The Hidden Girl (38 page)

At Will’s door she didn’t hesitate. She turned the handle and walked in.

Will was at the desk, replacing the receiver.

On the sofa was a woman she didn’t recognize. She had a fake bohemian look that Hannah hated. Long bleached hair. A maxidress with a whimsical cardigan. Boots. She was lying on Hannah’s parents’ couch, checking her mobile.

She and Will looked good together. Arty, cool. Laid-back.

Hannah’s heart broke in two.

‘Hi,’ Will said. She saw it now, in his eyes. The hard shell of deep brown that melted like chocolate when he was hurt. He could never hide it from her.

‘Hi.’

The woman raised her eyebrows at Will and stood up, with a languorous uncurling of her limbs. She was taller than Hannah and wore an expression of disdain. Hannah knew what she wanted.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ the blonde woman winked at Will, walking out.

To it .

Hannah stayed standing. ‘Have you seen the news?’

Anger simmered in his voice. ‘No.’

She looked at the familiar shape of the chest she could always fall into, the arms that always came round her, and the hair that brushed her cheek, and realized she didn’t know if they were hers any longer.

‘Well, you need to watch it. It’s about Tornley.’

A ripple of curiosity. ‘OK.’

She fought back tears. ‘Will, I’m sorry I made you move there, without asking if it’s what you wanted, but I did it because I wanted to have a baby for you. Because I couldn’t give you one. And I wanted to make it right.’

He picked up a pen and drummed it on the desk. ‘When did I ever say that’s what I wanted, Han? I didn’t ask you to do that. I just wanted things to be like they were.’

‘Yes, and I understand that, but I was panicking – we could have discussed it. But you won’t discuss things. You just sulk and walk off. You can’t bear me needing something from you, but I’m not your mum, Will. You left me out there on my own because of that,’ she said. ‘You didn’t believe me, because you were angry. And when you see the news, you need to think about why.’

Silence filled the room.

Will turned the pen upright and clicked it on and off, on the desk. She knew he wanted to ask what had happened, but couldn’t.

Hannah smelt the woman’s perfume in the room. A cloying, sexy scent.

She nodded towards the door. ‘She likes you.’

His voice was dry. ‘Don’t they always.’

Hannah took out a folded sheet from her bag. ‘Barbara says I can start again, and apply to adopt her by myself. So you need to decide what you want to do.’

She placed the photocopied picture of the little girl on his desk.

‘But if you want to do it with me, you and I have to be solid. No cracks. It’s not fair on her. What this little girl has been through is worse than you, Will, and she’d need us both to be strong. If you want to do this with me, then you need to really grow up.’

She opened the door and, although it made her heart break, she walked out.

The blonde woman sat in her studio at the end of the corridor, watching her, unsmiling.

Hannah arrived back at the clinic in Ipswich the next morning and was directed to Dr Barton’s office. She put down the bag of items that she’d brought, as clues to help the team now in charge of Elvie’s welfare piece her life together.

‘Hi. How is she?’ she asked, when Elvie’s psychologist bounded in with a cheery hello and shut the door. He was in his late fifties with thick grey hair and a beard. He wore a sleeveless cardigan over a shirt and tie, and held a sheaf of notes. The spark in his eyes told Hannah this was a thrilling moment in his career.

‘Well, she keeps surprising us!’ he laughed, taking a seat opposite Hannah.

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes.’ He opened his folder. ‘Now, first of all, thank you for your offer to help. Normally I’d be speaking to family, but clearly these are special circumstances. Now, can you tell me again: when we spoke on Tuesday, you said Elvie had learning difficulties? Someone had suggested a loss of oxygen at birth?’

‘That’s right – Tiggy.’ Hannah recalled her first meeting with the Mortrens. She’d thought a lot about this. Whose decision had it been to pretend that Elvie was their daughter? How much time had the Mortrens and the others spent trying to decide how to explain Elvie’s identity to the first newcomers to Tornley in eighty years? ‘But Tiggy’s one of the ones who’ve been arrested. So I wouldn’t trust that.’

‘OK.’ He sat back. ‘Well, we’ve done some tests, and Elvie is illiterate. And I suspect, if the domestic-servitude theory is correct, that would have been done on purpose. No knowledge, no escape. Hmm?’ Dr Barton placed his folder on the desk. ‘But, so far, no evidence of any birth-related learning difficulties, or a clinical disorder.’

