An Unwanted Inheritance

  PRAISE FOR IMOGEN CLARK

  An Unwanted Inheritance

  ‘Imogen Clark deftly peels back the layers of loyalty, family secrets and moral dilemma to examine a family that must make a choice between need, greed and integrity. Pacey, thought provoking and with characters that test the ties of blood, marriage and friendship to the limit, An Unwanted Inheritance will have you wondering how far you’d go to uphold your own principles – and how much, or how little, it would take to betray them.’

  —Julietta Henderson, author of The Funny Thing about Norman Forman

  ‘Lovingly crafted, with flawed and nuanced characters, this riveting story will stay with readers long after the last page is turned.’

  —Christine Nolfi, bestselling author of A Brighter Flame

  ‘What happens when you drop a bag of cash right in the middle of three siblings and their families? A whole lot of good fun and drama. An Unwanted Inheritance delightfully explores the flaws that come with being human as Clark plunges us into a story about what is right and wrong and what it means to be a family. She ratchets up the tension as the story races to its surprising and oh, so satisfying conclusion.’

  —Boo Walker, bestselling author of The Singing Trees

  ‘Brimful of emotion – a wonderful plot, and characters that you are rooting for, even when you know you shouldn’t. An Unwanted Inheritance is that gem of a thing: a story to truly lose yourself in – I LOVED IT.’

  —Faith Hogan, bestselling author of The Ladies’ Midnight Swimming Club

  Reluctantly Home

  ‘Connected by loss, a friendship blooms across the generations in this compassionate and nuanced story of endings and new beginnings.’

  —Fiona Valpy, bestselling author of The Skylark’s Secret

  ‘Imogen Clark is a master at creating flawed, real, loveable characters and exploring their emotions. This novel cleverly weaves together the past and present, and will leave you thinking about the story long after you finish the final page.’

  —Soraya M. Lane, bestselling author of Wives of War and The Last Correspondent

  The Last Piece

  ‘This is a wonderful novel about the secrets we keep from the ones we love the most. Imogen Clark has a real talent for shining a light on the idiosyncrasies of family life and revealing past traumas, present hurts, and future hopes.’

  —Victoria Connelly, author of The Rose Girls and Love in an English Garden

  ‘The Last Piece is a beautifully crafted, insightful tale about family and the cracks below the surface of seemingly perfect lives. Clark’s characters, with their various secrets and flaws, leap off the page. A most enjoyable and riveting read.’

  —S.D. Robertson, author of My Sister’s Lies and Time to Say Goodbye

  ‘I couldn’t resist going on this journey with the Nightingale family. With emotion on every page and mystery swirling around each character, The Last Piece explores how the past can be as unpredictable as the future. I raced through this life-affirming book, which left me buoyed with the promise of second chances.’

  —Jo Furniss, author of The Last to Know

  Where the Story Starts

  ‘Once again . . . Imogen Clark urges readers to turn the pages as the delightfully pleasant façade of her characters’ lives begins to crack when the mysteries of the past come to call. Both soothing and riveting, Where the Story Starts asks: what if your greatest secret is the one you don’t even know exists?’

  —Amber Cowie, author of Rapid Falls and Raven Lane

  The Thing About Clare

  ‘Warm and emotionally complex . . . A family drama that’s hard to disentangle yourself from.’

  —Nick Alexander, bestselling author of Things We Never Said

  ALSO BY IMOGEN CLARK

  Postcards from a Stranger

  The Thing About Clare

  Postcards at Christmas (a novella)

  Where the Story Starts

  The Last Piece

  Reluctantly Home

  Impossible to Forget

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2022 by Blue Lizard Books Ltd

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542032858

  ISBN-10: 1542032857

  Cover design by The Brewster Project

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  MAY

  Caroline found the money in a battered suitcase under the narrow bed in the box room. It had been shoved right to the back wall, a few other boxes pushed in front of it, and she would never have come across it if she hadn’t been trying to rescue Monty, her dead father-in-law’s cat.

  Poor Monty appeared to have been traumatised by the number of strangers who had been traipsing through the previously quiet house of Tony Frost, recently deceased. Caroline didn’t blame him. She was spooked by being there too. When she and her husband Max had arrived to retrieve the forgotten cat, the atmosphere inside the house made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

  There was nothing inherently creepy about the place. It was a perfectly ordinary mock-Tudor detached house, standing in a quiet cul-de-sac of similar boxy houses, built in the eighties and now looking a little self-conscious in a world that no longer valued things made to look like they belonged elsewhere. Which was ironic, Caroline always thought, given how the internet was packed full of fake.

