Your business is talking to Will, and starting your family, Laurie had said.
Yes, but what kind of person did Hannah want that little girl to see, when she arrived?
She stood up and returned upstairs to the child’s bedroom with renewed determination. Dax and Madeleine were hiding something. They were possibly coercing people – including Frank and Tiggy – to do the same, and it had something to do with Elvie. She was going to discover the truth, get help for Elvie and expose Dax’s lies. Then she was going to persuade Will to come home.
Until then, she would carry on exactly as she’d planned.
She was going to adopt a child with Will, and bring her up in this home, where he was going to start his business. And nobody in bloody Tornley was going to stop them.
An hour later Hannah had painted the front wall by the window a pale yellow, and had formed a new plan.
First, she had to prove that Elvie existed. If the residents of Tornley were going to deny it, she had to enquire further afield, beyond the village. Elvie was so distinctive – someone must know her.
Then, as Hannah reached upwards to touch up the last patch, someone entered her mind.
Gemma – the postwoman. Perhaps the only person who came to Tornley regularly and who didn’t live here. Gemma must have seen Elvie.
Hannah leapt down, checking her watch. It was nearly seven o’clock. Gemma delivered the post around ten in the morning. Tomorrow, Hannah would be waiting for her by the gate.
Tonight, however, she’d get this room done.
She moved the ladder to the next wall, over the faded patch of wooden floor where Peter Horseborrow’s bed had once been. She climbed up and yelped as the ladder listed to the right, remembering once again – too late – the loose floorboard.
Cursing, she fetched the hammer to secure it. She pushed one end of the yard-long floorboard, to see where nails were required. To her surprise, it see-sawed up at the other end. The whole board was clearly just resting on a joist below. This was dangerous. Presumably, if it had been hidden by a bed for ninety years, nobody had ever noticed.
Hannah picked up the hammer. Just as well she’d noticed it, before a social worker stepped on it. She took a nail – then stopped.
Twenty small black nail-holes ran along the edge of the floorboard. It wasn’t one or two nails that were missing – it was every single one. Why?
Hannah lifted up the floorboard.
She stared at the sight that met her. A pile of postcards and letters was tucked against the joist.
Two minutes later Hannah was sitting, against the wall, with the secret stash spread out in front of her. Her face broke into a shocked grin as she flicked through a pile of sepia and black-and-white postcards. ‘Naughty Peter,’ she said out loud. It was an extensive collection of faded Victorian or Edwardian porn. Young women, either naked or semi-dressed in lace dress and petticoats, sat astride each other or on various well-to-do gentlemen sporting handlebar moustaches and black socks, and occasionally a birch stick. One of the oddest images was of an older man wearing a monocle, top hat and morning coat, lying back on a chaise longue, his erection taking centre-stage. Hannah’s mind flicked briefly to the snow-penis in the garden. Had Elvie seen this postcard?
She sat back. Peter had never married, by all accounts. This little hiding place under the floor had presumably been his only place of privacy from his sister.
She pushed the postcards aside and undid a bundle of three yellowed envelopes. What were these? Letters to a secret lover?
To her surprise, the letters were still sealed. They had never been opened. There was a blue stamp on each, with a photo of King George V1 and a price of ‘2½d’. Air Mail was written by hand on the left, yet there was no post-office stamp. The addresses made no sense, either:
D. Burstenstein
All The Kings Horses
And All The Kings Men
Couldn’t Put Humpty
Together Again
Feeling strangely uncomfortable about invading the privacy of a man who had died, Hannah opened the first envelope and pulled out a letter. It was written in old-fashioned copperplate on two sheets, but again in the same gobbledygook verse of nursery rhymes. The date at the top was 19 August 1945. Who was D. Burstenstein? Had Peter Horseborrow’s secret lover, in fact, been a man? It would have been difficult, she supposed, for him to have been openly gay back then.
She checked the envelope again and found a photo inside.
