In My Mother's Name: A totally addictive and emotional psychological thriller

by Laura Elliot

  I wish I could have left a trail behind. Breadcrumbs or secret signs that he could follow. I kept thinking he’d throw pebbles at my window or leave a note under our hiding stone. He can’t have run away. That’s just a lie and it’s the same as all the other lies those girls have been spreading about me and him. Does he know I’ve been sent to prison? That’s what Atonement is. There are bars on the windows and spikes on the gates and all the doors are locked so that makes it a prison, no matter what Mother Gloria says about it being a holy sanctuary.

  7

  Barefooted and wearing a pair of jogging pants, Daniel came from the bedroom and sat down beside her.

  ‘What are you doing, Adele?’ he asked.

  ‘Reading this.’ Tears stung her cheeks as she handed the diary to him. ‘It belonged to my mother. I found it when I was clearing out the attic.’

  Shock, anger, disgust, sadness, his expression revealed each emotion as he turned the pages.

  ‘How long have you known about this?’ He laid the diary down when he finished reading it and took her into his arms.

  ‘It was inside a backpack I found under the rafters when I was clearing out the attic. My mother must have brought it with her to the mother and baby home where I was born.’

  ‘Was that why you cancelled your flight?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I couldn’t… I still don’t know what to say about it or what to do.’ She steadied her voice with an effort. ‘How could Noreen have kept this information from me?’

  ‘Maybe she intended telling you but events took over―’

  ‘I’ll never know. The bag was so well hidden. Like she couldn’t bear to throw it out or to keep it. I believe she planned on going to her grave with her secrets.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Adele. So very sorry you’ve had to find out―’

  ‘I’m not sorry.’ She was too confused to know if this was true but it felt right to say it aloud. ‘My mother was so young to give birth and I’ve spent my life haunted by the possibility that I killed her. But they were responsible… those three monsters.’ She covered her eyes, afraid that the vague shapes she visualised in her mind would assume features that resembled her own. ‘I’ve been searching the web in the hope that there might be something online about a court case from around that time.’

  ‘From twenty-five years back? That would be a long shot.’

  ‘Not really. So much old information is online now. But there’s nothing that links to what I’ve read in her diary. They got away with it, Daniel. My mother was gang-raped…’ She shuddered, her stomach churning at the violence the words conveyed. ‘My father is out there somewhere. I want to find him.’

  ‘Find him?’ The indentation between his eyebrows deepened. ‘How would you even begin to embark on such a search?’

  ‘At its source. Reedstown. I want to go there and discover what I can about her.’ She spoke faster, forestalling his objections. ‘I know it’s not the right time to make such a decision but I won’t be able to move forward until I know what happened… how it happened. They may believe that they got away with it but all crimes leave traces behind. I’m that trace, Daniel. The result of their depravity. The consequences… whatever you want to call it.’

  ‘A gift,’ he said. ‘That’s what you are to me. A precious gift that I love. Come to Colorado with me. Give yourself time to think this through and decide on the steps you can take to begin your search. I’ll give you all the support you need and when you feel that you’ve enough to go on, we’ll hire a private investigator.’

  He had been born into security, one of three children, all cherished by their parents and rooted in an extended family tree. She trusted him to do as he promised but how could he even begin to understand the depth of her lost identity? Noreen had left her with a property and an income but with no sense of self. Would he ever appreciate the potency of her anger? Like flames on a parched mountainside, it had no boundaries, no cut-off point. It was focused on the men who had killed her mother, for that was what they had done, as cleanly as if they had plunged a knife into her chest. One of those faceless men was her father. His blood ran through her veins. She carried his DNA. Nurture, nature, what did it matter when she hated the genes she had inherited?

  ‘They murdered my mother,’ she said. ‘This search is my responsibility. She deserves justice for what they did to her. I have to go there, Daniel, and try to tell her story.’

