Everything She Forgot

by Lisa Ballantyne

  John Henderson has lived in Thurso for over fifteen years, moving to the town in 1970, and now has a management position at Dounreay. Molly Henderson was illegitimate, born to Kathleen Henderson née Jamieson and George McLaughlin, in Glasgow in 1977. George McLaughlin is part of a notorious crime family from Glasgow, who collectively have stood trial for extortion, torture, moneylending, and murder. George McLaughlin is pictured below celebrating on the steps of Glasgow High Court following his brother’s second murder trial, which was concluded with a not-proven verdict.

  While John Henderson married Kathleen Jamieson in 1979, and has acted since then as Molly’s father, the story of her real family background has only just come to light. George McLaughlin is not an official suspect at this time, yet Highlands police are aware of the link and he is wanted for questioning in relation to his daughter’s disappearance.

  The search continues for young Molly Henderson who has now been missing for nearly a week. The investigation has swollen to 40 police officers and another 40 trained mountain rescue personnel, according to Detective Inspector Pat Black. Police are thought to have accepted a large contingent of 200 volunteers, who continue to search the Highlands.

  Volunteers have said their search is being hampered by difficult terrain, which includes mountain areas, forest, rivers, and farmland. “There’s a lot of us here and we want to just do what we can to help and support,” one female volunteer said. “The terrain is very difficult, there are acres and acres of forest, we’ve all got a bit of local knowledge but I don’t know how good that’s going to be.”

  “It feels like a needle in a haystack at times,” another volunteer said.

  Highlands police are coordinating with the national force, comparing details of this abduction with other open child murder cases.

  The Caithness community continues to offer staunch support for the family, as the desperate search for Molly continues.

  Kathleen pushed the newspaper away from her with such force that she spilled a little of her tea. She stood up and paced the kitchen, the back of her hand against her lips. She was furious at Angus Campbell for his intrusion into their lives. She considered calling the Journal to complain about him. Illegitimate, he had called Moll, as if it mattered a damn who her father was, or wasn’t, or if Kathleen had been married or not—when Moll was missing. Kathleen bit her lip.

  There was no great revelation in the article and she did not worry about others reading its contents. John knew about Moll’s father, and Kathleen had even told Moll herself, so that the child had a vague notion of who her father was. But the article was insinuating that George McLaughlin had played some part in Moll’s disappearance.

  Kathleen held on to the back of her kitchen chair. Would George have taken Moll? Kathleen considered for a moment, incredulous. George was incorrigible. He wasn’t as dangerous as her parents made out, but they had been right about one thing: he was no father, no husband. He would be twenty-seven years old now, and probably still a bigger wean than Moll.

  Big George. Georgie Boy. She had loved him like no other. He was tall and heavy, with the blackest hair and the bluest eyes, and a smile that had made her heart skip the first time she saw it.

  They had started seeing each other when they were just thirteen years old, not long before George got kicked out of school. By the time they were sixteen he had persuaded the good Catholic girl that she was to sleep with him, and he had told her all his secrets.

  Even now, Kathleen could still remember the weight of George’s head on her chest, feeling blessed that his mind and his thoughts had chosen her as a place to rest.

  He was beautiful and everyone agreed, but he was also bad and everyone seemed to be in agreement about that too. But Kathleen knew that George was as afraid of his family as everyone else. He was guilty by association, but she knew the kind, beautiful person that he was inside.

  “ARE YOU GLAIKIT?” Kathleen’s mother had said, pinning her to the wall with the sleeve of her sweater when Kathleen admitted she was pregnant with George’s child. “You’d have no life and your child would have no life either. It’s death you’ve chosen, death.” Kathleen had not chosen anything at all, because the pregnancy had been an accident.

  At the age of twenty-seven, standing in her thick cotton bathrobe, in her four-bedroom stone house in Thurso, Kathleen could still remember, exactly, how it had felt to be nineteen and in love, and pregnant, to Big Georgie Boy McLaughlin.