It immediately appeared to disprove her theory. The black-and-white image was of an unsmiling girl, around sixteen years old, standing against an ivy-strewn wall. There was something familiar about the girl, but it wasn’t Olive. Olive had pale features and a round face. This girl’s face was narrow, her eyes and hair dark. In the teenager’s arms was a newborn baby. Hannah stuck out her bottom lip, surprised. She’d always assumed from what Brian, the estate agent, had said that Peter had been unmarried. Perhaps that wasn’t true. Perhaps he’d had a family early on, then lost them and returned to live with Olive?
Hannah followed the handwriting to the bottom and saw a signature. It appeared to have been scrawled by a three-year-old: MaBeL vYnE.
‘Hello, Mabel Vyne. Who were you then?’ Hannah asked, opening the second envelope. The letter inside was almost identical: two pages of nursery rhymes with the same scrawled signature. In this one, however, the date was 30 January 1946, and Mabel Vyne – if that’s who she was in the photo – stood against a tree holding the baby, who was now around six months. The baby shared the teenager’s dark hair and eyes and unsmiling face.
Why was Mabel Vyne writing nursery rhymes and putting them in envelopes? And why was Peter hiding them under his bed unopened? Tornley was turning out to be a place of more than one secret. Hannah opened the third envelope.
The same two-page letter and a photo dropped out, this time dated 15 August 1946. The baby wore a dress and had short hair brushed to the side in curls. Its gender still wasn’t clear. Mother and child sat side-by-side, awkwardly. Mabel wore a plain dress and flat shoes. Her hair was now cut in a bob, pushed to the side with a pin. Within a year she’d transformed herself – a grown woman now. Hannah examined the photo closely. The young woman’s face was even more familiar now.
Something was …
Hannah peered closer.
A stained-glass curve of feathers was visible behind Mabel’s shoulder. That was the peacock window. That was the hallway in Tornley Hall.
She dropped that photograph and checked the other two. The wall behind Mabel in the first shot: was that their Victorian garden wall, behind the kitchen? And in the distance behind the tree of the second image: was that a group of spiky cat’s tails in the marsh across the lane?
Hannah frowned. This young woman, Mabel Vyne, had been standing here, downstairs in Tornley Hall, with a baby in the mid-1940s, nearly seventy years ago. Had she lived here with Peter and Olive? Who was she? And why were these letters sealed and never sent?
Hannah sat back, wishing she had the Internet to do a local-history search. Somebody, somewhere, had probably documented life around this area in the 1940s.
Then she remembered.
Five minutes later Hannah stood bent over in the attic, rummaging through the boxes of books from the sitting room. The idea had come as she’d rechecked the dates on the letters.
The old Tornley Hall household ledgers were in a book near the window. She yanked them out and sat on the dusty floor, searching for the 1940s domestic accounts.
Now she thought about it, skimming through them, there was something strange about these ledgers. Decades of household costs for Tornley Hall, yet no foreign travel costs listed, anywhere. And neither was there a single week when groceries had not been purchased. It was almost as if Peter and Olive had never left Tornley, let alone visited the exotic foreign locations of their books and paintings.
The ledger she wanted finally appeared in the middle of the pile: 1940–1950: Household Accounts.
Hannah leant against a rafter and began her search to see if Mabel Vyne had ever been listed as a householder.
She nearly missed it.
Twenty minutes later her eyes were starting to skim over the cost of butcher’s sausages, candles and vinegar, when two letters caught her eye: Hat, M.V. – 2s.
‘Yes!’ she hissed. Mabel Vyne.
Now she knew that the name was definitely listed, she double-checked the entries she’d already skimmed.
In 1945 there was another one she’d missed: Dress, M.V. – 5s.
Five shillings? That was a lot less than the fifty-five shillings that Olive had spent on her dresses.
Hannah searched and found some more.
In total there were one or two entries each year, all through the 1940s. Whoever Mabel had been, she either had her own income or had only lived in Tornley Hall from time to time. On a whim, Hannah carried on into the 1950s: Hat, M.V. – 1s. Mabel continued to appear a few times a year in the 1950s, and then in the 1960s and 1970s.
