Those You Trust: compelling women's psychological fiction Read online

  Those You Trust

  Bernie Steadman

  Copyright © 2020 Bernie Steadman

  The right of Bernie Steadman to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 2020 by Bloodhound Books

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  www.bloodhoundbooks.com

  Print ISBN 978-1-913942-09-0

  Contents

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  Also by Bernie Steadman

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Acknowledgements

  A note from the publisher

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  Prologue

  How it began…

  However much we think our lives are under control, planned out and set on a certain course, sometimes life offers us a choice. The road ahead forks unexpectedly and we get to choose which way we will go. Take one path and all will stay the same. Take the other, and our lives will change forever. I took the other.

  A letter was the catalyst. I was eating breakfast in my cavernous kitchen at the start of another ordinary working day. It was early, and I could hear Will getting ready upstairs so I opened the letter quickly and skimmed the contents. Postmarked Crete, it was short and to the point. I had inherited a house and a sum of money from my deceased grandmother, Nyssa Georgiou. It was in the seaside town of Kissamos in Crete. The keys and the cash would be available to me as soon as I was able to verify my identity, or the legacy could be sold and the profits transferred to a bank if I preferred.

  I read it twice more. I’d inherited a house from a grandmother who I thought was called Cybele, but who was called Nyssa. I hadn’t been to Crete in almost thirty years despite being the only child of Greek immigrants, and yet she had left me her house. Surprised doesn’t cover it. My heart did a funny little flip and just for a second, I allowed myself to think of sunshine, sea, sand, food, escape. For some reason I wasn’t able to articulate at that instant, I hid the letter in my bag, washed my plate and mug, dried them, put them away and cleaned down the worktop. It was better to leave it like that than face disapproval so early in the morning.

  Will thundered down the stairs and stood impatiently at the kitchen door. He was immaculate in a charcoal-grey suit and open-necked white shirt. ‘Ready at last?’ he asked, his eyes running over my hair and choice of clothes. No comment was good. He could never understand my need to eat in the mornings though. I think he saw it as a weakness, a digestive slacking. I knew that if I didn’t eat I’d have a pounding headache by ten o’clock so I usually got up before him and had eggs and spinach or something similar with no carbs in it, naturally.

  We drove into Alderley Edge towards our smart new office. Hunter Design was picked out in burnished steel on the polished concrete wall. If Will noticed I was quiet he didn’t say anything. It was then that I realised I was quiet nearly all the time these days. I glanced across at him and saw a stranger, a man driven by work and success. Not my Will anymore. I wasn’t his Anna anymore either. What on earth had I been doing for the last ten years? Living a life I hated. I clutched my bag close to my chest, like it was something precious. It was.

  Hunter Design consisted of Will, the architect, and me, the interior designer. We also had several staff members who managed everything else. It was a tight little business, well-respected for quality and we had begun to attract major design projects in Manchester and as far away as London. Hunter Design was going places. It was what Will had always wanted.

  That morning Will had a meeting and I had a pile of paperwork to sign off, so I shut the door and got straight onto Google Maps where I scanned the town of Kissamos, looking for the house and dredging up ancient childhood memories of walking up from the beach, along a narrow road to a pair of old houses. I was delighted to find it. It was a semi-detached house, built pre-war, I guessed. It had a tiny front garden with a tatty old bench under the window, and a larger back garden enclosed by a stone wall, behind which a lane ran parallel to the road into town. There wasn’t much else to see, but I wasted another half hour prowling the streets and alleyways, zooming along the beaches, trying to remember the places I had visited when I was a child. I’d spent several holidays on the island with my mother visiting her relatives and enjoying the sun and sand and sea. Dad never came, as he said someone always had to mind the restaurant, and he never talked about Crete, or his family. Neither did Mum, well, not about his family. Then the holidays had suddenly stopped, and I’d never been back.

  I hovered the mouse over the house roof. It was this little house we had stayed in, though, on my holidays. I remembered it well, even if I had no recollection of my grandmother’s face. And no photos, of course, because of Dad’s refusal to discuss or be reminded of his past. He and Mum ran a Greek restaurant in South Manchester, and had done for thirty years. They worked hard and had bought it as soon as they were able to. It was their whole life, and I didn’t think Dad had ever forgiven me for not making it mine. Well, I thought, excitement and hope welling up in me, I might just be able to make somewhere else mine. Properly mine. Hope bubbled so close to the surface. I closed the site down, erased the search from the computer, and wrote back to the solicitor in Kissamos accepting the house.

