The Hidden Girl (34 page)

Gemma crinkled her eyes, concentrating. ‘Um, well, we did have a chat now and then. I remember her saying that her father had built Tornley Hall. Some big, rich Suffolk ship-builder, wasn’t he?’

A ship-builder? Hannah thought about the library. Had the travel books actually belonged to the father, not to Peter and Olive?

‘But nothing else – not that I can remember,’ Gemma continued. ‘But I definitely saw people up here. So you’re saying they weren’t family?’

Hannah shook her head. ‘Do you know what they were doing?’

‘Well, there were lights on. And the front door was open. The garage was open a few times – there was machinery in there. Farm stuff.’ Gemma’s mouth fell open. ‘Oh, and then a few months ago I came up here with a letter, and those shutters were open.’ She pointed at the sitting room. ‘I remember thinking that was odd – there was machinery in there, too.’

‘Machinery?’ Hannah said, incredulous, suddenly remembering the diesel smell.

‘Yes. It was a circular that I had to deliver. They still send them after you die, you know. It’s terrible. I always think it must be upsetting for bereaved people when they see a letter with the name of—’

Hannah interrupted. ‘Gemma, why would someone store machinery in this house?’

Gemma scratched her head. ‘Oh, gawd! I should have probably called the police, shouldn’t I? I didn’t think. I thought it was the family. Should we ring them now?’

‘No!’ Hannah exclaimed, louder than she meant to. ‘No. Not, yet. There’s probably an explanation for it.’ She blew out her cheeks. ‘Listen, can I ask you a favour: not to mention this to anyone? Not until I’ve found out who Elvie is. I really thought she was Frank and Tiggy’s daughter. But if there’s any chance she’s related to the Horseborrows, there might be legal implications about the house sale. So . . .’

‘Oh, OK. No worries.’ Gemma pointed at her own head. ‘Listen, I don’t want to be cruel, but she did seem a little . . .’ Gemma made a face.

‘No, you’re right. She definitely does have some sort of learning difficulties. I mean, it’s not impossible – now I think about it – that she might have lived in a care home, and stayed with Peter and Olive for holidays, if they were her family. What I don’t understand is what she was doing here last week.’

And why had Frank and Tiggy denied that they knew her?

Gemma headed out the front door. ‘Well, let me know. I’ll be wondering all day now!’

As an afterthought, Hannah scribbled down her new mobile number and handed it to the postwoman, asking her to ring immediately if she saw Elvie. Gemma headed back to her postal van with a friendly wave.

Hannah’s eyes drifted over to the field.

The tractor had stopped.

It was parked, with its cab facing her.

‘Oh, go to hell,’ Hannah said, slamming the front door behind her.

Ten minutes later she had written down everything she’d just learnt from Gemma, and realized she was no wiser than she had been an hour ago. Was Elvie related to Frank and Tiggy, or not? Was she actually a Horseborrow? And why was everyone else in Tornley lying about Elvie’s existence, and trying to scare Hannah and Will away?

She stood up. The little girl’s social workers would be here on Friday, and she needed Will back. This had to be sorted, for her own sake as well as Elvie’s.

She was running out of time. She needed more information.

She phoned a taxi, and quickly grabbed what she needed.

An hour later Hannah arrived in Woodbridge and caught the train to Ipswich.

There was one thing that she could at least try to find out today: who was the pregnant Mabel Vyne?

After two weeks in a rural hamlet, Ipswich was a shock to Hannah, even if it was a fraction of the size of London. Petrol fumes from the busy road made her feel queasy. She’d already forgotten the art of dodging around people on the busy pavement, and banged arms more than once.

Hannah arrived at the Records Office just after two. If Mabel Vyne had lived at Tornley Hall, she guessed this was the best place to start. At the desk she explained her task. The office searched the documents archive and the old
Kelly’s Directory
listings of business addresses, and came up with three Mabel Vynes who had lived in Suffolk in the past hundred years.

Hopeful, Hannah scanned the list. One Mabel Veronica Vyne was the lady in the newspaper cutting, and lived in a village on the outskirts of Ipswich. The second Mabel Katherine Vyne had died in 1923. Hannah struck her off the list. The third looked most interesting: Mabel Anne Vyne, born on 4 March 1930. She would have been a teenager in 1945–6 and would now be in her mid-eighties.

