A Mother's Secret

by T J Stimson

  Lucas ushered Maddie into the hotel corridor and shut the door behind them. ‘You don’t even know if this woman is still alive,’ he said, in a low undertone so the children wouldn’t hear them. ‘Even if she is, how are you going to find her? She’s probably changed her name or married or moved away. It’s been more than forty years. Come on, Maddie. This is a fool’s errand.’

  ‘I can’t just sit here and do nothing,’ she said impatiently. ‘There has to be a reason my mother did what she did. Children aren’t born monsters! Something drove her to it. It can’t just have happened in a vacuum!’

  ‘I’m sure it didn’t, but do you really think this woman is going to give you answers, if by some miracle you do manage to find her?’ Lucas asked reasonably. ‘What kind of woman raises a child who does something like that?’

  ‘That’s just the point. I don’t know what kind of mother she was. And I need to, Lucas, I really need to. Otherwise …’ her voice broke suddenly, ‘otherwise how do I know I won’t end up the same?’

  ‘That’s not even a possibility,’ Lucas said, without a second’s doubt.

  ‘You don’t know that,’ she said thickly. ‘You can’t.’

  ‘I know you, and that’s enough.’

  ‘But I don’t, Lucas, don’t you see? I need to know where I came from. Where my mother came from. I need to know who I really am, what kind of genetic inheritance I really have, don’t you understand?’

  He paced back and forth in the hotel corridor. ‘Do you really believe this woman is going to want to help you?’

  ‘I’m not naive, Lucas. Children who grow up in stable, happy families don’t turn around and murder little girls.’ She swallowed. ‘Something terrible happened to Lydia, and her mother probably had a lot to do with it. I don’t expect the woman to suddenly sit down and confess her maternal shortcomings. But if I can talk to her, at least see where Lydia came from, what kind of life she had, maybe it’ll give me some answers. Some closure, at least.’

  ‘What if it turns out she was just an ordinary mother, no different from you?’ he said quietly. ‘What if Lydia was just born evil? What then?’

  ‘I don’t believe anyone is born evil, and nor do you.’

  He pulled her aside as an elderly couple made their way down the hotel corridor. ‘Are you absolutely sure about this?’

  ‘After everything that’s happened, I wouldn’t blame you for not wanting to be a part of it,’ she said. ‘But I don’t have a choice. I have to go.’

  ‘OK,’ he sighed. ‘I’ll take the children to stay with Lucy and Giles in the morning, if this is really what you want. He’s an ex-Para; no one’s going to get past him. I doubt the press will think to look for us at a client’s house.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m so sorry to put you through this—’

  ‘Don’t apologise, Maddie. None of this is your fault.’

  She knew she was hardly to blame for her mother’s sins, but she felt guilty nonetheless for dragging Lucas into this. ‘Maybe you should warn the hospital, in case they come after Candace,’ she said. ‘If they can’t find us, she’ll be an easy target.’

  ‘Sarah didn’t hurt Noah,’ Lucas said abruptly. ‘If that’s what this is all about. You do know that, Maddie, don’t you?’

  She stared at him, startled. She knew it couldn’t have been her mother, but how could he be so sure? ‘Lucas,’ she said slowly. ‘Have you spoken to Candace yet? About why she took those pills?’

  ‘She won’t talk about it. I’ve tried so many times to get inside her head, but I don’t think even she has a handle on why she finds life so difficult.’ He leaned back against the wall and stared at the ceiling. ‘That night, the night we lost our parents, I pulled her out of the fire,’ he said softly. ‘But I didn’t really save her. I’ve spent my whole life trying, but I don’t know now if I ever can.’

  Maddie hesitated. She didn’t want to fight with him again, not now, but she had to ask. ‘Lucas, there could be another reason she did this,’ she said carefully.

  He looked at her. ‘You still think she hurt Noah?’

  ‘Not deliberately.’

