Mr Wilmott Gets Old School Read online

  “Because they’re human beings posting on a social media site, not corporate robots lining up for an ID card. Oh, that’s a good idea, though. I’ll try the same names on Linked In.”

  After a short pause, Crystal shook her head, blowing her fringe out of her eyes. “Nada. I’ll put in a friend request for the guy obsessed with privacy since the other two are no-gos.”

  “How long will that take?”

  Crystal gave her a curious look, then tapped on the phone again. “How is this possible?” She stared openly at Emily until she shifted in her seat, feeling exposed. “How can you not have a profile on Facebook?”

  “I liked Bebo. When everyone got off it, I couldn’t be bothered trying again. It was just a distraction from life.”

  “Yeah.” Crystal mugged at her. “That’s the whole point!”

  “I guess this conversation is a way to distract me from my question.” Emily waved her finger in the air. “And I further guess, that means you don’t know.”

  “Of course, I don’t know how long it’ll take for someone to friend me back. For all I know, he’s already checked out my profile and decided that he’d rather walk along a road of embers to hell than accept a request from me.”

  Emily chuckled, then buried her face in her hands. “There must be some other way. We can’t get this close to the answer, then lose it because someone chose the wrong setting online.”

  “You know, the whole private investigator idea might not be a bad one.” Crystal tapped away at the phone again, leaving Emily wondering what her pay-as-you-go plan was about to debit to her account. “There’re a few in Canterbury or Hurunui we could try.”

  “Any in Pinetar? I think I’d prefer to meet someone face to face.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you.”

  “It’ll make it easier to plead poverty if they can see the state I’m in.” Emily ruffled up her hair into a crazy mass and undid her cardigan so she could re-button it wrong. “What’d you reckon?”

  “There’s pleading poverty and then there’s not getting through the front door because you look like a bag lady. Tone it down a little and hook your hair back to showcase your scar.”

  Emily pulled the hair back, trying to tuck it in behind her ear—a hard ask for her short, grey curls. She struck a pose, chin up, lower lip pooching out. “What about now?”

  “Oh, now you look irresistible.”

  Crystal put the phone down to clap and Emily snatched it up before her bill could be run any higher.

  She flicked back to the social media profiles, scrutinising each profile image. The man with the wrong birthday seemed familiar. Like an old friend she vaguely remembered from school.

  “This is exactly six months past the incident.”

  “What is?” Crystal leaned over, staring at the page upside-down. “Yeah. That’s a pity because he’s otherwise the right age.”

  “No!” Emily held up the screen, placing it next to the ghost’s face, then comparing each feature, one by one. “I mean, if Astrid stayed in the nunnery for six months, then her baby wouldn’t have been adopted out until the end.”

  Crystal opened her eyes wide. “You think they changed the date?”

  “It’s the sort of thing that might’ve happened back then. A birthday’s just a number, isn’t it? It’d mean more for the new parents to record the day they adopted their son and brought him home than the actual date he was born.”

  “But the birth certificate would show the right day.”

  “Yeah. But it’s not as though this is a government ID. You can put any date you like in here. If his parents celebrated the day, he became part of their family rather than his actual birth…”

  Crystal finished off the thought. “Then he might’ve grown used to saying it. Does it have an address or something?”

  Emily frowned at the phone. “No. But there’s some way to geotag people on here, to locate them.” She pulled her seatbelt on. “Let’s go back and talk to Gregory. He’s the right age to know about stuff like that.”

  “I think they turned off most of that information,” Gregory said an hour later, checking the mobile. “People kicked up a stink over it.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Crystal said, clutching her shawl closed over her chest. “The idea someone can do that freaks me right out.”

  “On the other hand…” Gregory held out the phone towards Emily, pointing at a picture on the screen. “Recognise this place?”

  “It’s the stone cottage outside Belfast.”

  “Yeah. And fix on that tree in the third house along. The camellia.”

  Emily nodded, waiting for him to get to the point.