‘Wow. That might be her,’ Hannah said to the woman on the desk.

She arrived at the Registrar’s Office at lunchtime, to see if the trail continued there. To her disappointment, it dried up immediately.

The first and last record of Mabel Anne Vyne was her birth certificate. After that, there was nothing. No marriage or death certificate, or any birth certificate for the child she bore. There was no record of her even on a census. The house on Star Street where she’d been born had long been demolished.

Mabel Anne Vyne had simply disappeared.

Hannah sat on the wall outside the library and ate a sandwich. She knew Mabel had not actually disappeared. If this was the right Mabel, she had remained in Suffolk, at Tornley Hall, for forty years. So why was there no listing of her in the official Suffolk records after her birth?

She wandered to the local library and found a friendly local historian in a tweed jacket and carrying a stick, with sharp blue eyes, who directed her back to the Records Office to look at the microfilm of local newspapers.

‘You could look for a mention of her, or her family, or even of Star Street. If their house was bombed in the war, that might explain why she disappeared from the records, for a while at least,’ he said.

Sighing, Hannah stared at the screen, not knowing where to start. It was nearly four o’clock. She wanted to get back to Tornley Hall and turn on the lights before dark.

She forced herself to look at the evidence. The first proof she had that Mabel Vyne existed was a photo dated August 1945, at the end of the war.

Knowing now that she was clutching at straws, Hannah started earlier, with newspapers from 1 January 1945.

The search quickly became tedious. There were endless reports of Allied victories and local church fayres, and of lost dogs, and building work. This was pointless. She still had so much to do, back at Tornley Hall, before the social workers came. She’d give it an hour, then that was it.

Forty minutes later she was slumped forward, head in her hands, when a name finally jumped out at her from the screen. The story was from 6 February 1945:

Hannah had to stop herself whooping in the quiet office. Instinctively she knew she was a step closer to the mystery of who Elvie was.

Fired up, she searched on. Yet the story did not reappear. Had Mabel been found? Who would know?

Remembering the Mabel Veronica Vyne who was in her fifties, Hannah decided to give her a shot. She searched the local phone listings in the library for the woman’s number and, as an afterthought, picked out the only other three listings for people with the surname of Vyne in the Ipswich area. Tentatively she rang each number.

The man who answered Mabel Veronica Vyne’s number told Hannah that he and his wife had moved here from Nottingham three years ago, and had no relatives in the area. She crossed her name off the list.

The second Vyne didn’t answer. The third was a friendly woman called Jean Vyne. She told Hannah to ring her husband Mark, at his shop. Vyne was his family name, not hers.

The March light was now starting to dim, and she had to get home. She walked towards the bus station, ringing Mark Vyne’s number. If this came to nothing, she was giving up for today.

‘Vyne Plumbing,’ said an equally pleasant voice when the phone was answered.

‘Oh, hi, is that Mark?’ Hannah asked.

‘It is.’

She suddenly felt worn out. She was cold and tired, and she wanted Will. What was she doing, spending all this time in Ipswich on some ridiculous trail of a woman she didn’t know? The missing Mabel Vyne from the newspaper might have nothing to do with the girl in Peter’s photo. And it might be pure coincidence that Peter’s Mabel and Elvie shared the same physical features.

‘Listen, I’m sorry to bother you,’ she continued. ‘Your wife said it would be OK to call. This is going to sound crazy, but I live over near Thurrup, and I’m trying to track down a woman from this area called Mabel Vyne, who’d be in her eighties now. I know it’s unlikely, but I’m just ringing people with the same surname to see if anyone knows what happened to her, and . . .’

She stopped, hit by a wave of exhaustion. She needed to go home. Stop this, now.

There was a silence at the other end.

‘Auntie Mabel?’ Mark Vyne exclaimed. ‘Good God! Now there’s a name I never thought I’d hear again.’

A reinvigorated Hannah arrived twenty minutes later in a taxi. Vyne’s Plumbing was located on the outskirts of the city. A white van was pulling away as she climbed out.

‘Mark?’ she asked nervously, walking in. The shop was long and narrow, lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with cardboard boxes and silver valves and piping.

A cheerful-looking man glanced up from the counter.

‘Hello! Hannah.’ He held out a hand.

