The Suitcase Under the Eaves

After Derek left, nobody wanted to talk about the voicemail. So they did what the Harlows did best — they got to work.

Katherine climbed up to the loft with Florence because she didn't want to leave her sister up there alone. That was what she told herself. The truth was she didn't want Florence finding anything without her.

The loft smelled of dust and sun-warmed tiles. Mum's dresses in garment bags, Dad's skis, boxes labelled "Christmas," "Kat — school," "Nige — school." Florence smiled as she touched one of them — for the first time in two days — and Katherine suddenly remembered carrying her around this very loft when the little one was three and she was fourteen, telling her that an owl lived behind the chimney and stole naughty children. Florence had cried until she got hiccups. Mum hadn't spoken to Katherine for three days.

It was Florence who found the suitcase — brown leather, pushed so far under the slope of the roof that she had to crawl in on her knees. Inside were letters. A hundred, maybe more, tied with thin white ribbon, the way Mum used to tie Christmas presents. Every envelope was addressed in the same hand — Mum's, firm, slanting to the right.

"Mr Thomas Banks."

The addresses changed: Leeds, Bristol, Norwich, Norwich again. And on every envelope, a red postal stamp: RETURN TO SENDER. ADDRESSEE REFUSED.

Not one had been opened.

"Who's Thomas Banks?" Florence's voice had gone thin, the way it used to when she was little.

Katherine didn't answer. She was going through the envelopes, and her fingers did on their own what twenty years of work had trained them to do: sort, cross-check, look for the pattern. Postmarks from 2006 to 2016. Ten years. Sometimes several letters a year: at Christmas, in summer. But there was one letter every single year. Without exception.

The fourteenth of March.

"The fourteenth of March," Katherine said aloud. "Every year."

"It's someone's birthday," Florence whispered.

Katherine knew every birthday in the family. The fourteenth of March didn't belong to any of the Harlows.

"We should open them," Florence said.

"No."

The word jumped out on its own, ahead of any thought.

"Kat, she told me herself she wanted to tell me something. Maybe this is it."

"Or maybe it's just…" Katherine searched for the word and couldn't find it. "Private. An old friend. A falling-out. Mum had a right to her own life, Flo. Not all of it had to be about us."

"A hundred letters to a man who refused to take them," Florence said slowly. "For ten years. That isn't 'an old friend.'"

Katherine knew her sister was right. And that was exactly why she wanted to shove the suitcase back under the roof and go back to her lists. For twenty years she'd checked other people's accounts, and she knew: once you find the first wrong line, you never look at the whole set of books the same way again.

"Not today," she said. "Please. We'll do it together, with Nigel. Not here, on our knees in the dust."

Florence looked at her for a long time. Then she nodded.

They carried the suitcase downstairs. Nigel went through a few envelopes and laid them on the table carefully, as if they might go off. He had never heard of Thomas Banks either.

While her brother and sister sorted the letters by year on the kitchen table, Katherine went back up to the loft for Mum's dress bag. That was what she said. In fact she needed a minute alone.

She sat down on the floor beside the empty space under the eaves where the suitcase had been, and that was when she saw it. A small square envelope that must have slipped out of the side pocket and fallen into a gap between the floorboards. A different colour — pale blue. And the handwriting on it wasn't Mum's.

"Mrs M. Harlow, 14 Orchard Lane, Little Ashford, Kent."

Postmark: Norwich, April 2016.

This envelope had been opened.

Katherine slid out a thin card. One line, written in a hurry, pressed so hard that in places the pen had gone through the paper:

"Please stop writing to me. You made your choice a long time ago. — T. B."

"You made your choice."

What choice? When?

Katherine could have gone downstairs and put the card on the table with the rest. That would have been the right thing to do. It was what she'd have told any of her own team: no hidden documents, everything on the table, full transparency.

She folded the card in half and slipped it into the pocket of her jeans.

Then she went downstairs with Mum's dress bag in her arms, sat down at the table with her brother and sister and helped them sort the letters they'd agreed not to open yet. All evening the blue envelope burned against her hip through the fabric — as if she'd taken from this house not a scrap of paper but a live coal.