by Camilla Way
‘I know, I know. Sorry. It’s just … well, it’s a big day today, isn’t it?’ Viv turns back to the road ahead, marvelling once again at the recovery Cleo has made over the past eight months. Still, though, she can’t help but glance down at her daughter’s left hand, feeling the customary lurch of dismay that she knows won’t ever leave her.
The specialist had told them that, thanks to its severed nerves, Cleo’s hand would never regain full dexterity, but this news had been met with admirable equanimity by Cleo. An excellent psychotherapist has been helping her to recover from the mental impact of her ordeal, and the strength and resilience Cleo has shown makes Viv glow with pride. But it is, of course, the revelations about Stella that have been hardest for them both to overcome.
For many weeks after her escape from Jack, Cleo would slip into Viv’s bed at night, and the two of them would lie together in the darkness, talking, Viv stroking her daughter’s hair, trying to answer her questions, while still reeling from shock herself.
It was on one such night that Cleo had told her about the letters she’d found in Stella’s room.
‘They were from her mum and dad,’ Cleo said. ‘My great grandparents, I guess.’
‘What did they say?’ Viv asked, confused. So far as she was aware, they’d cut Stella off decades before.
‘They were really sad. The earliest ones were from nineteen sixty something and were begging her – Gran, I mean – to let them see Ruby. And there were others after you were born, pleading with her to let them see you too.’
Viv sat up in astonishment. ‘But Mum always said they never wanted to meet either of us.’
Cleo had nodded unhappily. ‘They said that Gran had to stop demanding money from them, that they wouldn’t be blackmailed into paying to see their own grandchildren.’
‘Jesus,’ Viv had been aghast, and then she said, ‘I wonder what caused the rift in the first place?
‘I don’t know. The early letters mentioned how she’d lied and stolen from them in the past, but it sounded as if they were willing to give her another chance for Ruby’s sake. I think Gran was only seventeen when Aunt Ruby was born, wasn’t she?’
‘That’s right.’
‘One letter described how they’d travelled down to Essex to try and persuade her to let them see Ruby, but there’d been a big scene and Ruby had been so upset that they’d decided to stay away for her sake.’
Cleo had fallen silent, resting her head on her mother’s shoulder, before continuing: ‘One of the last letters was so sad, pleading to be allowed to go to Ruby’s funeral.’ She’d looked at her mother. ‘They weren’t there, were they?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Viv said quietly. ‘I guess Stella forbade it.’
‘There’s worse though, Mum,’ Cleo went on. ‘Gran took you to see them once, after Ruby died. She wanted money, in exchange for …’
She’d trailed off and Viv had looked at her questioningly. ‘In exchange for what?’
‘For you,’ Cleo said. ‘Apparently Gran had planned to leave you with them, on condition they gave her enough money to start her life again somewhere else.’
Shock and hurt had blossomed in Viv’s chest. She remembered the day they’d gone to Shropshire, how she’d waited patiently at the gate with no idea of what Stella had been intending. Since learning the truth, she’s found herself mourning the grandparents she’d never known, the reason for their absence so different from the story Stella had spun over the years. She will never know what went on between the three of them, what Stella had done to cause the rift, but she takes comfort in the fact they’d chosen to leave their money to her in the end, that they’d always wished her well.
‘Do you think your gran knew you’d seen the letters?’ she asks Cleo.
Her daughter shrugs. ‘No, but I think she knew something was up. Once I’d read them, I found it hard to be normal with her. I guess I was treating her differently, being a bit off with her, and …’
‘And your Gran couldn’t cope with that,’ Viv finishes for her, remembering the way Stella had become so icy towards Cleo. Stella never could tolerate anything less than absolute admiration and devotion.