  ‘How do you intend to do that? Walk up to every man you meet and ask him if he murdered your mother? Gang-raped her?’ He was unable to hide his scepticism. ‘If what your mother wrote is true―’

  ‘Daniel…’ The same feeling of detachment she had experienced yesterday when she lied to him about the house deeds returned. As if the words in her mother’s diary, now that they had been released, would always drown him out.

  ‘I’m not trying to hurt you but you need to slow down. She was fifteen, Adele. She must have been highly emotional and stressed out. Perhaps Shane was responsible and abandoned her. What you’ve read could have been a story she concocted.’

  ‘Is that what you think? Why would she make up something as sickening as that?’ She paced the room, unable to sit still.

  ‘I don’t know the truth,’ he replied. ‘And neither do you. But, if it did happen as she described and those men are still in Reedstown, do you honestly believe you will be able to identify them after all this time?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘But the information I’ve always wanted is in my hands. I’ve finally found something tangible that has brought me closer to her. I’m going to the mother and baby home in Inisada and see where I was born. Then I’m heading to Reedstown.’

  ‘How long will all that take?’ He forced her to stand still and face him.

  ‘I don’t know. Please don’t try to pin me down to a specific date. I’ll join you there as soon as I have answers.’

  ‘Supposing you never find those answers. How long will it take you to accept that reality?’

  How long is a piece of string? she thought, but he would not appreciate such a reply. She had no way of naming the tears that scalded her cheeks. Rage or frustration, fear of what she had lost or what she was about to lose? Her sobs were stifled against his shoulder. She was a rape child, not a lovechild, as she had always believed. Speared into being by an unholy trinity.

  She saw him off at Heathrow Airport. They held each other in a tight, breathless embrace. More promises, reassurances, vows of love. A swallow in an attic. A butterfly in a jungle. Random events. Heartbreaking decisions.

  8

  The Marianne Diary

  It’s over two months since I came to this prison and Miss Bethany never shuts up.

  ‘Pay attention to your work, Number Fifty-Three,’ she shouts. ‘You don’t know how privileged you are. You could be in a laundry washing dirty underwear instead of being allowed to handle sacred objects.’

  The medals are awful, shiny and heavy, and Mother Gloria’s ugly face is on all of them, showing off like she’s the queen of England. Me and Barbara spit on them and rub our saliva all over them. She’s my friend and sleeps in the bed next to me. The factory is in three big steel containers at the back of the big house. It’s either too hot or too cold. When it’s cold we’re allowed to wear fingerless gloves. Such luxury!! We’re not allowed to talk to each other when we’re packing the medals because that will slow production. But we can listen to music. Just classical and hymns. The violins screech inside my head but the hymns wash over me and help me to stay calm.

  We do gift packs of Mother Gloria CDs. She’s supposed to be meditating with God on them but Barbara says she’s crackers and anyone who listens to her recordings is just as daft. All the candles are made in her image. I like to think of her melting away and becoming a great, big, greasy blob. We pack the books she’s written about her apparitions and the holy messages she receives when she’s doing one of her weird d
ances.

  Barbara says it’s slave labour. Her father is also a Thorn and lives in the Donegal commune. One of the chosen. Hah. One of the clones, more like. Such drippy, awful women cleaning the house and cooking our meals. All spit and polish in honour of Mother Gloria. Barbara calls Miss Bethany ‘The Enforcer’ and Miss Elisha ‘The Quack’ and Miss Rebekah is ‘Poison Paws’ because of the awful food she cooks.

  The men who look after the grounds are worse. I see them looking at Mother Gloria with their beady eyes when she puts on that white robe and it’s like she’s poured her body into it. When she goes into one of her stupid trances and talks gibberish, those men are not thinking about their prayers, I can tell you that for nothing.

