“Sure I am. She even looks like him, with her hair and eyes. Look.”
He handed the reporter another photograph.
“This is Jenna?”
“Yes. She’s a bit older now.” The tattooed man did not explain why he had no recent photograph or image of his stepdaughter on his phone. Guy noticed it was something the reporter did not pick up on.
“Why haven’t you said anything before now? It’s not as if Warwick Eden hasn’t been in the news most of the time for the last couple of years.”
“My partner, Wave that is, she didn’t want me to say anything. It was painful for her, you see?”
“Painful?”
“She was very young when she had Jenna—”
“How young?” the reporter asked, sensing an even juicier story.
“She was just sixteen.”
“When she had Jenna or when…”
“She would only have been fifteen when he had his way with her.”
“You’re saying he raped her?”
“If she was under sixteen it would be rape, wouldn’t it?”
The reporter was ambitious and this story seemed as though it would make her name but she understood she would need to do a bit more research before accusing the deceased politician of statutory rape. “But he couldn’t have been much older than her, could he? Perhaps it was one of those things that happened between young people of the same age. Not like an older man grooming her, or anything like that.”
“I dunno about that.”
“Let’s leave their ages out of it when we’re live on camera, shall we? Simply say she is his biological daughter.”
“And she should have his money. It should all be hers.”
Guy quickly walked away. He couldn’t listen to any more.
There was a daughter.
He reached his car, put his head in his hands and tried to think.
Surely all his months of planning… having to pretend to love Arjun… and the murder of four people… the deaths of Warwick, Ryan, Diane and Arjun… surely all that could not have been for nothing.
Chapter 20: Wave and Jenna Freece
For all her fifteen years Wave Freece had lived in a caravan with her mother Mimosa and her father Micky.
As a child, travelling up and down the country, never staying in one place for longer than a few weeks, was all she ever knew. When they weren’t attending music festivals or converging on Stonehenge for the summer and the winter solstices they parked their van out of sight of civilisation and enjoyed life simply, watching nature.
Though some of those they sometimes hooked up with were political, getting involved with demonstrations and protests, Mimosa and Micky were just hippies who maintained their lifestyle long after many of their contemporaries had succumbed to a more traditional way of life. Even through the eighties Mimosa, Micky and Wave wore flowers in their hair as they listened to the music of the sixties and ignored the changes in the society around them.
Wave never went to school. Everything she ever learned was from her day-to-day living.
She knew about flowers and animals, about rocks and how water and ice had formed the land; she knew how the world would continue long after she was gone, just as it had existed long before she was born; she knew that to be a free spirit was to be truly alive. Mimosa had taught her that these were far more important things to understand than anything she would have been taught in any school.
What Mimosa did not teach her daughter, because she did not think it important, was that physical love had consequences.
Wave’s first sexual encounter was when she was twelve. She was not unwilling, because she had no idea what was happening to her, but she had gained no pleasure from the experience. The man had been older than her, his chest covered with hair, and she had felt uncomfortable with his weight heaving up and down on top of her. She had told Mimosa and Micky what he had done as she had no reason to lie but she never saw the man again.
She had many encounters after that first time, but rarely with the same man or boy twice.
She stopped telling Micky or Mimosa when she was fifteen; she was a woman by then and they no longer needed to know.
Fordy was different from anyone she had ever known. He was educated, he spoke well and he listened to her when she named the flowers that they passed and explained why the land was shaped as it was, asking questions as if he had not known before she told him. They had been friends for weeks before New Year’s Day 1988 when he asked her, very politely she thought, if she would like to have sex with him.
Fordy was different from all the others in other ways too. He was the first one she cared about.
Through that winter they became very close. She began to think that she might be learning what it was to be in love, a word she had heard many times but never thought to understand, and she began to believe he felt the same.
They had been together for six months when he told her, almost as if he didn’t care, that he was going away for a while. He didn’t say for how long and he didn’t say where. She was hurt and she was angry. She had thought he was her man and she was his woman.
It was only because she was angry with Fordy that she had allowed his brother to fuck her.
Fordy had been away for six weeks when Warwick turned up, out of the blue, looking for his brother. Warwick, or War, as he said she should call him, was very different from his brother. He looked different, being fair haired and blue eyed where Fordy was dark, and he acted differently. Where Fordy was polite and reticent War was arrogant, seeming to believe that whatever he wanted he got, and he made it obvious he wanted Wave. So, despite not liking anything about War but filled with anger towards Fordy, and wanting in some way to get back at him, she let War lead her into the woods.
She was devastated when Fordy returned the next day and she overheard the brothers talking.
“Not so innocent, is she, your little flower?”
“Wave?”
