The woman’s head started to shake even before Tayte had finished his enquiry. “I’m sorry,” she said, “So few records of privately run homes for unmarried mothers survive today. We don’t have anything here at all.”
Tayte’s shoulders slumped. He thought there might have been something.
“The main items we have that might be of interest to you,” the woman continued, “are for the Diocese of Leicester Board of Social Work - formerly the Leicester Diocesan Moral Welfare Association. It was established for young people in moral danger, such as unmarried mothers, and it became an adoption society in 1943, although that function ceased in 1980.”
“Of what religious denomination is the Diocese of Leicester?” Tayte asked, thinking there might still be some hope if the Diocese was Catholic.
“Anglican,” the woman said, killing that hope dead.
Tayte sighed. “I see. Well, thanks for your time.” He turned away and headed out.
“So that’s it?” Jonathan said as he caught up with him.
“I need a coffee,” Tayte said. “I saw a machine on the way through. I need to think.”
The coffee machine was in a small rest area close to the main reception desk. They stood with their drinks as they talked.
“If Mena went to Trinity House in 1945,” Tayte said. “Then as I see it there are only three ways that she left. Reason one - someone claimed her. Two - she died while she was there. Three - she was transferred, either in 1959 when the home closed or sometime before.”
“I think we’ve already ruled out option one,” Jonathan said. “If Margaret - perhaps being the only person who knew she was there - had claimed her, she would have brought Mena home again and I know that didn’t happen or Dad would have said.”
Tayte agreed. “And I’m pretty sure that we can rule out option two. If she’d died while at the home, I would have found a record in the local indexes. I’ve already checked them for Mena Lasseter and Fitch.”
“So you think she was transferred?”
“It seems the most likely scenario of the three and that raises two new questions. Where and when?”
“But isn’t there a fourth scenario?” Jonathan said. “She could have escaped.”
Tayte had considered that but he’d ruled it out for the simple reason that if Mena had escaped, she would have gone to Joan for her letters and pendant.
“No,” he said. “She didn’t escape.” He gazed thoughtfully out the window and watched the lunchtime traffic go by. “To find out where Mena was transferred,” he added, “I need to find records for a Catholic home whose records no longer exist.”
“Quite a conundrum,” Jonathan said.
Tayte drained his coffee back and tossed the paper cup into the waste bin. “I’d better drop you home,” he said. “I need to think my way around this and it’s not going to be much fun. Sometimes you just have to grind things out and I think this is one of those times.” He fished in his pocket for his locker key so he could reclaim his briefcase. As they headed for reception, he added, “I’ll call you as soon as I get a breakthrough.”
Tayte stepped outside with Jonathan and noticed that it was getting much colder, which he put down to the clear skies. The air numbed his nose and dried his throat and every breath seemed to freeze in front of him as he let it go. As they joined the pavement, slotting in with a few other people going about their business, Jonathan turned to him with a puzzled expression.
“I’ve been thinking about that photo you showed me earlier,” he said.
“Mel’s photo? Danny and Edward in Paris?”
“Yes, there’s something familiar about it that’s been bugging me all morning and I can’t seem to put my finger on it. Can I have another look?”
“Sure.”
Tayte slowed the pace and popped the clasp on his briefcase. With his free hand he rifled through the contents and pulled the image out.
“Here you go,” he said, handing it to Jonathan.
They were ambling now, Tayte with his briefcase tucked under his arm as Jonathan studied the image again, screwing up his face as he did so. Tayte watched him with eager eyes hoping for some new revelation, but none came. When they reached the car park entrance, Jonathan shook his head and handed the image back.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s not helping.”
“Maybe it’ll come to you if you stop thinking about it,” he offered. “It works for me.”
He balanced his briefcase on his knee and tried to slot the sheet of paper back inside, which quickly resulted in him hopping and stumbling and dropping the case. The contents spilled out across the pavement and Tayte cursed under his breath. Jonathan came to help him, but another man beat him to it. Tayte looked up as someone in a navy pinstripe suit squatted beside him.
“Madame Bovary,” the man said. He picked up the book and adjusted the glasses that were pinched to the bridge of his nose as he opened it. “It’s a little overdue,” he added.
“It’s not mine,” Tayte said.
“So I see,” the man mused, studying the inside cover. He opened the book at the page Tayte had marked with the nametape. “I’m partial to the classics myself. Poor old Charles, eh?”
“I haven’t finished it yet,” Tayte said, still putting all the papers back into his briefcase.
“Well you must finish it soon,” the man said. He closed the book and passed it to Tayte, holding on to it as he looked him in the eyes and added, “I have a fear of dying partway through a book - of never knowing the ending. It’s silly, I know, but it makes me a quick reader.”
“I’ll bet,” Tayte said. He offered him an awkward smile and the man released the book. “Well, thanks for your help,” he added. Then he turned, exchanged bemused glances with Jonathan and the pair of them headed into the car park.