  “It’s the same bush here, in the photograph of him and his wife. You can see it out the front window, through the net curtain.”

  She had to enlarge the photograph to see exactly what Gregory had caught, but once she saw it, the plant was unmistakable.

  “How long ago was the photograph taken?”

  “I don’t know but it was only posted a few weeks ago.”

  Emily pressed her hand against her stomach which appeared to be turning somersaults. “We can be there in half an hour.”

  The car had been parked outside for ten minutes before Emily finally gathered up her courage and got out. Both Crystal and Gregory had been silent during her deliberation while Fred had stared at her with a full dose of petulance.

  “Here goes nothing,” she said, mostly for her own benefit, as she strode up to the front door. Net curtains were drawn over every window and she hoped somebody would be home, but it was impossible to see.

  Three knocks and she stepped back, her calf muscles tensing as though to run. Fred stood beside her, an eager expression creeping across his face. Yearning.

  “I don’t think anybody—” she began, then cut off as footsteps sounded near the door. A lock clicked open, then another, then the handle turned. Everything moved into slow motion.

  “Hey,” a middle-aged woman said, leaning out with a half-smile.

  Emily’s voice disappeared for a second. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

  “Are you selling something? Only, we’re just in the middle of tea—”

  “Is Wolfgang here?”

  The woman’s face had been edging into a frown, but it now cleared, and she stepped back. “Sure is. Just a sec. Wolfie,” she yelled as she walked out through a doorway. In a more muffled tone. “There’s a lady at the door for you.”

  Emily bit her lip at that. A lady. She thought the woman who’d answered must be her same age. Wolfgang would be too.

  If he was the right man.

  As soon as he appeared in the corridor, Emily knew she’d found the right target. On the online photos, there’d been a slight resemblance but in person, the similarities were striking.

  Her eyes filled with tears of relief as she stood in the doorway, staring gormlessly at him and smiling.

  “Can I help you?”

  “You’re Wolfgang? Your birth mother was Astrid Wall or Wallheimer?”

  The man jerked his head around to check nobody was standing behind him, then pulled the door mostly closed, him on the outside with Emily. “Are you from the adoption agency? Do you have some news?”

  Emily tried to think of a way to say what she had to without sounding like a madwoman. As she paused, Fred stepped forward, his hands reaching out towards the man standing there.

  In a voice rusty with disuse, he said, “My son.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Wolfgang stepped out of the car and stared at the Stoneybrook Acres entrance. “It doesn’t look evil.”

  “It’s not.” Emily came around to stand beside him. “I’m not even sure the people running it—now and in the past—could be classed that way. What’s that book?” She snapped her fingers. “A series of unfortunate events. If you want to call it anything, unlucky would be a better title.”

  “It was certainly unlucky for my father.”

  “And
by proxy, for you.” Emily took his arm and steered him towards the oak tree rather than inside. The lawn was patchy, the lumps and chunks of broken concrete still piled near the wall. Where the police tape had been a week ago, now there was a temporary fence to protect the grass seed while it sprouted.

  “I keep thinking if I’d just pushed the agency harder, I could’ve connected with my dad before he was gone.”

  Emily flicked her eyes towards where Fred stood, his eyes fixed in adoration on his son. “What would you have told him?”

  “I don’t know. Probably nothing.” Wolfgang laughed and shook his head. “My wife accuses me of being monosyllabic at the best of times.”

  Under the tree, Emily stared at the wounded trunk with fresh eyes. The scars hadn’t healed all the way—neither the ones sunk in the wood or the ones buried in the ground.

  “The headmaster left all his money into a trust to be paid out to the children who survived Oakhaven School. It’s not enough to make up for what he did, or how he covered it up, but I guess it shows, in the end, he felt guilt.”

  “Not much use for the ones who’d moved on to other cities.”

  Emily tapped on his arm. “Your father moved down here to take advantage of the offer. I don’t know how or when the pupils were informed, but it brought him back here.”

