Apartment 16 Read Free

sixty years and Apryl could see why. The place was classic, flawless, and effortlessly exuded the sense of a long history. She imagined the polite but indifferent faces of butlers behind every front door. Aristocrats must live here. And diplomats. And billionaires. People unlike her and her mother. ‘Shit, Mama, you’re just not gonna believe this,’ she said out loud.
    She’d only ever seen one photo of Great-aunt Lillian, when Lillian was a little girl. Dressed in a curious white gown matching that of her elder sister, Apryl’s grandmother, Marilyn. In the picture Lillian held her big sister’s hand. They stood next to each other with sulky smiles in the yard of their home in New Jersey. But Lillian and Marilyn were closer at that time than they ever were after. Lillian moved to London during the war to work for the US military as a secretary. Where she met an English guy, a pilot, and married him. She never came home.
    Lillian and her granny Marilyn must have exchanged letters or cards because Lillian knew when Apryl had been born. She used to get birthday cards from Lillian when she was little. With beautiful English money inside. Pounds. Really colourful paper with pictures of kings and dukes and battles and god knows what else on them. And watermarks when you held them up against a light that she thought were magical. She wanted to keep them, not cash them for dollars, which looked like toy money in comparison. It always made her want to visit England. And here she was for the first time.
    But Lillian went quiet on them a long time ago. They even stopped getting Christmas cards before Apryl was ten. Her mother was too busy raising her alone to find out why. And when Granny Marilyn died, her mother wrote to Lillian at the address in Barrington House, but there was no response. So they just assumed she’d died too, over in England, where she’d lived a life they knew nothing of, the weak connection with that generation of the family finally severed, for ever.
    Until two months back, when a probate lawyer sent a letter to inform the last surviving relatives of their inheritance following the ‘sad passing of Lillian Archer’. She and her mother were still in a daze. A death, occurring eight weeks previously, and leading to the bequest to them of an apartment in London. Knightsbridge, London, no less. Right here where she was standing, outside Barrington House: the great white building seated solemnly at the foot of the square. Rising up, so many floors dignified in strong white stone, the classicism tempered with slender art-deco flourishes around the window frames. A place so well-proportioned and proud, she could only feel daunted before the grand entrance, with its big, brass-framed glass doors, its flower baskets and ornamental columns either side of the marble stairs. ‘No way.’
    Beyond her reflection in the pristine glass of the front doors she could see a long, carpeted corridor with a big reception desk at the far end. And behind it she received an impression of two men with neat haircuts, each wearing a silver waistcoat. ‘Oh shit.’
    She laughed to herself. Feeling ridiculous, as if ordinary life had suddenly transformed into cinematic fantasy, she checked the address on the papers they had received from the lawyer: a letter, with a contract and deeds that would get her the keys. To this.
    No doubt about it. This was the place. Their place.

TWO
    The figure was there again, watching Seth from across the street. This time it stood at the kerb between two parked cars and was not slouched inside a shop doorway, or peering from the mouth of a side street as it had done on three previous sightings.
    Closer now, open to his attention, the small form was more sure of itself. Unperturbed by the slanting rain, it just stared. At him.
    It.
    Seth thought it was a boy but couldn’t be certain. Even though the head was no longer dipped, inside the hood of the dirty parka he could see no face. Just a child then,