The Influence Read Online Free Page A

her days when she had you move in.”
    Hermione and their mother came through from the kitchen, Hermione guiltily nibbling a ham sandwich. “Budge over and let Hermione sit down,” Edith said to Keith with a hint of rebuke, as if he ought to show her more concern, and Alison couldn’t help thinking resentfully as she stood up that she was the one who’d been trapped in the dark.
    She had felt trapped for hours. If she had tried to open the door she would only have pulled the knob loose, and so she had stayed as still as she could, waiting to hear someone, anyone, coming upstairs. She’d tried not to look behind her, especially whenever the creaking of the window sounded like movement on the mattress where the dead woman lay, but now and then she’d felt Queenie rising stealthily from the bed, creeping barefoot behind her and lowering her face with its dead eyes staring in opposite directions, so that it would be level with Alison’s when she had to turn and look. Whenever Alison swung round, Queenie was face up on the bed, and only the dim glow through the rain on the window had made her appear to stiffen her limbs in readiness to rear up from the mattress. Alison had felt trapped in a nightmare version of the schoolyard game in which you had to turn quickly enough to catch whoever was behind you moving.
    Perhaps something like that had happened to Hermione as a child; her nerves hadn’t been the same since the day she had run sobbing out of their aunt’s room. All the more reason not to resent the way their mother fussed over Hermione, Alison told herself. “Derek’s taken Rowan shopping,” she said. “They shouldn’t be long.”
    Edith lowered her head and gazed at her as if over invisible spectacles, her broad ruddy oval face sinking into its chins. “We’ve been looking forward to seeing our little girl. We were hoping you’d come to stay more often now that we don’t do much driving.”
    They lived in Cardiff, a day’s drive away on roads that were never as straight or as clear as they looked on the map. “We will once I’m roadworthy again,” Alison said. “My old car gave up the ghost the week we moved to Queenie’s.”
    “We didn’t see that much of you when you were driving. Hermione seems to manage, even if she has to close her shop and take the train to come and see us.”
    Just because they were fifteen years younger than Queenie didn’t mean they had fifteen more years of Rowan, Alison reminded herself as Hermione said “Ali’s children need her more than children need my shop.”
    “I certainly hope they appreciate you as much as we do,” Edith cried. “Just remember you’re welcome any time you feel you’d rather not be on your own.”
    “You’ve no need to worry about me,” Hermione said, so shrilly that she contradicted herself.
    “Well, you know best,” her mother said in a tone that managed to combine hope and umbrage, then craned to look out of the window. “Here come Derek and our little girl, and someone else.”
    “My brother, I expect,” Keith said.
    “No, it’s not Richard. Good God, I believe it’s his son.”
    “It could be Lance, they’ve let him out of hospital,” Keith admitted. “I suppose that could be him under the beard.”
    It was indeed Lance, whom Alison hadn’t seen for years. She and Hermione had always been wary of him. He’d been twenty, and a civil servant, when the sisters were five and eight, but they had never gone with him along the beach at Waterloo to see his secret, even though that would have taken them out of sight of Queenie’s house. He’d never harmed anyone so far as she knew, but whatever he’d imagined doing must have consumed him with guilt, for when his father had found his cache of magazines he’d not only denied they were his but begun to deny he was Lance. Now Hermione let him in and said brightly “Hello, Lance. We weren’t expecting you, but you’re welcome.”
    It occurred to Alison that he was a childhood