  “To be killed.”

  “Yeah.” Emily shifted her weight to her left side as her right hip raised a protest. The muscle at the back of her knee gave a twinge, and she clenched her teeth, ready for a cramp. After a second, they loosened again, offering a reprieve.

  “I think he came to the house, once.”

  The admission took her so much by surprise that Emily gasped. “Really?”

  Wolfgang nodded, looking bereft. “I think so. It was about two years ago. I was in the front room on the computer when he walked past and up to the door. I expected him to knock and my wife was closer, so I just kept on with what I was doing. About five minutes later, he walked past again. He never knocked or rang the bell.”

  The ghost reached out for his son, a hand passing through his shoulder. Wolfgang shivered while Mr Wilmott trembled, tears streaming down his face.

  “If only I’d gone to answer the door that day, so many things might’ve been different.”

  Emily stared at the ghost, biting her lip as she tried to find the words to heal the breach between them. “I think, if he was standing here now, he’d be proud to know you as his son.”

  Fred nodded. “When my friends died, I didn’t just lose them, I lost any chance to get to Astrid and prove to her I could be a father. That was the plan. Get a job and support her and the baby. By the time Mr Leuf was finished with me and I got to the hospital, I was so traumatised I couldn’t speak and the staff there couldn’t work out what I wanted. They put me in an asylum for a while after that. Long enough so when I was discharged, I could barely remember anything that had happened.”

  “A string of bad luck might have kept the two of you apart,” Emily said, stroking the tree trunk where the scars were deepest. “But I think if you talk now, he’d listen. No matter how far away he might go, I believe he’ll hear you and be waiting.”

  They turned back toward the retirement complex but as they drew nearer, Wolfgang pulled away. “I don’t want to go inside if that’s all right. Maybe another day, now that I know it’s here. Just not today.”

  Emily headed towards the car, but again the man shook his head. “There’s a bus that goes by in less than ten minutes that’ll have me home in an hour. I’m grateful for you showing me around, but I think I’d rather travel back on my own.”

  She waved to him as he walked down the winding driveway. Fred came and stood beside her, his posture an exact mimicry of his son.

  “Why didn’t I have the courage to knock that day? All those years, I held onto him as the one good thing that came out of my life. Just the knowledge that I had a son somewhere, made it easier to keep going.”

  Emily shrugged. “Sometimes we dream so hard, it’s hard to believe the reality will come close. I don’t even know if it’s fear. It feels more like love.”

  “Freddie! You’re it!”

  The two of them turned to see the filled in burial plots bathed in radiant light. Three boys stood inside the brightness, gesturing to Frederick to join them.

  “I want to stay.” The ghost turned, his eyes searching the path his son had just walked. “What happens if I go? Will I ever see him again?”

  “Cynthia doesn’t have any problem coming back.” Emily realised her hands were clenching as she said that and forced them to relax with a small laugh. “Peanut went and came back, too.”

  “Fred?”

  This time, when they turned around, Astrid was standing there, waiting. She extended her hand and Frederick ran towards her, pulling her into his arms and twirling her around.

  “Did you see him?” Fred asked, his voice thick with emotion. “Wolfgang?”

  “I saw him. He turned out okay, considering his parents were nothing but trouble.” Astrid spoke the last words in a plummy accent, perhaps imitating someone they both knew because Frederick burst into laughter.

  “Will you come with me and be my love again?”

  Mr Wilmott nodded, cupping her face in his hands as the teenage boys bounced around them, catcalling. With a burst of energy, the light absorbed them.

  “Knock, knock,” Emily said at Agnes’s door, seeing it slightly ajar.

  “Who’s there?” a voice called out, female but not Agnes.

  “Come in. Just watch you don’t let the dogs out.”

  “Who let the dogs out?” a voice sang off-key, and Emily pushed inside, shutting the door behind her, to find Suzanne Wilberforce and Conker in the room.

  “Am I interrupting something?” Emily asked.