  The first time I heard Mother Gloria speaking was just a few weeks after Dad died. She described how she’d seen Jesus on the top of a mountain and how he told her it was her mission in this life to lead an assembly of Thorns into his light and away from the idolaters of sin and the devil. They had to shun those who would try to corrupt them and use the courage of their beliefs to keep on the path of righteousness. By the end of the assembly everyone in the hall was hugging and singing Thorn hymns and their eyes were really scary, like they were rolling around like marbles in their heads. Tears were streaming down Mam’s face when she was ‘touched’ by Mother Gloria. I shrank back and didn’t let her put her skinny hands on my head. I couldn’t stand all those women and men acting like she’d come down from heaven on a cloud. Afterwards, I couldn’t get her smile out of my head. Like it was a mask that hid how much she loved seeing everyone in her power. Like them. The ones who came for me in their balaclavas. Their masks as fixed as her smile.

  Mam says Mother Gloria helped her understand that Dad died when he tried to double-cross Jesus. Crap. He died because a French tourist came out of a side turning on the wrong side of the road and crashed headfirst into his car. Three people wiped out. The French tourist was called Pascal and the woman in Dad’s car was Bernice. Where were they going that night? To her apartment or a restaurant? Did they have time to say goodbye? Did he have time to whisper my name? Or Mam’s? Did she know about Bernice? I’m afraid to ask and she never says. Never mentions her name and, after the crash, I saw her tearing up the newspapers with Bernice’s picture on the front page.

  Hate feels like a tiny scab that begins to itch then it becomes infected and grows into a seeping pus. In the beginning I just hated them, the faceless, nameless three. Then it spread to Sergeant Bale, then Davina Maye and Julie Boland and their clique for the horrible things they said about me. I hated the Thorns with their twisted faith, and Mam, who chose them over me. Dad’s now wrapped up in my hate. It’s his fault that Mam joined the Thorns and ‘found her true identity’. That’s when everything changed. She didn’t seem to notice me any more and there was always another workshop, another conference where she could learn how to help her true self to emerge from the rot of a Godless society.

  9 Adele

  The signpost to Inisada was almost obscured by overgrown hedging. Easy to miss in a car and Adele had passed it twice before she noticed the rusting finger pointing left. She turned onto a road that was going in only one direction. The car juddered over potholes and she was forced to drive dangerously close to a sloping ditch at the edge of the hedgerow. This was Sleeping Beauty territory, the stunted spikiness, the prickling thorns and bristles reminding her of fairy stories from her childhood. How long since anyone had driven along this road, she wondered? Had they been as confused as she was? As frightened by the questions that had brought them here?

  Afraid that the tyres would puncture on a pothole, she considered abandoning the car and continuing on foot. A fallen tree blocked the road and took the decision from her. Its roots, wrenched from their sockets, hung like dreadlocks through the clotted earth and briars twined around the shrivelled trunk. After climbing over it, she reached a set of padlocked gates. She imagined them swinging open and closing behind Marianne. Her terror as Noreen drove away and left her imprisoned behind them.

  Beyond the gates, she could see the gaunt outlines of a building. Once, it must have been a magnificent stately home but now, roofless and reduced to blackened exterior walls, it was a shell, razed to the ground by a fire. The sign ‘House of Atonement’ was faded but still visible on the gatepost. Adele walked around the perimeter wall, searching for a gap that would allow her to enter the grounds. The top of the wall was covered with shards of glass and she was unable to find a break in the solid brickwork. Climbing over the gate was impossible. The curves and loops patterning the bottom section could give her a foothold but the sheer iron bars rising into spikes would defeat her. She returned to the car and removed a hammer and chisel. Determined to enter the grounds, she jammed the chisel into the base of the padlock and hammered at it until the fitting broke free.

  She walked across a courtyard towards a blackened archway where a door had stood before it was burned to ash. A gaping space led into the ruin. She imagined the fury of the fire as it roared through this three-storey building, the crash of ceilings and floors thundering downwards. Metal frames of beds and other furnishings lay on the ground, twisted into grotesque sculptures. Flimsy trees rooted in metal crevices, flowers and wild grasses sprouted from the mounds of brick and rubble. What had caused this inferno? An electrical fault, a cigarette flung carelessly aside, an accident in the kitchen, or had the fire been started deliberately? An act of arson carried out by an enemy of the Thorns in the dead of night?