They drive on in silence for a while and Stella thinks about the last time she’d seen her mother. She had deliberated long and hard about whether to tell the police the truth about Ruby’s murder, but in the end it was a phone call from Carl that had made up her mind. He’d rung after seeing the news of Cleo’s return, to tell her that he’d succeeded in tracking down Declan Fairbanks’ last known address only to find out he’d died the year before. Morris of course was also long gone, and without those two key witnesses any case against her mother would inevitably fall apart. Stella was bound to deny it all, and Jack had already been found guilty of the crime decades before. Eventually, Viv had realized that the only way she could begin to get over what she’d learned was to remove Stella from her life completely.
The last thing she’d said to her mother was, ‘Stay away from us. I never want to hear from you again. If you try to make contact, I’ll go to the police. I’ll tell them what you did, and I will do everything I can to make sure you go to prison.’ And with those words, the love she’d felt for her mother, her fear of her, the control she’d had over her, shrank to nothing.
For her part, Stella had raised no objection. She’d closed the refuge down, sold the house and moved away, and Vivienne didn’t know or care where to.
The inquest into Jack’s death had been traumatic, but thankfully brief. The jury agreed that Viv had acted in self-defence to protect her family from the man who’d killed her sister and kidnapped her daughter. After all, he’d had a knife in his hand when he’d died, and Cleo’s finger was proof of how dangerous he was. Jack’s two brothers, now in their late fifties, had attended court to hear the verdict, and she had felt their eyes on her throughout. To her shame, she’d not been able to meet their gaze, knowing that their anger at Jack’s conviction thirty years before had been justified.
Afterwards, the press attention had been so fierce that for a while Viv and Cleo rented a house some distance from their own – though ironically the same newspapers that had accused her of drunken neglect when Cleo first disappeared now hailed her as a hero.
She will never truly untangle the myriad complexities of Stella, will never know how or why she became the person that she did. With the help of her own therapist she’s come to understand that Stella was most likely suffering from a personality disorder, one defined by a sense of grandiosity, extreme narcissism and a pathological lack of empathy for others. It had allowed her, through sheer force of personality, charisma and cleverness, to convince everyone she met that she was nothing short of the perfect mother. Or, that is, nearly everyone.
Margo, of course, had seen through Stella from the start. And as she drives, Viv recalls that chance encounter with her in a supermarket a decade ago, how confused she’d been when, instead of the shame and guilt she’d expected to see in the older woman’s eyes, it had been profound pity she’d seen there instead. Stella, jealous, threatened by their closeness, had expertly engineered Margo’s expulsion from the commune – and Viv, to her eternal shame, had let her.
As Viv and Cleo draw up outside a familiar terraced house, Viv swallows her regret and sounds the horn, both of them smiling when Samar appears at the door, carrying a large rucksack.
‘Everything OK?’ Viv asks, when he gets in.
‘Yep! I’ve dropped the keys off with the estate agent and the removal van has just left.’ He shrugs. ‘Guess this is it.’
The three of them gaze up at Samar’s top-floor flat, his home for the last fifteen years. Like Viv’s house on Albert Road, it had become too full of memories for him to remain there.
‘You ready?’ Viv asks him gently.
He turns to her and nods. ‘Absofuckinglutely.’
The three of them are silent as they make their way to East Dulwich, each of them lost in their own thoughts. Viv and Samar had had
the idea of moving in together a few months after she and Cleo had moved back to their house in Peckham. They’d been in Viv’s living room, talking over a bottle of wine. ‘I can hardly bear to be in the kitchen any more,’ she’d confessed. ‘I keep seeing him lying there …’
‘I know how you feel,’ Samar had admitted. ‘I hate being in my place, surrounded by memories of him. In fact, I’m thinking of selling up, making a fresh start somewhere new.’
That’s when they’d had the idea of renting a house together for a year or so, in a new area, not too far from the café or from Cleo’s school, but far enough away from their old lives to not be reminded constantly of Stella and Jack.
‘Whatever will Neil do without us?’ Viv remarked drily as they celebrated their plan. Amusing as it had been to observe him tying himself in knots to avoid her since she and Cleo had returned to Albert Road, it would be good not to have to risk seeing his weaselly face every time she stepped outside her door. She doubted she would ever forgive him for the things he’d said about her in the press.