  “Yes,” Agnes said from the head of the bed. “An argument about the relative merits of paint by numbers as opposed to needlework.”

  Maude trotted over to sniff at Emily’s ankles, seemingly disappointed to discover there were no dog treats secreted in her socks.

  “Poor lady,” Suzanne said, snapping her fingers to call Maude over. “Some big meanie put her on a diet and now all the fun’s gone from her life.”

  Agnes snorted. “She’ll get over it. I was on a diet from the age of sixteen through sixty.” She patted her ample hips. “For all the good it did me.”

  “To old age putting an end to fad diets,” Suzanne said, raising a glass of what looked suspiciously like sherry, in a toast.

  “Hear, hear.” Agnes produced a glass she’d been concealing behind her back and took a large swig. “But Maude is just a spring chicken, aren’t you darling? Only eight so in dog’s years that’s…”

  “Just a bit older than me,” Emily finished for her. “And I can tell you right now if you wanted to put me on a diet, you’d be out of luck.”

  Suzanne doubled over with laughter. To Emily, it looked like the glass wasn’t the first of the day.

  “Michael!” Agnes squealed with delight and shoved up the window. The painted wood caught at an angle and gave a matching shriek back.

  “Hello stranger,” Michael said to Emily, poking his head into the room. “I didn’t expect to see you around here again.”

  “It’s her favourite place because we’re here,” Suzanne announced, grabbing hold of Emily’s hand. “She loves us and loves our dogs, so how could she stay away?”

  “True enough,” Michael said with a wink at Emily. “How could she resist such gorgeous ladies? Especially when they’ve spent the morning getting soused.”

  Agnes leaned out, placing a hand on his arm. “We’re having an early tipple because the new owners are coming tomorrow, so we’ll have to be on our best behaviour from now on.”

  “Ah. Better drink it all up today, then.” He tapped a finger against his nose. “Good call.”

  “Speaking of people we didn’t expect to see back here…” Emily stepped closer to the window.

>   “Oh.” Michael clutched at his chest. “That’s the worst segue I’ve heard in quite some time.”

  “Have you moved back in or are you just hanging around outside the windows, flirting?”

  He waggled his eyebrows and mimed a cigar. “Can’t it be both?” After a short pause with no response, he sighed. “Talk about a hard audience. I’ve moved back into my room, citing a mix-up with paperwork through no fault of my own. Unfortunately, getting that changed into my real name means I don’t qualify for the Samuel Leuf grant any longer. Luckily, I heard on the grapevine this place needed a new gardener.”

  Emily’s face must have shown her shock in detail, because Michael laughed again, shaking his head.

  “No, I can tell what you’re thinking. I’m not too old and if there’s anything I can’t handle, I’ll arrange for some work experience on the cheap.” He wrinkled his nose. “I can work a system as well as the next man, and unlike the last employee, I’m not about to take an axe to the residents.”

  “Well, I still don’t know why that horrid man hurt Freddie like that,” Suzanne said with a sniff. “We didn’t interact much, all I remember about him was that he wouldn’t say boo to a ghost. Still, not being noisy doesn’t seem a great reason to murder someone.”

  “Frederick attacked the gardener when Eli tried to chop down the oak tree.” Emily moved back from the window, taking a seat on the bed next to Agnes. “It was an accident, but he panicked, from all accounts. Once he’d shoved the body into the shed, he spread a rumour that poor Mr Wilmott had wandered off into the rear field. Nobody had any reason to doubt him. He’d already dug out the ground for the patio so disposing of him was a quick fix.”

  “You get that from your police friend?” Agnes asked, her eyes suddenly on full alert.

  “I got that from the sergeant, yes. I wouldn’t—”

  “Ooh!” Suzanne interrupted in a falsetto. “I wouldn’t call him a friend. More of an acquaintance or a colleague. We’re definitely not making eyes at each other over crime scenes. No, not at all.”

  Emily’s mouth dropped open in horror. “But… I…”