The Lost Child (33 page)

Elaine shook her head. She had snatches of recall, but nothing concrete and it all added up to jumbled feelings of fear and panic rather than images. The only thing she could picture clearly was Ada’s pearl necklace.

‘I’ll keep it brief and spare your feelings.’ Fern said, her mouth twisting into a snide smile. ‘He tied you to a post in the stables with barbed wire. He had it wrapped round your neck. Then he tried to poison you with rhododendron leaves. When I found you he had a penknife and I reckon he would have cut you if I hadn’t scared him off, he was gouging the eyes out of that bloody dog you used to carry everywhere and you were screaming your head off.’

‘And you just left her, I mean, me there? Like that?’

‘Jesus no, do you think I’m that much of a frigging monster? I went and got Esther and that old woman, Ada.’

‘But you said you kept your mouth shut, that you didn’t tell anyone.’ Elaine was confused.

Fern had the grace to blush, a florid, blowsy puce. ‘Well I did after. When they came you were out of it, blood everywhere. The barbed wire was all the way into your neck and Esther had to go and get pliers to cut it off. We all thought you were dead. Ada was freaking out and when Esther got you free she checked your pulse and said you were a goner. I don’t know what they did then, they never told me.’ She said it as if it was an inconsequential detail.

‘And you never said a word? Not to Shirley, not to the police, not anyone?’

Fern didn’t say anything and refused to look at Elaine. Her silence seemed to stretch out into long, uncomfortable minutes. Nature abhors a vacuum and like her daughter Fern was compelled to fill the gap. ‘All right! She fucking paid me! Two hundred lousy fucking quid to keep my mouth shut. Happy now?’

Elaine stared at her, wide-eyed and incredulous, her mind working nineteen to the dozen, connecting all the dots. Eventually she spoke. ‘Exactly how long were you blackmailing Ada?’

Fern shrugged and looked mildly shamefaced. ‘Long enough. Put it this way, life on benefits isn’t much fun you know. You had it easy, we all did you a favour.’

Elaine’s shout drew the curious stares of several customers. ‘Had it easy? You left me for dead!’

‘Calm the fuck down! People are staring at us.’ Fern hissed. ‘Anyway, you didn’t frigging die did you?’

Elaine took several deep breaths and tried to regain some composure. She was gripping the edges of the table with both hands and felt as if she might snap the wooden plank at any second. ‘Excuse me if I’m finding all this a little hard to take in.’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘So what happened? I turned up alive and kicking and you decided to up the ante?’

‘Something like that. I figured what with him running for election I might get a bit more out of them, not exactly short of it are they? Turns out he wasn’t as easy to scare as Ada, and there was no money left if you can believe that! If you can’t get it one way, you get it another. I figured the papers would pay even more for the truth. Anyway, what’s it to you? I’m getting my comeuppance.’

Elaine peered at her and feigned indifference. ‘Oh I don’t know Fern, not much I suppose. Only that you making laughable blackmail attempts pushed that monster over the edge and nearly cost me and your daughter our lives. Hardly worth worrying about, really.’

Though she had fairly oozed sarcasm the whole effort was lost on Fern. ‘You lived didn’t you? At least you aren’t facing a prison sentence.’

Wasn’t she? Not all prisons had bars on the windows and locked doors. Elaine looked at her, weighed her up and tried to decide if it was plain old narcissism or outright sociopathy that made Fern Miller tick. Maybe it was just bog standard stupidity, given that her greed had outweighed her sense. Either way Elaine knew she was on a hiding to nothing. She stood to leave. ‘One more thing. Why did you give Brodie away to Shirley and why did you want her back?’

Fern seemed surprised by the question. ‘Might as well be totally honest while we’re at it, not going to save me now is it? I didn’t want a kid, and Shirley did. It was compensation for you I suppose. I felt I owed it to her, stupid really. And if you really want to know how low I’ll go I’ll tell you. I wanted her back so I could get the tenancy on Shirley’s flat, you can’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’

‘I hope,’ Elaine said, ‘that one day you’ll discover that there is a special kind of hell just for people like you. In fact you are probably already in it but too stupid to know.’ She turned around and started to walk away.

‘Fuck you Mandy Miller!’ Fern shouted.