  Adele looked upward towards the blue sky and small, skittering clouds. She should have been prepared for the sensations that swept over her but she had no defences left to hold back her grief. She sank to her knees amidst the debris. No one to hear her in this grim monstrosity. Her cries rebounded from the walls and echoed through spaces she had yet to explore. She found the strength to rise again and fight her way through the wreckage. Which room had been the dormitory where the young mothers slept? Where was Gloria Thornton’s office? Where was the clinic, the dining hall and prayer room? It was impossible to map her way through the devastation, apart from the kitchen, where a solid stove was one of the only objects to have withstood the heat and retain its shape.

  Outside, in a nearby field, someone was using a tractor. The grass swayed, knee-high and dizzy from the heat. Gaunt and black, the walls brooded under the searing sunshine. She reached another courtyard at the back of the house and found three steel containers. The doors were jammed on the first two containers but she managed to enter the third one, which was furthest from the house. The intense heat had warped the crude wooden floorboards and settled a pall of soot everywhere but the interior was still intact. No wonder it had been icy cold in the winter when the only heating was a few electric bars positioned near the top of the walls. Two windows had been cut into the sides of the container and the sun, shining through the corroding frames, glinted on shards of glass. She noticed scattered flecks of black on a long table and moved closer. Medals, she realised, all speckled with soot. She rubbed away the soot on two of the medals with her sleeve and saw the moulding of a woman’s profile, surrounded by a woven arch of thorns. The same woman’s face was visible on the second medal, a crown of thorns suspended like a halo above her head. Adele shuddered and dropped the medals. Her skin felt clogged, as if soot was penetrating her pores.

  She found more medals under the long trestle table. These ones had been packed in cardboard gift boxes. They were free from soot but tarnished by time. The boxes also contained leaflets that claimed the medals had been blessed personally by Mother Gloria. A faded photograph on the leaflet showed her on her knees gazing rapturously upwards towards a shaft of light. Unable to find anything else of interest, Adele returned to the front of the house. The grass, bleached from the sun, was turning yellow and the heat rolled towards her in waves as she moved in and out of the wall’s shadows.

  A cocker spaniel bounded through the open gates and headed straight towards her.

  ‘Stay, M
olly,’ an elderly woman shouted at the dog, who immediately came to a standstill, tongue drooling, her bright eyes staring at Adele. The woman hesitated by the entrance, obviously surprised at finding the gates unlocked.

  ‘I see that barriers aren’t any obstacle to you.’ She walked briskly towards Adele. Her walking boots looked comfortable and well worn, and the blackthorn stick she used had that same sturdy usefulness. She pointed her stick at the blackened hulk and said, ‘It was an inferno the last time I stood inside these gates.’

  ‘What happened to it?’ Adele asked. ‘Were you involved with the cu— sodality?’

  ‘Perish the thought.’ The woman snorted. ‘They kept to themselves and didn’t welcome outsiders – apart from those, like me, who brought supplies to them. I used to run the local supermarket in Inisada. Of course, that’s long gone now. No competing against those big shopping centres. And, sure, isn’t that what they call progress, I don’t think!’ Her gaze was direct and compassionate as she took in Adele’s unkempt appearance, her reddened eyes. ‘You must be one of the babies. You’re of an age and, sure, who else would want to visit this wretched place?’

  ‘Do other people come here?’

  ‘A few come, those who were babies and those who gave birth to them.’ The woman’s briskness steadied Adele. ‘But they never make it beyond the gate. I saw your car turning onto the road, if you can call it that any more. I didn’t think you’d make it past the fallen tree. But I can tell you’ve a determined nature.’

  ‘As you have,’ said Adele. ‘It’s tough climbing over that tree.’

  ‘Far too tough for me, girl. My climbing days are long over. I came by the back field. There’s a path through the wood that leads to here. Lilian’s my name.’ Her hand was rough, calloused with age and exposure, but firm as she held Adele in a warm grip. ‘Were you adopted out of here, if you don’t mind me asking?’