The shadows of proof

Chapter Two

Eleanor spent her first night at Thornwood in her childhood bedroom, unchanged since she'd packed a single bag at nineteen and walked to the train station. The same faded wallpaper roses climbing a trellis, her mother's choice. The same narrow bed where she'd read by flashlight, planning escapes.

The same view of the garden where she'd found her mother collapsed among the hydrangeas, fifteen years old and screaming into silence. She didn't sleep. Instead, she searched her father's study legally hers now, though the will's probate would take months. The police had already removed his computer and files, but they might have missed something.

They didn't know him as she had, however distantly. They didn't know about the loose floorboard under the window or the false back in the cabinet where he kept his mother's jewellery. The floorboard revealed nothing but dust and a child's marble, blue glass, probably Gabriel's from some ancient summer.

The cabinet held the expected necklaces, the pearls her mother had worn to church. But behind them, tucked into a velvet pouch Eleanor didn't recognize, she found a photograph. Her mother, young and laughing, in arms that weren't her father's. The man holding her was unfamiliar, dark, handsome, with the look of foreign places about him. On the back, in her mother's elegant script: Vienna, 1987.

The last time, I was truly happy. Eleanor's parents married in 1988. She was born in 1989. She sat with the photograph until dawn, reconstructing possibilities. Her mother had been a pianist and had studied in Vienna before returning to Yorkshire for her father's funeral, meeting James Vance at the memorial service.

The official story, But this suggested another narrative an interrupted love affair, a hasty marriage, a life of quiet disappointment that ended with her collapse in the garden, cardiac arrest at forty-three, so similar to her husband's recent death. Elevated potassium levels. Eleanor dressed mechanically, the photograph burning in her pocket.

She needed to know who the man was. She needed to understand whether her mother's death had been as natural as claimed, whether her father's recent change of heart leaving everything to the daughter he'd ignored represented guilt or fear or some final, incomprehensible gesture.

She found Mrs. Patterson, in the kitchen, the elderly nurse making tea with the automatic movements of long habit.

"You've come back, then." Mrs. Patterson didn't look up.

"I told him you would. Eventually."

"Did he ask for me? Before?"

"Every day for the last month. She'll come when I'm dead,' he'd say. Ellie always had a sense of timing.'" A cracked laugh.

"He thought he was being clever. dying to bring you home." Eleanor absorbed this.

"Mrs. Patterson, did my father ever mention my mother's death? Whether he had concerns"

The teacup shattered. Mrs. Patterson stared at the fragments, her hand shaking.

"I don't your mother died of her heart. Everyone knows."

"Her heart stopped. So did my father's. Both difficult to distinguish from potassium injection without specific testing." Eleanor kept her voice level, professional.

"My father had medical training. Army medic, before he inherited the estate. He would have known how."

"Stop this." Mrs. Patterson's voice rose.

"Your father loved your mother. He mourned her his whole life. He wouldn't. " She stopped, breathing hard.

"Wouldn't what?" But the nurse was retreating, gathering her coat, muttering about needing air. At the door, she turned.

"Ask Gabriel Ashworth about Vienna. Ask him what your father told him the night before he died. And then leave this alone, Miss Eleanor. Some truths don't help anyone."