Elaine just carried on walking. She had one more visit to make before she finally turned her back on the past.

*

Miriam seemed to have shrunk from the inside; her once plump flesh had started to sag away from her bones as if she was folding in on herself. She had developed a tremor, evidenced by the way the cup rattled in the saucer as she handed it to Elaine. Half filled boxes littered the room and, like Miriam, the cottage was fast becoming a shadow of its former self as all the life was sucked from it. ‘I can’t believe they’re making you move out, it seems so unfair after everything you’ve been through.’ Elaine said.

‘It was Esther’s cottage, not mine, and only grace and favour at that. Besides, the official receivers or whatever they call them aren’t exactly known for their sympathy. They’ve given me three months, but I’d rather go sooner than later.’ Miriam said with phlegmatic resignation. ‘I’m not sure I want to live with the memories now anyway.’

Elaine could see her point, things had not turned out well for anyone. ‘Where will you go?’

‘I’ve still got a few friends in the village. I’ll stay with Elsie Sutton for now. The vicar is trying to find me a nice flat in a sheltered housing scheme, but it takes time. I’ll be all right. It’s not the end of the world.’

‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

‘Awww, bless you love. The best thing you can do is put it all behind you and have a good life. And look after Brodie, she deserves better than what she got.’ Miriam looked as if she was about to cry.

‘I’ll do my best, I promise’ Elaine said. She leaned across and squeezed the old woman’s hand, though it felt like a paltry gesture under the circumstances.

They sipped their tea and endured a moment’s quiet.

‘I met up with Fern earlier.’ Elaine said, casually slipping it into the silence.

Miriam set her tea down on the side table and sighed. ‘You know I never did like that girl, she was always so devious. You have to wonder if some people are just born that way, or if life makes them that way. I mean, look at my family, there’s definitely a bad gene somewhere. I spent half my life wondering if I carried it, or if it was going to pop up somewhere. When I look back, Esther was always a cruel creature – even as a child.’

‘Yet you were so loyal to her, you cared for her. And was she all bad if she loved Alex so much? Everything she did was about protecting him.’

‘She was my sister, I didn’t think I had a choice. I come from a generation where you just do your Christian duty and don’t ask questions. As for Alex, I’ve been thinking about that and I keep coming back to the Ten Commandments – “thou shalt not covet”. That’s what she did, she coveted him and it can’t be right, it has to do some damage.’

Elaine was still assessing her own damage and had to agree.

‘I always knew he was a spoilt boy and he could be a spiteful little sod too at times. But he could be a charmer when he wanted to, and let’s face it, who was I to question things? They were the Hallows and I was just the paid help.’ Miriam said.

‘Esther was the paid help too.’

Miriam shook her head. ‘Oh no, she was more than that, much more. She was their crutch. They couldn’t have functioned without her. Let’s face it, the likes of Ada and Albert weren’t bred for hardship, without the likes of us they don’t function at all. Without their crutches they fall flat on their faces, and they spend their lives despising us for it. Look what happened to them after Esther got ill, cobbling by with a bit of foreign help and becoming the masters of their own destruction. When that Pavla went, it all came tumbling down like a house of cards.’

It was a pretty fair assessment as far as Elaine could see, people like the Hallows always needed someone else to hold them up, but she saw it less like a house of cards and more like a stack of dominoes, tip one and they all fell. ‘What do you think will happen to Ada and Alex now?’ she said absently, thinking out loud.

‘They’ll get their just deserts. They might think they are above the law, but it doesn’t mean it’s the truth. We all have to take the consequences of our actions one way or the other.’ Miriam said, as if she knew first-hand exactly what that meant.

‘Miriam, I have to ask. Did you know what happened to me, were you aware of what they did? I know you’ve told the police that you didn’t, but I’m asking you now and it’s important that I know.’

Miriam looked at her, eyes brimming with tears. She put her cup down and reached for Elaine’s hands, grasping both of them in her own. ‘If you knew what you mean to me, what Mandy meant to me, if you knew who you are to me – you would never have needed to ask me that question. The answer is no, if I had none of this would ever have happened. You and Brodie are the nearest things I have to grandchildren, you mean the world to me and I would lay down my life for you. No, I didn’t know and it’s the biggest regret of my life, and I have a few of those to make the comparison.’