  He exhaled slowly. ‘I’ve thought it,’ he admitted. ‘Maybe. I don’t know anymore. But this isn’t the first time she’s done this, taken pills. She tried once before, when she was about nineteen, after she split up with her boyfriend. She went to therapy for years afterwards, but it didn’t stop the drinking.’ He rubbed his face wearily. ‘I don’t know why our parents’ death hit her so much harder than me. Maybe it’s because it was her nightlight that started the fire. It wasn’t her fault, obviously – she covered it with her blanket because she liked the glow. She was only four, she couldn’t have known what would happen. But she’s always blamed herself. And she was so young, she has no memory of our parents. She’s always felt she doesn’t belong anywhere, and nothing I do helps.’

  She wrapped her arms around him, reaching up to stroke his huge back. ‘Oh, Lucas. I didn’t know.’

  ‘I promised her I wouldn’t tell anyone.’ He hugged her hard. ‘I kept hoping that I could be her family, we could be. I thought we’d give her roots. But losing Noah seems to have churned everything up again.’

  ‘Lucas—’

  ‘I love you, Maddie,’ he said fiercely, burying his face in her hair. ‘I never stopped. You and the children, you’re all that matters to me. We nearly lost each other, and I don’t want to risk that happening again. If I have to choose between you and Candace, I choose you.’

  Now was the time to tell him the truth: she was racing two hundred and fifty miles north to Manchester not because she thought his sister had killed their baby, but because she was deathly afraid she had. It wasn’t Lydia she needed to exonerate, but herself. She needed her mother to be innocent, for there to have been a reason for what she’d done, because if her mother was innocent, then Maddie might be, too.

  Chapter 37

  Saturday 2.15 p.m.

  It took Maddie more than five hours to reach the outskirts of Manchester. She checked the satnav on her phone as she drove into the city, praying the battery wouldn’t die before she got to the Central Library. Thirty-two per cent. She should make it.

  Her certainty that she was doing the right thing had dimmed with every mile. Lucas was right: she was on a fool’s errand. The chances of tracking down Lydia’s mother after all this time were infinitesimally small. She had no idea what she’d do if she failed. Maybe she could find a social worker who’d known the family, friends, neighbours; anyone who’d met Lydia and might be willing to talk about her. But it was a long shot. Forty years after the event, there would be few adults alive who’d known Lydia as a child, and those who had would have spent the last four decades trying to forget her. This was a waste of time.

  But she was here now. She parked the car in an underground car park and walked to St Peter’s Square. She’d been to the library once before, when she was a student. It was an impressive building, with its domed rotunda and columned portico. Lucas had always admired it: he’d once told her it was loosely based on the Pantheon in Rome. But she didn’t have time to appreciate its architecture today. It was already after two, and the library shut at five.

  She made her way to the newspaper archives and narrowed down her search to the Manchester Evening News for late May 1976. Julia Taylor had disappeared on Tuesday May 25th. For the next four days, the frantic search for her had made front-page news.

  Maddie stared at the artist’s sketch of the tall, thin man with his arm in a sling whom Lydia had described as hanging around the Taylors’ back gate the day the little girl disappeared. He looked like a paedophile, with the sinister scar above his eyebrow and his wall eye and straggly grey moustache and chipped front tooth. No wonder people had believed Lydia’s story. There had been no reason to think the distraught eleven-year-old was lying. The police had asked people to contact them if they saw the thin man or the blue van with one door painted green that Lydia had said he was driving. For four days,
they’d scoured Manchester, running down false leads and hitting dead ends. And then, on Saturday, Julia’s broken body had been found buried beneath a pile of rubble in a derelict house just yards from the Taylors’ back garden.

  Maddie couldn’t bear it. She knew what it felt like to lose a child. But to lose one like this, knowing how your baby must have suffered, to imagine her last moments, terrified and alone, crying out for you, wondering why you didn’t come – how could any parent live with that knowledge?

  She read every edition of the Manchester Evening News from the 25th May onwards. She read about the arrest of Jimmy Resnick, a lowlife with a long criminal record, whose police mugshot bore a striking resemblance to the man Lydia had described. She saw the photographs of the hundreds of mourners who’d gathered to pay respects at Julia’s funeral, and learned about the £25,000 reward for any information leading to the conviction of her killer.

