Unforgotten by Clare Francis

suburbs the traffic ran freely and then he was only fifteen minutes from home. Lizzie had called to say her meeting was overrunning and she wouldn’t be back till eight thirty. He would use the time to have a bath. There was something about the London grime that seemed to lie heavily on his flesh, almost to chafe at it, so that he longed to scrub it away. Then he would soak for a while, a glass of Merlot in hand, and mull over the day while he listened for Lizzie’s arrival, the clunk of the front door, the faint clatter of her keys as she dropped them into the dish on the hall table, her familiar call, a long hello sung on a rising note. Having called back, he’d wait for the sound of her steps on the stairs, which, if not actually audible from the echoing bathroom, would resound strongly enough in his imagination. Then the real thing, footfalls on the bedroom carpet, soft but distinct, and the squeeze of happiness he would feel as she appeared in the open doorway. She would bend down to kiss him, then, having stolen a sip of his drink, she would sit on the chair at the end of the bath while they got the measure of each other’s day.
    In the long years of their marriage such visions of homecoming had never palled for him. He loved Meadowcroft, the house where they had lived for the past fifteen years, and he loved the pattern of their evenings, the preparations for supper, theexchange of news over the table, the discussions about the children, Lou now halfway across India on her gap year, Charlie at IT college in Birmingham, and their shifting plans for weekends and holidays. But most of all, he loved coming home to Lizzie. This was the miracle of his existence, that the woman he loved was also his wife, that he’d never been interested in any other.
    They lived in what had been a small village until the mid-nineties when the first of a series of utilitarian housing developments had advanced into the surrounding fields, ultimately trebling the population. Now cars clogged the main road and buses ran into the city every hour and noisy teenagers caused trouble on Saturday nights. But they had been lucky, their side of the village was protected by the deep cut of a small river and, half a mile away, the steep rise of the Cotswold Hills. From Meadowcroft’s upper floor you could see rolling fields dotted with sheep and against the skyline the tiny dots of walkers on the ridge path.
    If the house with its odd proportions and pebbledash exterior had few pretensions to beauty, its plainness was thoroughly redeemed by a rambling garden of almost an acre, framed by a ring of magnificent trees, ash and beech with a lone lightning-scorched oak. While several of the partners at Dimmock Marsh had migrated to handsome eighteenth-century honey-stone farmhouses in the country proper, complete with stables and tennis courts and four-by-fours, Lizzie and he had never had aspirations to that sort of life. They were content to stay in their solid house in its unfashionable village, perhaps because they had always been happy there.
    The rain intensified as he drove through the village and made his turn. The lane that led to Meadowcroft and six other houses narrowed into a single-track road that wandered back in a half circle towards the west and was therefore little used. Hugh accelerated up a slight rise to the first bend, then steadied his speed as the road straightened out. On either side, dripping shrubs and hedgerows gleamed and sparkled in the headlights,until a patch of darkness to the left marked the gates of a house. Another twenty yards and the porch light of his immediate neighbour twinkled briefly through a tangle of shrubs to the right. Then he was rounding the last curve and coasting towards the gates to Meadowcroft. Some ten years ago, following what the local paper had described as a spate of burglaries, they had installed a burglar alarm and a security light operated by a motion sensor. The spate of burglaries turned out to