She gave him an intense stare, then looked away, avoiding his eyes.
‘What’s going on? Why so upset?’
‘Do I look upset?’
‘You look something. But until you tell me, I don’t know.’
‘It’s a long story.’
She put her tea down, got up, walked across the room and stood with her back to the wall, her arms folded across her chest, as if to protect herself. She looked intently at him as if considering whether to tell him. Seb sensed something catastrophic had happened. He waited for her to speak. The expression on her face reminded him of his mother on one of the occasions she’d become very upset −usually because of his father.
‘Nixie, you look distressed. I’m sorry. Is it my questions?’
‘No, not really. It’s not your fault.’
‘So tell me, tell me what it is. It’s okay. Whatever it is, it’s over.’
‘Look, I’ve only just met you, and I don’t know you.’
‘Well. You know more about me than I do you. Don’t you?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like I didn’t like my work and my father’s a bastard. That’s all pretty personal stuff.’
‘I guess so, but I feel ashamed.’
‘I’m intrigued but I’m not about to judge you. Please tell me what’s going on for you, because holding back is making it worse for you. Trust me.’
There was a long silence, then she said, ‘Okay. Not sure whether I can trust you but I will tell you… My mum got in trouble when she was young. She did something wrong. I won’t say what, but she got help. For a while she helped other women and she became a forensic psychotherapist. Recently she’s become involved with a research project. It’s about psychopathy in different occupations.’
‘What did she do that was so wrong?’
‘You really want to know?’
‘Yes, I do. I want to know the whole story.’
Avoiding his eyes, she blurted out, ‘She stole someone’s baby.’
Seb took a deep breath while it registered. Despite his shock, he had to know more. Keeping his voice well modulated, he said, ‘Stole a baby? From where?’
‘Don’t sound like that. It was ages ago. She’s changed. It was from a flat in Earl’s Court. She wasn’t in her right mind. She never harmed him.’
‘And…?’ She didn’t reply. He continued. ‘You say “him”. It was a boy then.’
‘Yes, she kept him for over two months. She ran off with him to a Scottish island but they tracked her down.’
The conversation in Starbucks after the demo was returning to him. She’d said she was conceived on a Scottish Island. It had stuck in his mind but he hadn’t known why. Now it was beginning to make sense.
‘What did the parents do?’
‘They worked in the City.’
‘I mean after the baby was returned?’
‘No idea, from what I gathered they were pretty unpleasant. They worked in finance; one was a trader… funnily enough. Are you okay? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘I’m fine.’ He stood up, he had to get out. ‘I have to be off. It’s been a long day.’
‘Why so fast? Has it put you off?’
‘No, no, it hasn’t. It all makes sense Weird. What your mother did, is not your fault.’
‘I sometimes wonder how the baby got on, and what he might be doing now.’
‘Well, he recovered. Look, I must go, Nixie. I really am tired.’
‘What about Sunday? Will I see you Sunday?’ She looked anxious.
‘I’ll be there.’
He glanced at Nixie. He had considered making a pass, but he couldn’t do that now. Not after what he’d just heard. He stared at her. She seemed to change in front of him. Her hair was a rich brown, shoulder length, thick and glossy. She had a half smile on her face. She was no longer Nixie. The person standing in front of him, was her mother. He felt as if he knew her. She was taking a step towards him, her arms outstretched. The walls were closing in on him. He felt more and more disorientated, as if he might pass out.
‘I have to go.’
Nixie put out her hand. He looked mindlessly at her hand and then her face. He left abruptly.
— 7 —
He was preoccupied as if he wasn’t part of everyday life, but existing in another time and place. Of his early life he knew little, other than what his mother, in a rare moment of intimacy, had told him. It had been the night before he was due to start prep school. He’d gone to bed early and been woken by his father bellowing at his mother.
He’d lain, unsuccessfully trying to get back to sleep. Eventually he’d crept out from his bedroom and, pressing his face between the balusters, had sat listening from the top of the stairs. The door had been left open to the lounge and he could hear everything; his father yelling, his mother crying. He was brutal, roaring at her to shut up and toughen up, but this caused her to cry even more until all he could hear was great, gasping sobs.
His father shouted, ‘You don’t get it, do you? He’s too close to you. Do you want a son like a big girl’s blouse?’
The phrase stuck with him. It had taken time before he understood it, but when he had, from that moment on he felt pure hatred for his father.
‘I don’t want him to go, Rupert. It’s cruel. Can’t you understand? When he’s not with me, it brings it all back – he was only two months old. Snatched. The agony of not knowing whether he was alive, of not being able to see him, of not being able to hold him in my arms. It was torture and I vowed then I would always have him near me.’
‘Shut up.’ There was a long silence.
‘Don’t make him go. Please. It’ll be torture for me.’
‘I said, shut up.’ His father had been silent. Then he heard him say, ‘Oh, grow up, woman,’ and he’d left the room, banging the door behind him.
