No Place Like Home Read online

  No Place Like Home

  Jane Renshaw

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  Contents

  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

  Epilogue

  THE CHILD WHO NEVER WAS

  We hope you enjoyed this book

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  From Jane

  Also by Jane Renshaw

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  Prologue

  They had wrapped nylon twine around his wrists and then around his ankles to hog-tie him, so he couldn’t do anything, he couldn’t use his arms or legs to brace himself as the van swerved, rolling him around like a pinball, flinging him against its metal sides. And every time he slid across the floor he slid, naked, through the rotting vegetables and pig shit they’d got from somewhere and piled in the middle of the otherwise empty space. There was shit on his face. In his eyes.

  He could hear them in the cab, laughing.

  And then one of them shouting: ‘You okay back there, Owen?’

  He tried to shout back through the gag, over the whine of the engine: ‘Please! Please, let me out of here!’

  And maybe they’d heard him, maybe they thought they’d made their point, because suddenly the van braked and there was nothing he could do to stop himself flying forward and crashing into the divider panel between the cab and the back of the van, his head cracking off it.

  The next thing he knew there was cool air on his bare skin and one of them was saying, ‘Here we are. Out you come.’

  He managed to open his eyes. He could see one of them, silhouetted against the bright white light of a torch moving in the dark beyond the open rear doors. He could see them as they jumped up into the van, hear them complain, raucously, about the stink. He tried to wriggle away, to slide himself around so his back was turned to them.

  What the hell were they doing?

  They were tying more twine around his ankles. More twine around his wrists. He could smell strong aftershave, cutting through the stench of pig shit. And then, in the gloom, there was the flash of a knife, and the original twine that had tied his wrists to his ankles had been sliced away so that now, thank Christ, he could straighten his body, but before the relief of it had transmitted from his muscles to his brain he was being hauled by rough hands, dragged across the floor, through the shit and out into the cold air and he was falling, his face was smacking on tarmac, and pain was screaming through his head.

  His nose had bust.

  There was blood in his nose, in his throat.

  He was screaming, he was trying to scream but then he was just trying to breathe, he couldn’t breathe, he was choking on the blood-soaked gag, trying to heave in just one breath –

  ‘Oops-a-daisy.’

  The gag was whipped away and he could breathe, but he didn’t scream. All he could do was sob. All he could do was gasp. All he could do was repeat, over and over: ‘Thank you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry!’

  One of them grabbed his legs and one his shoulders and they lifted him, and the torch went out but there was a bright harvest moon, and for the first time he could see where they were. In the wash of moonlight, he could see that they were parked up against the bollards that closed off the Old Bridge of Spey. The bridge was closed to traffic because a structure built in 1754 for carts and wagons and marching soldiers wasn’t up to carrying modern traffic. He knew it was built in 1754 because he was into that stuff, he was into military history, he knew all about the network of military roads and bridges constructed to pacify the Highlands after the Jacobite Rebellion. Bonnie Prince Charlie and all that.

  They carried him, quickly, half-running, through the bollards and up onto the hump of the old bridge.

  ‘Aw, no!’ he sobbed through the blood. ‘Christ, please, no!’

  He had wet himself.

  ‘Up we go,’ said a cheerful voice. ‘Up and over!’

  They dropped him.

  And then his back exploded in pain, and thank God, they’d dropped him not over the edge but onto the stone parapet, and he was squirming away from them, he was begging: ‘Please… Please!’

  They were laughing.

  The bastards.

  The absolute bastards.

  But he was laughing too, weakly, hysterically. They weren’t going to drop him over the bridge into the water below, into the River Spey, into that swift-flowing mass of water he could hear roaring under the bridge and away. They weren’t going to kill him. All they were doing was putting the fear of God into him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he choked. ‘I’ll go. I’ll go and I won’t come back.’

  ‘You’ve got that right.’

  And now they were manhandling him again, flipping him onto his stomach, his head and shoulders out over the edge of the parapet so he could see the black water moving below, black touched with silver where the moonlight caught the churned-up surface as it roiled and swirled its way past the massive stone supports of the bridge. There had been rain. There had been a lot of rain in the last two days, and the river was swollen with it.

  He tried to find a purchase with his hands, with his fingertips, on the rough wet stone of the parapet. He tried to cling on as his legs were hauled up over his head but he couldn’t, he couldn’t get a proper hold, and then his fingertips were ripped away and he was tipping right over and past the edge of the parapet until he was dangling, blood dripping off his face and down, down onto the roiling black water.

  ‘Don’t let go! Don’t let go!’ he shrieked.

  As the hands holding his ankles released him and he fell, he heard her, up on the bridge, he heard her shout his name:

  ‘Owen!’

  1

  ‘Noooooo! Dad, tell her she can’t!’ Max staggered back against the worktop, as if the shock of seeing the ingredients Phoebe had assembled on the table had sent him reeling. ‘Please, you have to assert some sort of control here.’