Chapter Thirty-Six
By nine p.m. that evening, Tayte had a pile of room service trays filled with dirty crockery on the floor and not too many Hershey’s miniatures left in the emergency bag he’d been saving for his return flight home. The crockery was piling up because he had a ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door as he didn’t want anyone coming into the room to take the old trays away, distracting him any more than was necessary to bring them to him in the first place. The desk he’d been sitting at with his laptop all this time resembled a field of crop circles where his coffee cup had been filled and refilled and spilt so many times, but he paid no mind to any of it.
Grind it out. Grind it out.
He kept thinking that and saying it to himself whenever he lost the thread on his latest line of research, which was often. It was a familiar phrase that took him back to the long days and nights where he would shut himself away, trying in vain to research his own family history - the deep stuff. He wasn’t drinking this time, though. He needed a clear head and knew from painful experience that Jack Daniels wouldn’t help him to find what he was looking for.
So how do you find records for a home whose records no longer exist?
The obvious answer was that you couldn’t, so Tayte knew he had to find a way around the problem. First, he wanted to be sure that Mena went to Trinity House; the consent forms showed her mother’s intent to send her there, but it didn’t prove that Mena actually went. After that he wanted to know when she left and he knew she had to have by 1959 because that was when the home closed down. Most importantly, if Mena was at Trinity House, he wanted to know where she went from there.
From those questions, Tayte figured that if he could answer the last one first, he would in effect answer all of them together. That was his way around the problem of there being no surviving records for Trinity house, but after several hours of trawling the Internet, following every Mena, Philomena, Lasseter and Fitch result he could find, he concluded that working his way around the problem had been the easy part. His hair was already sticking up and out every which way through continually shoving his frustrated fingers through it. He did it again and then popped another Mr Goodba
r miniature into his mouth, having saved the best for last.
So where would everyone from a Catholic mother-and-baby home go when that home closed down?
Tayte must have asked himself that question ten times already. He was fixated with the idea that they would have been sent to another Catholic home. The Catholic Church was very tight knit, but in his experience it was also very guarded. He was beginning to suppose that might be the reason he couldn’t find anything.
What if Mena was transferred before it closed down?
He thought it was time to move on to another line of investigation because the mini bar had started calling to him and he knew he wouldn’t be able to ignore it if he didn’t get a breakthrough soon.
Why would she have been transferred?
The reasons were limited as he saw it. Either she was too unruly for the home to manage - in which case she would have been sent somewhere with more discipline and control - or she was physically or mentally ill. If she was ill she would have been sent to a hospital, maybe with a view to being returned, or maybe not if the home had closed down in the meantime. Either route presented many possibilities and further problems, but Tayte figured he had all night and all day tomorrow if it came to it.
Or the day after that.
It was just after eleven p.m. when Tayte thought he’d exhausted the direct approach and it had yielded nothing. With the advent of the World Wide Web and its exponential growth in the last decade, Tayte was more and more of the opinion that any information you were looking for was out there somewhere in one form or another. What was becoming all the more important was that you had to know what you were looking for or the data would drown you.
Tayte felt like he was drowning now.
He got up and made a fresh jug of coffee and when he sat down again he finished the last of his Hershey’s and turned his thoughts to the indirect approach. He couldn’t find Mena, but perhaps he could find someone who knew her. He started with a search for the Sisters of Enlightened Providence, but with no matching results he quickly moved on.
Running a general search for Trinity House was something Tayte had hoped to avoid because it was such a common name, but he had no choice. He began with the address but that was too specific and also returned no matches. When he Googled ‘Trinity House’ he found that there were almost one million results worldwide. He thought to narrow it down to the UK, but how could he know that the link he hoped to find wasn’t on a server in some other part of the world - a reference to the home, made by someone who now lived abroad?
“Gotta be thorough, JT,” he told himself.
He added Leicester to the search thinking that any reference to the home had to include at least its broad location, but there were still some two hundred thousand results. He sat back with a sigh, drank his coffee and refilled it from the jug, knowing that it was going to be a very long night.
Two hours later, he concluded that he had to try another approach again because after all that time it was clear that he hadn’t even scratched the surface. A few links had looked promising enough and had kept him going but they had subsequently led nowhere. There was just so much reading to do - scanning through the details.
The pain that was building in the centre of his eyes told him they were bloodshot. He rubbed them and yawned. Then he picked up the hotel phone and ordered a snack from the 24-hour room service menu to keep him going. Pushing on again, he added ‘Catholic’ to the search, having no idea whether one or more of the twenty thousand results would yield any reference to the Trinity House he was looking for. He scanned pages and pages of data. Then at around four a.m. he sat bolt upright up in his chair.
He was looking at a name that filled him with dread from all the stories he’d read about in recent years: Magdalene. He clicked the link and was presented with a website for survivors of the now infamous Magdalene asylums or laundries as they had later become known, which began in Dublin, Ireland, in 1765 and by the 20th century operated in countries throughout the world. He’d read that they were little more than labour camps and that many were operated like prisons to serve the local communities under the guise of rescuing fallen women, who could be sent there for little more reason than being thought too attractive to the opposite sex and therefore in ‘moral danger’. Right there and then Tayte hoped with all his heart that Mena had not ended her days in such a place.