The last entry Hannah found was in 1986: Shoes, M.V. – £4.
This was interesting. Someone called Mabel Vyne had visited or lived in Tornley Hall, at least off and on, for around forty years.
So what had happened to her child?
There was one more place to look. Downstairs, in the kitchen cupboard, Hannah found the photo album that Elvie had flung on the floor the other night.
Eagerly she flicked through it. The photos were again black-and-white ones. The fashions worn by Olive and Peter’s friends suggested that it was now the 1960s. Peter certainly had more hair than he did in the images from the 1970s.
Once again the photos were located around Tornley Hall, and at what she now recognized as Graysea Bay, increasing her new suspicions that Peter and Olive rarely left home. There was one shot of a grinning Olive in the lane on a bike, the sun glinting on her plaits.
The photos were only four-by-four inches, and there were six on each page. She searched carefully. Finally, halfway through, she saw it.
In one set of images Olive, Peter and their friends were eating a picnic on the shingle beach, sitting on rugs. Behind them a dark-haired woman leant over a basket, in profile.
Hannah peered. Was that Mabel? She would be older now, of course, maybe in her mid-thirties, but the colouring was definitely familiar.
She flicked over to the next page, then the next – and stopped.
The dark-haired woman was standing up now, still in the distance, but closer and face-on to the camera, behind Olive and her friends. While they were laughing, she was not. Hannah was almost certain it was the sulky teenager of the earlier photo, twenty years on. She had the same dark eyes and hair, and the long, narrow jaw. There was that same dull gaze in her eyes. With other people to give perspective, Hannah now realized that Mabel Vyne – if it was indeed her – was very tall.
She held the book under the lamp to see better. Her breathing felt shallow. Goosepimples covered her arms.
She knew that sullen face. That’s why it was so familiar in its teenage form.
‘I am not seeing ghosts!’ she whispered.
This photo was taken fifty years ago, yet she was looking straight at Elvie.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Despite being exhausted from the day’s events, that night Hannah tossed and turned in bed. The curtains were once again closed against the black night. Disturbing images came at her from all angles. Every creak made her glance at the door.
Before she’d turned out the light she’d rung Will for the twentieth time, to find that his voicemail was now full. If he didn’t call her tomorrow, then she was going to London.
Eventually she fell into an uneasy sleep, only to be jerked awake by images of Dax and Madeleine in the garage, towering above her. Twice she got up and double-checked the locks downstairs, put on another lamp and then re-jammed the wooden wedge underneath her locked bedroom door. To chase away the memory of the garage encounter, Hannah summoned the image of the little red-haired girl. Hard as she tried, however, she couldn’t picture the two of them and Will at Tornley Hall. She tried to imagine a trampoline on the lawn, and swings, but could only see scrubby grass and piles of rotten leaves and the dead pheasant, its rotten stink back in her nostrils.
So, instead, she turned on the bedside light at 3 a.m. and, to distract herself, picked up the old letters from the floor and thought more about the mystery of Mabel Vyne, and her physical similarity to Elvie. How could they be related? Apart from the fact that Elvie might be Frank and Tiggy’s daughter, the baby in the teenage Mabel’s arms in 1945 would be almost seventy years old now. Elvie was forty at most.
At some point Hannah did fall asleep, jerking awake when the telephone engineer rang the doorbell at nine o’clock. She dressed and waited impatiently for him to install the phone, Internet and television channels, checking out the window for Gemma.
As soon as the broadband was up, Hannah flung open her laptop and, joyful at being connected back to the outside world, checked a long list of new emails in her in-box. One in particular stood out. It was from Laurie and had arrived yesterday morning, a few hours before Laurie’s talk with Jonathan and her visit to Tornley Hal. The tone was friendly and supportive – clearly written before Jonathan told Laurie off for sending him on a wild goose chase:
Hi Hannah, not getting through on the mobile, so emailing in case. Just to let you know that Jonathan is going over to Tornley this morning – you might see him around. And also I spoke to Maureen again. She did vaguely remember Nan being upset at a house over near Snadesdon. She thinks it was something to do with catching an old man shouting at a young woman in the house, and Nan telling him to lay off her. He didn’t like it, and she gave him hell, and that’s probably why I remember Nan rushing us out, cross.
