Snowflakes at Lavender Bay. Sarah Bennett

       Chapter 1

      Owen Coburn stared at the bottles lined in neat rows on the mirrored shelves opposite him. He’d never been one to drown his sorrows, but the collection of single malts seemed to whisper a lullaby more seductive than the songs of the mythical siren which the seafront pub had been named after. With more effort than it should’ve taken, he wrenched his eyes from the array of spirits and studied the rest of the busy bar as he waited to be served. Like his bedroom upstairs, the place was spotlessly clean, if a little worn in places.

      Black-and-white photographs studded the pale-blue walls, showing scenes of Lavender Bay from times gone past. Ladies in white dresses clutching parasols in one hand, the fingers of the other tucked into the arms of besuited gentlemen as they strolled the promenade. Fishermen sorting their nets in the old harbour, faces leathered from years of exposure to sea and sun.

      On the side of the wooden upright beside him a ragged line of young men dressed in their Sunday best beamed out of the past, their expressions a mixture of shy pride and cocky confidence. With their hair neatly slicked and battered suitcases at their feet, not one of them looked older than he was now. Owen wondered if any of them had understood what awaited them on the bloody fields of Europe and how many—if any—had returned. Faint writing at the bottom of the photo caught his eye. Hating the need inside him, Owen scanned the cramped squiggles on the photo. No Blackmores among them.

      With a snort of disgust at himself, he turned away. What the hell was he doing chasing shadows? According to the piece of paper burning a hole in his pocket, Deborah Mary Blackmore had been 17 when she’d given up her son for adoption. She’d listed Lavender Bay as her place of birth, but extensive searches had yielded no trace of her. Either his mother was a ghost, or she’d lied about her name.

      Requesting his original birth certificate had seemed like a good way of setting the final pieces of his past to rest. After a childhood in care where the kindest thing anyone had ever done was ignore him, compartmen‌talisation had become his daily survival technique—what hadn’t killed him didn’t make him stronger so much as it got stuffed in a mental box and shoved to the furthest reaches of conscious memory. As a result, he’d managed to convince himself that delving into his origins could be an exercise in intellectual curiosity, nothing more.

      Unprepared for it, the emotional tsunami caused by the arrival of the innocuous brown envelope had swept him so far off course he wasn’t sure who he was anymore. With the words ‘father unknown’ thwarting half of his search before he could even get started, finding Deborah had become a near-obsession. He’d joined every online genealogy website he could find, and spent hours trawling through scanned images covered in spidery writing to no avail. After those efforts came up blank, he’d switched his focus to the whimsically named Lavender Bay. If he couldn’t find his mother, perhaps he could forge a connection with her birthplace instead. And, as the owner of his own building and property development company, if he could turn a profit in the process, so much the better.

      When he’d boarded the train from London the previous morning he’d been full of foolish optimism. Walter Symonds, a local solicitor Owen had been cultivating a relationship with for the previous six months, had called to give him the heads-up on a potential property. Located directly on the seafront at Lavender Bay, it had looked ripe for development from what he’d been able to tell via Google Maps. The previous owner had died, leaving everything to a young woman who, from what Owen had been able to tell, had moved away from the area some years before. Hoping to jump the queue, he’d taken the unusual step of visiting in person to extend an offer to buy.

      Expecting her to be grateful for an excuse to offload the place, Owen had been disappointed to find her well ensconced behind the counter of the emporium with zero interest in selling the place. An afternoon touring the local estate agents as well as a good recce on foot had yielded nothing in the way of other empty or struggling properties. In a last-gasp attempt to find any sign of the Blackmore family, he’d spent the past couple of hours tromping around the local churchyards and come back to the pub with nothing to show for his efforts other than a nasty nettle sting on his arm. In other words, his entire weekend was a total bloody bust. Time to put this foolishness behind him—he’d managed thirty years without any family to speak of, he’d manage the next thirty just fine.

      ‘Pint, lovey?’

      Startled, Owen blinked at the smiling older woman on the other side of the bar. ‘What? Oh, yes. Lager, please, Mrs Barnes.’

      ‘Right you are. How’s your room, have you got everything you need?’ Oh great, she was the chatty sort.

      ‘Yes, it’s fine thanks.’ In so far as it had a bed and a kettle. Egyptian cotton and designer coffee machines hadn’t made it to Lavender Bay, that much had been clear from the moment he’d set foot in The Siren the previous day. Not that it mattered, now he wasn’t staying. ‘What’s the earliest I can check out in the morning?’

      Mrs Barnes placed his drink before him with a wry laugh. ‘I’ll try not to take offence at your eagerness to leave. You can settle your bill before you turn in