Every Bookshop Needs a Cat (Fleckney Fields Series, Book 2)

Past Lives

Once Varya had finally settled - after half an hour of crying, and about the same amount of time of quietly sobbing and sniffling in her sleep - Anya climbed on her bed with their iPad, and started googling. 

Firstly, his name wasn't Klaus. As she found out in a bio on one of the pages dedicated to his art, he was born Niklas Sigvard Gustaf Bjornsson, to Cecile Holyoake and Peder Bjornsson, and he'd adopted the name Klaus after studying in the Berlin University of Arts. According to one of his interviews, his grandfather was Niklas, it was a family name, and Klaus claimed he 'didn't feel any connection to the dusty old family history of the Bjornsson clan.' 

All and all, it seemed, in his past life he had been a toff, a playboy, 'one of the most brilliant and daring painters of his generation', as well as an occasional model, who once had been featured in a music video of a certain mega popstar. Anya youtubed it: in the video, he was dressed, interchangeably, in a mixture of drag and some sort of a fantasy pirate outfit, his long shiny hair streaming down his back, black eyeliner emphasising his unusual eyes - and then occasionally in pretty much nothing, with the exception of golden glitter powdering his wide-shouldered, sculpted body, from the top of his ginger head, down his triangle torso and his long muscular legs. It took her a significant effort to stop staring at his photo in skin-tight leather trousers and a tall feather collar - nothing else - from some sort of a masquerade, giving him the seventies' glam rock vibe, while simultaneously making him look like a porn worthy version of David Bowie in Labyrinth. It was almost impossible to imagine - not that Anya had paid any attention to his appearance during either of her visits - that the half-dead shaking addict in the cabin was the same person.

The picture of his mingled Ferrari, at the bottom of a ravine, looking like a crunched up lolly wrap, was the third top link on the search result page. Anya attentively read the article. There had been three of them in the car: Klaus, his girlfriend Caria, and her younger sister Semra. Caria had passed away before the ambulance arrived at the site of the crash.

Anya found another article, released two months after the accident. According to his and Semra's statements, Caria had distracted him, which led to the crash. He had been acquitted of all charges. The article painted his behaviour in the most favourable light. He was said to have dragged both women out of the car, after which he'd collapsed. He'd been officially dead for almost a minute, before the paramedics had resuscitated him, after which he'd spent three days in a coma. At the time when the article had come out, his prognosis had been unclear.

Many pages later, Anya ran into a eulogy written for Caria by Sam Holyoake. The two families appeared to be close. The eulogy was published on the site of The Fleckney Gazette - and Anya spent the next two hours catching up on the years of history  and gossip of the county. It seemed Klaus had been right when calling himself 'the disgrace of the Bjornsson family': there hadn't been a single mention of him after the article about the crash. Semra was now married to Sam Holyoake. The Bjornsson stately home, a historical landmark, and the Bjornsson Fund were run by his Uncle, after the death of Klaus' father, the oldest in the family, five years ago. So, just as he'd said, Klaus had been indeed 'kicked out, disowned, and disinherited.'

When Anya finally crawled in her bed, she'd already formed a plan in her head.

***

The next day she told Sally she needed to go to town to purchase baking supplies. She'd been paying for them out of her own pocket, since Sally had told her that the Fergusons providing Anya and Varya with food and board was already 'more than enough' - given, Sally and Martin were the ones who were eating most of Anya's creations. When Anya closed the door behind her and Varya, she could still hear Henry wailing inside. Recently, he'd gotten into the habit of throwing a benny if Anya wasn't in the same room with him.