  And that was the start of the end. The end of my marriage, the start of divorce proceedings. The end of my involvement in Hunter Design, the start of me finding my own clients. The end of living in that awful, empty designer house, the start of me growing my hair and wearing red. It was a hard, painfully fought two years, especially the bit where I had to move back in with my parents because Will had cancelled all my access to our money.

  There was nobody except my parents that I even wanted to say goodbye to. What did that say about my fabulous life
? To say I had hurt Will would be fair, but what I had really hurt was his sense of himself as a family man, a man with a wife. He had never played the role well, but he liked the look of normality, and I’d presumed to take it away from him. He was in disbelief for the first four months, hassled me for the next four and fought me for every penny of the business until we finally reached a settlement that would give me enough money to support myself until I sorted out what I wanted to do with my freedom. By the time I held the decree nisi in my hand, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. The money would pay to make the little house in Crete my home, and give me time to make a new life.

  And after all that pain and upset, there I was. In Crete. In Crete at the beginning of March though. Hold any ideas of sun-drenched beaches. I couldn’t wait any longer to get away from my parents, once all the court business was over, and I wanted to have my own little house sorted out and finished before summer came. Why have work done when it was hot if I could get it done early in the year? And there was nothing to hold me back, was there?

  Stepping out of the taxi in front of my new home, I stood and breathed in the cool air of Crete. Early flowers, orange blossom, I think, and the smell of the sea which was only a few hundred metres away, welcomed me. I stared at the house that I’d devoured online, my heart tapping out a staccato rhythm. The taxi driver hauled both large suitcases from the boot and disappeared in a squeal of tyres. I was here. O Lefkos Oikos, The White House, stood at the foot of the White Mountains and they stood quietly behind the town, like the ridged spine of an enormous creature.

  A woman waited in the doorway, smiling. She had come from the solicitor’s office and spoke good English apparently, which would help as my Greek was unpractised and slow. ‘Welcome to Kissamos,’ she said and handed me a bunch of keys. ‘This is your house. Please come to the office tomorrow and we will give you the papers that you need.’ She gave a shy smile. ‘I have arranged for the water and electricity to be switched on, and the telephone will work, I think, as the engineer fitted the internet connection yesterday.’

  ‘That’s wonderful, thank you,’ I said. She really had saved me lots of work. The solicitor had been so helpful, too. It was a good sign, I thought, that this was where I was meant to be.

  ‘It is dusty inside. You will have to work hard to clean it, but it will be a lovely home. Good luck!’ And with that, she headed off in the direction of town. Leaving me standing in front of my house. I felt properly alone for the first time in my life.

  I left the cases on the doorstep and went inside. The back door was wide open, allowing a breeze to stir the dust. Everywhere I looked was evidence of the grandmother I couldn’t remember. Traditional pottery covered the old dresser, photographs of people I didn’t recognise hung from the walls. Every chair had a lace cover over it. I picked one up. Hand-sewn lace. The old fireplace still had ashes in the grate. It smelt musty as, I supposed, it would after two years unoccupied.

  The kitchen had a well-used range cooker, a battered table and chairs, an old pot sink and several cupboards piled full of china. Through the kitchen door I could see the potential for a garden between the weeds and the rubbish piled up. Somebody had been in after my grandmother had died and emptied the fridge and food cupboard, but there was a lot of her personality still there, waiting. I hoped she was pleased that I was here.

  I climbed the narrow stairs and found two bedrooms and a bathroom. The bedding was still on the main bed, and it gave me a little shiver that it hadn’t been touched since my grandmother had died in it. I couldn’t sleep in that room, not until I’d given everything a good spring clean. The back room was better as a bare mattress lay on an old metal frame, and it had been where Mum and I had slept when I was a child. I could manage that. I just had to do one day at a time, of course. I had the rest of my life to get it straight.

  I pulled my suitcases over the threshold, opened them on the living room floor, took out the bedding I had brought with me, and made up a bed. I would use grandmother’s beautiful woollen blankets once I’d aired them. I ventured outside and hung the blankets on the old line, then into the kitchen and rattled around, finding a pan with a lip, cups and plates. I turned on the water, and ran it for a while to clear the pipes, then put the pan on to heat a little water for tea. The second suitcase was full of essentials, including tea bags and an electric kettle.

