Forgive Me (47 page)

‘They didn’t trace either of them.
This girl is younger than you, only seventeen. Her name is Freya. They only found her
when they had a report of a young girl sleeping rough out on the fells. She was very
sick with a chest infection and malnutrition, and they took her to hospital. On being
questioned she said her mother had gone to Spain two years earlier and she hasn’t
heard from her since.’

Eva frowned. ‘She left a girl of
fifteen?’ she exclaimed. ‘My God, it sounds like Flora ought to have been
given a medal for taking me away from her! How could anyone leave a girl of that age and
go swanning off to Spain?’

‘It seems she left her in the care of
a friend who ran a bed and breakfast. Freya was already working there on Saturdays and
during school holidays, and she had a full-time job lined up in a bakery for when she
left school. Of course that doesn’t make it right to leave her, she was far too
young.’

‘Poor kid! Girls of that age can get
into serious trouble if they aren’t supervised,’ Eva exclaimed.

‘Quite so, but according to the
Carlisle police she’s never been in trouble with them. She wasn’t sleeping
rough for fun or because she got into bad company. She’d lost her job, because the
bakery went bust, and the so-called kindly friend of her mother’s at the bed and
breakfast threw her out when she hadn’t got the rent. Anyway, they are keeping her
in hospital until she is well again and can be found a new home.’

All at once Eva came out of the dazed state
she’d appeared to be in when they first arrived. ‘That’s absolutely
dreadful,’ she said, and her eyes filled up with tears. ‘She must have felt
very alone and frightened. Does she know about me?’

‘Only that someone of the right age to
be her sister has been making inquiries. She doesn’t know your name or address.
She did tell the police, though, that her father, and yours too, was Michael Borthwick,
a drayman for a local
brewery. He died of stomach cancer when Freya
was thirteen, but by all accounts he was a good father. He paid her mother maintenance,
he visited Freya regularly and took her on little holidays. He had no police
record.’

‘So we really are full
sisters?’

‘So Freya said, and the blood test
bears that out. The Carlisle police are redoubling their efforts to find her
mother.’

Eva didn’t respond to that. She just
sat there, looking at her hands in her lap, and appeared to have gone back to her
earlier dazed state. Knowing what she’d been through recently, Turner wondered if
everything was getting too much for her.

‘Are you alright, Eva?’ WPC Rose
ventured. ‘I’m sure this has been a great shock to you.’

Eva looked up at her concerned face.
‘Perhaps it would be as well if they never found her. There doesn’t appear
to be anything good about her.’

The policewoman was right about shock.
Patrick bringing round Flora’s statement had left her reeling. That same night,
and all day yesterday, she’d thought about nothing else. She’d told Phil
last night that she felt oddly comforted to know the whole truth, but that wasn’t
strictly true. Flora’s statement had been like opening Pandora’s box, and
the stuff that had come out was just too much to deal with.

Now to get a second shock – to learn that
she had a sister – had taken her a step too far. She felt shaky, frightened and very
vulnerable, and she knew she really needed time to digest what this meant to her, before
she said or did anything further.

Yet at the same time she felt she must tell
these two police officers now about Flora’s statement. She needed them to
understand why Flora took her, and to prove that Andrew had a real motive in trying to
kill her.

‘Phil, my boyfriend, said I was to wait
until he was with me before I showed you this,’ she said, and got up to fetch the
folder she’d put Flora’s statement in. She took out one of the photocopies
and handed it to Turner. ‘But under the circumstances, I think you need to see it
now.’

She explained carefully who had found it,
and where. And she confirmed it was Flora’s handwriting.

Turner took about ten minutes to read the
first few pages. Eva could see he was as affected by it as she and Patrick had been.

‘My goodness. This is something I
didn’t expect,’ he said, looking very troubled. ‘No wonder you
didn’t seem that surprised or even interested in our inquiries at the hospitals. I
will of course read it all thoroughly when I get back to the station, but there’s
far too much detail about taking the baby for it not to be true. This must have been
overwhelming for you?’

