Coincidence: A Novel (2 page)

That, at least, was the proposition. There was no CCTV footage, and the only photograph recovered from the fairground that showed Azalea was a snapshot taken by a teenager from the top of the big wheel. There was an adult alongside the little girl, but she – or he – was in shadow, and the police could not be sure if this mystery person was Azalea's missing mother or just an innocent stranger. No unclaimed blue car was found in the fairground car park, or in the streets nearby.

By the end of the second week, the police operation in Torquay was already being scaled down. It was July, and the holiday season was in full swing. This was the busiest time of the year for the police in this part of England. One officer was still assigned to the case, but she was overdue for maternity leave and when she called in to the Chief Inspector to say that her waters had broken, the case was not reassigned.

Four months later, Azalea Ives was placed into the care of a second foster family, this time in Exeter. Two more months passed, and approval was given for her adoption. She was adopted by a childless couple from the Cornish village of St Piran. The couple were Luke and Rebecca Folley. They were teachers. So Azalea Ives became Azalea Folley, and the events of 21 June 1982, when a small girl was discovered to be lost at a travelling fair, were gradually forgotten.

 

But there are postscripts to the story of the foundling girl, and these are significant too. In none of these cases did anyone appreciate at the time quite how relevant each of the events might be to the life of Azalea Ives. The first such event occurred in May 1983, almost a year after Azalea's appearance at the fairground. The body of a young woman, very badly decomposed, was discovered on a beach in North Devon, near Bude. She had been dead for about a year. She lay unidentified in a refrigerated store for eighteen months until instructions were issued for her burial. In 1986, a police constable in Cornwall, carrying out a cold-case review, was able to point to a number of similarities between this case and the case of ‘Girl A'. In particular, he noted, both the dead woman and Girl A had red hair. He speculated that the body at Bude could have been related to Girl A. In particular, he thought, the dead woman might have been Azalea's mother. His report was seen by an Inspector in Exeter who considered the theory briefly and then dismissed it. The conclusions were too circumstantial. The official explanation for Azalea's presence at the fairground was still deliberate abandonment, and the Inspector saw no reason to change this. There was no DNA testing, but crucially, the conclusions of the Cornish policeman were diligently recorded on the file.

The file on Azalea I
ves was closed on 6 June 1986, and in 1992 all the documents associated with the case were sealed and sent to Exeter for long-term storage, where they still exist in a brown cardboard document box among several thousand others in a warehouse near the old docks. In all this time only one person consulted them – a private detective called Susan Calendar. We will come to her, in good time.

Neither Azalea nor the Folleys were ever officially told about the body discovered on the beach; not by the police, at least. There were insufficient grounds to warrant such an intrusion into their lives. And this could have been the end of the official story of Azalea Ives, and in many ways it was, except that the list of postscripts kept on growing. In 1990, eight years after the discovery of the girl, a fifty-year-old man called Carl Morse was arrested in Liskeard, accused of abducting a student nurse from a fairground and raping her. The girl survived the ordeal, escaped from a locked car by kicking her way through the rear windscreen and led the police to her attacker. At his trial, Morse confessed to an earlier abduction. According to Morse, he had been invited by a young woman into her car at a travelling fair in Totnes in 1982. He couldn't remember the exact date, but records confirmed a fairground had been there for the last two weeks in June. Morse denied having murdered the woman. Instead he made the unconvincing claim that the woman had thrown herself from the cliffs at Millook, not very far from Bude.

A second event occurred in the spring of 1993. A decorator in Cumbria came across two suitcases on the top of an old oak wardrobe. It was this discovery that set in train a sequence of events that led to the mystery of Azalea's origin being solved. But that story is still to come.

2

June 2012

T
he plain, painted sign on the office door reads ‘T. Post, PhD', and beneath these words, in a smaller point size, ‘Lecturer: Applied Philosophy'. It is something of a forbidding legend, its minimalist presentation not especially welcoming to casual callers.