  What made Caroline uncomfortable was the feeling that her father-in-law was still there. Tony Frost had filled every corner of his home with the essence of himself, and everything in it shouted his name. Ever since his wife Valerie, Max’s mother, had left him over a decade before, he had systematically removed all trace of any taste in furnishings other than his own. The result was rather larger-than-life, reminiscent of a Best Western hotel, with oversized sofas and lamp-adorned occasional tab
les in every corner. Valerie’s style had been far more modern, all crisp colours and clean lines, but left to his own devices, Tony had filled the space with dust-attracting soft furnishings. The effect was surprisingly feminine, and very dated.

  But what made it really impossible to forget whose house you were in were the photographs. They were everywhere. Tony shaking hands with the great and the good, whilst grinning broadly, his head turned at an unnatural angle towards the camera. In some he wore his mayoral chains, in others he was on a golf course, and Caroline wasn’t sure whether her eyes should linger on the spectacular tartan trousers or the oversized cap on his head. There were photos of Tony with smiling restaurateurs, with men who looked like Tory politicians (and probably were) and, in one particularly unlikely shot, with the tennis player Andy Murray who must have been in town for some event or other and had rubbed shoulders with Tony just when there happened to be a photographer on hand to capture the moment and preserve it for Tony’s gallery.

  Tony had considered himself to be a man of some standing in the community, and no one who visited his home would be allowed to forget it. However, now that he was dead, Caroline had the slightly unnerving feeling that he was still in the house, watching them.

  What would her father-in-law make of her now? Caroline wondered as she knelt on the carpet of his box room, posterior in the air, trying to coax his cat back out so that she and Max could take him home with them.

  ‘Come on, Monty,’ she cajoled, her voice almost a whisper. ‘Don’t be frightened. I’m not going to hurt you.’

  She sounded as if she was talking to a child. Caroline didn’t know much about cats, but she imagined that Monty would be scared and she could empathise with that. Nobody liked it when the rug was suddenly pulled out from underneath them, even if they did happen to be a cat.

  Gently, she began to slide the boxes out so she could see where Monty was hiding. It was dark under the bed, but it was quite hygienic, with no balls of carpet fluff or dead flies. Tony had kept a clean house, she’d give him that.

  The battered suitcase was the last obstacle between her and the cat. Caroline wasn’t sure what she should do for the best. If she crawled under the bed, he would either run straight out or stay to defend his corner. She didn’t fancy being at eye level with him in his frightened state. She’d seen what those claws could do. Maybe she could pull the bed away from the wall and slip in and pick him up. Probably if she just left him alone he would come out of his own accord when he felt less hunted. But she was on a mission now. She had told Max she would catch the cat and catch the cat she was determined to do.

  She grabbed hold of the suitcase by the handle. It was the sort that were all the rage in the eighties: British racing green fabric with faux leather straps and enormous and quite unnecessary buckles. It slid out easily enough, but she could tell from the heft of it that it wasn’t empty. She pushed it aside. There was nothing between her and the cat now.

  ‘Out you come, Monty,’ she said, exasperation starting to show in her voice. Her back was hurting and she had banged her shoulder on the underside of the bedstead.

  She reached a little further in. If she could get hold of his collar then maybe she could drag him out, although that probably wouldn’t do much to build trust between the pair of them. Then, just as she had predicted, Monty shot out from under the bed, bounded for the door and was no doubt racing down the stairs and straight into Max’s arms.

  Sighing deeply, Caroline reversed herself back out and sat on her heels as she looked at her under-the-bed bounty. The boxes were mainly packaging for household gadgets – a new DVD player, a Sky box, a matching kettle and toaster, no doubt saved in case the items had to be returned, and then forgotten. The suitcase probably had clothes in, she thought, although since Tony had occupied the house alone there could be no shortage of wardrobe space in its four other bedrooms. And Tony was no hoarder. They hadn’t even considered sorting out his things yet; Tony’s sudden death was still far too raw for his children to think about that, but from what she had seen, everything in the house had an ordered air to it. It seemed unlikely that a stash of random clothing would be hiding in a case under the bed in the box room.

  She unfastened the buckles then felt for the zip’s pull. It slid along easily and she dragged the case clear of the bed so she could open it without obstruction. Bracing herself against the possibility of the suitcase containing sex toys or porn magazines or something else that a daughter-in-law shouldn’t have to see, she lifted the lid.

  Her jaw dropped as she took in the contents. The suitcase was full of cash. There were bundles and bundles of twenty-pound notes, all held together with elastic bands. Caroline had seen moments like this in countless films and TV dramas, where briefcases are opened to reveal neat piles of crisp currency all tidily held together with bank bands. This was not like that. The money seemed to have been thrown in on a bundle-by-bundle basis, the pile in the centre being higher than around the edges. There was an awful lot of it, though, more than she had ever seen before. There must be thousands of pounds, Caroline thought. In fact, probably tens of thousands, maybe more.