‘I seem to reel from one shock to
another these days.’ Eva shrugged. ‘Mostly I wish I’d never found the
diaries Phil told you about. I could’ve been happy in blissful ignorance. A
psychic up in Scotland gave me a weird warning about “waking the sleeping
serpent”, and I really wish I’d heeded that warning, however barmy that
sounds. Nothing good has come of me trying to solve the mysteries – even my brother and
sister have turned against me for claiming their father set the fire.’

She stopped for a moment, overcome with
emotion. The policewoman got up and put a comforting arm around her, urging her to sit
down and asking if she’d like a cup of tea.

‘A cup of tea won’t make this
any better,’ Eva said sharply. But she did sit down again. ‘But what might
help me is if you arrest Andrew Patterson.’

‘We’ve already explained we have
no evidence against him
to charge him with starting the fire at your
house,’ Turner said.

‘Just read on in that statement and
you will see that he knew all about Flora taking me. It was Flora who financed getting
the house in Cheltenham, and he used blackmail and physical abuse to keep her in line.
He drove her to kill herself too.’

Turner shook his head as if unsure of what
to say. ‘I will read it, Eva. And believe me, I have every sympathy with you. It
must be utterly devastating to discover such unpalatable truths and to realize the
people you trusted and believed in were not as you thought.’

‘Are you trying to tell me you
can’t arrest Andrew now?’ Eva asked, her voice shaking as she pointed to the
statement. ‘That proves his motive for trying to kill me.’

Turner looked abashed. ‘I’m
sorry to disappoint you, Eva,’ he said. ‘This statement could possibly be
used by the prosecution to show the man’s character if we had firm evidence to
prove he set the fire, but it has no other value in this case. Even then, the defence
could argue that Flora had made it all up. A self-confessed baby-snatcher would not be
considered a reliable witness alive. And as she’s dead, she can’t be
cross-examined.’

Eva felt as if he’d stuck a pin in her
balloon. ‘He drove Flora to kill herself, tried to kill me too – and he gets away
with it?’

Turner shrugged. ‘Unless some firm
evidence turns up, I’m afraid so,’ he said. ‘The police in Cheltenham
are still keeping an eye on him and making inquiries. We will pass this on to them too.
I know they do think Sophie lied, or was mistaken, when she said he was in bed when she
arrived home that night. She might have a change of heart – people do sometimes, when
they get a guilty conscience.’

‘So it all rests with Sophie to tell the
truth?’ Eva was incredulous. ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this.
I know it was Andrew who set the fire. By the time you’ve read the whole of that
statement you won’t have any doubt he was capable of it either. Get the police in
Cheltenham to talk to Sophie again. Give her a guilty conscience, for God’s sake,
before he tries to shut me up again!’

‘We’ll look at this statement
and try to see if it gives us another angle to bring him in for questioning,’
Turner said soothingly. ‘Now, speaking of guilty consciences!’ He put his
hand in his pocket and brought out an envelope. ‘I very nearly forgot this. We had
to open it of course, just to check the contents.’

Puzzled, Eva pulled the letter out of the
envelope and gasped when she saw it was from Myles.

‘Go on, it’s alright,’
Turner urged her.

Hesitating slightly, Eva started to
read.

Dear Eva,

I am writing to apologize for my appalling behaviour towards you. I can offer no
good excuse at all; you didn’t do anything to deserve it, and I am ashamed
of myself. I guess I didn’t see the light until I heard about the fire and
you being trapped in it. That was such a terrible thing that it made me see it
was so very wrong to keep on lying and saying I didn’t insult, hurt and
frighten you.

You may think this is a cynical attempt to get you to drop the charges against
me, but it isn’t. I have already changed my plea to guilty, as the police
will tell you, and I will accept whatever punishment the court deems
appropriate.

I really hope you have fully recovered now and that you can rebuild your house
and your life soon.

All my good wishes for your future,

Myles

‘Hum!’ She sniffed. ‘I
suppose someone told him I was in two minds about dropping the charges against
him!’