Instantly she felt disappointed. He was nothing like the tall, dark-haired woman in Peter and Olive’s photos. He was of normal height, for a start, with grey-blond hair and curious pale-green eyes.

‘Well, this is exciting, isn’t it?’ he said with a grin. ‘Very intriguing. Can I get you a cup of tea?’ He pointed at his Ipswich Football Club mug.

Hannah held up a hand. ‘No, thanks. Listen, I know this sounds mad, but I’m trying to track down someone who I think used to live in my new house. I won’t explain why, because it’s boring and complicated, but you said you might know her – Mabel Vyne?’

The door tinkled and a large man came in behind her. ‘All right, Danny.’ Mark swung up the counter and the man went into the back. ‘Well, I might do,’ he said. ‘Not personally. But my dad did have an Auntie Mabel. I’ll have to ring him and ask. Always been a bit of a family mystery.’

Hannah felt hope return. ‘In what way?’

Mark checked behind him and lowered his voice. ‘Well, the story was that she ran off, when Dad was a baby. There were nine of them – she was the youngest, and his dad was the oldest.’

‘And when was that?’ Hannah crossed her fingers.

‘Hmm . . . during the war? End of the war?’

‘Really? And you say, “ran off”?’

‘That’s right.’

Hannah frowned. ‘Right. It’s just that I found a newspaper report about a Mabel Vyne, which made it sound as if she disappeared – as if the police were involved. So I’m curious that you say “ran off”.’

Mark winked. ‘Yeah, but that’s what they all said back then, didn’t they? Didn’t want a scandal. No, the way I always understood it, old Mabel ran off with one of those American GIs, from the station out near Sudbury. Not that you’d blame her. Florida or Ipswich? I know which I’d choose.’

Hannah stared. ‘She married an American?’

‘Well, I don’t know about married, but she certainly got knocked up by one. That was what my dad told me.’

A frisson of excitement ran through her. ‘Mabel was pregnant?’

‘Yes, it was all a bit of a scandal, I think. Stupid really, if you think what teenagers get up to these days. No, that was the story. That she got knocked up and did a runner with the GI, back to America. My Uncle Stan tried to find her once. He did our family tree in the Eighties, but he couldn’t find any record of her. Probably changed her name over there, he said.’

Hannah nodded. ‘Wow. Do you happen to know the name of the GI?’

‘No, sorry. Stan might, though. I’ll give him a ring.’

Hannah remembered the old green photo album from the 1970s. She pulled it out.

‘Actually, Mark, can I show you something? In case you spot a family resemblance.’

‘Ooh, this is her, is it?’ Mark put on his glasses and peered at the dark-haired woman, in her thirties, on the beach. He looked uncertain. ‘I don’t know. My gran’s side were dark, I suppose.’ Mark pushed his glasses back. ‘Tell you what: I’ve got a scanner on my printer. Why don’t I email it to Dad, see if he knows?’ He lifted the book, smiling. ‘This is fun, isn’t it – like that programme on telly. She wasn’t rich, was she, Auntie Mabel? We’re not coming into a fortune, are we?’

Hannah smiled as he walked off, grateful for his good humour.

This was becoming weirder and weirder.

If this was the right Mabel Vyne, how had she ended up living in Tornley Hall when everyone thought she was in America with a GI? And what was her relation to Elvie?

Mark brought the album back. ‘So where was this place you thought old Auntie Mabel might have been living?’

‘Oh, it’s by the coast,’ Hannah said, taking it back. ‘It’s a tiny hamlet, near Snadesdon, called Tornley. I think this woman lived at Tornley Hall, for a while at least.’

The smile slid from Mark’s face. ‘Tornley Hall?’

‘Why?’

He shouted to the man working in the back. ‘Danny, didn’t we do the plumbing out at Tornley, few years back? Big old house, out by Snadesdon?’

‘Yeah . . . that’s right.’ Danny laughed. ‘Mr Toffee, wasn’t it?’

Hannah stared. ‘You
are
joking.’

‘Ha!’ Mark grinned. ‘That’s right! I remember it because the old bloke wanted me to come out with Danny, even though I run the shop side of things now. Wanted two of us. He was a strange old bloke. Hung around, chatting, when we were working. Kept offering us toffees. Like we were kids. Mr Toffee, we called him.’

Hannah put the album back on the counter. ‘But that’s my house.’