Pippa’s Cornish Dream

Eight other elderly couples came forward with their version of events, claiming McConnell had done the same to them. Ben Retallick, though, had not managed to secure a conviction – the evidence was all circumstantial, leaving the jury with enough doubt that they were unable to convict him.

The rest of the story came out at another court case – Ben’s own. He was charged with criminal assault after beating McConnell so badly he was left with three broken ribs, a broken jaw and concussion. Various versions of events were recalled, but the conclusion seemed to be that McConnell had gone to see the lawyer after the case and thanked him for “letting him off”. During the course of the conversation, he gloated about the fact that he had been guilty all along. That he’d stolen the money, that they’d been “asking for it”, that he had no remorse. That he didn’t give two hoots about the “old codger” who died.

Retallick had snapped and taken a swing at him. A fight ensued, with McConnell coming off much the worse – unsurprising as he was a weasel of man who ended up hospitalised. Ben had been sentenced to a year in jail and disbarred, despite a media campaign that portrayed him as a hero. The press came down mainly on his side, stressing the way the legal system had let the victims down, and that Ben Retallick had finally cracked under the pressure.

He’d never given an interview, never gone on the record outside the court case, never spoken publically about the mess his life was in, even after his release. In fact, he became something of a hermit, with near-legendary status – people snapped pictures of him on their mobiles and posted them on websites, reported sightings of him, wrote messages of support to newspapers. Someone had even set up a fake Twitter account in his name with photoshopped pictures of Big Bad Ben taking down historic villains with a handy right hook.

McConnell might have been the victim – and there were plenty of pictures of him with his taped-up ribs, matching black eyes and head bandage – but Ben came out as the one people sympathised with. Ben Retallick was a criminal – but he was one the nation very much approved of. Despite his silence, newspapers and columnists were still debating the rights and wrongs of the whole fiasco. A convicted criminal or a national hero, depending on your point of view.

Exactly which Ben Retallick was here, with her family, Pippa wondered? Hiding out in Honeysuckle Cottage. Moments away. Probably asleep, although the light was still burning in his bedroom window. What should she do about it? He’d seemed a nice man, a calm man. A thinker, not a fighter. He’d even helped with the recalcitrant cow. Yet the photos didn’t lie – he’d come close to killing McConnell, and no matter how much he might have deserved it, that kind of violence was frightening.

As she often did when she was troubled, Pippa turned to her parents for answers. She twisted around in bed, looked at the framed photo of them on the cabinet. A rare shot of all of them together, Scotty a babe in arms, Patrick lurking in the background, already looking sullen and angry with the world – as though he knew the world was going to punch him in the face even before it actually did.

Marissa and Stuart Harte had been kind people. They never judged and they’d raised their kids to do the same. They were always encouraged to think freely, to use their own instincts. To trust their own feelings. Even if that ended up getting them dunked in a duck pond.

And that, she thought, climbing out of the tangled sheets and pulling on a pair of old tracksuit trousers and a vest top, was exactly what she had to do now. She needed to follow their lead and trust her instincts. Use her own judgement – not that of the tabloid press.

She checked in on the kids as she tiptoed down the hallway, avoiding the patches of old wooden floorboard that creaked – they needed replacing, which was coming in at about number ninety-eight on her to-do list. Daisy and Lily were top-to-tail in one bed, as usual, even though they each had their own, and Scotty was crumpled up in his traditional tiny ball of warm flesh. His hair was too long, she thought, seeing it stuck to his forehead in blonde clumps. She lingered an extra moment, the sweetness of the sight filling her heart and chasing away at least some of the strain of the day. Bless him. He was the anti-Patrick – for now at least. With her parenting skills, though, he could be a criminal mastermind by the time he was ten.

Satisfied they were all firmly in the land of nod, she crept downstairs and slipped out of the side door, crossing the cobbles to Honeysuckle, realising it was too chilly for flip-flops. She paused and looked up at the cottage. The light was still on. She wouldn’t be waking him. And even if she was… well, it had to be done, and it pretty much had to be done now.

