All Bones and Lies by Anne Fine

unpleasant innuendo. ‘Listen,’ he’d said a dozen times. ‘This is absolutely nothing to do with ensuring there’ll be plenty left for me to inherit.’ But how could his mother turn up the chance of hovering, bent-backed, over her fading cheque book for all the world as if her only son were bullying her into paying his gambling debts, not sensibly suggesting she scale up her premiums. ‘I’ll pay for it
myself,
’ he told her more than once. ‘Just so long as we get it all sorted out properly.’ But she was adamant. ‘No, no. I wouldn’t dream of having you a penny out of pocket over some poor old lady on her last legs.’ Leave it, he told himself a dozen times through the long, grinding afternoon. For once in a lifetime, be brave. Take a chance. And instantly the alternatives paraded in front of him. If he were lucky, just sleepless nights and half a heart attack each time he heard a fire engine tear past his own drab flat in the direction of West Priding. And if he weren’t? A heap of rubble, years of argument with his own colleagues about possible economies in the rebuilding, and Mother living in his own back room.
    It didn’t bear thinking about. And mercifully he was distracted from the nightmare vision by Dilys flicking at his plate. ‘Buck up and eat, Col. We’re not all councildrones with endless tea breaks. Some of us have to get back to our desks.’
    At the mere mention of desks, he felt another stab of panic. To try to make a little headway on the cake front, he set his sister off on the first topic to come to mind. ‘So how is Perdita? Safely gone?’
    â€˜Thank God! And I can’t say how glad I was to see the back of her. She was so
sneaky
.’
    Sneaky? That pricked his interest. After all, what could be sneakier than insinuating yourself into a strange house inside an envelope? Manfully struggling with what appeared to be, on dissolution, nothing but a mouthful of whipped oil, he was still hoping to break in with news of the curious materialization of Perdita’s photograph on Mother’s hall floor when his sister not only kept on as if his thoughts were perfectly audible, but also as if they were grist to her mill. ‘Do you know, the bloody woman gets
everywhere
. Last week she even fetched up on
Weekend Round-up
.’
    â€˜I knew that,’ Colin admitted.
    â€˜How? Did you see her?’
    Lamely he shook his head.
    â€˜Well, she was
terrible
. Vain enough to get her hair done at Tatiana’s, but all she did was mumble a few inanities over and over.’
    Anything, even risking an argument, was better than taking another mouthful of cake. ‘Really? That doesn’t sound at all like Perdita.’
    Rumbled, his sister felt obliged to backtrack. ‘Well, all right, I suppose she sounded sensible enough.
If
you’re as obsessed as she is with property values . . .’
    Forcing words out of his mouth still held a good deal more attraction than forcing cake in. ‘I didn’t know she was in property. I always thought she worked on all that arty sponsorship stuff, with you.’
    â€˜That was only to keep her busy while they were over-staffed in Insurance Services. Now she’s moved over and carving out empires in Estates.’ His sister’s principle of never denigrating a fellow female professional took another hard knock, Colin noticed, as she finished dismissively, ‘No, Perdita’s really just a glorified estate agent now. And Marjorie says—’
    â€˜Marjorie?’
    Again Dilys tapped the side of his plate. ‘Do get a move on, Col. I haven’t got all day.’
    â€˜I’m eating as fast as I can,’ he responded pettishly. ‘I do have to
chew
.’ And along with this echo of the squabbles of childhood came yet another reminder of everything he’d left abandoned on his desk: the report that the youngest Haksar boy had crept