It takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the light. At first I don’t believe what I see in the orange glow of a coal fire and the cosiness of someone else’s private room. When I’m sure, when I know what I’m seeing is real and not a mirage of hope or paranoia, I pick up a garden rock and smash my way inside.
JULIA
The Land Rover carries us noisily along the lane, and at first I don’t hear my phone ringing. It’s Alex who alerts me to it. I pull over, fumbling to answer in time, but the phone slips from my hand into the footwell of the Land Rover. I miss the call but see it was Murray. My heart flips in my ribcage, making me feel sick. I kick aside the newspaper lying at my feet – a recent edition with a familiar headline scrunched and muddy.
I call him back. ‘Murray, what? It’s me. What did you want?’
Breathlessly, beautifully, precisely, my husband tells me that he has found our daughter. Flora is alive.
David’s house beckons to me across the countryside. From half a mile away, the flatness of the land shows that the property is flanked and lit up by at least half a dozen police cars. Redemption, at last. I sincerely hope that Ed is there to witness David’s good deed.
‘I’m coming, baby,’ I say with tears obscuring my view. Alex is asking a thousand questions that I can’t answer.
‘Who found Flora, Mum? Is she hurt? Did David get arrested again?’ He peers ahead at the pulsing blue lights.
‘No,’ I say. ‘He
found
Flora. That’s why she’s at his house, thank God. Won’t this thing go any faster?’ I have my foot digging down on the accelerator but still we chug along at thirty miles per hour. Eventually we push down the final narrow section of lane and I see my car parked haphazardly in a gateway, as if Murray dumped it in a hurry. Odd, I think, that he didn’t drive right up to David’s house.
I skid the Land Rover to a halt beside a police car and fling open the heavy door. ‘Hurry,’ I call to Alex as he unbuckles himself and runs up to my side. I grab his hand and suddenly we’re inside, shoving between startled officers, tearing from room to room.
‘Flora!’ I cry out. ‘Murray, where are you?’ I follow the sound of his voice and turn to the kitchen. Pushing past Ed, I skid to a stop just inside the room, and there, sitting on her daddy’s knee at the kitchen table, is Flora. My angel.
Nothing exists around me. I fall to the floor at Murray’s feet, pulling our daughter into my arms. I press as much of her body against me as I possibly can. Just to make sure she is real. Just to make sure this isn’t a dream.
Her hair covers my face as I press her head to my lips. Her skin feels soft against me and her little arms wrap around my neck. I whisper in her ear that I will never let her go. She can’t hear but I know she understands.
I’ve been on an adventure, she signs. My hands shake too much to sign a reply. I love you, Mummy, she says over and over with grubby fingers. I kiss each and every one of them – they taste so sweet – and I tell her that I love her too.
After a few more moments of greedily drinking in my daughter, I am able to communicate.We didn’t know where you were, I tell her. We were so scared. But David found you and that’s all that matters. I cast my eyes over her body, hardly daring to look for signs of harm.
‘No, Julia—’ Murray stands, but doesn’t get a chance to speak in response to my signing.
‘Thank God it turned out right for you.’ Ed butts in, awkwardly breaking into our reunion with an inappropriate voice.
‘Julia, it wasn’t David who found Flora.’ Murray joins his hands somewhere between our daughter and me. I hear him but I don’t understand him.
‘Well who did find her, then?’ It doesn’t sound like me talking. I try to convince myself that it doesn’t matter who discovered her, just that she’s OK. ‘I . . . I thought that David rescued her. That’s why you’re all here.’
‘No, Julia.’ He closes his eyes. ‘David
took
her.’ Murray reaches out for me as the blow hits the side of my head.
I can’t have heard him correctly. But when I watch Flora’s hands in front of my face, she signs, Mummy, don’t be cross. David didn’t hurt me. We went on a holiday. Alex couldn’t come.
I feel like I’m going to faint.
‘We’re going to need to speak to Flora while everything is still fresh in her mind,’ Ed says solemnly.
This can’t be true. I know the police have to get on with their business – Flora went missing after all – but that means acknowledging what they are saying; that David has done something . . . wrong.