The last laundry had closed as recently as 1996 following public scandal over the discovery of the remains of one hundred and fifty-five bodies three years earlier, when the Catholic Sisters of Our Lady of Charity sold one of their properties in north Dublin to developers in order to raise funds. Of all the exhumed remains only seventy-five deaths had been registered and of the eighty remaining, twenty-four could not even be sufficiently identified. It put Tayte in mind of the protestant-run, Bethany Home: another religious place of detention he’d heard of which had faced similar outrage in the 1970s, reminding him that such homes were not unique to the Catholic religion.
Tayte scrolled down, looking for the connection to Trinity House. He saw images of several women and began to read a little of each account - of the hidden attitudes and conditions that surely belonged to the Dark Ages and yet were as recent as the latter half of the twentieth century. When he saw the reference to Trinity House he leant in closer, hoping that it was the connection he was looking for, yet at the same time praying it was not.
“Audrey Marsh,” Tayte said under his breath.
He was looking at the image of a grey-haired woman he thought was in her mid to late seventies, noting that her entry had been added to the website a little over a year ago. He began to read through her account, which told the harsh and often brutal story of her life at a Magdalene laundry. Then when he came to the reference to Trinity House he paused. There it was. He read ‘Leicester’ and the year ‘1959’, which was the year Trinity House had closed down and Audrey Marsh - perhaps with all the other girls who were then in the care of the Sisters of Enlightened Providence - had been transferred to a Magdalene laundry. It made perfect sense. All Tayte wanted to know now was whether Mena had been transferred along with her.
He sat back and let out a long sigh. He’d been staring at his screen for so long now that the text had started to look fuzzy. Every now and then the words seemed to jiggle in front of him. There was a comments box at the bottom of the screen. He expanded it and saw several comments and responses, some as recent as a few months ago. They offered no further answers but every comment had been responded to, so he quickly registered with his email address and typed in a comment of his own, stating who he was and whom he was looking for, ending with the key question of whether Audrey knew Mena Fitch or had ever heard of her.
As he closed his eyes and laid his head on the desk - just for a minute, he thought - he hoped that Audrey Marsh was still monitoring the website and that she would get an email alert to notify her of his comments.
“Sometimes, you just have to grind it out,” he mumbled to himself - right before exhaustion overcame him and he fell asleep.
Some hours later, Tayte awoke with a start. He sat up and looked around the room like he didn’t know where he was for a second. Then as consciousness fully caught up with him and he saw his laptop on the desk in front of him, he noticed that he’d received a new email. It must have been the sound of its arrival that woke him. He sniffed and drew a deep breath, yawned and rubbed his neck and the side of his face that felt numb from being pressed against the desk for so long. He checked his watch as he opened the email. It was a little after eight a.m. Wednesday.
The email was a private message notification from the website he’d used to contact former Trinity House and Magdalene laundry intern, Audrey Marsh. He followed the link and read the message.
Hello, Mr Tayte,
Yes, there was someone called Fitch at Trinity House while I was there - although as I recall, she didn’t like being called Fitch by the Sisters. I don’t know why. I’d completely forgotten her
first name until I read your comments. My mother took me to the home in 1955 when I was sixteen and Mena was already there when I arrived. She was much older than me, or so she seemed at the time, and I never really knew her - I don’t think she had many friends. I remember her because she always used to talk when she wasn’t supposed to, even though she knew she would be beaten for it. There were only around 30 girls at the home, so it was easy to stand out.
Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.
Audrey.
“Beaten,” Tayte said under his breath. Audrey’s email was the proof he was looking for, but reading it had angered him. He checked the timestamp against Audrey’s message and noted that it was only five minutes old. He quickly hit the reply button and sent another message, asking whether Audrey knew what became of Mena. Had she been transferred with the rest of the girls when the home closed down? Was everyone transferred to Magdalene laundries? He sent it and sat tapping the desk while he waited for an answer. When none came he got up and set about making a fresh pot of coffee. He was in the bathroom washing his cup out when he heard the new message alert and raced back to his laptop.
Hello again, Mr Tayte,
Mena left the home a couple of years before the rest of us - sometime in 1957, I think. I believe she was sent to the ‘Borough’. All the girls called it that but I never knew what it meant. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific.
Audrey.
Tayte was glad to hear that Mena had at least avoided the Magdalene route that Audrey and so many other girls had suffered. But where had she gone?
“The Borough?” he mused.
He wondered what that was, concluding that he didn’t have much to go on, although he’d already considered the kind of places Mena would have been transferred to. He thought it had to be another Catholic home or a hospital. He opened another Web browser and typed, ‘the Borough’. Then he added, ‘Leicestershire’, thinking to start the search locally. There were half a million results. He added, ‘home’, which didn’t help. Then he tried ‘hospital’ which was worse, increasing the results to over a million and none of those on the first few pages were of any relevance; most being references to the Leicester borough council.
JT02 - To The Grave Page 21