But just above this uninviting plaque, someone has helpfully pinned a more informal notice. This one is on a sheet of drawing paper, fastened with a pin at each corner in such a deliberate way that you sense the occupant of the office must have placed it there himself. It is a caricature drawing, in charcoal, of the kind that artists do for tourists in Leicester Square or Montmartre, and it portrays a lofty, angular man with a wildly exaggerated nose and chin, a quiff of disobedient hair and a disproportionate set of rabbit teeth. No one could consider this a
flattering
portrait. Although, on closer inspection, there is a kindness to the eyes, a becoming smile and a look of gentle amusement about the subject. The man in the drawing is leaning forward over a table, across which he has scattered half a dozen dice. Every die shows the number six. Now the twinkle in the subject's eye has some meaning. He is, perhaps, a magician. Underneath the drawing, the artist has added a legend. ‘Thomas Post', this caption reads, ‘the Coincidence Man'.

We've leaped forwards three decades from the fairground in Totnes, and the case of the foundling girl. This part of the story takes place in London, in the glorious Olympic year of 2012. We are in the upper corridor of a nondescript building in the university quarter of north London, and we are following Thomas Post, PhD down the dimly lit passage and into his office. We can see, at once, many of those features that the caricaturist chose to amplify. Thomas Post seems to roll along, a curious, angular fellow, a lummox, tall, awkward, in an ill-fitting jacket and large round spectacles. His arms swing clumsily, as if they are somehow too long to control. He pushes the door shut and folds himself down into his office chair and, in that moment, but just for that moment, he is the man in the sketch; all he lacks are the dice, and the inscrutable smile.

The small office obeys the principles and traditions of academe in its furnishings and its general sense of disarray. Sunlight streams in from an attic window. There is a solitary desk, its territory occupied with books, papers and computer devices trailing tangled, disobedient wires. There are bookshelves, themselves overladen, and an armchair and a whiteboard that carries faint fossil traces of charts and tables that have never been fully rubbed away. There is a small worktop, designed, or so it would appear, exclusively for the making of tea.

This is the workspace of Thomas Post, PhD. There are few personal touches, apart from his array of mugs and the books. A poster of a steam train, dog-eared and faded, looks as if it may have belonged to a generation of occupants of this room. A postcard of the seaside is pinned up beside his desk. Otherwise, the walls are populated by charts and more books. A photograph in a frame on the desk appears to be the only private image. It's a snapshot of a woman on a hillside with the coiling blue of a lake far below. It could be Scotland, perhaps, or Wales. The woman is laughing. She has been caught by the camera unawares, and her hands have flown up to rescue her hair – hair the colour of an autumn maple.

Thomas lets his upper body cantilever forwards like a tree being felled in slow motion until he is face down on his desk, his hands locked behind his head. There is something desolate about his manner.

He stays like this for some time.

‘Everything that happens,' says a very soft voice, ‘happens for a reason.'

Thomas doesn't stir. Perhaps he didn't hear the voice. Maybe it was too quiet for him to hear.

‘Everything that happens . . .' whispers the voice again.

Thomas levers himself up. He mouths the response through thick lips: ‘ . . . Happens for a reason.' He is distracted. He taps his fingertips on his desk.

Now that we look closely, there is no one else around. Did he imagine the voice?

There are footsteps coming down the corridor. He waits for them to pass.

‘Everything that happens . . .'

It isn't a voice at all. It is nothing but the echo of a voice. The remembered echo of a voice. He isn't even hearing it. He is fabricating it, creating it from phantoms and figments of his mind.

His eyes flicker to a calendar propped up on his desk. ‘Six days,' he whispers. ‘Six days.'

Then, without so much as a knock, his door bursts open. He has a visitor.

‘Clementine?' Thomas springs upright and starts to lift himself from his chair.

‘Thomas, dear boy. Don't get up.' The visitor is a woman, comfortably twice his age. She wields a walking stick, and seems out of breath. She sinks heavily into the armchair without inviting a handshake. ‘On second thoughts,' she says, ‘you can make me a tea.'

‘Of course,' Thomas says. He looks taken aback.

The woman casts her eye around the small office. ‘So this is where you've been hiding away,' she says. ‘On the fifth floor, where no one will ever find you.' She speaks with a faint accent. There is something Germanic or Eastern European about her voice, a huskiness, a hint of Lili Marlene.

‘
You
found me,' Thomas says. He has made his way over to the workbench and is pouring water from a jug into a kettle.