  There had been no one else she had wanted. He had been everything to her, and she knew that he had been sincere in his affections toward her. She had never felt so needed as when she and George were together. They had been deep, deep in love, so that leaving him had hurt her physically, as a rip or a tear, and then a scar, as time passed. She still remembered him walking into the room and kissing her, and how time had stopped and stretched out, so that now was an elongated sweetness, like soft toffee pulled. He had taken her into adulthood. He had taught her about herself. They had taught each other how to love.

  Kathleen remembered grave family meetings in her family’s tenement, talks about adoption and single parenthood, and—God forbid—abortion, over countless cups of strong tea. She remembered George getting down on his knees in Glasgow Green, after the hardest rain, so that she could almost feel the cold wet that must have soaked through his jeans as he proposed to her, and was refused by her, again.

  “YOU MIGHT LOVE him, but let me tell you,” her mother had said, pursing her lips as she always did in moments of truth, “the McLaughlins come as a package and, believe you me, you don’t want that package!”

  Kathleen had been grateful that Georgie had been there for the birth, but she remembered being exhausted, watching George take Moll into his arms and sing to the baby with his whiskey breath, twirling her around the room. Her daughter was newborn and so small and yet he was spinning her as if he couldn’t understand how fragile she was and how precious.

  Walking away from George had broken her heart, but her mother had been right.

  JOHN HAD LOVED Moll, and Kathleen had grown to love him, and life had been so easy and so without grief, she had thought that the possibility of loss had been evaded. Yet no one escapes loss, and Kathleen knew that now, as she had always known it. In the beginning she had often thought of George and how her life would have been different if she had said yes to him.

  John had been a widower, known to her parents and their friends. At a family dinner he had taken a shine to Kathleen right away. She had found him kind.

  Over time, she had come to admire many things about John Henderson: his calmness and methodical approach to life, his love of industry and his generosity of spirit, his leanness, the fine sinews of his body. He had a weakness for soft-centered chocolates and she loved to buy him violet creams, which he would eat on a Saturday night if they were watching a film. He liked solid gold or silver cuff links and Rolex watches and good-quality umbrellas and tweed caps. He liked to brush Moll’s long hair after a bath, before Kathleen tied it back for bed. He liked reading stories to her: Peter Rabbit, Blackberry Farm, and Aesop’s Fables. He would lie on top of the covers and Moll would tuck herself into the crook of his arm.

  More than once Kathleen had found him asleep in the child’s bed with a storybook in his hands. “Don’t wake him up, Mum,” Moll had whispered, suddenly wide awake. “I like him here.”

  John … John was wonderful, and Kathleen was grateful.

  But George, George, Georgie Boy, he was still special in her heart. She could only whisper his name to herself, it was such an admission. It was as if he had whittled out a little place for himself, etching the detail of their young, intense love. It was memorable because it had been unfinished. It had not been destroyed, but had merely ended. Sometimes Kathleen wondered if it still lived on in some uncharted psychic space between them both.

  As if it were yesterday, Kathleen could remember looking down at him, on his knees before her, and seeing all the love and hope in his eyes.
Saying no to him had been the hardest thing that she had ever done. Walking away from him hurt her more than anything else she had ever experienced. Being without him had been like living without her skin. She had been raw with the sorrow of it, and had it not been for her daughter and the need to make a good life for her, Kathleen was not sure that she could have done it.

  At first George wouldn’t accept it, but when they finally said good-bye they had held each other, crying. The noises they made were like the noises of wounded animals. Parting was a violence to them both—an intense insufferable pain.

  They didn’t stay in touch.

  Kathleen remembered that she’d lost over a stone in weight after she parted from George, and the doctor was worried that it would affect the baby. Kathleen was eating but it was as if nothing could nourish her now that George’s love was gone.

