasm. “Detective Chief Superintendent Serrailler. He’s a policeman.”
    “I know,” she said. Smiling. Coming over to him. She held out her hand. “Hello, Simon. I’ve been wanting to meet you.”
    There was a smell of cooking. Something simmered on the stove. Since his mother’s death, the kitchen had lost some of its warmth and the small touches that had made it special. There had always been flowers and flowering plants on the window ledges; there had been notes pinned to a cork board, reminders about meetings written in Meriel’s striking italic hand and bright blue ink; there had been a row of musical scores on a shelf next to the cookery books, and