Hannah watched, surprised. ‘Really?’

‘No. In fact, we’ve already seen a slight improvement in her language use, as the staff talk to her. I wanted to ask you – you thought she’d spent time with her mother and grandmother, as a child?’

‘Yes, I found photos of her grandmother Mabel up till the 1980s, and then apparently the police found more photo albums in the toilet . . .’

‘Where Elvie was hiding?’

‘Yes. One album had photos of her mother, C.V. They think C.V. might have died – or disappeared – around 2000. Here.’

She pulled out a photo of C.V. that she’d been allowed to bring. As in Olive’s oil painting, C.V. was different from Mabel and Elvie – much slighter of frame, with lighter, curly hair. Only the long jaw and the flat expression in her eyes were familiar.

Dr Barton scribbled on his notes. ‘Right. Well, yes, that might explain it. If Mabel and C.V. were around during the crucial developmental phases, Elvie would have developed normally, as far as attachments and language skills and socialization are concerned. Elvie mentioned a bedroom to one of the staff – is it possible she could have shared it with her grandmother and mother? Maybe one with flowers on the wall?’

A memory returned of the night Hannah put Elvie to bed in Tornley Hall.
No flowers . . .
Elvie had said in her strange, low voice. She hadn’t been talking about Tiggy’s smallholding. It was a reference to the flowers that Hannah had painted away, on the wall of the only home Elvie had ever known.

‘Yes! Wow, that makes sense. I mean, it’s pretty clever what she did – making that secret room after the Horseborrows died, in a place where nobody would notice. Even our surveyor missed it. But why does she appear so . . . well, slow?’

Dr Barton tapped his pen. ‘Well, environment is our best bet right now. Twenty-five years with very little stimulus and no education; nobody to speak to but Mabel and C.V. – and who knows what emotional state they were in? Depression, self-harm, suicidal thoughts perhaps. No children to play with. Then another fifteen years alone, surrounded by people who emotionally and physically abused her. Two-and-a-half years of that, possibly sleeping in the garage, and on the sitting-room floor, you thought?’

‘Yes,’ Hannah replied. ‘It was like Elvie couldn’t understand why we were there. She said it was her house. I think that’s why Dax and the others got spooked and decided to get rid of her. It was too risky that we’d find out. They told her to stay away from me, and not to speak, but she kept coming into the house.’

She looked at the closed folder of notes about Elvie.

‘I have to ask: were there any signs of . . .’

He shook his head. ‘Bruises, historical small bone fractures in her hands. No signs of sexual abuse.’

Hannah blew her cheeks out, relieved. ‘It’s bothering me that somebody must have got her mother, C.V., pregnant, though. Maybe Peter? Or one of the others?’

‘Well, it’s a grim thought, but if it was Peter, that would at least put Elvie in a position to contest the proceeds of Tornley Hall. Talking of which . . .’

‘Oh yes,’ Hannah opened her bag and took out the letters. ‘This is what I wanted to show you. I think Peter Horseborrow wrote these to the American GI who got Mabel pregnant with C.V. But he didn’t send them. And they’re written in gobbledygook. Do you have any idea what he might have been doing?’

Dr Barton took the faded reams of nursery rhymes, clearly fascinated. ‘Goodness! Well, he was clearly trying to control the situation, wasn’t he? Increasing his efforts to coerce poor Mabel, perhaps.’ The psychologist broke into the impression of a posh Peter talking to the pregnant teenager. “
He doesn’t answer the letters, dear, he doesn’t want you and the baby. Your family doesn’t want you, either. No, you’re better off with us.
”’

Hannah regarded the neat, copperplate writing of the arrogant, idle Peter Horseborrow and imagined him plotting to keep Mabel at Tornley Hall. How clever he must have thought himself, to find this vulnerable, working-class teenager. How perfect a plan to use her as free domestic help, to replace the servants that he and his lazy sister Olive could no longer afford, now that their father’s hard-earned estate had been lost.

The thought of Mabel’s family reminded her of the plumber, Mark Vyne. Mabel’s nephew.

‘Oh, and you met Mark Vyne?’