When Seb had been sure he’d gone, he’d crept downstairs. He wanted to comfort her, put his arms round her. He’d told her he loved her, but that had made her cry even more, until eventually his father heard them, had come back into the room, and dragged him away. He’d sobbed as he was carried upstairs, but his father was unmoved. He pushed him into his bedroom and slammed the door behind him. He’d been seven years old then, and that was the first and last time he cried in front of his father. The next day, he was taken to prep school.
Several times he’d tried to get his mother to tell him more. He’d asked what she’d meant when she’d said ‘snatched’ and that he’d only been two months old, but she’d always clammed up. She said it was too upsetting, that his father had forbidden her to talk about it. She’d said what had happened was in the past and it was unhealthy wallowing in negative feelings and endlessly going over things.
But he hadn’t forgotten the row and the phrase ‘a big girl’s blouse’. It continued to haunt him. He hated it and because of that, he knew he had to eventually pull away from his mother. He began to see her through his father’s eyes. He began to associate her with being soft and feminine, qualities he came to despise and to see as weak.
He tried to win his father’s affection and attention by imitating him, but it hadn’t worked and as he got older, it dawned upon him that his father was indifferent to him. He was a bully and realising this made him critical of everything about him; his views, his politics, his attitudes, even the way he dressed and spoke. Something had been switched off inside himself. It was as if he’d grown a shell around himself, and the shell protected him from being hurt ever again. He felt nothing − other than that he despised his father.
Still he remained curious. He wanted to know about his early life and what his mother was referring to when she said that she didn’t know whether he was alive. He knew he couldn’t ask or confront her, because she wouldn’t answer. He’d tried and it hadn’t worked. Besides he didn’t want her
disintegrating into a sobbing wreck all over again. There had to be another way. If he had been snatched, it would have been reported.
Two weeks later, armed with the relevant dates, addresses, and using his real name, Albert Sebastian Melbury, Seb visited the Newspaper National Archives. Bertie, short for Albert, had been his first name. He’d been named after his great grandfather, but when he got to prep school, finding he was the object of ridicule, he’d refused to be known as Bertie. Instead, he insisted on being called Seb, the shortened version of his middle name, Sebastian. He planned to focus his research on the national newspapers of the time, when he was two months old. The national press of the time had been put on microfiche and everything he wanted to know was there.
He read slowly, starting with the Daily Telegraph. It had made the front page, with the headline, ‘Baby Snatched from Cot as Parents Sleep’. It described how in the early hours of a morning, someone, probably a woman, had crept up a fire escape running up outside a block of mansion flats in West London and entered one of the flats through an open window. It was believed she’d hidden behind the floor-length curtains in the sitting room, waited until the baby’s parents had gone to bed, and had then snatched him.
He read on. All the newspapers covered the developing story. That ‘someone’ was Flori, and she’d been helped by a friend called Rose. She’d taken him to a Scottish island and he’d been with her for two months before she was caught. A recording of a Crime Watch programme showed an appeal for further information. The clip showed an interview with his parents. He watched it and grimly noticed that whereas his mother was visibly distraught; his father seemed indifferent to her distress.
Nothing has changed, Seb thought. It brought home to him how totally alienated from his feelings his father was. But he felt the same. Reading about what had happened seemed to have little effect on him. He was empty of emotion, even when the interviewer revealed he’d been conceived via IVF. That was something he hadn’t known, but he didn’t feel any identification with himself as a tiny baby. It was as if this baby was a stranger and had nothing to do with him. He saw his parents’ distress as a charade, an act, a lie, a show for the world they’d created of themselves as the happy couple.
On his second visit, he came across a later article in the Saturday Guardian. It was about Rose, the woman’s accomplice, and written four years after he’d been snatched. She now worked as an anthropologist and had just returned from Northern Canada where, motivated by her friend’s tragic history, she’d researched Post-natal Depression among the Inuit. She had opened up to the journalist and described her relationship with Flori. They’d met when they’d worked at Harrods. Rose had initially found her fascinating, but now she recognised they’d been far too close.
‘Do you think there was some sexual attraction between the two of you?’ the journalist had asked.
‘No, not at all. It was more about us standing together against the world. We were like sisters, although we’d had totally different backgrounds. She always knew what she wanted, and she could make me laugh. I’d become too dependent on her, that was the problem.’
‘The psychiatrist’s report said you both shared the same delusions and desires. Did you agree with that?’
‘Not at the time, but now I do. He said we thought and behaved as if we were one. It’s a rare psychiatric condition known as “folie a deux”.’
‘So what happened then?’
‘We were banned from further contact with each other and Flori was given a compulsory treatment order. She had to attend sessions with a therapist.’
‘Have you seen her, since then?’
‘No. At first, being banned from seeing her was devastating, but in the long run, it was a good thing. I had to separate from her…’
‘And what about the baby?’
‘The baby was beautiful. She called him Owain. That wasn’t his real name. Flori told me she’d chosen it while she was in some kind of trance. She loved him. She really cared about him. When she took him, he had a little fat giraffe in his crib lying beside him and she always insisted that the giraffe should be kept for him.’