  ‘I’m out of control!’ Phoebe shouted happily, dancing across the kitchen waving a wooden spoon in each hand, the oversized Bake Off apron impeding the execution of the moves she was attempting.

  Bram saw it happen as if in slow motion: Phoebe’s ill-conceived decision to go for a high kick; the long apron catching at her legs; the inevitable fall to the unforgiving Caithness slate floor, on which her nine-year-old skull would crack like an egg.

  He shot across the kitchen, his dad-bod physique transformed into that of a superhero, leg muscles powering him into position, arms flying out with supernatural speed to catch her as she fell.

  ‘Oof! Thanks, Dad!’ She clutched at his shirt as he righted her, smiling up at him as if he really were her superhero.

  He held on to her a moment before letting her go. ‘Careful, Phoebs. It’s a kitchen, not a dance floor. You shouldn’t really be messing about in here.’

  Maybe slate flooring hadn’t been such
a great choice for the kitchen after all.

  ‘They mess about on Bake Off all the time,’ Phoebe objected, the wooden spoons now drooping in her hands, her big blue eyes fixed on Bram reproachfully. Unless he was careful, they’d be streaming with tears in a second. Phoebe’s moods were mercurial things, will-o’-the-wisps, giddy flames that flared and were gone.

  Bram swept her up in his arms, making her squeal like a much younger child as he set her down on the table next to her chosen ingredients. Max had picked up the jar of jam.

  Phoebe snatched it back. ‘Peanut butter and jam is a classic combination.’

  ‘Not in a quiche!’

  ‘You’re not the boss of me, Max.’ Her brother may have been nine years older than Phoebe, but she had never let the age difference carry much weight. ‘Each competitor gets to choose her or his own ingredients. Don’t they, Dad?’

  Bram grimaced a concession. ‘Them’s the rules, I guess.’

  ‘But we can’t make Grannie and Grandad and Uncle Fraser and Mum eat a peanut butter and raspberry jam quiche,’ Max wailed, the wail turning into a chortle as the two of them gave themselves up to mirth.

  Bram smiled as he opened the oven door. ‘Okay, Phoebs, you have the time it takes to blind-bake the cases to ponder the wisdom of your choices.’

  The three pastry cases were lined up ready to go into the oven. Phoebe’s effort was already looking extremely unappetising, sweaty-looking and grey. Max’s pastry, in contrast, was so perfect it looked like the bought stuff, neatly pressed into the wavy edge of the quiche tin and overlapping the edges just the right amount to allow for shrinkage.

  When had this happened? When had Max become someone who made perfect pastry? Almost while Bram wasn’t looking, their little boy had grown up. Up, up and away. After this last year of school he’d be off out into the world on his gap year – which absolutely terrified Bram, no matter how much Kirsty tried to reassure him that Max was a sensible boy and would be perfectly fine constructing a school with no proper training under the supervision of a load of randoms a hundred miles from the nearest hospital in the Rwandan bush, surrounded on all sides by Gaboon vipers, spitting cobras and black mambas, an encounter with any one of which could prove fatal. Kirsty had banned Bram from Googling snakes, but that only meant he’d moved on to spiders – and they were worse, if anything, being so much less visible.

  He shoved the three pastry cases into the oven and threw an arm around Max’s shoulders, trying and failing not to choke up. He’d really missed Max these last two months. After selling the flat in Islington, Bram, Kirsty and Phoebe had moved straight up to Scotland to live temporarily with Kirsty’s parents until the new house was finished, but Max had stayed on with Bram’s parents in London to finish the school year, with just the odd weekend trip up to Scotland.

  ‘I’m relying on you to contain the force of nature that is your sister until I get back, okay? I’m going to the veg patch to harvest some onions.’

  Bram had planted onions, leeks, carrots, lettuce and chard in late spring and tended them religiously on every visit to the new house. Today, hopefully, they could all enjoy the fruits of his labours.

  ‘We’ll try not to burn the place down in your absence,’ said Max, pushing his floppy dark fringe to the side, the better to scrutinise the oven temperature. He was taller than Bram now, and fortunately blessed with Kirsty’s looks rather than Bram’s: her straight brows and soulful green eyes.

  ‘That would be good.’

  Phoebe laughed. ‘Grandad wouldn’t be happy if we burned the house down on our first day in the new kitchen!’

  ‘I don’t imagine he’d be best pleased, no.’ Bram looked beyond the big antique pine table to the open-plan sitting area situated between the kitchen and the front door. Kirsty and her dad, David, who had built the house for them, had based this open-plan space on the Walton house – Kirsty had been obsessed with the TV show The Waltons as a child – with two windows either side of the door looking onto a verandah. There was a solid fuel-burning stove and even a radio cunningly disguised to look like an old-fashioned wireless.

