‘I don’t want tea!’ Daniel protested. ‘I want to go down to the police station and admit it was me and not Mum!’
‘No, we’re going to talk about this first,’ Elvi overruled. ‘Mum protected you for a reason—’
‘Bloody medical school! It doesn’t matter—’
Of course it mattered, Elvi thought ruefully, that Daniel wanted to be a doctor like their late father. It was all he had ever wanted to be since he was a little boy and a conviction for theft would totally destroy that ambition. Furthermore, Daniel had already been awarded a place at Oxford to study because his academic results were the very best. She knew exactly why her mother had lied and taken the blame for her son, but what she could not understand or credit was that Daniel would ever have stolen anything.
‘I need to know what happened,’ she persisted quietly, seating herself on the bed where her dark-haired brother had flopped down to hang his head. He was getting so tall and lanky at just past eighteen that he was fast growing out of all his clothes, his jeans barely reaching his ankles and his enormous feet. She and Daniel bore not an ounce of resemblance to each other because, although they had had the same father, they had had different mothers. Elvi’s mother had died when she was a baby, and her father’s second wife had adopted her and brought her up as her own. She was the short, plump one of the family, Elvi conceded ruefully, bright blue eyes troubled, pushing back the white-blonde hair sticking to her perspiring brow because she had run all the way home from work as soon as Daniel had phoned her.
‘Yesterday, I called to pick up Mum for her AA meeting but I was a bit early,’ Daniel confided.
Elvi heaved a sigh, for both of them tried to ensure that their mother went to regular meetings and since the summer arrived and Daniel had finished school and only contrived to find part-time employment, he had taken over the duty. Sally Cartwright deserved her family’s support to stay sober. She had been sober now for three long wonderful years but Elvi was painfully aware that alcoholism was an affliction that never entirely went away. Denying herself the craving for that one dangerous drink was what Sally dealt with every day.
‘And?’
‘She was cleaning something and had to finish it, so she told me to sit down in the hall and not to touch anything,’ Daniel grumbled. ‘Like I was a little kid or something and I was annoyed, so I didn’t listen...’
‘What did you touch?’ Elvi almost whispered.
‘There was this little jade pot sitting on the console table in a patch of sunlight—honestly, Elvi...it was the sort of thing I’ve only ever seen inside a museum case—and I just wanted to hold it for a minute, so I picked it up and took it over to the window to hold it up to the light because it was so delicate—’
‘And then what?’ Elvi prompted with anxious impatience.
Daniel studied her in almost childlike discomfiture. ‘Then the doorbell went and Mum rushed out to answer it and I kept the pot hidden in my hand because I didn’t want her to see what I’d been doing. Unluckily for me, the man at the door worked for Mr Ziakis too and he was there to tell me that I shouldn’t be in the apartment in the first place and that I should be waiting for my mother downstairs. He made me leave immediately, like...he was sort of nice about it but I had no chance of putting the pot back with him standing there—’
‘For goodness’ sake, Daniel!’ Elvi erupted in vehement protest. ‘You should’ve handed it to him straight away! The minute you stepped out of that apartment door with it, you labelled yourself a thief—’
‘Yeah, you think I don’t know that now?’ Daniel traded with laden irony. ‘But I gave way to panic and I concealed it, brought it home and stuck the blasted thing in a drawer. I planned to ask Mum to put it back for me tomorrow but apparently the housekeeper reported it missing when she turned in for work in the evening, so that was that. I missed the boat and—’
Stupid, stupid, stupid, repeated in Elvi’s head but she didn’t let the word pass her lips because she could see that her sibling was already painfully aware that he had acted like an impulsive and reckless total idiot. ‘When did the police get involved?’ she interposed.
‘This morning...they arrived with a search warrant and of course they found it. Mum asked me to go into her room to get her handbag and while I was in there she may have confessed to taking it because by the time I came back out again because I couldn’t find the blasted thing she was being arrested and read her rights,’ he revealed chokily, gulping back more unmanly sobs. ‘We need a solicitor—’
Elvi was thinking hard and fast but coming up with nothing. Her brain was still in shock. She wished she didn’t know as much about her mother’s fabulously wealthy employer as she did. He was the guy with the colour-coded closets and alphabetically arranged books. He had a desk that must never be touched and a bed that had to be changed every day. Her mother’s duties in his apartment were hedged in by a very detailed list of do’s and don’ts. That in the flesh the same male looked as though he had stepped straight out of a glossy magazine advertisement as a supermodel for designer apparel had struck Elvi as uniquely unfair.
She had read up about her mother’s employer on the Internet, learning more that had made her grind her teeth together. Why? Because, Xan Ziakis seemed to have been born under a very lucky star, blessed by every conceivable attribute, and all he seemed to have learned from his remarkable good fortune was a marked tendency to behave as though he suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Of course, maybe he did, she allowed ruefully, because nobody could possibly be that perfect in the real world. When she was still meeting her mother out of work to accompany her to AA meetings, she had seen Xan Ziakis coming home on several occasions while she sat waiting in the foyer of the luxury apartment block. And he was gorgeous to look at, absolutely, unmistakably gorgeous.
* * *
‘I did the only thing I could,’ Sally Cartwright confided hours later as she sat with her adopted daughter in the bedroom they shared. In her forties, she was a slender brunette with anxious green eyes now lined and shadowed with strain.
‘It wasn’t the only thing,’ Elvi argued in a low voice, neither of them wanting Daniel in the next room to overhear them. ‘You could’ve told the truth, both of you—’
‘And do you really think anyone would have believed us?’ her mother demanded tearfully, her cynicism unhidden. ‘We’re poor and down on our luck. Why? Because I wrecked all our lives, brought us down from a normal happy family to this!’
‘This’, expressed by a shamed hand gesture, encompassed the grim surroundings of their council flat in a tower block. But it was the guilt infused by Sally’s bitten-back sob that worried Elvi the most, fearful as she was that her mother’s distress would drive her back to alcohol. She knew better than to fall into reasoned argument with her mother on the score of her culpability because essentially the older woman was stating the unlovely truth.
At the time of Elvi’s father’s sudden death, the Cartwright family had been financially secure. They had owned their home and Sally had been a respected teacher in a girls’ school but alcohol and a tide of growing debt had washed that safe, comfortable life away. Inevitably, Sally had lost her job and Elvi had left school at sixteen to find work. Like bricks tumbling down in a child’s game, everything they had once taken for granted had been taken from them until they’d reached rock bottom and became homeless.
From there it had been a slow climb back to security, a very slow climb, Elvi acknowledged wryly, but until this theft incident occurred their lives had steadily been improving. The three of them had rejoiced the day Daniel was accepted into medical school because it had been the first positive event they had had to celebrate in a very long time. Sally was so proud that, in spite of all that they had lost, Daniel had kept on studying and finally won through against such stiff competition because places to study medicine were very much oversubscribed in the UK. The threat of Daniel being ruined by one foolish mistake could