Stolen Child

by Laura Elliot

  Over Danny’s shoulder she sees a sweep of headlights in the distance, a blue light revolving.

  ‘Fucking cops,’ says Danny, and hurries her back to his car.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she shouts.

  ‘Who cares?’ he yells. ‘Watch this panther go.’ The Boxster surges forward and slaps her against the seat, swerves her to one side when he turns corners.

  ‘I want to go back, Danny,’ she shouts above the music.

  ‘Where to?’ he shouts back. ‘You don’t belong anywhere.’

  ‘You bastard!’ She screams at him but he laughs and presses harder on the accelerator.

  ‘Slow down, Danny.’ She’s frightened now. The car sweeps between the trees. Branches whip against the windows as Danny turns this way and that, seeking a gate that will lead him from the park. The headlights frame a deer as it leaps from the darkness and bounds into their path.

  ‘Fuck!’ Danny tries to straighten the wheel but the car skids sleekly towards an embankment. She hears a thump, as if someone has smacked the back of her head with a hammer, and she is suspended for an instant in midair. The car settles back on the road with a gentle bounce that turns into a grinding crunch. Danny, scared and howling, holds the steering wheel so tightly that the guard who opens the door has to prise his fingers loose.

  ‘Are you determined to make an intolerable situation even more intolerable?’ demands her father when he arrives in A&E. ‘What will you do next? Hack out my heart?’

  She can see by his face that he wants to embrace her and shake her at the same time. But he can do neither. Her leg is in a cast, hanging from a pulley and her head is still encased in a block. Danny has a broken nose. Tough about the Boxster. Not much market value on scrap metal.

  ‘I won’t let you go,’ she whispers so that none of the others, her so-called foster mother with her concerned expression, and her social worker, who is really her jailer, can hear. ‘I can’t accept the truth.’

  ‘The truth?’ He speaks more quietly. ‘I wish I knew what the truth meant. We’ve all been living a lie for fifteen years but that doesn’t make what we had any less real or meaningful. I will always love you as my daughter. No matter what happens, nothing can change that.’

  ‘You could go to jail.’ The thought terrifies her but facing it is easier than holding it back.

  ‘I have a good defence team. The most important thing I need right now is for you to stay safe.’

  ‘Do you want me to meet them?’

  ‘You won’t hurt my feelings if you do.’

  He is lying, of course. She loves him more than ever. He’s right about that never changing. Not on this side of the earth. But with her mother, Susanne Dowling, on the other side, so many things are clear now. Her possessiveness, smothering Joy. Her sudden rages when Joy refused to do things her way. Had she ever loved Joy? Was love possible when it was haunted by a deed too dreadful to confront?

  Patricia has released a statement to the media, telling them that Joy’s injuries are minor and asking for privacy. At last Joy is moved to a ward with four beds. With everyone swirling around her and the injections, it’s difficult to remember who’s coming and going. She awakens once and there is someone standing by her bed. She’s like a ghost, pale face, trembling hands. She touches Joy’s forehead. Her fingers are cool and soothing.

  ‘Sleep tight, my darling child,’ she whispers.

  Joy floats on the sound, swaying in a rainbow boat and everything is wonderful. Then the pain comes again and when she opens her eyes she knows she was dreaming because no one is there – and how could Clare Frazier possibly have known where to find her?

  Dear Joy,

  I cried for ages when I got your mail. It’s so cool that you’ve decided to keep in touch. But the crash! You could have been killed! My aunt is terribly upset. We all are. It’s a relief to know you only have a broken leg. I know that’s awful but you will get better. I broke my arm when I was ten and once I got the cast off it healed real fast.

  You asked me to tell you about my family. There’s five of us, two cats and a dog. The other animals are twins but I’m forced to call them brothers. My dad’s a lawyer and my mum works in a health food shop. She believes brown rice and soya will save the world so I eat my Big Macs in a dark cave. My gran drinks gin and pretends not to, and worries all the time about my granddad’s heart. It’s weird, ‘cause she’s the one with the pacemaker. He’s nice and gives us chocolates on the sly. More visits to the dark cave!!

