Free Betrayal by Clare Francis Page A

how long you’ll need.’
    David pursed his lips. ‘I don’t know—’ He shot a look at Mary. ‘The weekend? Say, Tuesday?’
    She shrugged her agreement.
    ‘Tuesday then.’
    It could have been worse. Suppressing the urge to press my case further, I mustered a grin.
    In the short silence that followed, Mary jumped to her feet. ‘I’ll go and do that lunch!’
    ‘I’m not sure I’ve got time, Mary.’
    She wagged her finger at me. ‘It’s only a sandwich. Won’t take a moment.’ There was something brittle, almost peremptory, in her tone. She paused at the door. ‘Have you told Hugh about Dittisham, David?’
    ‘Ah . . . no.’
    Mary caught my eye and, reverting to her more familiar role, made a face of jokey forbearance as she disappeared into the hall.
    ‘The thing is, we might have a buyer,’ David told me when she had gone. ‘Someone who wants it pretty quick. We heard this morning. Prepared to pay the asking price.’
    I felt a pinch of loss. Dittisham had been the home of our childhood, the place in which I had spent many untroubled years, the house in which our parents had lived all their married lives. Until our mother’s death twenty years ago, it had stood at the very core of the family. Yet while the child in me hated to think of other people living there, the realist knew that, with Pa dead too, it had to go.
    ‘When do these people want it?’ I asked.
    ‘In a month.’
    ‘You’ll let me know, will you? I’ll need to clear some stuff out.’
    ‘You can’t clear it out now?’
    ‘No chance.’ Reminded as always of the time, I reached for my briefcase and jumped to my feet.
    ‘Hugh—’
    There was something about his tone, a warning note, which made me pause. He came round the desk and, half sitting on it, folded his arms. ‘The thing is . . .’ he said with a sigh of annoyance, ‘the police have been asking about Sylvie.’
    A small pull in my chest somewhere. ‘Asking?’
    ‘They came to see me yesterday.’
    ‘You? Why you?’
    David frowned as if I were being particularly dense. ‘Because she was my patient.’
    I must have let some of the surprise show in my face because he said, ‘Didn’t you realise?’
    I gave a shrug. ‘No . . . Well, I simply never thought about it. You didn’t say . . .’
    ‘Anyway, the point is’ – and he hesitated as if he would rather have avoided the whole subject – ‘they seem to think that Sylvie was on the boat a few weeks ago.’
    I didn’t need to ask which boat he meant. During the summer David and I had been keeping an eye on Pa’s cruiser Ellie Miller while we decided what to do with her.
    I made a show of puzzlement. I asked evenly, ‘Why do they think that?’
    ‘They didn’t say. Listen, it’s none of my business, but . . . Well, be careful of those cretins, won’t you?’
    ‘Careful?’ But we both knew what he meant.
    ‘If Sylvie was seen on the boat with you, they might make too much out of it. Assume you were, you know –’ he flapped an impatient hand – ‘together.’
    ‘Did they say that?’ I blurted.
    ‘No, no . But you know how their minds work. One-track. In my experience, anyway.’
    I had been so desperate to talk to someone about Sylvie for such a long time that I almost told him then. I wanted to explain the extraordinary hold she had always exercised over my imagination, and in telling him perhaps to explain it better to myself. I think I wanted to hear him say that he understood, that it could have been the same for him. Yet something held me back: an instinct for secrecy, a fear of being misunderstood, a doubt as to how he would receive such confidences. David had never been one for letting his feelings get the better of him; as far as I knew he had never lost his head over anything, far less a woman.
    I said abruptly, ‘They’ve already been in touch, actually.’
    ‘The police? You’ve seen them?’
    ‘Soon. In half an hour, in fact.’
    ‘Oh!’ He looked at his watch, reached back