Dr Barton dragged his eyes from the letters. ‘Yes, I did. DNA results are due back next week.’

‘And he told you that Peter Horseborrow called him to Tornley Hall about ten years ago, on a pretext? I just wondered: why do you think Peter did that? Do you think he felt guilty?’

‘What – did he have a moment of conscience towards the end of his life?’ Dr Barton sat back and folded his arms. ‘Who knows. Perhaps Peter thought he’d been very clever. Perhaps he wanted to gloat. He’d not only managed to find one young woman to do his dirty work, but two more – born in Tornley – to carry on after Mabel. As you said, they almost bred the girls like farm animals.’

Hannah nodded. ‘I keep wondering how Peter met Mabel. Mark said his Uncle Stan thought she’d hitched a lift to Sudbury to find the GI on the day she went missing. Peter and Olive definitely had a car. I saw one in the photos. I keep imagining them pulling over on the road and finding her in tears, because the GI had told her to get lost, or had gone back to the States. And Mabel being too scared to go home, because her mother was so angry at her for getting pregnant.’

‘What – and they offer to take her home and look after her? Offer her free board and food, in return for a little domestic work till the baby is born?’ Dr Barton interlinked his fingers and pushed them behind his head. ‘Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? At what point does a bit of free help around the house become seventy years of group abuse by a whole farming community. And at what point does it become serious enough that they decide to let Mabel and C.V. die – or even bring about their demise – instead of calling a doctor and risk some busybody asking questions about who the women were, and what they were doing there.’

Hannah recalled, with a shudder of terror, her night in Samuel’s shack. ‘Samuel used the phrase “put down”. I believe they were going to get rid of me, and Elvie.’

Dr Barton sighed. ‘Well, they must have known that if you spilt the beans, they’d be charged over the deaths of Mabel and C.V., at the very least, to say nothing of coercing Elvie into free labour. I imagine they were panicking, and blaming each other. This type of group abuse can be incremental, of course. One person’s act is built upon another’s. The Horseborrows use a vulnerable teenager for free domestic help. The farmer next door gets suspicious, so they lend her to him to work during the harvest, to shut him up, and he enjoys the profit he gets from the free labour. Then the Mortrens move in, to start their flower business in the 1970s. They ask questions, and the girls are “lent” to them, too. If Mabel wants to leave Tornley with C.V., how does she do so? She’s illiterate, has no money, no way to communicate, no transport. Even if she could walk out of there, the Horseborrows tell her that she’s shamed her family and nobody wants her. She’ll end up on the streets. She’ll go to prison, for wasting police time searching for her. She can’t leave. Anyway she owes them now for all that food and accommodation, and there’s the baby, too. She’s better off at Tornley.’ He shook his head. ‘It really is astonishing. It could only happen in a closed community. Think about it. There are no outsiders to condemn the group behaviour. And it becomes worse. Mabel loses the will and confidence to leave. The abusive use of her labour becomes so entrenched within the community that nobody can remember who started it. When C.V. and later Elvie are born, it carries on.’

Hannah frowned. ‘But to cause a death – somebody must have been responsible for that. Surely one of them must have had less of a conscience than the others?’

Dr Barton nodded. ‘Quite possibly. It is certainly a serious development within the group.’

Hannah thought of Dax, and of those cold wolf-eyes. ‘I can guess who, too,’ she shuddered.

After her meeting with Dr Barton, Hannah visited Elvie. Elvie sat opposite a member of staff, who held up cards with pictures on. She regarded Hannah with the usual blank eyes.

She was clean and wore a bright-pink tracksuit, which the nurse said she’d chosen herself and would not be dissuaded from. Her black hair was brushed to the side, and on her feet she wore large, furry slippers.

‘Hi, Elvie,’ Hannah said, walking over. ‘You look lovely.’

Elvie smiled shyly.

Hannah took her big, rough hand, and Elvie let her. ‘Thank you for helping me the other night. You did a very brave thing.’

Elvie kept smiling.

The therapist kept her eyes trained on her. ‘Elvie’s been telling me one of the nursery rhymes her grandmother Mabel taught her and her mother, C.V.’

‘Wow, I’d like to hear that,’ Hannah said.

Elvie opened her mouth and started to speak. It was a shock to hear so many words come out in her deep, flat voice: