Read Online The Mysterious Miss Mayhew by Hazel Osmond - Free Book Online

young.’
    Round and round they went, Hattie getting more and more frustrated. And all the time he had his hands tied because there was no way he could say, ‘I don’t trust your mother with you. She’ll lose it at some point.’
    ‘I want to go skiing,’ she had cried finally and he’d watched the tears stream out, snot too, and tried to put his arms around her. She pushed him away and turned her back on him.
    He’d sat in the chair by her bed and asked if she wanted a story, but her silent antagonism felt like another presence in the room, forcing him out and down the stairs after a fumbled kiss on the top of her head.
    He took a sip of lager. He had already tried to ring Steph back, but only got her message service. Lying low, no doubt.
    He thought of how he’d let her parents off this morning and not rung them. (My God, was that only this morning?) Well, good old Tom wasn’t feeling so kind right now.
    He imagined Geoffrey blinking awake, nose and ear hair akimbo.
    Striped pyjamas, concave chest. Caroline in the other bed. Another concave chest.
    ‘Yes!’ Geoffrey’s bark was hoarse this late.
    ‘Tom here. How are you doing?’ Geoffrey’s eyebrows would be having a field day. He could hear Caroline saying something and pictured the waving-down-a-car movement she employed to get her husband’s attention. ‘Just thought I’d let you know I’ve had a call from Steph.’
    A growly ‘Anything wrong?’
    ‘I won’t bore you with the details. But I’m not having her upsetting Hattie like this. Not after I’ve been so bloody reasonable—’
    ‘Upsetting? What? I …’
    ‘So … I am asking you yet again to help me stop this long, lingering death with Hattie being used as leverage for God knows what.’ Tom took a breath. ‘That envelope I left with you. She said you haven’t passed it on to her?’
    ‘Yes I did. I gave it to her when she was …’
    ‘When she was over here?’ Tom asked. ‘That’s what you were going to say, weren’t you? When was that?’ He wished he could reach down the phone and pull Geoffrey up it by his nose hairs.
    There was what sounded like a skirmish and it was Caroline on the phone. ‘What seems to be the problem?’
    She appeared to be reading from a ‘How to handle a belligerent customer’ handbook.
    ‘Usual one, Caroline. I’d like to divorce your daughter. I’m trying to be civilised, but she’s still blocking me.’
    Silence for a while. He knew where Steph had learned her communication skills.
    There was an arrogant whine to Caroline’s tone when she spoke. ‘I don’t know what you expect us to do? We didn’t know Stephanie was coming over until she rang from the airport. We’ve tried never to interfere in the lives of any of our children.’
    That’s because you’d have to get emotionally involved. Emotions are messy and you’re very tidy people .
    A longer pause, before she asked, ‘And how is Harriet?’
    If they were down to platitudes, he might as well give up.
    He finished the call feeling that he’d achieved nothing. Why should he be surprised? These were the people who had never asked, not once, why Hattie had ended up living with him. Was it because they were too frozen in the ice of good breeding to enquire? Or had they always had their suspicions about how volatile Steph was?
    He looked at the lager bottle. Unfair really to criticise them for not asking. His family had, plenty of times, and he’d always side-stepped telling them everything.
    He just had to cling on to the fact that Geoffrey and Caroline, in their own frigid way, loved Hattie. But Steph, jeez, he couldn’t believe she’d been to see her mother and father but not her daughter. It was nearly four months since their last, fraught meeting in York.
    He got up and checked on Hattie again. Gummy was still in her hand, but she wasn’t asleep, he could tell. There was an echo of his earlier position on the sofa in the way she was lying on her side, shoulders stiff.
    ‘I