Page 16 of All Our Missing Pieces

She made her way down the hallway, following the smell and hum of voices, hanging her coat on the makeshift rack with the others. The one time she hadn’t bothered and had just dumped it over the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, she’d found it covered in plaster dust the next morning. Lesson learned.

‘Good evening,’ she said.

‘Hey, Beatrice.’ Luke was just getting up out of his chair, stretching his arms up to the ceiling. ‘I was just about to head to bed. I’m knackered.’

‘How was your day?’ Livvie asked, stacking plates and carrying them over to the sink, where the hot tap groaned and spluttered before letting out a reluctant stream of scalding water.

Why does she bother? Beatrice wondered. If she leaves it, Orla will just clear up herself.

‘There’s a couple of chops for you in the oven,’ Orla said. ‘I’m afraid they might be a bit dried out. Did they keep you late this evening?’

Beatrice nodded, perching on one of the hard wooden chairs. ‘Peter’s in New York and Frances was out at a McQueen launch.’

Lucky Frances. Out having fun while Beatrice had been reading Oh, the Places You’ll Go to her offspring.

Orla opened the oven and took out a plate. On it were two lamb chops, the fat crisp round the edges, and a pile of some sort of potato and bean sludge, which Beatrice presumed had been the meat-free offering. Not that she cared – she was hungry enough to eat her own hair.

‘There’s some salad, too.’ Orla pushed a bowl towards her. ‘Help yourself. Hopefully we’ll be able to grow our own later in the summer.’

What would be the point of that? Beatrice wondered, slicing into a chop. All that hard work when there are perfectly good lettuces in Sainsbury’s.

While she ate, Livvie finished the washing up and Orla pottered around the kitchen in the way Beatrice had noticed she often did, picking things up and putting them down again, wiping worktops that were already clean – or as clean as they were going to get, given the chips and scratches that marred their surfaces – or just standing, hands on hips, looking at the house as if wondering what she was going to have to do to it next – or as if she was listening, waiting for it to tell her what it wanted.

The thing was, Beatrice had come to realise, she was never alone. Not during the day, certainly – that was to be expected, with either one or two kids constantly underfoot – but not here, either. In the mornings, she was constantly made aware of Orla’s presence by the crack of light showing beneath her bedroom door, even though she only emerged just as Beatrice was leaving. And in the evenings, Livvie or Luke or both of them – and often Orla, too – were downstairs, drinking tea, playing music on the ancient boombox Orla had picked up from a market stall.

I could be wasting my time here, Beatrice thought. I don’t even know whether this is the right place.

All she had to go on was a search of Wikipedia, which had informed her that Spitalfields’ weaving industry, back in the eighteenth century, had been centred on the area around Christ Church. A further search had revealed the handful of streets with Georgian houses that hadn’t been demolished by either German bombers or 1960s town planners.

Damask Square could be the place she’d been looking for – but so could about fifty other possible candidates. That was assuming it even still existed: there was every chance that the Doyle family’s house in Spitalfields had been reduced to rubble decades ago.

And as for Orla – any number of women living here could have inherited properties from grandparents. The chances of Orla being who Beatrice hoped she was – or even connected to that woman – were vanishingly small.

Still, the need to find out clawed at her as insistently as her hunger had a few moments before.

‘There’s no need to wait up for me,’ she said. ‘It’s almost ten. I’ll finish clearing up down here and head to bed.’

Livvie yawned, drying her hands on a tea towel. ‘All right then. Goodnight, Beatrice. Night, Orla.’

To Beatrice’s surprise, she leaned in and dropped a kiss on Orla’s cheek before hanging up the tea towel and leaving. A moment later, Maud the cat appeared at the window, eyed Beatrice suspiciously and jumped in via the sink, twining herself around Orla’s legs.

‘Come on then, madam.’ Orla picked her up and Beatrice could hear the cat begin to purr. ‘Sleep well, lovey.’

Beatrice only nodded, her mouth full of lamb.

She finished her meal, hastily washed her plate and cutlery and then sat down again, listening. She could hear the thud of the pipes as someone ran hot water, the whoosh of the toilet flushing, the creak of floorboards and the rattle of a window being closed.

She waited some more, until she was sure there would be no more sounds from the house until morning.

Then she got up, switched off the kitchen light and crept upstairs – not to her bedroom on the second floor but to the first.

The floor that used to be offices, where all the drawers and filing cabinets and folders full of dusty yellowing paper were.

The problem was, Luke was clearing it all out faster than she could investigate it. Each evening when she returned from work, the skip outside had grown fuller and fuller with swathes of stripped wallpaper, battered lever arch files, some empty and some not, and falling-apart cardboard boxes full of God knew what.

The other problem was she had no idea what she was actually looking for. But she couldn’t shake the idea that, somewhere in the house, she would find the answer she needed – or even a clue to where the answer might be. She knew she had to start somewhere – and it had to be there, before all the junk and accumulated history was removed and Luke started sanding the floors, plastering the walls and painting over any secrets that remained.

So, by the light of the street lamp outside the window and the tiny torch she kept in her handbag, Beatrice began searching. She found nothing of interest – only the accounts of long-defunct sari importers, piles of back issues of The Draper magazine and folder after folder of typewritten minutes of meetings.