Elaine looked into Miriam’s eyes and saw something of herself there, reflected back in the woman’s glistening tears. She believed her and they parted on good terms.

*

Before she made the long drive back to Bristol, Elaine walked to the churchyard and knelt down by Derry’s grave. Someone had recently put fresh flowers there, handpicked from the woods and standing haphazardly in an old jam jar. Elaine gave them a little extra water with her tears and blew two kisses for him as she stood to leave. One for the first life, one for the chance of a second.

Chapter Twenty

Jack Pearson closed his newspaper and set it down on the table. His wife passed him a cup of tea and said, ‘Well?’

Jack exhaled slowly, ‘It’s not going to trial. He’s been found unfit to plead.’ It was always disappointing when a judge found a defendant unfit to plead; it went against public interest and left everyone dissatisfied. Derry Tyler might have saved Elaine and Brodie, but he hadn’t done the public any favours by caving in Alex’s head with a rock. The incident had left Alex with serious physical deficits and Jack pondered the irony of the fact that Alex had ended up in much the same state as Esther; metaphorically, all dressed up with nowhere to go. Sometimes fate seemed to dictate its own form of justice.

‘And it’s taken them eighteen months to decide that?’ Mrs Pearson said with a huff of disgust. ‘I’m pretty sure any one of us could have told them the man was stark staring mad. So what happens now?’

Jack rubbed his eyes with fingers and thumb as if the action would wipe away the weariness he felt. ‘Section forty-one I should think. They’ll ship old Alex off to Broadmoor or some such and he won’t see the light of day again until the state sees fit, which will be never I hope. Not that he could achieve much now, unless he recovers. That bash on the head left him quite damaged.’

Mrs Pearson harrumphed. ‘Well, I suppose that’s something. If he’d stood trial and been sentenced there’d be a chance he’d come out one day, and who knows what he’d have done next?’ She shook her head in bemusement. ‘Those poor girls, and the police never connected it to him until all that at Hallow’s End.’

Jack felt like her words were some kind of indictment, he had been the police and he hadn’t made the connection. He would probably feel guilty forever over Mandy Miller, even though he couldn’t have known her disappearance was the result of a child’s game gone wrong. Too many people had lied, and lied well. If only one of them had told the truth he might have got to the bottom of it sooner. But then again, if they had been natural truth tellers there would have been no case in first place. Ah well,
c’est la vie
. ‘The police are not perfect Mary,’ he said, a little defensively. ‘Besides, that lot at Hallow’s End were pretty good at covering their tracks. I’m not sure if that makes them mad, or just plain bad.’

Mary poured herself a cup of tea, ‘Born bad if you ask me. Maybe the silver spoon was tainted. Which reminds me, whatever did happen to the old lady? It all seemed to go a bit quiet in the papers about her.’

‘I must admit I was a bit curious about that myself, so I did a bit of digging.’ He saw Mary roll her eyes; she never had accepted that just because he had retired he wasn’t dead. The machinations of the law and all it encompassed still drew his interest. ‘Apparently she was sectioned after the to-do at Hallow’s End, under the theory that no woman of eighty could possibly be in her right mind to pull a shotgun on someone. Elaine broke her shoulder you know, when she hit her with the gun. Who’d have thought that slip of a thing would have had that in her?’ The words were accompanied by a wistful shake of his head. For all that had gone before, he still missed Dan, Elaine and Brodie even though they were a motley crew. ‘Anyway, Ada’s dead now, died about a year ago of natural causes.’

Mary frowned, ‘Well, I know which place she ended up and I hope she’s nice and warm down there, evil old cow,’ she said.

Jack wasn’t so sure. ‘Was she evil? I don’t know. I always got the impression she was just out of her depth. I think she acted out of fear and confusion rather than evil. Everything had gone wrong and she blamed the only person she could see as the common denominator,’ he mused.

Mary let out a snort of derision, ‘You’re too bloody soft Jack Pearson. Life goes wrong for lots of people but they don’t go around trying to shoot people,’ she argued.

Jack thought she might be surprised by how many who did, but he didn’t say so. ‘Anyway, there was an interesting twist on what happened to the estate. It turned out that old Albert had it mortgaged up to the hilt, no doubt under pressure from Alex. It’s being turned into a hotel now.’