The Memory Collector: The emotional and uplifting new novel from the bestselling author of The Other Us

She lets go of the girls, and all three of them are excited now.

‘Is Daddy coming?’ Heather asks.

‘No, poppet. He’s working late again tonight.’

Faith sighs. ‘He’s always working late,’ she grumbles.

Their mother’s eyes get that shiny look again, but then she smiles and says, ‘All the more for us, then! Go on, go and get your coats!’

Heather starts to run towards the piles near the front door. She thinks that’s where she left hers, but then the doorbell goes and everyone freezes. Both sisters turn and look at their mother. She puts her finger to her lips and motions for them to come towards her. Quietly. It’s hard to do, because everything underneath their feet is crunchy, but they’ve had plenty of practice.

‘Hello?’ a voice calls through the front door. ‘Mrs Lucas?’ The man knocks loudly. Heather starts to feel scared.

Her mother points at the next room, near the big table that’s always full of all her important papers. There’s a space down the side and both girls instinctively head for it and crouch there.

The letterbox clatters. The man must be peeping through it. ‘Mrs Lucas? I’m just here to read the electric meter… Are you there?’

But Mrs Lucas doesn’t answer him. Instead, she runs to where her daughters are hiding and squats down beside them, holding them tight. As they all close their eyes and wait for the man to go away, Heather realizes there probably isn’t going to be any ice-cream sundae tonight after all, and probably no chocolate sprinkles either.

CHAPTER TEN (#ulink_2379c3b9-ff8d-5104-84d3-dcdaee874ca4)

NOW

It’s much later in the afternoon when Heather gets back to her flat after visiting her old house in Bickley. She goes into town for a cappuccino, sits outside her favourite café and watches the people march up and down the pedestrianized section of the High Street.

This is a mistake.

Because eventually she joins them, and then Mothercare pulls her inside, and by the time she’s feeding pound coins into the parking machine in The Glades shopping centre a squashy toy giraffe is tucked securely in the side pocket of her bag.

She’s really glad to get back to her flat, her sanctuary. She stows her contraband in the forbidden drawer and hurries into the living room, ready to perform her breathing ritual, but when she finds her usual spot in the middle of the rug and looks up she gets a shock.

Instead of flat, green grass and regimented borders, she’s met with a garden full of people. And there’s Jason in the middle of them, flipping burgers on a barbecue and swigging Coke from a bottle. He looks completely at ease as he smiles and chats with a group of guys.

Heather is completely infuriated, but she knows she has no right to be. When they’d bumped into each other in the hallway a couple of days ago, he’d told her he was having his housewarming thing this afternoon. The weather forecast was good for once, he’d said, so he’d decided to go for it. It’s not Jason’s fault her thoughts have been so tangled lately that the information got lost inside her head.

As if he knows she’s staring at him, he turns and looks at her, meets her gaze and smiles. She waves back. His smile grows wider and he makes a beckoning motion. She has no choice but to follow his tractor beam, to unlock the French doors and walk outside. She doesn’t look to the left or the right, doesn’t pay attention to the other bodies or the curious glances she’s getting. She just walks straight towards him.

‘Hi,’ he says softly, once she is standing in front of him.

‘Hi,’ she says back.

‘Want a burger?’

She nods, even though she has no idea if she’s hungry or not. It’s not a fancy affair, no lettuce or pickle, just a charred piece of meat stuck inside a floury white roll with a blob of ketchup. It tastes like heaven.

‘Glad you could make it,’ he says as Heather takes another bite. ‘I wasn’t entirely sure you were going to put in an appearance.’ And before Heather can say neither was she, he steers her towards a group of people. ‘Here, let me introduce you to the gang.’ Her mouth is too full of burger to object.

‘This is Damien, my partner in crime from my university days, and this is his girlfriend Tola.’ More names fill Heather’s head as he goes round the group, all instantly rejected and lost – her brain’s storage drive is too full – but she pulls her cheek muscles into what she hopes is a smile and nods with each introduction.

‘So,’ says Damien (the one name she can remember), ‘you’re Jay’s mysterious girl downstairs.’

Heather’s eyebrows rise. She’s mysterious? That sounds a lot more interesting and romantic than the truth: that she is Jason’s terminally damaged girl downstairs, the one who’s on the verge of being arrested for petty theft. She doesn’t disabuse Jason’s friend of the notion, though. She learned right from childhood that most people don’t look too far below the surface and anything they superimpose on you is invariably better than the reality. These assumptions create a useful shield, one she does her best not to dislodge.

