by Susan Lewis
‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ a tall, short-haired woman in her fifties said in a foreign accent, ‘but my husband and I, we are walking on the footpath and we see a lamb standing in the stream. We cannot get to it, but I thought I should let you know.’
‘Thanks,’ Nate responded. ‘I’ll come and see to it,’ and leaving Kat to put his meal in the oven to keep warm, he followed the woman into the murky darkness.
Able to breathe now she knew the police hadn’t come calling with terrible news, Shelley turned to her father as he said, ‘Have you looked in her room?’
Slapping a hand to her head Shelley raced upstairs, certain now that Hanna had crept in without them noticing – it would have been just like her.
Finding the room empty, she wanted to scream.
‘Zoe,’ she cried, running back down to the kitchen. ‘Who’s Hanna been hanging around with lately? Do you know their names?’
Starting to look frightened, Zoe said, ‘She never tells me anything.’
Shelley grabbed the phone and began calling everyone they knew. Her parents and father-in-law did the same, while Kat and Zoe carried out a further search of the house and barns.
Fifteen minutes later Shelley was staring at her father, eyes wild with fear, not knowing what to do next. ‘I should have let her have a mobile phone,’ she said shakily.
‘She’s always going on about one,’ Zoe reminded them.
‘Do I call the police?’ Shelley asked, feeling sick. ‘Is that overreacting?’ Please say yes. Please tell me there’s no need to be this afraid.
‘I’ll do it,’ George said gently, and picking up the landline he connected to the local station.
He was asked so many questions that in the end he had to hand the phone to Shelley. She did her best, struggling to make herself think straight, to say, ‘No, she’s never run away from home before.’ ‘No, there haven’t been any arguments in the last few days, or none that stood out from the usual bickering.’ ‘Yes, I’ve contacted all her friends.’ ‘Yes, there could be others I don’t know about.’ ‘No, she doesn’t have a mobile phone.’ ‘No, she doesn’t take drugs?’ Drugs. She turned to Zoe.
Zoe threw out her hands as if to say, ‘Don’t ask me.’
‘No, I don’t think she’s pregnant. She doesn’t have a boyfriend.’ Her eyes were still on Zoe, begging for answers, but Zoe clearly didn’t know any more than she did.
Still more questions.
‘No, I haven’t checked to see if she’s taken anything with her,’ Shelley said.
At that her mother and Kat ran upstairs to find out.
They came back shaking their heads. ‘Everything seems to be there,’ her mother told her.
‘Nothing appears to have gone,’ Shelley told the officer at the end of the line. Oh God, she’s been taken. Someone’s got her. They’re holding her somewhere, doing things to her …
‘I’ve got all the details,’ the officer was saying, ‘but I’m afraid at this stage, given her age and how long it’s been …’
‘You have to find her!’ Shelley cried furiously. ‘I just told you, she’s not someone who runs away. She’s never done this before. I’m worried out of my mind …’
‘I understand, but you’ve already told me that her friends confirmed she was at school today, so she hasn’t been gone for more than twenty-four hours …
So what are you going to do? Just let her stay out all night? For God’s sake. She’s only fifteen … She’s not mature like some girls her age. She’s … She’s … Her father died,’ she choked desperately.
There was a pause. ‘How long ago?’ she was asked.
‘Six years, but I think …’
‘Mrs Raynor.’ The man’s voice was still kind, but firmer now. ‘I’m sorry this is happening, I really am. Teenagers are notoriously difficult, and they’re giving their families scares all the time, it’s like a national sport for some …’
‘She’s not like that.’ She could hear all parents in her shoes saying the same, and how did she know what Hanna was really like when they hadn’t communicated properly in months?
The officer said, ‘I’ll log your call and ask the beat guys to keep an eye out for her. If you haven’t heard from her by tomorrow morning then please call us again.’
Two days later a full-scale police search was under way. Hanna’s pale, serious face was all over the TV and newspapers, the house and farm were turned upside down, all her schoolfriends received visits, the local villages were subjected to door-to-door enquiries and just about everyone they knew was questioned.