“Of course Wave.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have to say there’s not much of her to get hold of, her tits are too small, and she’s not very imaginative but she’s pretty enough in a cloying sort of way and she’s got that nice little rosebud birthmark, just here—”
She heard, rather than saw, Fordy punch his brother who fell to the ground laughing.
“Yes, my dear older brother, I fucked your precious little flower. Short and sweet but well, well worth the bother. She started off, how can I say, acquiescent? It was so worth the effort just to see your face now.”
She did not hear what Fordy said and she was not surprised when she saw his van drive away a few minutes later.
She found a place where no one could find her, where she could cry.
He hadn’t even tried to find her to say goodbye.
She was with another man, Johnny, on another convoy away from her parents, when she discovered she was pregnant. She hoped it could have been Fordy’s but she knew the timing was wrong.
The father was his arrogant younger brother who had boasted how rich his father was, how rich he was, how he was not stupid throwing it all away like his brother had.
As he lay on top of her, he had told her his name. Warwick Eden. “Remember that name,” he had said. “I’ll be famous one day. I’ll be a success unlike that stupid older brother of mine. Fordy he calls himself, doesn’t he? Do you know his real name? No? He obviously doesn’t care for you that much.”
She had not known Fordy’s real name. War had been right. But she still should not have let him take her into the woods.
She hadn’t had the opportunity to talk to Fordy. He had gone. He had never even said goodbye. And now she was having his brother’s baby. It did not occur to her to try to get rid of it. That had not been the way she had been brought up. Life was life. What happened happened. I
f the baby was born alive and well it would take its chances.
She knew Johnny would look after them both even though it was not his. He had said he would when she first found out she was pregnant and she had believed him.
But then he had got into trouble at a protest in London and been sent to jail, leaving her alone.
She was sixteen years old and she had nowhere to go other than back, with the baby daughter she had named Jenna, to her parents.
She found them quickly enough through the New Age travellers’ grapevine and Mimosa and Micky accepted her and her baby in their lives without welcome or comment.
On her first night back Wave watched them out of their skulls on drugs and understood they hadn’t registered that she had been away from them for the best part of a year and had returned with a baby girl.
Jenna was four years old when Wave decided she was going to join the real world. Travelling was not what it was, sites were closed off to them, numbers were dwindling and festivals more expensive and unwelcoming to travellers.
At a festival in August she met Billy Watkins when he rescued her from an aggressive security man. He said he had a job and a flat and after one night together offered her and Jenna a home.
Twenty-three years later Wave was still with Billy though Jenna had left home the day she was sixteen.
Jenna’s childhood was very different from her mother’s.
She was eleven years old when she first asked whether Billy was her father. She had sometimes wondered whether Wave was her real mother too, as her colouring was very different from both Wave’s and Billy’s.
“Wave? Am I adopted?”
Wave was shocked. “What on earth sort of question is that?”
“For a start you won’t let me call you Mum and Dad. All my friends call their parents that or Mummy and Daddy. You’ve always made me call you Wave and him Billy.”
Wave wasn’t sure how to answer without having to explain too much about her early life. “We just didn’t want to be called Mum and Dad. Is that so dreadful?”
“And then look at us. You and Billy are slim, dark haired and I’m blonde and fat.”
“I wouldn’t call you fat. A little on the chubby side perhaps but you’ll grow out of that when you’re a little older.”
“But blonde? How come my hair is blonde? And my eyes? They’re blue. I’m nothing like either of you.”
Wave shrugged. “I suppose you had to know sometime.”
“You mean I am adopted!” Jenna cried.
“No. No. No. I’m your mother. Of course I am.”
“So?”
“Billy isn’t your father.”
Jenna had wanted all the details, asking who her father was, had he ever known she existed, why wasn’t he around, but Wave told her nothing. “That is something I’m never going to tell you.”
Wave couldn’t read very well but she did follow celebrity gossip in magazines and newspapers. When she had first seen the name ‘Warwick Eden’ she had read all about his inheritance and his jet-setting lifestyle. She wondered what had happened to Fordy. She had loved Fordy, or at least had thought she did. She had been very young and perhaps these things were misremembered. She did know that Fordy had been War’s older brother, and she was saddened when she read somewhere that he had died in an accident the year after he had left her.
From the day of that conversation with her mother Jenna became wary of both Wave and Billy. She concentrated on doing well at school and in the evenings and at weekends she spent as much time out of the house, with friends, as she could.
Regularly, when Billy was out, she would ask Wave about her real father.
“Who was he?” she would ask and Wave would find some excuse to leave the room or change the subject.
“Do you even know?” Jenna asked, as she grew older and more aware of what went on between men and women.
Jenna was fourteen years old when she asked whether Billy knew he wasn’t her father.
Wave turned sharply away from the magazine she had been reading.