  Aunt Carla lives by herself in an apartment and ghostwrites books. We thought she was going to get married in June but that’s over. Her fiancé was nice but he’s one of those guys who only notices children if he falls over them. Uncle Robert lives in Oz but he’s still here. I guess he’ll go back soon. I wish they were still married. But they’re not and Carla says that’s just the way the dice falls.

  Your taste in music is cool. I also adore Coldplay, Snow Patrol and Kings of Leon. My favourite girl band is Sugababes. The twins have a band. Imagine knives on a draining board – that’s sweet music compared to the noise they make.

  Gotta go now. Time for Quorn on the cob. Yuk.

  Stay cool.

  Jessica.

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Carla

  The restaurant Robert had chosen was intimately lit and fragrant with promise. Sheen’s on the Green, where they had first met. Carla recognised the danger signals, his hand resting on hers for an instant longer than necessary, his eyes leading her back to other occasions, forcing her to remember…A dangerous business, straying into past territory.

  ‘A nightcap?’ he asked when he pulled up outside her apartment.

  ‘Why not?’ She was beyond caring, weary of it all: the waiting and anticipation, the hopes dashed.

  She poured two brandies into glasses and sat down beside him. He lifted her hand and stroked her bare ring finger. ‘He’s a fool to let you go.’

  ‘He didn’t want to share me with my daughter.’

  ‘An arrogant fool.’

  ‘Will Sharon share you with her?’

  ‘She has no other option. I hope to bring Isobel to Melbourne for a holiday in the summer. I’d love you to come as well.’

  ‘Somehow, I think that would be stretching Sharon’s tolerance to breaking point.’

  ‘This whole business had been tougher than I thought,’ admitted Robert, who had been able to extend the date for his departure by an extra week when his son’s tonsillectomy was postponed. ‘I’d stay on indefinitely only for Sharon and the boys. I want to be there when Damian comes to after his operation. But that means I’m walking out on you and Isobel. Why won’t she accept the truth and agree to meet us? Why?’

  ‘You heard what Patricia said. Our daughter is terrified. Once she meets us, she can’t go back.’

  ‘But we can go back…at least for one night.’ Robert slid his arm around her shoulders.

  ‘Stop it, Robert. It’s not fair on Sharon or your sons.’

  ‘It’s crazy…but I still feel as if we’re married.’

  ‘Considering you’ve been married to Sharon for far longer than you were married to me, I’d say that’s just your imagination working overtime.’

  ‘I wish it was, Carla.’ He stood up and poured another brandy. ‘I’ll take a taxi back to Raine’s…unless…’

  ‘No, Robert.’

  He sank heavily back into the sofa. ‘I hope to Christ that bastard is put away for life.’

  ‘You think he’ll be found guilty?’

  ‘How can it be otherwise? The case is cut and dried.’

  ‘But he was working on an oil rig when she was born—’

  ‘Jesus, Carla, what is this?’ Robert demanded. ‘He stole our daughter. Give me one rational explanation why you think he’s innocent of the crime that destroyed us…our relationship, the future we could have shared with our child…our children?’

  ‘I’ve met him, Robert. I’ve seen how he is with Joy…I sobel. S
usanne Dowling faked the latter stages of her pregnancy. The first scans are genuine, which means there was a baby until she miscarried. I’m convinced he genuinely believed Isobel was his daughter. But it doesn’t matter what I think, Robert. A jury will decide his guilt or innocence.’

  ‘Since when did you make this huge leap of faith?’ He folded his arms, his face hardening. She imagined him cross-examining a suspect, his blank yet demanding stare. ‘Have you any idea how defensive you become every time his name is mentioned? I’m beginning to wonder if you’re in love with him.’

  His words ran like an electric shock through her. ‘That’s ridiculous. Just because I believe he’s innocent…how can you say such nonsense?’