Someone said they’d seen her on the notorious Temple Fields Estate, home to gangs and dropouts, but a search of the area and scrutiny of local CCTV proved fruitless.
Someone else claimed to have spotted her boarding a train at the station, but again surveillance cameras showed no sign of her.
Shelley was beside herself, unable to eat, sleep or think of anything else. Why isn’t Jack here? He’d know what to do, where to find her.
She’d never have left if he were here.
She blamed herself in ways that didn’t even make sense. She appeared on TV pleading with Hanna to come home; she joined in an inch-by-inch search of local fields; she went to church and prayed.
Zoe and Josh took to coming into her bed at night, as terrified as she was that something unspeakable had happened to their sister. They had nightmares that Shelley did her best to cope with, but it was mostly left to David and her parents to calm them down.
Two weeks and three days after Hanna had disappeared, the police rang Shelley during the early hours of a Thursday morning. So much terror flooded through her when she realized who was at the end of the line that she couldn’t speak or breathe. She was screaming inside, telling them to go away, that whoever the body belonged to it wasn’t Hanna’s. It couldn’t be. She wouldn’t let it …
‘… so I’ll put her on,’ she finally heard the officer saying.
Stunned, and shaking badly, Shelley held her breath as she waited.
‘Mum?’ Hanna’s voice was quiet and hoarse, and Shelley choked on so much relief that her words collided into each other. ‘Oh my God, are you all right?’ she spluttered. ‘I’ve been so worried. Are you hurt?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘I’ll come and get you …’
‘It’s OK, the police are going to bring me home.’
Shelley started to sob – and sob and sob. Hanna was coming home. The police were bringing her home.
‘MUM! DAD!’ she yelled, dashing outside into the farmyard. Dodgy came shooting out of the barn, barking frenziedly, as the lights went on in her parents’ cottage. She grabbed the dog’s muzzle and kissed him hard. ‘She’s coming home,’ she cried, almost falling over him. ‘Oh my God! Oh my God. She’s coming home,’ and sinking to her knees in the mud she gave thanks to the Almighty, the Universe, and even Jack, for she couldn’t help thinking that on some level he’d kept their girl safe and was now steering her back to where she belonged.
Less than an hour later, cleaned up and slightly calmed down, Shelley ran back into the farmyard as a police car drove in. She’d told just about everyone she knew by now that Hanna was on her way home, she’d even called Jemmie and Humphrey Bleasdale, who’d been in touch every day since Hanna’s disappearance, and who’d brought food and joined in the public search of the surrounding countryside.
Though she understood how eager the rest of the family was to see Hanna, they’d all agreed that Shelley should be the only one to welcome her at first. There was no knowing at this stage what frame of mind her daughter might be in, what sort of trauma she’d been through, or even where she’d been all this time, so they needed to tread carefully. Nevertheless, Shelley couldn’t hold back as Hanna got out of the car. She ran to her, and wrapped her in the tightest, most loving embrace she’d ever given in her life.
Hanna didn’t hug her back, nor did she try to break free. ‘Hello, Mum,’ she croaked.
�
�Thank God you’re home,’ Shelley murmured, over and over. ‘I’ve been so worried. Oh, Hanna. My baby.’ She drew back to look at her, needing to be sure she wasn’t dreaming. ‘Are you all right? You’re not hurt?’
Hanna shook her head, but she didn’t look at her mother, nor did she seem all right. Her hair was matted and filthy, her eyes were red and shadowed, and her clothes stank worse than the pigpens.
‘Come inside,’ Shelley urged. ‘Let’s get you a hot drink and put you in the bath.’
Hanna didn’t protest. She simply allowed her mother to take over while her grandparents thanked the female officer who’d brought her home, and went to boil the kettle.
Shelley led her up the stairs, and as though Hanna were still a small child she gently peeled away the foul clothes and hugged her thin, shivering body again.