  She picked up a bundle, flicked the edges through her fingers and lifted it to her face to smell it. It certainly looked and smelled like real money. She checked a couple of the serial numbers, although she wasn’t quite sure why. They were different and non-sequential. There was no reason that she could see to conclude the money wasn’t real. But what was it doing hidden under the bed in her father-in-law’s back bedroom, and why was there so much of it?

  Caroline turned her head towards the door.

  ‘Max!’ she called. ‘Could you come up here a moment? There’s something you need to see.’

  2

  FIVE MONTHS EARLIER

  ‘If you lot don’t get a shift on, we’re going to be late,’ shouted Caroline from the kitchen. It was a half-hearted reprimand. She was far from ready herself, but getting the four of them out of the house was more of a process than an event and you had to build yourself up to it. There was no sign that any member of her family had taken the slightest notice of her warning. Well, Caroline wasn’t going to get herself in a lather about it. It was Christmas Day, and if you couldn’t take things easy on Christmas Day then what hope was there?

  None of them wanted to go to her father-in-law’s house anyway, not even Max, and it was his family. It would be particularly difficult to get the boys to leave home this year as Father Christmas had given them a PlayStation in their stocking and she imagined that the draw of that would be far stronger than any desire to see their cousins. She would have to prise their fingers from the controllers when the time came.

  Caroline sympathised with them, though. She would much rather be in her own home on Christmas Day too. Over the years, she had tried to change the Frost family tradition of all congregating at Tony’s house, mostly because it made no practical sense; Tony couldn’t cook and so, since his wife Valerie had left him, Caroline and Max’s sister Ellie had had to make the food, either in their own homes or in Tony’s underused and ill-equipped kitchen. Both she and Ellie had perfectly lovely kitchens of their own – in fact, Ellie’s was spectacular, in keeping with the rest of her house. But no. They always spent Christmas at Tony’s.

  One year Caroline had suggested that they alternate between their respective houses, but that idea had hit stony ground.

  ‘You can’t expect Nathan to host us all in that tiny flat,’ Max had said, ever protective of his baby brother.

  ‘Well, we could do his year,’ piped up Caroline, happy to mop up any surplus Christmas Days that were available, but Max had shaken his head.

  ‘It’s probably best if we just leave things the way they are,’ he said in that way he had of not rocking the boat. ‘It’s kind of a Frost family tradition.’

  Caroline had wanted to point out that Max’s father no longer lived in their childhood home and that his mother had upped and left, so there probably wasn’t quite as much tr
adition there as he was claiming. Her own family had disintegrated when she was a child, her father having catapulted them from a perfectly normal existence to what she had once heard her late mother call ‘barely living’. As a result, no cosy Christmas traditions emanated from her side, but that didn’t mean she wanted to become completely subsumed by what always happened at the Frosts.

  ‘Yes, I understand that, Max, love,’ she’d said, delicately judging her tone to strike reasonable and not whinging, ‘but it might be nice for Alex and Theo if they got to spend Christmas at home once in a while, make some traditions of our own. It’s not fair to drag them out when all they want to do is play with their presents and eat chocolate.’

  ‘Oh, they don’t mind,’ replied Max genially, and Caroline wondered if they were talking about the same children. ‘And anyway, they always have a good time when they get there.’

  This Caroline couldn’t deny. What Tony lacked in catering skills he more than made up for in his other hostly attributes. Her father-in-law was one of those ‘life and soul’ people who adored having others around him, and he invariably made a huge effort to ensure that everyone else enjoyed themselves as well. He always provided lots of silly Christmassy things to do – it had been blow-up Sumo wrestler costumes the previous year – and the booze flowed generously, which made it all more than tolerable for the adults. She had to admit that despite initial objections, they did generally end up having a lovely Christmas. But that really wasn’t the point.

  Caroline continued to stir the rum sauce – she was on puddings this year – and hoped that maybe next year they might get a chance to host the day themselves. She might suggest it to Ellie.

  3

  When they arrived at the house, it looked like a tiny corner of Las Vegas had hit Cedar Crescent. Tony had clearly decided more sparkle was required this year and so had festooned the front of his house with garlands of garishly bright twinkling lights. They flashed in sequence along the gutters and drainpipes in a way that was quite mesmerising. A large cheerful-looking Father Christmas was perched on the garage roof and a white, brightly lit reindeer was grazing nonchalantly on the grass.