‘Julia, Flora must be checked out medically.’ Ed stops. He stares at me, willing me to understand what he means. As Flora’s uncle, he can’t bear to think of what might have happened to her.
Not
David
, I think, or perhaps I whisper it, because the words shatter around me. He adored the children. We were good together. I loved him. Suddenly the present tense slips into the past. ‘David took Flora?’ Murray catches my brittle words as they leave my lips.
‘It’s going to be OK,’ he tells me. He pulls me close and it’s then that I know we’ve never really been apart.
‘We have to get to work on statements,’ Ed continues.
I sit on the floor with Flora nestled within each of my limbs. I can’t hold myself up any more. Then it occurs to me. ‘What about . . . where is . . .’ I just can’t think of it. I can’t allow the thought of what has happened – or indeed
why
it has happened – to have space in my head. ‘Where is David?’ I finally get out. Ed glances out of the kitchen door, perhaps so he doesn’t have to look me in the eye.
‘He’s being detained by my officers.’ He indicates beyond the hall, meaning David is still in the house.
Are you OK, Flora? Alex signs tentatively, as if she’s come back someone else entirely. He kisses her on the head but she bats him away. What happened to you? Alex asks, unfazed by her rejection.
Nothing, Flora replies, shaking her head so that her curls flick my face.
Did you run away? Did the bad man get you? Alex asks.
Flora shakes her head and simply refuses to reply.
Ed announces he wants the house cleared for the forensic teams to start work. He is weary; he wants to get home to Nadine; he wants to be an uncle, not a detective.
I pick myself up off the floor. Both here and wherever David took Flora, they will be looking for tiny traces of my daughter mixed up with bigger pieces of David. Cell by cell, they will reconstruct the last twenty-four hours, whether Flora is prepared to tell us what happened or not. I heave her against my hip and walk outside to the waiting ambulance. The night is a dazzling cocktail of flashing lights, uniforms and authority. Murray and I stand with our children in the cold, somehow lost in the unfamiliar landscape of police business.
Then my world falls silent as David is escorted out through the house. I stare at him, our connecting eyes freezing in the frantic scene around us. He is handcuffed and winged by two detectives, who lead him right past us – just like before. I’m not sure if it’s the bitter wind that ruffles my hair, or David’s wake. There are so many questions that I will never get to ask. He is ushered into the police car and driven away into the night, his eyes shining brilliant dots through the glass.
Flora straps her legs around my waist so tightly I can hardly breathe. Murray pulls Alex to his side, linking us all together. ‘Are you scared?’ I whisper to my husband.
‘Not any more,’ he replies as the police lights vanish completely.
‘Me neither,’ I reply.
MARY
I couldn’t sleep. That particular night, my dreams were filled with images of him and her together in the café. It was as if the last thirty years had never existed, as if Julia and Alex and Flora were fragile parts of a forgotten reality; as if the only person I’d ever known was David. Life was an illusion and it was up to me to decide which parts were real.
I’d tried to forget him; I’d packed him away in the depths of my mind, and for three decades I believed I’d succeeded in obliterating him from my life. I got on with being Julia’s mother, running the farm, and later the fostering. I was busy, I was active, I was doing something good for society, and that, in turn, helped me forget.
But if I’m honest, David was always there – in my thoughts, on my skin, inside my house, in my dreams. After my parents died, I got rid of the old radio and television set at the farm. I would see him in every male actor; hear his voice in radio plays. He had wrapped his genes around my daughter and then my grandchildren. In truth, he was with me every minute of those thirty years.
I kicked the blankets off me. The house was freezing yet I stood at the open bedroom window without shivering, staring out across the flat land. An unrelenting wind dragged horizontal rain over the fields. I glanced at the clock. Four thirty a.m. The rain was turning to snow.
I stared over the barn roof in the direction of David’s house. It was too far away to see, of course, but not so far away that I couldn’t feel the warmth of his breath on my neck as he slept. I’d overheard him talking to Julia about his impressive country home, remote yet close to the surgery. The area was as familiar as the lines on my hand, so identifying David’s house would be easy. It was the Grangers’ old place a little way up the river – a derelict farmhouse that had fallen into disrepair before an opportunist renovated it and sold it on.