Hannah read it again, confused. If Will had been six or seven on his visit here with Nan Riley and Laurie, it would have been around the early 1980s. Who was the young woman in Tornley Hall at that time? It couldn’t have been Mabel Vyne – she would have been in her fifties. Olive would have been sixty-plus.
Intrigued, she waved off the engineer and sat back at her computer. She might be isolated geographically out here, but the screen gave her a renewed sense of empowerment. Dax, and everyone else round here, said that Elvie didn’t exist. Well, she could now find proof by herself.
First she inserted ‘Elvie Mortren’ into a search engine. Nothing appeared. She tried possible variations and combinations of Elvie’s name, as well as the location and Frank and Tiggy’s names, but nothing came up. That was strange.
Next she tried ‘Elvie Vyne’, in case the strange young woman was related to Mabel. When nothing materialized for that name, either, Hannah tried ‘Mabel Vyne, Suffolk’.
This time there was a hit. She peered at the screen.
It was just one link, and a modern one at that. An Ipswich newspaper cutting about a planning application refused in 2012 for a new hall. The photograph of a group of cross-looking parishioners accompanied the photograph. Mabel Vyne, a plump woman with glasses and short grey hair, was their spokesperson. From here, Hannah could see no similarity between her and the teenage Mabel in Peter’s black-and-white photographs, or indeed to Elvie. But surely there was some link? Mabel Vyne could not be a very common name in Suffolk.
She stood up and walked to the window. Maybe the two Mabel Vynes were related, even distantly. It was certainly worth finding out, in case it explained why Frank and Tiggy were hiding Elvie from the authorities.
Outside there was a crunch of tyres on gravel.
Hannah ran to the door.
Gemma.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Will woke that Tuesday morning and stretched out on Clare’s sofa, his back muscles even tighter than yesterday. He surveyed the whisky glasses and ashtray from last night. His watch said half-nine. Sitting up, he squinted at Clare’s and Jamie’s bedroom doors. Both were open. They’d left quietly again, without waking him.
He eased his legs round off the sofa, and groaned with pain. He sat for a second, one hand on his back, the other on his forehead.
Last night he and Clare had talked for hours again, well into the middle of the night. He hadn’t meant to tell her so much, these past few days, but she had a way of making him talk. She was easy to be around. Jamie was like her, a nice lad who had invited him outside on Sunday to watch him and his mates from Arndale Road skateboarding and jumping over ramps on their bikes. Clare had brought Will out a coffee and they’d sat on the wall, watching the group show off, the shock of what had just happened with Hannah hitting him in waves.
He’d only been at Clare’s a few days, but a pattern had formed. Each evening Jamie went to bed at nine. Clare made food, then brought out the whisky and weed, and put on quiet music, and they talked. He’d told her everything. About his childhood, about meeting Hannah, about how much last summer’s incident had changed her, and about that tosser she’d slept with in Suffolk. (He didn’t tell her, however, that the image made him feel sick and full of rage every time he thought about it.) He’d told her about the little girl, and how he purposely hadn’t looked at the photo Barbara had brought, because he knew that would complicate what he was going to do.
Clare was sympathetic. She told him not to feel bad. The little girl wasn’t his child yet. They’d never met each other. And, anyway, she needed a stable home. From what Will was saying, he and Hannah would be no good to her – not any more.
She reminded him that there would be other people out there desperate to adopt her. He had to look after himself right now, after what Hannah had done to him. The child would find another family, and would be fine. In the meantime, Clare would be here for him, as a friend.
Each night they’d ended up sitting on the same sofa, Clare’s soft rugs thrown over them. He knew the danger. Clare had given him clear enough signals about where her interests lay, but since that first time they’d kissed, she’d backed off and, right now, he didn’t have the energy to find somewhere else to stay.
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