‘No, they didn’t,’ Turner
said. ‘We were told he was changing his plea to guilty some time before we got
this. I promise you, I hadn’t told anyone that you were considering dropping the
charges – because, quite honestly, I didn’t think you would. He just came into the
police station and asked for this to be passed on to you.’

‘He sounds sincere,’ Eva said
thoughtfully. ‘But then men like him always do. There’s no way I’m
going to decide right now, I need to think about it, and talk to Phil. Meanwhile, he can
sweat a bit longer with the court case hanging over him.’

Turner nodded. ‘I think that is a wise
decision. Now, what would you like to do about this sister of yours?’

Eva realized he wasn’t going to be
drawn back to the subject of Andrew, and she felt too weary to even try further.
‘She’s still in hospital in Carlisle?’

‘Yes, and I believe she’ll be
there for a few more days.’

Eva thought about it for a moment. ‘I
really don’t know. Freya and I might have a mother in common, but that’s
all. And by contacting her I could open up another can of worms.’

WPC Rose had said almost nothing all this
time. She reminded Eva of a bird, because she had small dark eyes which kept darting
from Eva to Turner.

‘I got the Carlisle police to send
down a photograph of her for you,’ she said. ‘It’s only a Polaroid,
and as it was taken in hospital she looks a bit gaunt. But we thought you might like to
see what she looks like.’ Rose reached into her tunic pocket and pulled it out.
‘We both think she’s very like you – her eyes are identical to
yours.’

Eva stared at the photograph.
‘We’ll leave it with you then,’
Turner said, as she
seemed to be transfixed by it. ‘Thank you for letting me see this statement.
I’ll be in touch again soon.’

Eva let them out and said her goodbyes.
Still holding the photograph, she went into the kitchen and just stood there studying
it.

Turner was right, Freya did look like her.
She was very thin, and her eyes dominated her face; they were the same blue and the same
shape as her own. Her nose looked the same too, though that could just be the angle of
the photograph, and her hair was the same light brown that Eva had been born with. It
made goosebumps come up all over her to see a younger version of herself. For as long as
she could remember she had been compared unfavourably to Sophie and Ben, and in some
strange way it was comforting to see her own features mirrored in this photograph.

Yet it was more than the physical
resemblance that spoke to her. There was sadness and resignation in Freya’s face
that said she’d learned long ago not to expect anything good to come to her. Eva
had felt that herself at the same age – never quite belonging, feeling second-rate.

She wondered too about their father, Michael
Borthwick. She had a mental picture of a big burly man wearing a leather apron, rolling
barrels. He was dead, Sue Carling was missing, and Eva didn’t think she wanted to
know anything more about either of them. But Freya was all alone and sick.

At two that same afternoon the Glasgow
train pulled out of King’s Cross Station with Eva settled in a window seat.

She felt compelled to visit Freya in
Carlisle. It might not be wise, but the more she’d looked at the picture of her
sister, the more she felt she must go. Her nerves were jangling, she’d had a
recurrence of coughing while on the tube, and she knew Phil wouldn’t approve. But
the alternative – to sit
at home looking at that sad, forlorn face of
a young girl with nothing and nobody in her life – was too grim to contemplate.

In an effort to calm her nerves and make the
train journey pass more quickly she opened her book,
The Thorn Birds
by Colleen
McCullough. It had come out years ago, but it wasn’t until she was in Scotland
that she had got around to buying it. She had only read a few pages before that copy
turned to ashes in the fire, so she’d bought another one from W. H. Smith before
boarding the train.

Books had always been her escape from
reality ever since she’d learned to read, and she soon found this one so
enthralling that she was barely aware the carriage was packed and the rain was pelting
down outside. She had a small overnight bag with her, and she intended to find a bed and
breakfast when she got to Carlisle. She’d telephoned the hospital to make sure
Freya was still there, and had also rung Phil’s company so they could tell him
where she was. She was afraid he’d be worried, if he rang home tonight and got no
reply.

It was only as the train got to Cumbria and
the sun came out that she put her book down and looked out of the window. The trees here
were already in full autumn colouring and it looked very beautiful, reminding her
poignantly of when she saw the same scenery before – on her way to Scotland, full of
hope she might find out who her father was.