She knocked lightly as her hair flew around her face in the wind. Not quite gale force, but the waves would be crashing into the cove. She could hear them rolling in already. She hoped Patrick had found somewhere more civilised to bunk for the night, then switched that train of thought off – there was nothing she could do about Patrick. Not right now, probably not ever.

Ben opened the door, interior light flooding around him as he looked down at her. She took a gulp and hoped it wasn’t audible. He was wearing only a battered pair of faded Levis and his hair was damp from the shower he’d obviously just taken. Tiny droplets of water had scattered over broad shoulders and the moonlight played over the smooth, dark skin of his bare chest, even the small movement of holding the door open showing her the ripple of muscle in his arms. A fine line of silky black hair trailed down into the waistband of his jeans, and she tried not to stare at it. She was here for answers, not to lech, she reminded herself.

“Can I come in?” she asked simply, and he moved back, inviting her into the cottage that technically she owned. She sat down on one of the squashy armchairs and noted the open laptop with a screen full of text, a glass of rich amber liquid next to it. At least she hadn’t woken him. Maybe he had badass stun gun-wielding worries in his brain as well.

“Whisky and work,” he said, grabbing a black t-shirt and pulling it on. “The two essentials of my life. Want one?”

He held up the bottle – the label looked Scottish and expensive – and she shook her head. She rarely ever drank, and this didn’t seem like a good time to start.

“What is work now…after, you know…?” she asked.

He settled down opposite her, looking no less attractive for being clothed, but certainly less distracting.

“Why? Are you worried I won’t be able to pay my bill?”

“That’s not what I meant at all…and I didn’t mean to pry, but I’m sure you can imagine I have some questions.”

“Yeah. I can. To answer one of them, I’m writing a book. My second – the first is due out later this year. And no, it’s not about me and what happened – although there were plenty of offers to do just that. It’s a legal thriller. I’ve wanted to do it for years, but never had the time. Now, I have nothing but time, and a three-book publishing deal to keep me occupied. Next?”

She took a breath, wondered if she should have accepted that whisky after all. Time to belly-flop into the deep end – small talk would get them nowhere.

“I didn’t know anything about it,” she said. “Honestly, I didn’t. To me, you were just the boy from the duck pond. The last few years have been…well, busy. I’ve not exactly been keeping up with current events, and I had no idea what Patrick was talking about earlier. But thanks to the magic of the internet, now I do. Or at least one version of it.”

He was silent, waiting for more. Ben had been expecting this all day, from the minute her oik of a brother had recognised him – expecting to get his marching orders, or to be asked for his autograph. He’d known both to happen. When she didn’t continue, he asked, “Okay. So now you know. Why are you here? Have you come to ask me to leave?”

“No,” she replied simply. “I said I know one version of it. Now, I want to know yours.”

He smiled at her, but to Pippa it looked like a bitter, twisted thing, full of frustration and controlled fury. His eyes were downcast, his hair falling across his forehead. Beneath the thin jersey of his shirt, she could see packed muscle bunching and releasing in tension as he breathed hard and fast. His large hands were clenched into fists, and he was biting down on his lower lip, as though he was trying to keep angry words inside. No, McConnell wouldn’t have stood a chance. And neither would she, if he went all Hulk on her right now.

“Why do you want to know?” he finally said, reaching out and snapping the lid of the laptop shut with a dull thud. “And why should I tell you? I’ve kept quiet all this time. The only person I tried to talk to about it…well, she made her feelings quite clear. She left me as soon as I was found guilty. She didn’t want to know the truth and after that I decided there was nobody else important enough to tell. Certainly not reporters or complete strangers, even one I threw in a duck pond once upon a time. Why should I tell you?”

Pippa leaned towards him, which was harder than it looked in the squashy chair. She stared him in the eye, wanting him to know that she wasn’t going to give up.