She glances at Samar in the rear-view mirror and smiles. He’s looking better these days; there’s a lightness about him that she hasn’t seen for a long time. For months he’d avoided talking about Jack. Whenever Viv had steered the conversation in that direction, he’d deftly batted it away. ‘Don’t worry about me, it’s nothing compared to what you and Cleo have been through. I’m more concerned with how you are. Honestly, I’m fine.’
And he’d been such a huge source of support and comfort to the two of them that Viv hadn’t pushed him. Besides, she’d been too preoccupied with the fallout of Stella’s betrayal and Jack’s violent revenge.
Then, a couple of months ago, as they were eating dinner together one night, Samar had finally opened up.
‘How could I not see it?’ he’d said. ‘How could I have not known?’
‘Sweetheart, you can’t blame yourself,’ Viv had told him. ‘Nobody would have suspected!’
‘Looking back, there were so many signs that he was lying to me. He was never much into the physical side of things, but I’d put that down to the fact he’d said he’d only recently come out and was trying to adjust. We’d always meet at my place, but I never challenged him or asked about his background. I was just so grateful to have someone who seemed to like me. I’m so bloody pathetic!’
Viv had gone to him and put her arms around him. ‘Oh Sammy,’ she’d said. ‘You’re not. Of course you’re not.’
But he wouldn’t be comforted. ‘It’s all my fault,’ he’d said. ‘All of it. If I hadn’t been so desperate for a boyfriend, he’d never have had such easy access to Cleo. I was the one who let him into your lives.’
‘Sammy, he would have found another way,’ Viv told him. ‘Sooner or later he would have got to us. Cleo and I certainly don’t blame you, so you mustn’t either.’
Eventually Samar had dried his tears and said, ‘I’m giving Tinder a wide fucking berth from now on, that’s for sure.’
‘Jesus,’ Viv shook her head. ‘We really do have the absolute worst taste in men, don’t we?’ and they’d caught each other’s eye and laughed, slightly hysterically, for a very long time.
But despite her love life being the least of her concerns, Viv still thought of Alek occasionally. Even though she knew he’d had nothing to do with her daughter’s abduction, the hurt she felt about his disappearance and deception still cut deeply. Then, one night, she had been about to close her café when Alek had walked through the door. She’d been entirely speechless when she looked up to find him standing there.
‘Vivienne …’ he said. ‘Please—’
But Viv had cut him off. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Can I talk to you? Please, give me a chance to explain?’
She’d been on the verge of saying no, but instead she’d nodded curtly and indicated that he should take the seat across from her.
‘I know you must be very angry with me,’ he began.
‘Where were you? Where have you been?’
‘Vivienne—’
‘You knew that Cleo was missing. You knew how desperate I was to get hold of you, but you disappeared into thin air—’ She broke off, swiping away the angry tears that had sprung to her eyes.
‘Vivienne, I am so sorry. When you rang that night to tell me Cleo had disappeared, that the police were on their way over, I knew that they would be knocking on my door within hours – naturally they would want to interview me. If they had investigated me, they would—’
‘Realize your name isn’t Alek and you’re living here illegally?’ she’d finished for him.
He nodded. ‘I couldn’t take that risk. I knew if I was deported, I could end up being killed.’
‘Killed?’ Viv shook her head impatiently. ‘You said you wanted to explain, so go ahead. Why did you lie about who you are?’
‘My name is Edon Bequi,’ he told her. ‘Aleksander Petri was my good friend. We were at medical school together in Pristina.’ He paused, searching her face before he continued. ‘Kosovo, by the end of the war, was a dangerous, lawless place. The Albanian mafia was very powerful, Pristina had become the drug and people-trafficking centre of Europe. My wife and I were young, we were newly married, and we wanted to get out, to move to Greece where we had friends and could start a new life. But to do that, we needed money. Alek and I began stealing drugs from the hospital we worked at to sell to petty criminals, and it was OK at first. But it turned out they were mafia, and their bosses wanted more from us. First they wanted surgical equipment, then they wanted us to work for them in a medical capacity. At first we didn’t know why …’
As he trails off, Vivienne pales, remembering reading about the Albanian mafia, about an organ-harvesting racket that had operated out of Kosovo towards the end of the war. Surely he couldn’t mean that? ‘Oh Jesus …’ she murmurs.