It wasn’t until she was in the bath, thawing out and seeming to gain some colour, that Hanna finally said, ‘I’m sorry for what I’ve put you through, Mum. I didn’t mean to …’
‘We can talk about it when you’re feeling stronger,’ Shelley told her, somehow managing to hold back all the questions as her eyes searched her daughter’s body for any sign of abuse. There was none, apart from a small bruise on her shin and a few faint scratches on her fingers.
Hanna said, ‘There’s a lot to talk about.’ Her eyes finally met Shelley’s, bloodshot and haunted with tiredness, but there was a glow in their depths that reminded Shelley of Jack. ‘I’ve had this idea,’ she explained. ‘It’s completely brilliant and I think, no I know, that Dad would love it, and I reckon you will too. You just have to keep an open mind, OK?’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
VIVIENNE
Present Day
Vivienne twisted the cap of a small transparent tube back into place and watched a trickle of blue liquid merge with the saliva she’d just deposited inside. When it was done she looked at Michelle and their eyes sparkled, the way they had when they were small and up to no good.
‘I’ll send it off first thing,’ Michelle promised, taking the tube and dropping it into a package already addressed to a laboratory in Ireland. ‘This is so cool. I can’t wait to find out the results.’
Vivi’s nerves fluttered. Having decided to spare Gil – and herself – the ordeal of confronting her mother over her father, at least for the time being, she was now torn between the fascination of having her ancestry traced using her DNA, and the trepidation of what it might bring – if it brought anything at all. The website had asked for as much information on her family as she could provide, which wasn’t difficult on her mother’s side. On her father’s …
‘Six weeks is a long time to wait,’ she sighed. Time had a different meaning to her now. She wanted everything to happen right away, before it was too late, but had to accept she had no control. Reaching for her glass of iced tea, she said ‘I just can’t see how they’re going to find anything when I’ve given them next to nothing to go on.’
They were relaxing on the spacious deck of Michelle’s house on Westleigh Heights, where cosy wicker chairs and sofas were small islands between all the toys, magazines, kiddie shoes, compost sacks and huge urns of vibrant flowers.
‘The thing is,’ Michelle responded, tilting her face to the sun, ‘we don’t know the science of it, so we’ve got no idea how they go about it. So, we need to have faith – and in the meantime have you ransacked your mother’s bedroom yet to see if there are any old letters or photos hanging around, or something that might give us some sort of clue to work with?’
Vivienne had to smile. The idea of them as detectives kept reminding her of when they were young adventure-seekers trying to identify the source of treasures found on the beach, or attempting to discover a new secret pathway that might link their houses. This was before Vivi had also lived on the Heights. When she’d moved here with her mother and Gil they’d simply had to make a hundred and fourteen skips to reach each other’s front gates. ‘I did the ransacking years ago,’ she reminded Michelle, ‘but OK, I have looked again, and what I can tell you is that she still has the bronze sculpture all wrapped up in the bottom of a drawer. Do you remember how I used to think it was him?’
Michelle laughed. ‘I do, and it was a kind of romantic notion, thinking of him as a gangster-dancer, or I thought so at the time. I wonder why she keeps it hidden away. From what I recall it’s quite lovely. You’d think she’d want to display it somewhere, if only in her bedroom. Why don’t you ask if you can have it in your room?’
Vivi arched an eyebrow. ‘Because I’d have to admit I’d been snooping through her things,’ she pointed out, ‘and because I haven’t forgotten how she laid into me the last time I mentioned it.’ She sighed and drank more tea. ‘There’s definitely some sort of mystery surrounding it,’ she murmured, ‘but the chances of her telling me what it is are about as good as her telling me who my father actually is.’
Michelle looked thoughtful. ‘Which is why we keep connecting the two,’ she declared. ‘The sculpture and your father.’
It was true, Vivienne did feel there was a connection, though she could offer no good reason why. ‘Maybe she stole it,’ she ventured.
Michelle pondered this before shaking her head. ‘I reckon it was a gift to her from him, but that’s about as far as I can get with it, because it doesn’t answer why she won’t display it or tell you where it came from. She’s got more secrets than MI5, your mother, which actually makes her quite interesting in a wholly maddening sort of way.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Vivi muttered.