“Why? What’s he done?”
“Why do you ask that? Do you think he might be doing something he shouldn’t?”
Wave could not say that that was exactly what she was worried about.
She had seen the way Billy looked at Jenna as she wandered around the house in her bra and pants. She had told Jenna to wear her dressing gown, but had not explained why, so the problem had not gone away.
“Has he?”
“Has he what?”
“You know.”
“I don’t know unless you tell me.”
“Has he, you know, touched you? Where he shouldn’t?”
Jenna shook her head but from that day on she made sure she was never alone with Billy, and she never left her room without being fully clothed.
Before breakfast on her sixteenth birthday, without a word to Wave, Jenna left home. If she had met her mother she could not have told her her reason. She hoped she would understand.
Billy had come into her room during the night and had sat on her bed.
“Hello darling.”
She had realised he was drunk.
“You sishteen now aint yer.”
She had said nothing. Looking at her bedside clock she saw it was after midnight. Billy was right. She was sixteen. And she knew what that meant.
“Gisha cuddle. You’ll be good to me wontcha. Not like your cold fish ma.”
Without a word, as he leant forward towards her face, she had punched him as hard as she could. She knew it was a risk. He could have hit her back; even drunk he would have been too strong for her. But he put his hand to his bleeding nose and stood up.
“Fucking bitch, just like your ma. After all I’ve done for you. Fucking cold fish bitch.”
But he left the room.
She got up to close the door, making sure to lock it.
She got a job in a supermarket, loading shelves through the night, and spent her days in a library or the swimming baths before saving enough money to rent a room, where she stayed for three months before moving in with one of the men she had met at work.
She went through a marriage ceremony with him when he took her to Honduras for a week for her eighteenth birthday but in 2011, at the age of twenty-two, she was single again. She discovered the man she had thought was her husband had been married before, something he had told her, but had failed to obtain a divorce, something he hadn’t.
Jenna, humiliated and defeated, homeless and hopeless, went back to her mother despite the fact that she was still living with Billy.
“You’re back here now with your tail between your legs, are you?” Billy asked when she turned up at her old home.
“Just for a bit. I’ll get a job and be out of your hair, what you’ve got left of it, as soon as I possibly can.”
“You’re an ungrateful little bitch.”
“So what if I am? There’s sod all you can do about it.”
Her mother had changed in the five years she had been away and after Billy had left the house, Jenna sat her down with a mug of tea so they could talk.
“Is everything okay?” Jenna asked.
“Of course it is.”
“No it’s not. Is he hitting you?”
“Why do you say that?”
“You always used to wear T-shirts, now you’re wearing long sleeves.”
“I’ve just got old, don’t want anyone to see my bat wings.” Wave tried to laugh.
“You’re only thirty something! That’s not old. He’s bruised you, hasn’t he?”
Wave slowly rolled up her sleeves to allow Jenna to see the yellowing remains of bruises on her arms.
“Leave him! You can’t let him do this.”
“It’s not his fault, Jenna, it really isn’t. He’s got involved w
ith some very nasty people. I’m beginning to think I don’t know him. He always used to get drunk occasionally, but now it’s every night and he gets into fights all the time, and then when he comes home…”
“He takes it out on you.”
Wave nodded slowly as she pulled her sleeves down, back over the remains of the bruises.
“And there’s all that stuff,” Jenna said carefully. “All those leaflets and posters and things. I’ve seen them in the back room.”
“He’s got into politics.”
“Politics!” Jenna laughed incredulously.
“He’s decided that the world would have been better if Hitler had won the war. He’s joined a group that wants to kick everyone who’s not white and British-born out of the country. England Force or something it’s called, but as far as I can see it’s just an excuse for men to get pissed and have a fight with anyone they don’t like the look of.”
“Can’t you stop him?”
Wave shook her head.
“Leave him then.”
Again Wave shook her head. “It’s far too late for that. Where would I go? What would I do?”
“Come with me. We’ll get a flat together somewhere. We can live together, just leave him!”
“I can’t.”
“You can’t stay, you really can’t. What’s your life going to be? You can’t just let life pass you by spending it with that shit.”
“I have no choice, but you have Jenna. Leave just as soon as you can. Don’t stay here. One day he’ll lose his temper with you and I can’t let that happen.”
“I can look after myself,” Jenna said firmly remembering the night before her sixteenth birthday.
“You know he’s not your father, Jenna, he’d think there was nothing to stop him. And he’s strong. You know that.”
“He wouldn’t dare.”
“He would, Jenna. Believe me, he would. You can’t stay here more than a day or two at most.”
Jenna knew it was unfair, when her mother was so down, but she saw her opportunity.
Hostage to Fortune Page 20