Free I Trust You by Katherine Pathak Page B

cheeks flush. That much was true. She’d been narrowly permitted one trip. There was no chance of Eliot letting her have a second.
    ‘I also sussed that the Coleman menfolk are the types to leave their wives home at the weekend while they network on the golf course. I almost got that right.’
    ‘I doesn’t happen every Saturday.’ Marisa became defensive.
    ‘It’s not my business if it does or doesn’t. Each to their own.’
    Not wishing to get into an argument with someone who clearly had multiple chips on his shoulder, Marisa invited him inside. ‘Now, what is this information you’ve come to tell me?’
    ‘Have you got a computer?’
    ‘Yes.’ She led him into Eliot’s study, powering up the laptop in there.
    Lee placed both hands squarely on the desk, leaning over the screen, as if he could intimidate the machine into life more quickly. ‘After you’d left, I called my Dad.’
    ‘He’s still around?’
    ‘Of course. He’s only sixty eight and he’s been on the wagon for nearly thirty years. The guy’s probably healthier than either of us.’
    ‘Oh, I’m glad to hear that.’
    ‘I told him about you. Dad had no memory of you at the Dorans’ place. He wasn’t on the scene around the time you were fostered. But he certainly remembered Gerry Coleman.’ The computer was now on and Lee appeared to be logging into his emails. ‘I got the feeling you didn’t believe me when I said Gerry and my dad were workmates back in the day. So I asked Dad to see if he could dig out any photos from their time at Southern Seaways. He scanned over this picture.’ He shifted the screen around so she had a good view.
    Marisa squinted at the image. It was of a group of burly men standing in front of a container ship. It looked to be at the docks in Southampton. Her father-in-law was very clearly the man standing at the far right of the group.
    Lee pointed to the person next to him. ‘That’s my old fella, Bill Powell. This photo was taken by the skipper when they’d just arrived with a shipment of diamonds from South Africa. It was the most lucrative deal the company had ever done. Hence the photo for the album.’
    ‘When was this taken?’ The men were all dressed in a kind of dark grey uniform. It was impossible to date the piece.
    ‘Dad reckons it was the early eighties. It was the long voyages that caused him to start drinking heavily. I was a little kid then and still with my mum.’ He cleared his throat, the memory obviously painful to him. ‘Dad was away a lot and when he came back he was in the pub. Sometime in ’82, Mum packed her bags and fucked off. Dad barely noticed. It took a couple of days, but when he was finally sober, he realised he’d been lumbered with a four year old kid and a job which took him away for months on end, not to mention whenever he was in the country, he was off his face.’
    ‘And that was when you ended up with the Dorans?’
                  ‘One of our neighbours called the social. Dad didn’t even have the wherewithal to manage that.’
                  Marisa dropped into Eliot’s leather desk chair. ‘What the hell was Gerald doing working at Southern Seaways back in the eighties? As far as the family history goes, he built up the luxury boat business from being a young man, straight out of college. He inherited some money from his grandfather and used it to buy his very first marina, just outside Bristol.’ She looked again at the photo. It was unmistakeably him. The man had barely changed.
                  ‘I don’t know what bullshit he’s told the rest of the world, all I know is what Dad’s told me. Gerry was a hard case when he worked on the ships, but he was also clever. Dad always reckoned he had a racket going with the cargos they were bringing in and out. Dad was too pissed to ever be in on it. But he outright accused him once, when a shipment of electrical circuits was low after they unpacked them at port. In a