  And then she read of the arrest of the angelic-looking little girl who had been Julia’s babysitter and was now accused of her brutal murder. Even now, more than four decades on, in a world wearily familiar with acts of terror and cruelty, it still had the power to shock.

  She couldn’t take her eyes from Lydia’s grainy black-and-white photograph. It could easily have been Emily, except for her mother’s distinctive widow’s peak. This was what a real monster looked like, sweet-faced and innocent, not a pantomime villain like Jimmy Resnick.

  Except her mother had been far from innocent, that much was now clear. Lydia had put the Taylors through four days of indescribable agony before their daughter had been found. She’d described her own mother’s boyfriend and wept crocodile tears as she’d coolly sent the police off on a wild goose chase after the sinister thin man to save her skin. Those weren’t the panicked actions of an innocent little girl caught up in a tragic accident. They were the self-serving lies of a cold-blooded killer.

  Maddie’s heart ached by the time she reached coverage of the trial in October 1976. She no longer wanted to talk to Lydia’s mother. She’d seen and heard more than enough of Mae Slaughter to last her a lifetime. The woman had shamelessly sold her story to anyone willing to pay, with no regard for the Taylors’ grief, posing for photographs in plunging tops and short skirts, peroxide hair piled high on her head, clearly revelling in her daughter’s notoriety. Despite the brassy exterior, she was an exceptionally beautiful woman, and the newspapers loved her. According to Mae, Lydia had always been violent and uncontrollable. ‘She was born with the devil in her,’ Mae said, almost triumphantly. ‘I always knew she’d end bad.’

  When Lydia was sentenced to life behind bars at the end of her nine-day trial, Mae had given a self-pitying interview lamenting the cost of travelling to visit Lydia in jail and the ‘embarrassment’ her daughter had caused her. She didn’t spare a thought for the Taylors, who’d lost their child in the most unbearable way possible, or even for her daughter, whose life was also over before it had really begun. Maddie felt sick with the tragedy and waste of it all.

  A woman like Mae Slaughter wouldn’t have just disappeared from view, she realised. She’d have gone on milking her notoriety for as long as people were willing to pay for it. She must be dead, or she’d be popping up on Jeremy Kyle even now, lapping up another fifteen minutes of fame.

  On a sudden hunch, she searched for Jimmy Resnick, Mae’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, whom Lydia had used as her inspiration for the mythical thin man. And there it was. He and Mae had married a month after the trial, generating yet more newspaper headlines and no doubt getting paid handsomely for it. And it was Mae Resnick, not Mae Slaughter, who’d been found dead in 1997, having choked to death on her own vomit after a drug- and alcohol-fuelled weekend. Resnick himself had died while on remand for rape shortly afterwards, killed in a brawl with another inmate. They’d died as they’d lived – in the gutter, despised and unmourned.

  So that was it, then. The end of the line.

  A librarian passed through the stacks, quietly reminding everyone that the library shut in fifteen minutes. Maddie wearily rolled her shoulders. Once again, Lucas had been right. She should never have come. Even if Mae had still been alive, Maddie could see in that beautiful, spiteful face that she wouldn’t have given her any answers. Mae would have delighted in twisting the knife, rubbing salt into the wound. She was a monster. And so was her daughter, just as everyone had said.

  Or almost everyone. One person had tried to speak in Lydia’s defence, although the papers hadn’t run the story until after the trial was over. An ex-boyfriend, who’d lived with Mae and Lydia for several years. ‘My regiment was one of the first into Belsen in 1945,’ he’d told the interviewer. ‘I was only eighteen, but I’ve never forgotten the look I saw in the eyes of the children in the camp. Like they were dead already, only their bodies didn’t know it yet. That’s the same look I saw in Lydia’s eyes.’

  Maddie suddenly turned back to the newspapers, speed-reading as the librarian came back down the aisle towards her.

  ‘It’s after five,’ the librarian said, glancing pointedly up at the clock.

  ‘One more minute,’ Maddie pleaded.

  She’d seen it just five minutes ago. There.

  Frank Brzezina, that was his name.

  Chapter 38

  Sunday 9.55 a.m.