Glancing at her watch, Michelle stretched and got to her feet. ‘It’s time Ash was awake or he won’t sleep tonight,’ she said. ‘I’ll be right back.’
Resisting a check of her emails since there were rarely any these days, Vivi strolled over to the balustrade and rested her hands on the warm stone as she gazed out at the view. From here it was spectacular, especially on such a clear summer’s day. The sky over the bay was a perfect cerulean blue, with only a wisp of white cloud floating across the far horizon, and the mesmerizing rise and fall of the birds as they soared through the air and dived into the glittering mass of waves. She envied their freedom with a longing that seemed to burn; she even wondered how possible it would be for her to fly from the cliffs and look down on the coast in one of the hang-gliders that had just come into view.
She guessed not possible at all.
She inhaled deeply, felt nothing unusual in the region of her heart, no tightness in her lungs or stirrings of dizziness, and let the breath go. Bizarrely, in spite of two more shocks over the past couple of weeks, she’d been feeling less fatigued, even slightly more positive and engaged, so it seemed the recent change in her medication was working on one level, while the ICD reliably performed on another. She’d get used to the thumps, she’d read on the forums, comments written by those who also had the device. The shocks became less frightening over time, and if she was lucky she might go weeks, even months without experiencing one at all.
She wondered if she actually had that much time, or if a dreaded VAD was even now moving up the calendar towards her, with the end close behind. As though breaking away from the ominous, unseen advance she followed the course of a waterskier winding and speeding across the bay, and remembered the first time she’d been able to do that, taught by Gil. Her mother had been driving the boat, cheering her on, while Mark, also cheering, had impatiently waited his turn.
Something else she wouldn’t be doing again.
There were so many things, but what was the point of working herself into a state of useless frustration? It wouldn’t change anything; no amount of wishing she could be with Mark in Italy now, or skydiving from a plane in a surge of madness, or living it up in Monte Carlo with the GaLs was going to make it happen.
Earlier, she and Michelle had FaceTimed with Trudy and Shaz. It had been fun; they’d laughed a lot while catching up on each other’s news, though Vivienne hadn’t had much to report. They’d wanted to know
how she was, of course, and she knew they genuinely cared, but she’d simply said ‘fine’, and tried to move on. No one wanted to talk about her condition, least of all her.
Trudy, however, had asked if her ICD had gone off at all, and Michelle had told her that it had. ‘But she’s right as rain again within minutes,’ she’d added proudly. This was true, that was how it happened, a brutal kick in the chest out of nowhere, a small gasp or groan from her and maybe some nausea or faintness, but not much, and it was over. It shook her up mentally more than physically, but Trey the physiologist was still insisting that there was nothing for her to worry about at this stage. If that changed she’d be returned to hospital for more extensive checks. She couldn’t help but panic every time she thought about slipping away. But thankfully she didn’t have to torment herself with what that could lead to because Michelle had just returned.
‘Here she is,’ Michelle sang out to Ash as she carried him onto the deck.
Vivi turned and felt a rush of tenderness as thirteen-month-old Ash broke into a toothy grin and excitedly reached for her.
Once she was seated Michelle handed him over and Vivi buried her face into the heavenly baby smell of him, loving how sturdy and satisfying he felt in her arms and the way he seemed so thrilled to see her. He grabbed her cheeks and her hair, stuffed her fingers into his mouth to give them a good bite and let out a yell of pure joy for no apparent reason at all. Having been a baby who’d screamed for the first seven months of his life, he was now the happiest child, who loved to eat, play, laugh and be fussed, probably in that order, and hardly cried at all.
As Michelle relaxed back in her own chair a piercing little voice suddenly screamed out, ‘Mummy! We’re home. Where are you?’
‘Out here,’ Michelle called back. ‘There goes peace and quiet,’ she murmured to Vivi, and turned to watch as five-year-old Millie in red tutu and ballet pumps came clumsily pirouetting through the kitchen onto the deck.
‘Auntie Vivi,’ she cried ecstatically. ‘I didn’t know you were here. Did you see me?’