“I want to know because you’re living here, with us,” she said. “With my family. With people I love, people it’s my job to protect. That’s the only reason. Believe me, I’ve no interest in the dirty details, or sharing anything with the rest of the world. As I think we’ve already established, I’m not exactly plugged into the rest of the world. I just need to know that I can trust you. My instinct says I can, but I need to hear it from you before I can relax and allow you to remain here with us.

“I’m sorry you were hurt, but that was nothing to do with me, and that’s not my burden to carry. My responsibility to the kids is. So I need you to tell me why you did it. That simple.”

He looked up, surprised at her choice of words. Simple? Nothing about it was simple, he thought. She sat there, swamped in that stupidly chintzy chair, dressed like a homeless teenager, hair falling over her shoulders and back like a yellow waterfall. One flip-flop dangling half off her foot. Her eyes were direct and clear, her expression calm and still. She was waiting for him to reassure her, to tell her his version of events. Wanting him to back up her instincts, but wary. A tigress looking out for her cubs.

Not simple at all – but at least, he supposed, she was giving him a chance. She hadn’t made up her mind, not like Johanna and her family. And, he realised, he believed her when she said she wasn’t looking for the dirty details. She wasn’t prying – she was safeguarding her territory. Could he blame her for that? Wasn’t that what any decent mother would do? It was certainly a better motivation than pure nosiness.

He raked his hands through his hair, reminded himself that he needed to get it cut. Without the need to head into an office every day, these things had a tendency to slip. He sipped the whisky, grimaced as it burned down his throat.

Finally, he looked up. Met the cornflower-blue gaze, glanced at the determined tilt of her head, the stubborn set of her full lips. A child, really. That’s all she was – and yet she was having the strangest effect on him, making him feel calm and settled at the same time she made him feel hyper-aware of her physical presence. The way his body was responding to it. It was hard to think straight and unlikely to get any easier the longer he let this moment linger.

“Some of the stories were right,” he said, staring off through the window into the still darkness of the courtyard. He hadn’t told this story before – not properly – and he needed a small sense of distance to allow him to get the words out.

“It was partly the pressure. I’d been prosecuting for while by then, and I did the best I could. But you always feel the dice are loaded against you. The paperwork, the bureaucracy, the loopholes. McConnell got to me and I shouldn’t have allowed him to. Maybe a year earlier, he wouldn’t have done, who knows? But that case…he was so clearly guilty. He’d destroyed the lives of so many people, older people who’d worked hard all their lives. People like my granddad, who lost his farm to the banks when he couldn’t make farming work any more. Maybe that’s why it touched a nerve, I don’t know.”

He paused, poured himself another drink. God knew he needed it. Pippa remained still and quiet, her legs tucked beneath her as she listened. The neon-orange flip-flops had dropped to the floor, lying there criss-crossed.

“I always knew it would be hard to make the case,” he continued. “The evidence was flimsy, when it came down to it. He’d been clever, covered his tracks well. I knew, his lawyer knew, the jury knew that he’d done it. But the way our system works, we couldn’t make it stick. It was depressing and even before I’d been thinking of quitting. I couldn’t take it much more and watching him walk was the final straw. I thought it was – at least. Until that night, when he found me in my office. He was drunk, been out celebrating his freedom.

“He came to gloat, to push, to confess. Rub my nose in it. He actually laughed about the man who killed himself, said it was survival of the fittest, that he’d done his wife a favour, because at least she had the insurance money now. There was no remorse – he didn’t even see them as people. Just old, weak victims.

“What can I say? I lost my temper. I hit him. He hit me back. We fought. You know what happened next. I shouldn’t have done it – I know that. I’ve always regretted it, not just because of what happened to me, but because it was wrong. Stooping to that level, it made me as bad as the people I’d been trying to put away. The papers can talk as much as they want about me being on the side of the angels, but I was wrong. I’d never done anything like that before and I never will again. Afterwards, when I looked down at him crumpled on the floor of my office, when I called the ambulance and saw my knuckles were scraped and scarred and my hands were covered in his blood, I was sickened. Sickened by what I’d done. What I’d allowed myself to become. And I’ve regretted it every single day since.”