  Brzezina. It wasn’t exactly a common name; once she’d got back to the cheap hotel where she was spending the night and started searching for him online, he’d been easy to find. The surprise was that he was actually still alive.

  She was five minutes early, but the old man opened the front door straight away. He’d clearly only just finished his breakfast; he was wiping his mouth on a napkin as he came to the door, and the scent of bacon lingered on the air. ‘Sorry about the smell,’ he apologised, as he led her through to his sitting room. ‘My sister always swore the fry-ups would kill me, if driving trucks didn’t.’ He nodded towards a blurry black-and-white photograph of two teenagers on the mantelpiece. ‘Ruth never smoked, didn’t touch a drop of alcohol her whole life. Got breast cancer when she was thirty-four. Died eight months later. And here I am, ninety-two and still going strong.’

  Maddie returned his sad smile. He seemed like a respectable enough man. His bungalow was small but well kept, and he had the upright bearing of an old soldier. What had he been doing with a trampy woman like Mae? Try as she might, she couldn’t picture the two of them together.

  He gently shooed an elegant black cat off the dark green velour sofa and waved for her to sit down. ‘May I get you anything, Mrs Drummond? A cup of tea?’

  ‘No thank you. I’m fine.’

  The old man lowered himself into a claw-scratched armchair opposite her. ‘Well then. You’re doing some background research into the Lydia Slaughter case. That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.’

  She couldn’t quite meet his eye. When she’d phoned him and spun him a story about researching a book into violence and childhood trauma, she hadn’t given the lie a second thought. She’d just been relieved he’d agreed to see her, especially since she’d foolishly given her real name, though so far she didn’t think there had been anything about her in the newspapers and she doubted the old man went online. But now she was here, the deceit suddenly seemed shabby and dishonest.

  The black cat leaped onto the old man’s knees, kneading his trousers. He stroked it, and the cat arched its back and settled itself in his lap.

  ‘I appreciate you seeing me, sir—’

  ‘Please, call me Frank,’ the old man interrupted. ‘Sir makes me feel even older than I am, and Mr Brzezina is a bit of a mouthful, wouldn’t you say?’

  She smiled. ‘A bit.’

  ‘Polish. On my father’s side. My mother was Irish. Doesn’t get much more Catholic than that.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t.’ She hesitated, unsure where to start. She felt wrong-footed by Frank’s evident decency. Whatever had led his and Mae’s path to cross in the past, he didn’t deserve to have it raked over aga
in now, at his age. ‘It’s very kind of you to agree to talk to me, especially at such short notice.’

  ‘I’ve been waiting for someone like you to call me for forty years,’ Frank said unexpectedly. He leaned forward, unsettling the cat, which leaped indignantly to the floor. ‘What happened to that child was a bloody scandal! I said so at the time, but no one wanted to listen.’

  Maddie was taken aback by his sudden vehemence. He started to rub the flat of his hands back and forth against the arms of his chair, clearly agitated.

  ‘The way they treated her, trying her in an adult court, no attempt to understand what had driven her to do such a thing,’ he exclaimed. ‘Her defence team were a disgrace! Lydia was a victim, just as much as that poor little girl!’

  She hadn’t realised how much she’d needed him to say that until this moment. Her whole body went limp with relief. She’d been right to come here. She’d known there was more to it than the official story. ‘What do you mean, Frank?’ she asked keenly. ‘How was Lydia a victim?’

  ‘That mother of hers. Mae. The things she did to Lydia. Unspeakable things.’ He closed his eyes, as if to block out the images. ‘I knew she was no angel, but I had no idea. She used to lock the poor child in a cupboard for days at a time. No food, no water. And that wasn’t the half of it. That woman was a monster! Lydia was traumatised. In shock. What do they call it now?’

  ‘PTSD,’ Maddie said softly.

  He nodded. ‘Beatings, sexual abuse, horrific things you can’t imagine.’ His mouth trembled, his distress evident even after forty years. ‘She prostituted her own daughter. Her own child! Was it any wonder Lydia did what she did? She was so damaged, she didn’t know what she was doing!’