  For years afterward, when she visited Glasgow, she would find herself unconsciously scanning the streets for his face. Sometimes when the doorbell rang unexpectedly she would wonder if it was him. She hadn’t told him where she had gone, but she knew that he could have found her if he had wanted, if he had wanted.

  Would George have taken Moll? Kathleen didn’t believe it. He had loved her, Kathleen knew, and he had said how much he loved Moll when she was born. Seven years, but Kathleen still felt that she knew him well. In the early years of her marriage, she had wondered if George would reappear and try to win her back, but taking her daughter was not something he would do. The act was too violent and spiteful for him. George might have come to the door begging for her hand, but he would never have taken her child.

  Nonetheless, a flicker of anger licked her gullet and the brief change of chord in her emotions was a small relief. If George had taken her, Kathleen would have him. But the whole idea was ridiculous. What would George do with Moll? He could barely look after himself.

  After it had been confirmed that Moll was missing, two police officers had interviewed Kathleen and John at length, asking about relatives and friends who might have taken her or posed a threat. In the artist’s sketch based on the young girls’ description of the man who took her, he looked wild and malicious—blank eyes and a wide, thin mouth. It looked like no one they knew, and John had asked what the police were planning to do. Moll’s disappearance fit the profile of a stranger abduction, but even in those cases the man was often known in the community. Both she and John had said they could think of no one who would take their little girl.

  During that first interview, Kathleen had thought of George but knew in her bones that he wouldn’t have taken Moll. She had pressed her lips together instead of speaking his name. She hadn’t wanted time wasted on her George. Perhaps she had also wanted to protect him.

  The phone rang and Kathleen was startled by it. She picked it up quickly.

  “Kathleen?” said Detective Inspector Black.

  “Yes,” she replied. They were already on first-name terms. She could hear John upstairs in the shower.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you so early, but I knew …”

  “Yes, I’ve been awake for hours. Is there news?”

  “I’m afraid not. I only called because last night a journalist from the—”

  “I know, that ridiculous article.”

  “There’s an article?”

  “This morning, the Journal has a front page on Molly, and reveals her real father and suggests but doesn’t say that he might have taken her.”

  “I wanted to discuss it with you …”

  “Why?” said Kathleen, a fist of worry under her rib cage. “What do you know?”

  “Well, a writer from the Journal called me last night with information on Molly’s natural father … You hadn’t mentioned him.”

  Kathleen swallowed, considering her answer.

  “I never thought. He’s had no contact with her. He’s had no contact with me. George is … George wouldn’t take Molly. To be honest, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see George at my door one day, but the thought that he would take Molly when he hasn’t seen her for seven years … it makes no sense.”

  The detective inspector cleared his throat. “It sounded improbable to me too, and for all we know he’s on holiday, but I had one of my officers look into it just out of interest and sure enough, George McLaughlin is not at home.”

  “That means nothing. George doesn’t have a real home. He’ll be with whatever girl he’s with right now. If I went to the East End of Glasgow, I could probably find him for you in five minutes, but he won’t answer his phone or his door, that’s if he even has a door … I know him well.”

  “So you think this is not worth following up …”

  “Oh God, if only,” said Kathleen, unable to keep the grief from returning to her voice. “If she’s with George …” The tears came again and she put a hand over her mouth to stop them but had to take a hard gasp of air before she was able to control herself. “Then she’s OK.”

  “I checked his record. His family is rather colorful, but he seems only to have been cautioned for being drunk and disorderly five years ago. He’s clean, but that might be …”

  “He’s not like the rest of them,” said Kathleen, relaxed again, heavy with sheer exhaustion. “He’s a tearaway and he always has been, but that’s all.”

  “Well, I just thought I’d run it past you …”

  “Thank you and we should look into it. I want everything investigated—every lead, every single tiny detail, but … I know George and he wouldn’t take her. He wouldn’t do it to me.”

  “Well, rest assured, we’re checking it out. We’ll leave no stone unturned.”

