Free Risking It All by Ann Granger

Watching them made me hungry. I’d intended only to have a coffee but I ordered a bowl of pasta and, while I waited, tried to get my ideas straight.
     
    When I emerged three-quarters of an hour later my ideas were no clearer and I’d had to force myself out on to the street. The temptation to hide in the warm pub for a couple of hours and then go home had been great, but I’d resisted it. I felt quite noble – and doomed.
     
    The house proved to be a thirties-built semi, with bow windows and a bit of mock-Tudor woodwork, in a depressingly respectable street. People here painted their front doors, polished their windows and kept their cars washed. I could see why the DIY store had set up here. Any house that hadn’t already been revamped was in the process. This was commuterland, and there was an air of understated prosperity about it. I could see why my mother had thought Nicola (as I had to call her) would be better off with the upwardly mobile Wildes than in a squalid bedsit with her natural mother, farmed out half the time to a neighbour who probably hadn’t much cared.
     
    Because most of the houses were older few had garages. Some residents had solved the problem by sacrificing their front gardens to hard-standing for a car. On such an asphalted area before the house I was about to call at stood a nippy little Fiat. I took that as a sign someone was home.
     
    For a minute or two after ringing the bell I thought I might be wrong. Then, from some distant recess of the house, came the sound of an outraged infant yell. Feet clattered towards the front door. It was jerked open by a thin young woman in a short kilt, sweater, black tights and penny loafers. Her long fair hair hung dead straight in two expensively cut wings. She had a pointed nose, thin lips and frosty eyes.
     
    ‘Yes?’ she asked curtly.
     
    ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ I said. (There was another outraged yell behind us even as I spoke.) ‘I’m looking for Mrs Flora Wilde.’
     
    I’d considered whether to ask after ‘Mr and Mrs’ or just one of them. I’d decided it would be less suspicious if I took the latter option.
     
    ‘Wrong house!’ she said impatiently and began to close the door. The yelling started up more insistently than ever. She paused in closing the door to turn and shout, ‘He wants his Ribena, Marie-Cecile!’
     
    The yelling was now interspersed with the sounds of someone with a heavy foreign accent trying to placate someone else who was intent on kicking in the kitchen door. I felt sorry for the au pair, but she’d given me the chance to ask a further question.
     
    ‘Perhaps they’ve moved,’ I said. ‘This is definitely the address I was given for Flora.’
     
    The pointy-nosed one scowled at me and flicked back her gleaming hair curtains. ‘We’ve only been here two years. We bought from some people called Georgievich. I don’t know who used to live here before that. How long ago was it?’
     
    When I told her it was perhaps as long as twelve years, she said triumphantly, ‘Well, there you are! You can’t expect people to still be in the same place twelve years later, can you?’ It then occurred to her that given my age, I was asking about someone who would have lived here when I was a child. I saw suspicion dawn in her eyes. ‘That’s an awfully long time ago.’
     
    ‘Yes, it is,’ I said breezily. Damn it, I didn’t know how long the Wildes had lived here, or when. My mother had said it was their last address. How many had they had before this one? I should have asked her. Come to that, how many had they had after leaving here? When you’ve got a secret, one way of hiding it is to keep moving, as my mother had done. My flimsy strategy hatched over coffee and pasta was already revealed as less than watertight.
     
    Since I couldn’t think of a convincing explanation for my lack of precise information, and knew better than to attempt an unconvincing one, I simply ignored the implied question.