Pippa’s Cornish Dream. Debbie Johnson
couldn’t stop the anxiety flooding over her, dozens of tiny and not-so-tiny concerns drowning her in a crushing wave. Like the fact that the second instalment of the tax bill was due at the end of the next month. That the dishwasher in Primrose needed replacing. That their account at the vet’s was bigger than the national debt of a small African republic. That Social Services were due their quarterly visit in a few weeks’ time, and they’d all need to scrub up, shape up and pass muster. Four times a year she had to prove that she was a suitable person to be raising the kids. That Patrick’s problems weren’t dragging them all down; that Scotty’s issues at school were just due to shyness; that Daisy and Lily were communicating properly with the outside world.
She’d been doing this for years now, since she’d managed to convince them to take a risk on her after the car crash that claimed their parents. She was eighteen at the time and expected to head off to Oxford to study history. One drunk driver changed all that and instead she found herself playing mother to the other four, including baby Scotty. It wasn’t what she’d planned for her life – but she couldn’t stand by and watch them all get split up and packed off into foster care, could she? Not that the thought hadn’t crossed her mind – she was eighteen. Nowhere near old enough to become a mother, she knew. And maybe, she thought, when Patrick was playing up and her self-esteem was hiding somewhere round her ankles, they’d all have been better off if she’d thrown in the towel.
But…well. They’d survived so far and they’d carry on surviving.
She kicked the covers off her with her feet, lying in the dark and staring at the shadowed ceiling, criss-crossed with wooden beams. She glanced at the clock and didn’t like what she saw. Tomorrow was going to be an absolute bastard.
Her brain was just too busy to let her body go to sleep. It was all twisting and turning in there, like a barrel of angry snakes. Patrick, the money, Social Services – and, if she was honest, the man in the cottage across the way. Ben Retallick. Duckpond-slinger, cow-wrangler and convicted criminal.
Patrick’s revelation had shocked her, but not Ben – his face had fallen into a well-worn mask, almost as though he’d been expecting it. As though he’d played this scene out before. No replies, no response to her brother’s mockery or to her perplexed look. He gave them all a polite smile as he backed off, traipsed down the hill and retreated into Honeysuckle. No explanations. No comment at all, in fact. He’d shut the door behind him and never emerged again, not even when the rain cleared up and the sun started to shimmer gold onto the blues and greens of the Atlantic. He looked mega-fit, active, the type who went fell-running or surfing or at least cliff-walking. But he stayed in, presumably Minding His Own Business.
Which was certainly more than she’d managed. As soon as the kids had been packed off to bed – a long, multi-tiered process that involved stories, games of I-Spy, the forcible brushing of teeth and the collection of discarded underwear from the bathroom floor – she’d settled down with too much coffee and hooked up to her patchy internet access. It was frustrating, constantly having to reconnect, but she was used to it. All part of the charm, she told her guests, while swearing silently as she waited for pages to load. All she really wanted to do was watch an hour of crap telly and pass out, but she needed to know more about Ben Retallick. About Patrick’s comments and about the kind of man who was staying in a cottage just a few short steps away from her and her family in the main farmhouse.
The online newspapers were full of stories about him – so much so that she couldn’t believe she’d missed it. He must have been on the TV, on front pages, on billboards. Huge news in the local press. All over the known universe, in fact, and still it had slipped her notice. That’s what running a business and raising four kids did for you, she thought. You lost your grip on the world at large – all that mattered were the concerns of daily life, getting through every blocked toilet and piece of homework and dentist’s visit and random call from the local police. Feeding five humans and a menagerie of animals. Cleaning a farmhouse and three cottages and a barnyard and washing clothes for the whole tribe. Ironing school uniforms and plaiting hair and mowing the lawn and watering the plants and dealing with bookings and bills. It was endless and left approximately zero minutes per day for watching the news or reading tabloids. Frankly, she’d probably have missed a zombie apocalypse until the undead trudged over the hill looking for the next human limb to chomp on.
Now, though, she knew it all. Or at least knew what had been reported. She knew that Ben Retallick, up until two years ago, had been a celebrated criminal prosecution barrister living and working in London. He’d come a long way from the days of hangover recovery on a Cornish hillside.
That had all changed when he accepted a case involving Darren McConnell, a man who was accused of swindling pensioners out of their life savings. One of them had been so overcome with guilt at losing his and his wife’s nest egg that he’d committed suicide, leaving evidence for the police of McConnell’s involvement.
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