Read Online Unforgotten by Clare Francis - Free Book Online

it would force her to go out and buy something a bit more up to date. There was no question of claiming on the insurance. For one thing the amount of the claim would barely cover the policy excess. For another, there was the matter of the burglar alarm. When Lizzie had failed to mention it on the phone,Hugh guessed she had forgotten to set it and decided to maintain a diplomatic silence. But when they had finished their search she asked him to sit down. She would have told him before, she said, but she’d been hoping there might be some obvious explanation. The fact was, she had set the alarm that morning but it had failed to go off. They went through the limited range of possibilities: the thief had contrived by some extraordinary gymnastic feat to evade the beams that covered the dining room and hall; the alarm had gone off on cue but somehow managed to re-set itself; Mrs Bishop had been passing and had come in to switch it off, an idea quickly dispelled by Mrs Bishop herself when she came in next morning. With a sense of postponing the inevitable they called out the maintenance firm to check the alarm, though they shared an implicit understanding that no fault would be found. Finally they faced the explanation they had been hoping to avoid from the beginning, that the break-in was somehow connected to the bad old days with Charlie, that while Charlie might be away at college starting a new drug-free life, some of his former friends still had drug habits that required regular financing, friends who might have come to the house and watched Charlie tap the code into the key pad.
    They changed the code on the alarm and, in case of further trouble, reported the break-in to the police, who mustered just enough interest to issue them with an incident number. Then, telling themselves no harm had been done, they put the event to the back of their minds.
    But was the figure in the garden the same joker, back for another bite of the cherry? He certainly had every appearance of one of Charlie’s less appetising friends, young, hooded, forever hanging around on the lookout for easy money. The media would have you believe these kids were all the same, feral children from dysfunctional single-parent families, who scorned all notions of responsibility, embraced victimhood with the righteousness of the oppressed, and blamed their addictions on bad parenting, bad schooling, society as a whole, anyoneand anything but themselves, so that by a convenient twist of logic even the thieving wasn’t their fault, simply a means of surviving in a cruel, unfeeling world. Trudging upstairs to peel off his wet clothes, Hugh almost wished he could buy into this rant and feel something as simple as contempt. But these kids weren’t all the same, far from it, and to despise them was to allow for the unthinkable possibility of despising his own son, who, despite a stable home and loving family, a good education and constant support, had struggled with drugs from the age of fifteen. Fragile, impressionable Charlie, who didn’t need the contempt of others when he directed more than enough against himself.
    Hugh hung his suit jacket and trousers on separate hangers to dry and, with his mood long broken, abandoned the idea of a bath in favour of a shower. As he ducked his head under the streaming water he pondered, as he had pondered so many times before, the unanswerable questions about Charlie, why twenty years of nurture had been unable to override the disadvantages of his birth, why the receiving of family love had failed to translate itself into self-love. Had his first twelve months with his natural mother been so irretrievably damaging? Would everything have been different if they’d been able to adopt him immediately after birth? Or had the tendency to insecurity and lack of self-worth been ingrained in him from the start, set hard in some immutable genetic amber? Was the physiology of addiction itself genetic, as some scientists liked to claim,