‘Only after an ascent worthy of a Sherpa,' says the visitor. She is looking this way and that, as if sizing up the room for sale. In response, Thomas Post starts to scoop up books and papers from the desk and floor. It is a transparent but hopeless attempt to tidy the avalanche of clutter.

‘My dear boy, do leave all that alone,' Clementine says. ‘If you shovel that stuff back onto the shelves you'll never find it again.'

Thomas stops, looking sheepish. ‘You're probably right.'

‘I'm always right.'

‘It's just . . . I don't get many visitors.'

‘Five floors up, I'm not surprised.'

Thomas busies himself with mugs, waits awkwardly for the kettle to boil.

‘This is your opportunity,' says Clementine, ‘to ask me why I'm here.'

‘Ah yes,' Thomas says, and he bobs his head like a nodding dog. ‘So, Dr Bielszowska . . . to what do I owe the pleasure?'

What an odd couple they are. Thomas Post, thirty-something, gauche and gangling; Clementine Bielszowska, surely past the honourable age for retirement, looking more like a grandmother than an academic: small and stout and sporting a shawl that can only have been hand-knitted.

The kettle boils and Thomas makes tea. He balances Clementine's mug on the arm of her chair.

‘So?' Thomas says. He is back in his seat and waiting for a reply.

‘I thought,' Clementine Bielszowska says, ‘that we were friends.' She says this accusingly.

He gives a nervous shrug. ‘We
are
friends.'

‘So . . . when did you last come to visit me?'

He starts to laugh, but stops in the face of her uncompromising gaze. ‘I've been busy.' As he speaks, he knows these words won't suffice. Not for this visitor.

‘Too busy to visit a friend . . . for four months?'

It is a remark that can only be greeted by silence.

‘Is it that girl?' she asks.

‘Which girl?'

‘The one you introduced me to. Or a bereavement? I only ask because every time I see you you look as if all the life has been punched out of you.' Clementine punctuates this observation with a loud tap of her stick on the wooden floor.

Thomas looks into his tea as if searching for inspiration. ‘Am I that transparent?'

She looks at him unmoved.

He exhales very slowly and turns his face away. ‘Clementine,' he says, ‘sometimes I think you're the only person left who truly understands me.'

‘Think of it as my job.'

He rises from his seat and makes his way over to the little attic window. It's a sunny day, and the rooftops of London roll away into a distant haze. But the weather clearly doesn't match his disposition. ‘It
is
that girl,' he says. Then very slowly he adds, ‘and a bereavement . . . of sorts.'

‘The girl is dead?'

He lets out a sigh. ‘No. She isn't dead. I don't think so. Not yet.'

‘Not
yet
? Is she terminally ill?'

Thomas is wringing his hands now. He turns back to face her. ‘Do you have time,' he asks, ‘for a long story?'

She takes hold of her tea mug and sinks down into her chair. ‘Of course.' She purses her lips. ‘I have as much time as you need.'

Thomas looks back at the window. There are so many thoughts. So much to say. A maelstrom of words awaiting an audience. ‘It's complicated,' he begins.

‘I like complicated.' She is patient, settling down to listen.

‘You know I've been studying coincidences?'

‘Every time we meet, you regale me with a dozen.'

He smiles at this. ‘People think it's a whimsical thing. They love to come to me with a coincidence, and they challenge me to explain it. But it's never especially difficult. I can usually do some simple maths for them. Some events are unlikely, to be sure, but that doesn't make them miraculous. You understand?'

‘I do.'

‘One day, a woman came to see me, and she sat in that very chair you're sitting in now. Azalea Lewis was her name.'

‘Was she the redhead you introduced to me?'

Thomas nods forlornly. There is a silence between them for a while. ‘Azalea's coincidences were off the scale,' he says quietly. ‘They could not be explained. Not by mathematics, at least. In fact . . .' he lifts his face and the sun catches his countenance with its glare, ‘ . . . they might even be proof that our universe is not the place we thought it was.'

Clementine Bielszowska sips her tea slowly. ‘This sounds profound.'

‘I think it possibly is.'

‘Azalea Lewis . . . Azalea Lewis,' she tries the name. ‘She had a little scar if I remember, right here.' She lifts a finger to her eye.

There is the soft trace of a tear in Thomas's eye. ‘I can tell you how she came by it,' he says.