wheel of her car, she had driven away from the house that had always been her home in a select area of a Cheshire green belt without looking back.
The doors had been locked, the windows shut fast, and as a last knife thrust she’d put flowers in the hallway, a huge bunch of them that would be the first thing that the new owners saw when they arrived to take over their recently acquired property.
The purchase had been completed early that morning, the money was already in her bank account, but the thought of it brought no joy. It would be a matter of here today and gone tomorrow.
‘I’m sorry, sweetheart,’ her father had said as the last few moments of his life had ebbed away. ‘So sorry to be going like this before I’d sorted things.’
‘You have nothing to be sorry for,’ she’d told him gently, thinking that he must be delirious. ‘You have always been there for me, making me laugh, indulging me, keeping me safe, and David will do the same. I know he will.’
He’d tried to speak again but the mists had been closing in and the nurse at the other side of the bed had said a few seconds later, ‘He’s gone, Melissa. His injuries were too severe for him to overcome. There will be no more pain for your father.’
Max Redmond had been a charmer, and a wealthy one at that. Melissa had lost her mother to heart failure when she had been eleven and Max had given her everything she could possibly have wanted to make up for the loss. He’d taken her on fantastic holidays, bought her the kind of car that most young people could only dream of when she had been old enough to drive, and had given her a generous allowance that had been more than some families had had to feed their children and pay the mortgage.
The two of them had lived in a smart detached house amongst the rich and famous, not far from the city, and when she’d gone to fulfil a dream and enrolled as a medical student, it had been at a university in nearby Manchester so that her father wouldn’t be lonely, although it hadn’t seemed likely.
Max had never remarried, but he’d made lots of women friends in the circles in which he’d moved, where wining and dining was the order of the day. However, he had always cancelled any arrangements he’d made if his daughter had been free to socialise with him.
That had been until she’d got engaged to David Lowson, the son of one of her father’s women friends. After that, he’d watched benignly as most of Melissa’s time away from her career had been taken up with the delights of being in love.
She’d qualified as a doctor in paediatrics in the summer, and on receiving her degree had been employed at a nearby hospital. Life had been good in every way, with all of it centred around the big city that she knew so well and would never have wanted to leave, until her father had walked in front of a speeding car on a road not far from where they lived after a lively lunch in a nearby hotel, and had died from his injuries.
Since then Melissa had experienced all of life’s worst emotions: grief at the sudden tragic loss of the man who had loved her so much; sick horror to discover that his last words to her had been referring to a huge mountain of gambling debts that he had accumulated.
There had also been the aching hurt of betrayal from an engagement that had fizzled out when her fiancé had discovered that she was no longer the wealthy heiress that his mother had urged him to propose to, and was going to be poorer than a church mouse by the time she’d sorted out Max’s frightening legacy.
Everything Melissa could lay her hands on had been sold, and most of her salary each month had gone into the bottomless pit, with the sale of the house as the final heartbreaking humiliation.
During the time that the sale had been going through, those who knew her had seen little of her. Grief stricken and panicked about the future, Melissa had chosen to hide away from her friends.
Her father had given no inkling that he’d had money problems. Always a man about town, as generous host to all his friends, he hadn’t been able to admit to his failings, and she now understood fully his weak apology as he’d lain dying.
Incredibly, there’d been no life insurance to fall back on, or other safeguards that were usually in place regarding the death of a person, but thankfully the money from the sale of the house would clear the last of the debts.
She supposed it would have been sensible to rent herself a small apartment in Manchester and bring the shattered remnants of her life together again somehow. But with her father now resting with her mother in a nearby cemetery, and an ex-fiancé who had cast her aside living not far away, she had been intent on moving to some place where she wasn’t known.
Having left the hospital where she’d been employed, she’d headed for the small market town of Heatherdale, where her paternal grandmother had lived and where her house, which had been empty for a long time, was there for her if she wanted it.
The old lady had willed it to her and, though grateful for the thought, it was the last place she would ever have contemplated moving to in the past, but the present was proving to be a different matter. Alone and lost, she’d needed somewhere to hide from the pitying looks she’d received from her father’s friends and acquaintances when the news had got around that she was penniless. She’d wanted somewhere to avoid the mocking smiles of those who had witnessed the plight of the ‘golden girl’ and thought it would do her good to see how the other half lived. But the thing that had hurt most had been the speed with which her ex had found another woman to replace her.
She had found the keys to her grandmother’s house in a chest of drawers in her father’s bedroom, and as she’d gazed down at the heavy ornate bunch of them it had been as if a means of escape was being offered to her.
There had been receipts with them for payments that her father had made to the local authorities on her behalf over the years to comply with the law regarding the ownership of unoccupied housing, and she’d decided that the paperwork and the keys were heaven sent.
She’d felt as if she never wanted to see the city that she’d loved so much, with its familiar shops, smart restaurants and green parks, ever again. She’d decided to make a fresh start in a place that she’d never cared for much on the rare occasions she’d been there.
With no job, no money, and no family, she had to hope that she could find a future for herself in Heatherdale. First she had to get the house straight. Next on her agenda was finding a job. The obvious choice would be its famous hospital, but if there were no vacancies there for a newly qualified paediatrician then she’d simply have to find something to tide her over.
The internet had come up with the name and address of a firm of domestic cleaners in the Heatherdale area and she’d hired them to give the house a thorough cleaning from top to bottom before she arrived.
Apart from ordering a bed to be delivered later in the day, when she would be there to accept it, the rest of her belongings would arrive the following afternoon, when she was satisfied that the house was ready to take delivery of them.
It wasn’t the best time of year to be moving into a strange house in a strange place, she’d thought achingly as the miles had flashed past. The last leaves of autumn had been scattered at the roadside or hanging limply on trees, and a cold wind had been nipping at her while she’d been taking a last walk around the gardens of what had been her home.
During her early childhood she and her parents had visited her grandmother occasionally, but there hadn’t been any real closeness between them because the old lady had disapproved of her son’s attitude to life in general. She hadn’t liked the way he’d been such a spendthrift, although at that
