Exposure

Detective Inspector Ranjit listened to them for two hours. Katherine laid it all out on the desk in chronological order, with coloured tabs: the preliminary agreement, twenty years' worth of samples of Mum's signature, the train ticket and the hospital pass from the third of August, the DO NOT SIGN note, the Companies House extract, Thomas's May letter, and Mrs Abbott's statement, taken down by Mrs Hollis and signed in a shaky hand.

When they'd finished, the inspector looked at the stack of paper for a long time.

"Miss Harlow," she said at last, "have you ever thought about coming to work for us?"

"I'm an auditor," said Katherine. "It's practically the same thing. Just without the handcuffs."

After that, everything moved faster than Katherine could have imagined.

The handwriting analysis confirmed it: the signature on the preliminary agreement was forged. Not very skilfully — someone had copied Mum's signature from the loan agreement but hadn't known about the "E," and their hand had wobbled on the loop of the "H."

Mrs Abbott, in her best hat, gave her statement twice on the record. "I'm eighty-one years old," she told the inspector, "and I have never once lied to the police. I don't intend to start now."

And then R. Stoneman of Ashford Homes rang — personally, no go-betweens — and asked to meet. Katherine expected threats. Instead she found a grey-haired, frightened man who laid two more preliminary agreements on the table. Both with elderly widows on Orchard Lane. Both with penalty clauses. Both signed through the Pierce agency.

"I didn't know," Stoneman kept saying. "I swear, I thought he was just good with people."

"He was," said Katherine. "With people who were frightened."

Ashford Homes cancelled every deal made through Pierce and paid all three families compensation "for distress." The sum the Harlows received came to exactly six months of mortgage payments. Katherine suspected Stoneman had worked that out on purpose.

Derek Pierce was arrested on a Thursday, at half past ten in the morning, in his office on the High Street. Katherine didn't see it — she was in London, at work. But Nigel did. He happened to be buying bread across the road, and afterwards spent forty minutes on the phone telling his sisters how Derek had come out in handcuffs, his jacket draped over his wrists, and how the whole queue in the bakery had watched him in silence, and nobody — not a single person — had looked away.

The charges: fraud, forgery, theft of mail, coercion. The property agents' professional body revoked his licence within a week. The silver Lexus disappeared from the High Street. The following month a TO LET sign went up on the door of his agency.

Before the arrest, the Kent Herald had already run the story the three Harlows told them, on the front page. Katherine proofread it herself — three times, with a pencil — and insisted on only one thing: the headline.

"Margaret, Who Never Stopped Writing."

It was all there. St Agnes'. A hundred and twelve letters returned to sender. Edward, who found his wife's son. The kidney. The blackmail. And the photograph — the hospital one, from 1974, of a nineteen-year-old girl who isn't looking at the camera because she can't take her eyes off her baby.

Thomas had given his consent himself. On the phone from the hospital he'd told Katherine: "She hid me for forty years because she was frightened of what people would say. Let people finally say it. I'm curious."

Katherine had been afraid of what people would say. People said something else.

The next morning there were flowers at the gate on Orchard Lane. Not bouquets from a shop — roses from other people's gardens, cut by hand and tied with string, with ribbon, with whatever came to hand. Yellow, white, red. By evening there were forty-seven of them.

Old Roger put the cutting up in the pub window. Two women Katherine had never seen before stopped her in the supermarket and said they'd given up babies in the seventies too. One of them cried. The other simply held Katherine's hand by the shelf of cereals, until Katherine realised she was crying herself.

She hadn't known it could be like that. That the truth, said out loud, could heal instead of destroy.

They dealt with the mortgage the way the Harlows, it turned out, could deal with things when they weren't hiding from each other. Stoneman's compensation covered half a year. The rest they decided to split three ways — no, four: Thomas insisted from his hospital bed, and for the first time in her life Katherine didn't argue about the numbers.

"And the house?" Nigel asked in the kitchen that evening. "Are we selling?"

Katherine looked at the door frame where their heights were marked in pencil.

"Not this winter," she said. "Maybe not next winter either. We'll see."

Florence smiled without looking up from her mug. Katherine pretended not to notice.

The call from Norwich came eleven days after Nigel gave blood, on a Sunday. He was changing the hinges on the gate. Katherine watched from the window as her brother answered, went still with the screwdriver in his hand, and slowly sat down right there on the wet grass.

She ran outside in Mum's coat. The button, sewn on the week before, held firm.

"Nige?"

He looked up at her. His face was wet — from the rain, or not.

"A match," he said. "Six out of six antigens. The doctor says for half-brothers that's next to a miracle. The operation's in January, if all the tests come back fine."

Katherine sat down on the grass beside him. The coat got soaked, and she didn't care.

"Are you sure?" she asked. "Nige, this isn't two thousand for a van. This is—"

"Kat." He smiled through tears. "Mum wrote, 'Don't expect it back.' I'm done waiting."

She put her arms round her brother right there on the wet grass, in the rain. Florence came running out with an umbrella, then simply dropped it on the gravel and sat down with them.

That evening at eight, Katherine rang Norwich. Thomas picked up on the first ring.

"Sunday," he said instead of hello. His voice was weak, but there was a smile in it. "Eight o'clock. Someone in this family remembers."

"I remember," said Katherine. "How are you, Thomas?"

"Better. I've just been told I've got a brother who's giving me a kidney. And two sisters who don't seem to have any intention of letting me go."

"They don't," said Katherine.

At nine, out of habit, she glanced at the clock. And for the first time in seven weeks she didn't feel the emptiness. She was sitting in the kitchen with her brother and sister, and there was no one she needed to ring, because everyone she wanted to ring was right there.

Or a hundred and fifty miles away, at St Luke's. Waiting for January.