  “Thank you.”

  The detective inspector rang off and Kathleen drank the rest of her now cold tea. As she washed her cup, she listened to the creak of John’s feet on the upper floorboards, as he got ready for work.

  Kathleen wondered if all this would have been easier, or harder, if she had had another child to look after. In one sense she needed the distraction. John was gone all day, although he had taken two days off to look for Moll himself, combing the woods from dawn to dusk.

  After they had married, she and John had tried for a child, but without success. She had become pregnant so easily with George—just that one night of carelessness—but there had been years of consciously trying with John; taking her temperature and watching the calendar, and elevating her hips on a pillow afterward. She had not even had a single false alarm. It hadn’t mattered. John had talked abstractly about wanting a son, but he was smitten with Moll, and Kathleen had never been sure that she was ready for another child.

  Moll had been their world, and now that she was gone, their world was empty.

  Kathleen dried her hands on a dish towel and stood staring out of the kitchen window at the back garden. The trees had begun to shed their leaves and the grass was strewn with them. There was a makeshift swing strung to the tree at the back of the garden. John had hung it there for Moll, and Kathleen watched it moving gently in the wind. Sometimes when she was in the garden by herself, Moll would lie on the swing, so that it was resting against her stomach, and use her feet to push off from the ground.

  Taking a deep breath, Kathleen forced herself to look away. She washed the kitchen surfaces and put in a load of washing. She put bread under the grill for John’s breakfast and placed two eggs in a pot of water, ready for the boil when he came downstairs.

  It didn’t matter what she did or how fast Kathleen moved, Moll was still there, the panic of separation was still there and the fear that she was being hurt.

  She heard John’s footsteps above her and knew that he would be fixing his tie in the long mirror. She turned on the gas and lit it. She stared at the two eggs in the pan, remembering things that had gone before. She was no longer religious, but just then, before the boiling eggs, she crossed herself.

  “Georgie, if you have her, look after her,” she whispered.

  As she heard John’s feet on the stairs, Kathleen bit her lip. S
he wasn’t sure what had come over her. George wouldn’t have taken her, but the sheer thought that Moll might be with him gave her a strange desperate hope. He was a wild man, and Kathleen was grateful that they were no longer together. But there was no other wild man she would trust her daughter to.

  CHAPTER 17

  Margaret Holloway

  Thursday, December 19, 2013

  IT WAS THE FIRST DAY OF THE CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS AND BEN had gone to central London to interview a contact for his latest article. It was the afternoon and Margaret was wrapping Christmas presents in the living room with the children.

  The term was now over, but she had left without attending the glut of Christmas dinners and parties. Normally the two deputy head teachers, the four assistant heads, and Malcolm would go out for dinner, and then there was the big staff party, which was held in the school canteen with lethal punch and a secret Santa. Margaret also usually went out with her old team from the Learning Support Unit. This year she couldn’t face any of it. She had gone into work every day until the break, but told Malcolm that she was not feeling able to socialize and he had told her he understood.

  Margaret was wrapping the presents and Paula was decorating them—curling ribbons and sticking on golden-leafed holly. Eliot was supposed to be helping too, but had already lost interest.

  When Margaret was in the middle of wrapping a shirt for her father, Eliot stood up and put his arms around her neck. She kissed and nuzzled his hands, but he stayed where he was and she could feel his quick hot breaths against her neck.

  She had been an only child. As a young mother, she had been fascinated by the differences between her children. Her son had always asked for more affection than her daughter, from Ben too, but particularly from her.

  When Margaret was Eliot’s age, she had been a shy and withdrawn child. Her parents were kind and loving, but she had been left with a sensation that they were unable to give her all the love she needed—that they were not enough. She lacked clear memories of her childhood, but she remembered loneliness. It was not that her parents’ love had been sparing, but that their love had not been able to reach the place inside Margaret that needed love.