‘Put on a good face,’ her mother always said when they left the house. So no one would guess, so no one would know. Even social services hadn’t guessed the horror that lay inside the detached house in a ‘nice’ area for years. And Heather has cultivated this approach in her adult life, carefully painting a veneer of Perfectly Normal on top of her real self.

‘Oh, I’m not mysterious at all,’ she says.

‘How long have you been living here?’ Damien’s girlfriend asks.

‘A couple of years,’ Heather replies, feeling as if she’s giving something away she shouldn’t. Her mother taught her that information was to be hoarded just as much as belongings. It wasn’t until Heather was almost a teenager that she realized not everyone shared this mindset, that some people live their whole lives spilling everything out of their mouths with no thought for the consequences.

‘Oh well, don’t let Jason here keep you awake late at night when he gets maudlin and decides to play his Smiths albums back to back,’ Tola adds, sticking her tongue out at their host.

‘Oh, no, I don’t… I mean… he doesn’t. Not that I’ve heard anyway. He’s a good neighbour.’ And she shoots a look across at him and is rewarded by a burning sensation in her cheeks.

Thankfully, the rest of the group are in an ebullient mood and the conversation quickly sweeps by Heather. She stands there on the fringes of the group, sipping a beer that someone handed her, and smiling shyly every now and then when someone says something funny. She doesn’t mind that she doesn’t know any of the people they’re referring to or that she doesn’t get the in-jokes. It’s nice to stand out here in the sunshine and feel… well, as a thirty-two-year-old woman ought to feel. Just for a moment, she forgets about the faceless house in Hawksbury Road with the new driveway. She forgets about the toy giraffe that rode all the way home in her handbag.

‘So, what do you do, Heather?’ the guy with the ginger beard in the stripy T-shirt asks. She wants to call him Isaac, but she’s not sure that’s right.

‘I’m an archivist.’

‘You work in a library?’

‘Yes, well, sort of, I’ve moved all over the country since I qualified, but I’m from this area originally. I moved back when I got a job covering maternity leave for someone at the V&A. Now I work at a stately home.’

‘Cool,’ Tola says. ‘I love that museum. Which bit do you work in?’

‘Um, I’m not…’ Okay, maybe this isn’t as easy as she’d first thought, but Tola and T-shirt Man have open, enquiring looks on their faces. They don’t look as if they’re scanning the garden for someone more interesting to talk to, so she carries on. ‘I finished there about a year ago and was lucky enough to find another contract within commuting distance, so I didn’t have to pack up and move away.’

Jason comes up behind her. She knows it’s him from the smell of hickory smoke and the way the whole of her back warms up as he gets closer. ‘What’s this I’m overhearing about packing up and moving away?’

She turns to look at him. He’s frowning instead of looking hopeful, which surely has to be a good thing. ‘Oh, no one!’ she says quickly. ‘I was telling…’ – there’s a pause where she realizes she still doesn’t know T-shirt Man’s name – ‘your friends about my job.’

‘Which is?’

‘I work at Sandwood Park in East Sussex. It used to belong to a famous author but his widow died recently and the whole estate was left to a private trust.’

‘They didn’t have any kids to leave the house to?’ Tola asks.

Heather smiles. This is nice, having people interested in what she’s saying. Slightly giddying, in fact. She can’t resist keeping it going by sharing a bit of gossip. ‘Well, yes, actually, they did, but the wife decided not to leave her beautiful Arts and Crafts home to any of her two remaining children or five grandchildren. She left specific instructions to her solicitor to that effect, saying she didn’t trust her offspring not to rip out half the walls, replace the grand conservatory with sliding glass doors that fold up like a concertina, or make a swimming pool out of the rose garden. So she left them nothing but the ashes of their dearly beloved family pets: three dogs, two cats, and a guinea pig.’

‘Ouch!’ Tola says, laughing.

Heather feels as if she’s floating inside. She made another person laugh; she had no idea she could do that.

This leads to some bantering back and forth about jobs, during which Heather learns that Jason is an ‘heir hunter’ like that programme on daytime TV. His firm, based in central London, tracks down the beneficiaries of unclaimed estates and reunites them with their inheritances. For a commission, of course.

Someone new saunters up. ‘Hey, Jason. Great barbecue,’ the guy says. ‘Is Alex coming? I haven’t seen him in ages.’