Read Online Out of the Dark by Natasha Cooper - Free Book Online

he took an old envelope out of his pocket and began to write fast and untidily, muttering, ‘See to Bella, will you?’
    Trish glanced over her shoulder, to see her father’s current partner in the doorway of the restaurant, looking around for him. No wonder he’d suddenly turned cooperative. The last thing he’d want would be Bella catching him discussing one of her many predecessors. Happy enough to fulfil her part of the bargain, Trish waited until the head waiter had stopped kissing Bella, then took his place.
    Bella looked surprised but pleased, saying when they’d both straightened up, ‘You’re looking very well, Trish. Paddy was sure you’d be starving yourself into a knitting needle with George away.’
    ‘I may not be nearly such a good cook as George,’ Trish said, as she stood between Bella and the table, ‘but even I can boil a cauliflower and open a pot of yoghurt. Shall we order your drink while we’re here, to save time? They spend so long kissing new arrivals that it takes ages to get them to bring anything to the table.’
    Bella turned to the waiter and said she’d like a glass of prosecco, please. Then she and Trish joined Paddy. Trish saw the folded envelope in her place and discreetly put it in her bag while Paddy gave Bella a quite unnecessarily theatrical kiss. Trish wondered whether he was giving her time to get the envelope out of sight or punishing her for digging into his past. She knew her mother wouldn’t have minded the evidence of his passion for Bella, but that didn’t make it any easier for his daughter to watch.
    This business of treating your parents as one adult to another was tough, Trish had found long ago. Ashamed of her truculence, she set out to be entertaining. It was
worth the effort. Bella stopped talking to her as though she were a potentially temperamental invalid that night, and they discovered a lot of shared ground. At one moment, Paddy even told them to stop excluding him. They both laughed then, and agreed to order zabaglione all round, even though the menu and the waiter both warned that they’d have to wait twenty minutes for it.
    Trish drove home at the end of the long evening understanding both her parents better than she ever had. If a woman like Bella could have spent seven years with Paddy, it was no longer so surprising that Trish’s mother, Meg, had once loved him enough to marry him and have a child – and even to make light of his drinking and the violence that had followed it. Meg had always claimed that Paddy had only hit her once, but Trish’s professional experience of domestic assaults made that hard to believe.
    It was far too late to do anything about contacting his old girlfriend tonight, but Trish couldn’t resist seeing where she’d lived. Unfolding the envelope Paddy had given her, she saw that he’d added a note at the bottom. Don’t go stirring up trouble now, Trish.
    She knew she couldn’t promise that. If David turned out to be the product of one of Paddy’s affairs, bringing the information to light would do a lot more than cause trouble. But she couldn’t leave the boy unclaimed in hospital without being sure she’d done everything she could to establish his identity. He’d had her name and address in his fleece, so someone close to him knew all about her. She had to do what she could to find out who he was, however damaging that might be.
    To her surprise, Sylvia Bantell was still listed in the phone book above the same address Paddy had known. Trish rang her next morning from chambers. She answered the phone briskly, giving her name rather than her number, which suggested both confidence and recklessness.
    ‘Hello. I’m sorry to disturb you. My name’s Trish Maguire. I’m—’
    ‘Not Paddy’s famous daughter?’ The lightly drawling voice sounded full of amusement.
    ‘You mean he told you about me?’
    ‘Never stopped boasting about you, my dear. Banged on and on for hours and hours about how clever you were,