  ‘I once filled your eyes, Carla. No one else knows you the way I do. Tread carefully. You’re walking a dangerous path.’

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Joy

  Hi Jessica,

  Thanks for your last mail. My leg is still in the brace. It’s driving me nuts! But it’s going to be removed next week and then the physio starts. Hospital is such a drag. If I could escape I would…but not in a Boxster. Do you know what that creep once called me? A minger! I’m glad his car was trashed, not the deer, but I could have done without the broken leg. All he got was a broken nose!! It looked like a pig’s snout before the crash so the plastic surgery has to be an improvement…hope it isn’t.

  I’ve so much time to think now. Carla Kelly and Robert Gardner keep coming into my mind. None of this was their fault. I look so like her, it’s weird. But my baby photograph is hideous. I look like a trout. To think it was sent around the world and used in the FindIsobel campaign is so humiliating.

  I’ve been on a long journey and it’s still only the beginning. Your emails have helped a lot to bring me to this decision. I now accept that my ‘mother’ stole me. But I will never believe my father suspected. If you knew the kind of marriage they had, well, you’d understand how he never suspected. No matter what they do to him, I will never accept that he’s guilty. I hope you and all your family will respect my belief.

  I want to meet Carla first and then Robert and afterwards the rest of you…not so sure about the twins!! Oh my God…it’s so scary.

  Take care.

  Joy/Isobel.

  The FindIsobel site is addictive, especially the first awful press conference after her disappearance. That smile, anyone can see the agony behind it. This woman is her mother. Mother…mother. Joy presses her finger against the screen, her mother’s face, her hair, the tears gathering in the corners of her luminous eyes. She wants to touch her. Just the tiniest touch to feel her skin. But there is glass between them and it is up to Joy to break it.

  Dylan comes to visit her at last. He pulls up a chair and sits beside her bed. His fingers are linked, his knuckles clenched. When she tells him she has decided to meet her mother, the worry lines lift from his face and he tells her a story.

  Joy imagines grey empty buildings, echoes, rats, cobwebs, rusting machinery, cops’ voices, sirens, rubble, shadows. She imagines a woman walking between the shadows, tears like rain on her cheeks. She imagines Dylan with his pockmarked arms and lockjawed mouth and his breath wheezing out of him.

  The dopehead and the angel. That’s the way he makes it sound. Her mother laid her healing hands on him and he arose into the light and became…well…he became Dylan, someone she has always liked and trusted, and who is responsible for splitting up her family.

  The key word that Joy had used? Anticipation. It had resonance, reverberations. It pulled him back to his past and she, sitting unaware in his clinic, had started the unravelling. She remembers the frantic drive in the ambulance, the claw-like grip on her hands…Anticipation baby…Anticipation baby…Joy moans and presses her fingers to her temples. She can’t speak. What is there to say? Well done, Sherlock Holmes? She wants to lie in the silence. Then she will hear the crash of her friendship with Dylan shattering into a million pieces.

  But his story is not yet over. He drove to Dublin and met Joy’s mother. He alerted her, poured out his suspicions. But she was no longer the Carla Kelly he remembered. No longer the iconic image.

  ‘Once I got over the shock of seeing her, the resemblance was even more pronounced,’ he admits. ‘You looked exactly like her when your own hair was short.’

  She tries to imagine her mother with a boy’s haircut. Impossible. Her hair blows in the wind. It streams along a catwalk. It hides her face when journalists shout, ‘How do you feel…can you describe your emotions when you saw the empty cot?’

  Dylan says her hair is black now. Black and short like a skullcap. Jessica’s email…how did Joy not realise? A ghost…ghostwriter…she sees her mother’s neck bending like a swan as she keels forward across the grave of the woman who had stolen her child.

  Joy bends forward and touches the cast on her leg. The itch is a burn and she will scream if she can’t ease it. She opens her mouth. Dylan draws back, suddenly silenced, and the other patients also look startled at her, as if they have been smacked by the sound rushing from her mouth. It brings the nurse running, and a doctor, too, but there’s only one person she wants to see.