  In an hour’s time David would be coming through that door, a compact, muscly bundle of contained energy, nose twitching, on the hunt for something to criticise. David and Linda, Kirsty’s mum, lived in an ‘executive bungalow’ four miles away in Grantown-on-Spey. Bram had hoped that four miles out of town was far enough that David wouldn’t be popping in all the time, but here they were, on their first day in residence, and David, Linda and Kirsty’s brother, Fraser, were somehow coming to lunch.

  How had that happened?

  He ran a hand along the wooden worktop. David was an old-school builder who considered eco-friendly materials the work of the devil and had been appalled at the idea of using reclaimed wood in the kitchen, but had had to admit that the worktops looked great. ‘You’d never know it was reclaimed crap, eh, Bram?’ he’d said after his team had installed them.

  ‘Is our house the best house in the world, Max, or what?’ Phoebe demanded, whirling round on the spot. Phoebe had shown her brother around yesterday like an estate agent trying to sell the place to a potential purchaser. ‘I’m never going to live anywhere else but here!’

  Bram and Max exchanged indulgent looks. Phoebe, like Bram, was a real homebody, and had been desperate to move into our house, even though living at Grannie and Grandad’s meant she could play with Lily, Rhona and Katie Miller whenever she liked. The Miller sisters, Phoebe’s best friends, lived across the street from Linda and David, and Phoebe had got to know them well during all the holidays they’d spent up here. Back in London, Phoebe had somehow got off on the wrong foot with the girls in her class – Bram had never got to the bottom of the reason for this – and had had to deal with a certain amount of nastiness and bullying. When the decision to move up here had been made, Phoebe had immediately exclaimed: ‘I can be in Rhona’s class!’ and burst into happy tears.

  ‘Watch those quiche cases,’ Bram instructed, heading across the kitchen to the door to the Room with a View, as David called it. He’d better check that everything was okay in there. David was bound to head straight for it.

  He had to admit that David had been right to insist on an expanse of glass for the long end wall, the middle sections of which were sliding doors giving onto a terrace. Every room in the house had a lovely view – how could it not, in such an idyllic location? – but this was spectacular. Immediately behind the house was the paddock, where they hoped to keep goats, and beyond that another small field and, off to the left, the wood of pine and birch and beech trees that actually belonged to them – how amazing was it to actually own a wood? Was it deeply un-PC of him to be gloating about this? And just in front of the wood there was a stream, with a cute little footbridge carrying a Hansel and Gretel path across it, perfect for Phoebe’s interminable games of Pooh sticks.

  So much for his egalitarian principles. Dangle fourteen areas of idyllic Scottish countryside in front of Bram Hendriksen and it seemed his inner Tory would bite your hand off.

  The ground beyond the field dipped down and then slowly rose, providing a panorama of forests and fields and farmhouses and, as a backdrop to it all, the hazy bulks of the Grampian Mountains. On this perfect midsummer day, it was a glorious, impossibly lush patchwork of greens and purples and blues.

  Yeah.

  Oh, yeah.

  They’d done the right thing.

  He missed his London friends like crazy, but this was a little piece of Scottish heaven. It was going to be amazing, living here with nature all around them – none of which, barring the very slim possibility of adders, had the potential to be fatal.

  He straightened a picture, picked up some loose thread from the carpet and rearranged the fossils on the big fire surround made from old ship’s timbers. He defied even David to find fault with this room. Their honey-coloured linen sofas, which had looked oversized in the Islington flat, were perfect here, and Bram had found vintage fabric online wi
th which he’d made fresh covers for their collection of cushions. Which were looking a bit squashed from the four of them collapsing on the sofas last night at the end of the hectic moving-in day.

  He picked up an orange and white cushion and plumped it, and set it back on the sofa in its proper place. But as he reached for a green and blue one, he stopped.

  What was he doing?

  Why was he pandering to the man? This was their home, not a show house, and if the cushions were flat, David would just have to suck it up. In a childish act of defiance, Bram grabbed the orange and white cushion and chucked it down on the sofa and sat on it, bouncing a couple of times to make sure it was completely de-plumped.

  Starting as he meant to go on.

  He stood without looking at the cushions again – because he wanted to plump those bloody cushions! – and opened the sliding doors. On the terrace, he took his phone from his pocket to capture the view. He’d do a blog post tonight about their first day in the new house, in Woodside, as they had called it.

  The air was so clean, scented with pine resin, and as he walked round the side of the house and past the shed, he breathed it into his lungs. Thanks, Bram, his lungs were probably saying. You’ve almost forty years of London pollution to make up for, but it’s a start. He chuckled, imagining what David would say if he knew Bram’s lungs were talking to him.

  His smile widened as he spotted Henrietta, the carved wooden goose from his childhood, positioned by Phoebe in a little drift of wildflowers – were they some kind of buttercup? He took a photo for the blog. He’d get a shot of the veg patch too. Or maybe a video of his hand picking the first onion? He switched to video function, angling the phone to get a long-range shot of the veg patch, and started walking again.