Julia had been excited about having dinner there from the minute she was invited. I didn’t begrudge her that – it was what I’d been chasing, after all. Plus, she was keen to show the children David’s spacious home – perhaps one day theirs to roam. Julia was intent on slotting into David’s life where I had failed.
How could I stop her seeing her father, yet how could I tell her who he was? After all this time, she would hate me for not being honest with her. As a baby, she needed only me. There were no questions asked, no judgements made. The questions came when she started school. I’d already decided, virtually from the minute she was born, that Julia would never know about her father; she would never know what he had done, where she had come from, the pain he had caused. How can a mother tell her daughter she was the product of rape?
I hated lying to her. I hated that if I was honest, I would have to tell her how David was found not guilty, how I was accused of flaunting myself, of getting what I deserved. With David innocent, it went without saying that I must have been lying. Appropriate, then, that I have lied to my own daughter all her life.
Of course, once David was back on the scene, there was always the risk that he would tell Julia the truth. It was a chance I had to take. Having found out about my pregnancy after the court case, he would have easily deduced that Julia was his daughter. Her age, her looks, and being an only child were as good as a birth certificate. He knew exactly who she was. So what did he want?
‘I’m here for you, Mary,’ he’d said when he telephoned Northmire the same day I first saw him at the surgery. ‘And Julia.’ I hung up immediately. He stopped calling after a while, but not until Brenna promised to pass on a message that he wanted to help me. Too late for that, I replied silently.
The lie to my daughter had developed over thirty years; the clean-cut, hard-edged, no-nonsense con that prevented her from ever asking about her father held watertight. The more time that passed, the stronger the lie became. But with David in her life, it was just a matter of time before the dam burst. Me, I wasn’t going to be a part of it. The thick silt stirred up from the bottom of my mind got stuck in my throat; prevented me from talking; a safety valve about to blow.
The snow spread a silent blanket across the fields. Impulsively, I pulled some old clothes from my cupboard – a sweater, some torn trousers, my work boots – and got dressed. I went downstairs as quietly as I could. I avoided every loose and creaking floorboard and only opened the doors as far as necessary before the ancient hinges had a chance to creak. I unhooked my overcoat from the peg and shrugged it on as I stepped out into the flurries of snow.
In the yard, a newspaper fell from my coat pocket. I remember wedging it in there on my last walk back from the village shop. After that, they collected at the gate until Julia fetched them in. It seemed an age ago. I didn’t want to leave a trail, so I picked up the newspaper and took it with me. The cold air took my breath away.
Decades of a prison sentence I never deserved – the sentence
he
should have suffered – sent me out to the barn, marching across the courtyard as if I was setting forth into battle. I quietly opened the large double barn doors, remembering how Julia used to cling on and take a ride when she was a child. I sighed it all away.
The Land Rover only ever started fifty per cent of the time. ‘If it goes, then it’s a good omen,’ I whispered, climbing in. It smelled of straw and dogs. I tossed the newspaper on to the floor. I turned the key, which had almost frozen into the lock, and after a second’s sputtering it banged to life. I drove away from Northmire, praying that the rattling diesel engine wouldn’t wake anyone.
The house was smaller than I’d imagined. In fact, to me David still lived in his university room lined with books, smelling of cigarette smoke and Earl Grey tea. His property sat squarely behind a low fence at the end of a narrow lane to the east of the river. I let the engine die and rolled to a stop about a hundred yards away. I didn’t want him to hear me coming. I didn’t want him to plan excuses. I wanted it straight. I deserved that much. After all this time, I wanted to know
why
.
I got out of the Land Rover and walked through the bitter night. Something, perhaps a fox, scurried across the lane and disappeared into the hedge. I felt strangely calm as I approached David’s house. All the curtains were closed.
He would be sleeping. I would knock. He would answer. I would ask him why he did it. Everything would be resolved.