The Reunion

second fiddle to Zac? It was insulting. Terrified or not, he wasn’t going to stand here in the hallway, holding a ladder, waiting for Action Man to save the day. He summoned up all the courage he could and climbed up.
    ‘It’s all right, mate, I can manage,’ Zac said as Dan popped his head up into the attic. Dan ignored him and kept climbing. There was an ominous creaking sound from above, the rafters straining as the wind battered the roof.
    ‘Let’s just get on with this,’ Dan muttered.
    Jen’s information had been misleading; there were actually a number of boxes up there. They opened a couple, found them filled with books and papers, all in French. Finally they found one containing some kitchen utensils and one particularly manky-looking candle. They were about to go back down the ladder with their disappointing haul when Dan noticed another box, stuck underneath one of the rafters. It took him a while, but he managed to dislodge it and opened it up.
    ‘Score,’ he said, ridiculously pleased with himself, pulling out a box of twelve candles. He threw them to Zac, who was standing on the top of the ladder. Instead of following him straight down, Dan decided to take a quick look through the rest of the box’s contents, his curiosity getting the better of him and his fear. There were letters, postcards, all in French, presumably belonging to the tenant. An old bank card, a picture of a very tanned blonde in a bikini, standing outside this very house, grinning from ear to ear. At the very bottom of the box there was a yellowing piece of paper, lined, folded in two. Dan picked it up and unfolded it, turned it over and felt a shiver travel all the way up his spine. It was a list. Written in his handwriting.

 
     
    23 August 1995
    Villefranche, Alpes Maritimes, France
    Where will we be in the year 2010?
    Conor will be married to Jen. He will design furniture which will sell for extortionate prices. Jen will translate great works of modern literature from French to English. They will live here, in this house, with their two adorable children, Ronan and Isabelle. They will throw wild parties in the summer and at New Year, which we shall all attend.
    Andrew will be an internationally renowned human rights lawyer, lauded the world over for work in fighting for the rights of political prisoners and confronting injustice wherever he may find it.
    Lilah will be very rich. She will have married a billionaire and subsequently divorced well. She will have houses in the south of France, Vale, perhaps a small castle in the Scottish Highlands. She will have several lovers, one of which will be Andrew.
    Natalie will be a Booker Prize-winning author. She will be married to an American war correspondent who divides his time between the UK, New York and Beirut. This will suit Natalie perfectly. She will live in a rambling farmhouse in Yorkshire, but will spend a great deal of her time hanging out in Lilah’s villa in Cap Ferrat.
    Dan’s film will win a prize at Sundance. He will live in LA with Winona Ryder.

Chapter Eighteen

    THE WIND HAD become a scream. Looking out of the living-room window, Natalie could no longer see anything further than a few feet away, just endless sheets of driving snow. She wondered how many storms this house had seen, how many more it could endure before the roof was ripped off altogether, before the house was once more left open to the elements. She could hear Dan and Zac moving around upstairs, climbing up the ladder into the attic. And that banging sound, that relentless bloody banging sound, ominous, like a drumbeat, heralding disaster. Andrew had been gone for two hours.
    Jen had rung the B&B in the village. They weren’t there. Give it another hour, she’d said, and then we’d better call the police. Not that they would be likely to do much, not that there was a great deal they could do. There was a part of Natalie that didn’t want to ring the police anyway, because she couldn’t bring herself to even begin to prepare for bad news. She sipped her whisky, but it didn’t help; there was a bitter taste in her mouth, bile or despair, and no amount of Scotch was going to take it away.
    The things she’d said, all those things she’d said. She couldn’t get the words out of her head now, they kept repeating over and over. ‘He would have been a QC by now, not just a teacher in some fucking sink school.’ She’d stood there in the living room and called her husband a failure, in