  I sat on a kitchen chair and surveyed my little kingdom. It was charming. Filthy and in need of hard work, but charming. There was a lot to do just to make it habitable, and I was on my own, with rusty Greek and not knowing a soul. I battled down sudden feelings of panic. What the hell was I doing? Really? Running away. I had run away. Then I gave myself a good talking to. This was the start of my adventure. I had to make it work, or go home like a fool.

  I got to work.

  1

  I worked on the house flat out for two weeks; emptying, airing, repainting, and spending a small fortune on things I needed, like new mattresses and a decent fridge and hob. I loved doing it and collapsed exhausted into bed each night. I’d found a couple of local builders, too, which helped hugely.

  Then I realised that apart from workmen, shopkeepers and the local taverna owner, I hadn’t spoken to many people at all. My circle was very small; too small. I’d been a little nervous speaking Greek to native speakers when I’d first arrived on the island and knew my Greek needed improvement, and that something had to be done. Then I met Cathy Sinclair in the taverna, and my life changed.

  The expat society, run by Cathy, a Scottish woman, was offering Greek conversation classes on a Thursday, in a room in the town hall. On the first day of the course, only four weeks ago, I’d arrived early. Half a dozen chairs sat in a circle in the middle of a large space, so I’d loitered at the door, pretending to study my phone. I’d picked up a working knowledge of the language from my parents who still spoke Greek at home, but they had been keen for me to be a good English girl, and I grew rusty as I got older, especially after I left home and didn’t need Greek anymore. Now, I needed to be able to talk to the builders, the plumber, the bank, and the annoying man at the town hall who hadn’t yet processed my application for a work permit. I thought Greek conversation might loosen me up a little and broaden my vocabulary.

  Cathy had trotted in a few minutes later. ‘Ah, Anna, isn’t it? Welcome, do come in and sit down.’ She was a tiny woman with a refined Edinburgh accent and a head of short-cropped grey hair. She was wrapped up well in a wool poncho and jeans. I put her in her sixties, but she was hard to place. Some people just stop dyeing their hair early.

  ‘Cold today, isn’t it? Have you been here long?’ she asked.

  Cold? I’d say eighteen degrees at the beginning of April was miraculous. I dropped onto a hard chair. ‘Not long, only a few weeks in fact. I’ve been busy doing up my grandmother’s house. She left it to me. It’s a lot of work, and I realised I needed to speak to some humans rather than just talking to the wall. And I must improve my Greek, so I came along.’

  She’d smiled at me, encouragingly. Ex-teacher, definitely. ‘So sorry to hear of your loss,’ she said. ‘Were you close to your maternal grandmother?’

  ‘No. I don’t recall ever meeting her. The legacy came as a surprise, but it came at exactly the right time.’ I hadn’t wanted to say more, and was saved by the inrush of four other people. There were two teenagers, Syrian refugees I soon discovered, who had been offered asylum, and two men. One who looked Greek, like me, and one who looked the opposite.

  ‘Leo Arakis, pleased to meet you,’ said the Greek-looking one. He had a warm, firm handshake, a very white grin and a strong American accent. He wore chinos and a Ralph Lauren polo shirt, which looked a lot like he was trying too hard. A businessman working over here? The leisurewear look didn’t fit him as comfortably as a suit would. He gave me a good looking over, and I looked back; he was a very attractive man.

  The other guy, Alex, was Swedish, and the antithesis of Leo. Also tall, but with a long, lean body a
nd the weathered brown skin of someone who worked outside. He had the most wonderful pale-blue eyes and strong, workman’s hands. Sailor?

  I’d looked around while we waited for the teacher and listened to Cathy grilling the other newcomers. I’d wondered what they were all thinking about me. Probably nothing. I can’t stop myself from trying to work out who people are and what they might do before they even speak. It’s my favourite game and used to drive my ex-husband crazy. I like to observe people; it’s what makes me good at my job. If I’m designing the interiors of their house, I can tell a huge amount from the clothes they wear, the way they talk and their aspirations.

  Finally, in came our teacher, Cassia Papadikis, a young, pale Greek woman with a different accent from the islanders. Athens-born I guessed. She took over and we began.

  An hour and a half later, I was hot, sweaty and way out of my comfort zone. Cassia had made us tell each other our backgrounds, and I’d been able to explain that I was a designer, but I’d had to keep asking for help with words such as architecture (architektoniki) and interior design (esoteriki diakosmisi). I’d scribbled notes like a madwoman, and was delighted when we finished and the American, Leo, had suggested we walk down the road to the beach for an early evening drink before we went home.