‘There was a lot of hostility from the public directed at her for what she did. She became a hate figure to many…’
‘Yes, but that wasn’t fair. They didn’t know her. She wasn’t like that. She used to read a poem to him, one she was very fond of, by Pablo Neruda. When she was forced to abandon Owain on Jura, she left the giraffe, the poem and a note with him. Did you know about that?’
‘It came out in Court.’
‘Well, she’d asked that they be kept for him. Whether that happened, I have no idea. But she’d told me she’d always love him.’
He turned away. He’d had enough, read enough. He had no conscious memory of her, of the island, of returning to his parents. He looked around the room. He was alone, isolated in the world with his thoughts. Fragments, images, incidents, like snapshots, invaded his mind. None of them made sense. He was slipping away. The feelings of claustrophobia were returning. Feelings he’d had when Nixie had told him about her mother. The walls were closing in on him. How and why had that happened? Was there some unknown force impelling the two of them to meet?
He stared at his hands as if they were a reminder he was real. Before meeting Nixie he would have thought the chances of ever coming across the woman who’d snatched him would be infinitesimal. Although theoretically possible, he would have thought it was improbable. Was it just bad luck then that he’d met the woman’s daughter? But the coincidence was so mind blowing, it had to mean something. The questions kept coming. He was on overdrive, trying to make some sort of sense of his life. Maybe it was a stitch-up? Someone who knew about his history and had organised his meeting Nixie? But what would be the motivation? He could ask Gimp, but he’d probably say life is full of bizarre coincidences, that he had a job to do, and investigating his own past was not part of it, or what he was paid for.
But whatever it did mean, he wanted to know more. More about his past, more about what had exactly happened, and more about his snatcher, Nixie’s mother. It was possible that his parents had kept those items Rose had referred to; the poem, and the giraffe. There was only one way to find out, and that was to search his parents’ house.
He’d use the breaking and entering techniques he’d been taught during his induction and in the meantime, he’d continue cultivating Nixie. It was now even more important. She was the link with his snatcher and she was a source of vital information for his work. He’d win her over. It was only a matter of time.
That’s what he had hoped, but weeks later it was obvious; his usual charm wasn’t working. She didn’t operate like the women he’d hung around with before. He could no longer flash his cash or show off his car, and it dawned upon him that, as far as these tactics went, his powers of influence were limited. This annoyed him, particularly as his previous, preferred way with women had been to ‘wine and dine’ them. There had to be some other way.
He consulted with Gimp, told him of his frustrations. Gimp reassured him, said he must be patient, and to bear in mind, ‘When one technique fails, it’s time to try another. Get involved in other ways. An opportunity will present itself soon enough.’
Gimp was right; he didn’t have to wait long. One Sunday, he was with Nixie at the climbing wall in Stoke Newington, when she mentioned she was going to Pembrokeshire.
‘Who are you going with?’ he’d asked.
‘A couple of climbing friends. We’re staying at my parents’ farmhouse in Caefai.’
‘Carfai, where’s that?’
‘Near St David’s.’
‘Sounds good. A spring holiday along the Welsh coast?’
‘Yes and no, it’s to get in some practice at Porth Clais, on the sea cliffs.’
‘Practice? What’s that about? What’s the plan?’
She laughed and said, �
��Well, wouldn’t you like to know?’
Her answer annoyed him, but it also made him suspicious. Why hadn’t she asked him? She knew he wanted to try sea-cliff climbing. Was she involved with some kind of project; one that involved climbing that she didn’t want him to know about?
It was time to change tactics. He’d make her jealous. He’d make it personal. As an undercover agent, he saw himself as representing the forces of law and order, fighting the saboteurs and those seeking to destroy the status quo. Lying in that context was legitimate and necessary. It justified his employment and it was necessary to preserve the stability of society.
Seen in this way, he could justify anything he did, but lying for his own purposes, even on a small scale, was to go into new territory. By now he knew Nixie well enough to know how to get under her skin and he was prepared to manipulate her and any situation if it suited him. ‘That’s strange,’ he said. ‘I was planning to visit St David’s the same week with a friend called Jane. She’s a member of UK Uncut. She’s not a climber, but she loves coasteering. She took it up in Cornwall and she’s keen to try the cliffs and waters off Pembrokeshire.’
Nixie’s eyes widened. ‘I’ve never tried coasteering. It doesn’t appeal. Too scary, throwing yourself off a cliff into deep water.’
‘Yes, it’s not for everyone. But she says it sharpens her reaction times and it’s good preparation for more risky operations as an activist. Have you ever come across her?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Maybe. Does she have blonde hair and live in Ealing?’
‘That’s her,’ he said. ‘Her hair’s long. She’s very pretty. Funny thing is, when I asked if she knew you, she said she didn’t, but she said she’d like to meet you.’ He laughed as he said this.
Nixie digested this piece of information then, looking closely at Seb, she said, ‘So where will you stay?’
‘In a tent, not sure where. Any ideas?’
‘There’s loads of camping sites between Newgale and St David’s.’ She looked at him quizzically. ‘How well do you know her?’
Truth and Lies Page 8