He stopped, looked at her, his eyes shining with the pain of the memory, his voice rough, tense, his breath coming in fierce bursts, as though he’d worn himself out forcing the words she’d asked him to share.

“Is that what you wanted to know?” he asked, as she studied him intently, still silent. “Because I can tell you more…I can tell you how many times I hit him, how it felt when my fist slammed into his jaw; how hard it was to control myself and stop…or do you want to know what prison was like? How I’ve walked outside every single day since I got out, to try and clean myself of the memory? Do you want to know what my fiancée said about it on the day she left me there? Is that what you want to know?”

“No,” Pippa replied quietly, getting to her feet and tugging her top down, tucking stray hair behind her ears. She slipped her feet back into the flip-flops and looked up to face him. “That’s enough. That’s all I need. Thank you for explaining. I know it was hard for you, but I needed to hear it.”

He stood, looked at her, feeling the familiar anguish well up inside him. Waiting for the “but”. It had been a long time since he’d discussed this with anyone and he felt sick to his stomach even thinking about it. The whisky ran warm through him and he realised – completely inappropriately – that it had also been a long time since he’d been with a woman. Almost two years since he’d felt the touch of soft skin, the drape of long hair in his hands, since his fingers had skimmed delicate curves.

He closed that thought down and waited for the verdict, hovering next to her as she prepared to leave. With Johanna, he had expected forgiveness. The reassurance that she loved him and they would get through this together. The touch of her fingers twined in his, the feel of her lips promising she’d be there for him. That she understood, and that she’d wait for him – that they’d still build a life together.

He’d been wrong to expect any of that, and the memory of the cold sheen in her eyes was something he would always carry with him. It had been a stark lesson in what women were capable of: a ruthlessness he’d never seen before. She’d shut him out, closed him down, thrown him out with the trash and moved on to better things. The papers could call him a hero as much as they liked – but headlines didn’t keep you warm at night. They didn’t love you, give you hope or belief in the future. He hadn’t had any of those things for a very long time – thanks to his own actions and Johanna’s response.

And now here he was again, having poured out his heart, waiting for a woman’s verdict – and with almost as much tension as he’d felt in court. This was the part, he knew, where Pippa Harte told him to pack his bags and leave, and did it all with a sweet smile. Off you go, Mr Retallick! Don’t let the barn door hit you on the arse on the way out…He was braced, he was ready. In fact he hadn’t even unpacked at all, just in case – just plugged in the laptop to charge, showered and changed clothes, and left everything else in his bags. He had his polite smile ready for when she told him to sling his hook – or at least phoned him a cab, because he’d drank far too much whisky to be driving.

Instead, she reached out. Took one of his hands and gently squeezed it, as he’d seen her do with Scotty that afternoon. He felt the shock of the unexpected contact like a delicious slap: her slender fingers in his, all that glorious hair only inches away. The tempting shape of her body beneath her shabby old clothes.

“That’s enough,” she said. “The rest is private. I know what I need to know. I’m so sorry that happened to you, all of it. And we’d be glad to welcome you at Harte Farm for as long as you need to stay. Just try and keep a low profile – the last thing I need is the villagers deciding to throw you a street party or storming the castle with pitchforks. But…stay. Enjoy the place, for as long as you’re here.”

He was stunned. Silent. Flooded with emotion at her gentle acceptance, the way she looked up at him, her eyes liquid. Her hand, warm, soft, still in his. Sweet Jesus – this slip of a girl, this virtual stranger, had given him more comfort and consolation in that one short speech than he’d received in the last eighteen months. It warmed him even more than the whisky.