‘I wanted to get out, but my friend Alek didn’t. He became too involved, though I’ll never know how far he got into it. I could tell that whatever he was doing for them he had got in way over his head. One night he asked me to meet him, he told me that he’d stolen a load of money from one of the gangsters and he was planning on leaving Kosovo with it. I told him he was mad, that it was too dangerous and he needed to give it back, but he wouldn’t listen. The next night he was shot. And then I made the worst decision of my life. I realized they would be after me next, so I went to his flat and I took the money and his passport and documents. Aleksander and I looked very alike, I hoped that I could pass as him. After that, my wife and I came here, to England.
‘Things were OK for a while. I was granted refugee status and allowed to continue working here in London. Then Elira was born. At first we were happy. But after a while my wife missed her family and friends, she missed Kosovo and wanted to go back. I told her, even after ten years, it was too risky for me to return. I would be killed – the gangsters would have worked out I took their money. Gradually we became estranged, we were both lonely, angry …’ he looks away, ‘… and then I had an affair with a colleague.’
‘Oh, Alek.’
‘My wife found out and was furious. She took our daughter back to Kosovo and said that if I followed them she would tell the gang leaders where I was, and she’d tell the British authorities that I was here illegally. So I had to stay. I’ve sent every penny I’ve earned to Kosovo to pay for my daughter. Elira believes that I deserted her to stay here with a woman, that I don’t love her, so every week I write to her to tell her how much I do.’
Viv stared at him, trying to process what he’d told her. ‘What are you going to do now?’ she said at last. ‘Are the police still searching for you? You’ll be deported, won’t you?’
He nodded. ‘I have decided to return to Kosovo. I want to see Elira, even if it is just once, and then I will leave. I have some friends in Greece, so perhaps I will go there for a while, at least until Elira turns eighteen and is old enough for me to explain things to her properly.’
Vivienne got up and began putting chairs on tables, too agitated to sit and look at him. ‘I really thought you had something to do with Cleo’s disappearance,’ she said. ‘You were acting so strangely that night.’
‘That evening, before I came to you, I tried again to reason with my wife, to persuade her to tell our daughter the truth, to let me talk to her. But she wouldn’t even consider it. Even though I send her all my wages every month for Elira, she will not forgive me for what I did. That night I was feeling very sad about my daughter and the sight of Cleo was too much. I’m so sorry for my behaviour, for complicating what was already so unbearable for you.’
The two of them considered each other in silence. As she gazed at him, Viv felt the stirrings of an old familiar longing, but determinedly she’d pushed them away. ‘I’m grateful that you persuaded Miranda to see me,’ she said at last. ‘But I don’t think I’ll ever forgive you for complicating the police search, for disappearing when you knew I was so desperate. I do hope things work out between you and your daughter, though, I really do.’
‘I am so sorry, Vivienne. I was very lucky to know you, and I hope that you will be happy.’ He raised his hand as though to touch her face and Vivienne hadn’t known whether she’d wanted him to or not, the same lonely part of her instinctively reaching for that same lonely part in him. But instead he got up from the table and left, the door scarcely making a sound as it closed shut behind him. She knew that she would never see him again.
The Saturday morning traffic creeps along beneath the cloudless August sky as the inhabitants of south-east London head out to enjoy the last days of summer. At last Viv turns the car into a pleasant tree-lined street on the edge of East Dulwich, draws up behind two idling removal vans and, switching off the engine, turns to smile at the others. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘here we are!’
The three of them pause to look out at their new home and after a few seconds they see a woman with cherry-red hair come into view, followed by a removal man carrying a large box.