  He drives to Dublin the instant she phones him. He doesn’t bother about the guards or asking permission from Patricia and when he finally arrives he draws the screens around her bed so that she can cry against his chest and tell him about Clare Frazier who came like a ghost into their lives to steal back what was once stolen from her.

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Carla

  Carla crumpled the sheet of paper and flung it into the bin. Others followed. Finally, when words no longer made any sense, and excuses no longer had any meaning, she finished the letter to her daughter.

  Dear Joy,

  By the time this letter reaches you, Patricia will have told you the truth. I intend meeting her tomorrow morning and giving her permission to reveal my identity. My false identity, as you will know by now. I’m a writer, yet all my skills were useless when it came to finding the words that would make you understand the dilemma I faced.

  I never meant you any harm. I simply had to be near you. What did I hope to do? Watch you from behind the drystone walls? Hide in the hedgerows? I still don’t know what I would have done if you had not walked into the cemetery. Perhaps it was fate taking the decision from me but, once I saw you, I could not let you go.

  Patricia will have the right words. She is compassionate. She will comfort you. Please don’t turn your face from me. I’ve waited such a long time to hold you.

  I love you.

  Carla.

  Carla addressed and stamped the envelope, knowing that if she did not post it now she would tear it up in the morning and try to write a more coherent, sensible, pleading one. As she was leaving her apartment, she noticed a bunch of freesias she had purchased earlier from the flower sellers on Grafton Street. She removed them from the vase and wrapped them in paper.

  The cold night air gusted around her as she walked along the canal path. She fastened the top button on her coat, pulled her hat lower over her forehead. After posting the letter, she continued walking. Hopefully, she would be able to sleep through the night. She passed the lock gate where she had once hesitated for an instant between life and death. The ghost of Anita seemed to drift into view. But it was only a swan, an ungainly waddle of feathers until it reached the water and was transformed. The reeds grew high along the bank where her body had been dumped. She laid the flowers among the reeds and stood for a moment watching the flow of water. What had Anita thought of her? Had she seen her as a friend, a mother figure, or just an eccentric insomniac, killing time until dawn?

  She reached the bench opposite her apartment where homeless men and women often sat at night, sharing a bottle. Tonight it was occupied by a solitary figure. He looked up as she approached and rose to his feet.

  ‘It’s you.’ David Dowling stared at her in amazement. Perhaps he thought she was a sprite that had materialised from the w
atery reeds. A swan maiden, perhaps.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

  ‘I called to your apartment but you weren’t there.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Which of you is sorry? Carla Kelly or Clare Frazier?’ He shivered, his body braced against the wind and slumped back into the bench. ‘Dylan called to see Joy today. She knows who you are.’

  Too shocked to reply, she sat down beside him. He moved when their shoulders touched, creating space between them. She hunched into her coat, the sleeves forming a muff as she huddled her hands into them.

  ‘Why did you lie to us?’ he asked.

  ‘How could I tell you the truth?’

  He shook his head. ‘Ever since Joy came to us, I’ve been living a lie. And now, I find out that you are also an accomplished liar.’

  ‘I never intended lying…but things moved so fast…spun out of control. The night you were in my apartment, I was going to tell you then. But Joy was missing and you were gone…’ Her voice trailed helplessly away.

  ‘Why should I believe you?’ he demanded. ‘You came into our home and accepted our hospitality for only one reason. To destroy us. Well, you’ve achieved what you set out to do. You’ve taken her from me.’

  She watched a waterhen rippling the still water. ‘If she was your child, wouldn’t you have done the same?’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘But I would have done it honestly.’

  ‘How? Fifteen years, David. She’ll never be my child. She’ll always belong to you…no matter what happens now.’

  He stood up and walked to the edge of the canal. For a terrifying instant, she thought he was going to jump in. She rushed forward, shocked by her need to protect him, but he stood rock steady, staring into the water.

  ‘Come back to my apartment.’ She took his arm and moved him away from the edge. ‘We have to talk about this.’