‘Then how …?’
‘A contact of mine recognized you. Miriam.’
Silence on the other end – even the crying had stopped. Robin waited for either confirmation or denial but when neither came, she ploughed on. ‘It was a leap, I was going on the physical likeness and Hannah’s age, but I took a chance and went to see your sister.’
A small gasp.
‘Jude – Judith – gave us a DNA sample and then we started looking for you. You weren’t easy to find.’
Still not a word.
‘Mimi,’ Robin said, ‘Toby told me you thought Hannah was in Chile. Do you know why she might have come to the UK instead, without telling you?’
Now she could hear weeping again. She stayed quiet and waited. Eventually Mimi Lopez – Miriam Chapman – cleared her throat. ‘She wanted to find her father. Her biological father.’
‘So he’s here? In the UK?’
‘I don’t know.’
Robin frowned. ‘Then …?’
‘She knew he was British.’
‘But you didn’t tell her he was here?’
‘I couldn’t. I don’t know where he is.’
‘Your child’s father?’
‘Matias is Hannah’s father. He adopted her, he brought her up as his own.’
‘But Hannah still wanted to know about her birth father.’
‘She always knew Matias had adopted her. We didn’t talk about it but when she turned eighteen last year, she wanted to know more.’
Again, Robin chose her words with great care. ‘When you left the UK in 1999 or the beginning of 2000,’ she said, ‘you went to Brazil. Salvador – Un Lugar Seguro. You went ahead and, three months later, you were joined by the man you knew first as Brother Philip, Philip Hatton.’
Silence again.
‘Mrs Lopez – Mimi – am I right about that?’
A whispered, ‘Yes.’
‘You had Hannah there in 2000, when you were fifteen,’ she said gently. ‘Mimi, is Philip Hannah’s biological father?’
A long pause then another, ‘Yes.’
‘Were you and Philip,’ she spoke as gently as possible, ‘involved with each other when you went to Salvador?’
‘We were together. In a relationship. We loved each other.’
‘You were fifteen and Philip was how old? Thirty-five? Forty?’
‘Thirty-four,’ she said, as if Robin had traduced the man. ‘And that, what you just said, is exactly why we had to leave. He told me at the time and he was right. People wouldn’t have understood that it wasn’t strange or criminal, that we simply loved each other.’
‘But you were a child.’
‘Oh, child,’ she said, dismissive. ‘Girls used to get married much earlier than that.’
They used to die of scurvy and smallpox, too, Robin thought; there’d been all sorts of advances. ‘So you loved each other. And yet only four years later, you married Matias?’
‘You obviously haven’t met anyone like Philip,’ Mimi said and there was a smile in her voice now, unmistakable, and also, yes, pity. ‘To try and keep someone like him for yourself would be selfish, if it was possible.’
‘I don’t understand. Selfish, how?’
‘Philip is a gift. His energy, his light. He should be shared.’
‘Shared?’
‘He gave me two of the other most important gifts of my life, too: Hannah and Matias.’
‘How did he “give” you Matias?’
‘He found him for me,’ she said simply. ‘Matias had come to work at a church in Salvador and once a fortnight, he gave a service in English. Philip went to listen – he missed hearing the Bible in English, he said.’
‘Matias speaks English, too?’
‘Yes, his mother does and she taught him. Philip and Matias got to know one another, then Matias started to volunteer at Lugar Seguro. One day Philip told me he thought God had sent Matias to Salvador so that he and I would find each other. I didn’t know what he was talking about at first, I thought maybe he was trying to get rid of me.’ A hint of a laugh, as if even now, in her current situation, the idea were ridiculous enough to be funny. ‘But eventually he helped me to see that he was right. Matias is younger than him, closer to my age. Now I think how typical of Philip it was, that self-sacrifice.’
It was incredible, Robin thought. Breathtaking. The sheer brass balls of the man.
‘When I understood that Matias and I were right for each other, Philip thought it would be better if he left so we could build our life without distractions.’
‘Mimi, did Matias know that Hannah was Philip’s child?’
‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘Not until later, when Hannah was eight or nine. When I had our daughter Beatriz I had a crisis about him not knowing the truth and I told him.’
‘How did he take it?’
She hesitated. ‘Not well. He was very angry with Philip.’
Good, Robin thought, good. She desperately wanted Matias to be decent, she realized, to know that, finally, Miriam had found a real safe place in the world.
‘Matias wanted to accuse him, involve the police. It took everything I had to persuade him not to – it was only when I said I didn’t want Hannah to think she was part of a crime that he stopped.’
‘What had you told him until then?’
‘The same we told everyone in Brazil: that I was Philip’s adopted daughter. We didn’t want to have left England and gone all the way to South America only to face the same thing. We kept our relationship private, which was how we liked it anyway.’
‘So until then Matias had thought that Hannah was …?’
‘Someone else’s,’ Mimi said, voice back to a whisper.
‘Whose?’
‘Someone who’d forced himself on me.’
‘When you were fourteen. If you had Hannah in May, and you knew you were pregnant when you left, you must have been fourteen.’
Didn’t she see it? Did she still not see it, now, nearly twenty years later, a mother of three in her thirties? Hadn’t it occurred to her when Hannah was fourteen?
‘Miriam, there’s something else I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Everything you’ve told me, everything Jude told me about you – your faith, wanting to lead a good life – did you ever think about how your leaving hurt your family here?’
The change in her voice was instantaneous. ‘Of course,’ she cried. ‘Of course I did!’
‘Then …?’
‘For Philip. People wouldn’t have understood – he would have gone to prison. I had to protect him!’ She paused. ‘And it was the only way for us to be together.’
For the four years until he got bored of you or you got too old and he palmed you off on Matias and legged it.
‘And since then? When you came of age and were happy in your marriage?’
Miriam’s voice shifted again, turning colder. ‘My father committed suicide. Suicide is a sin, it’s against God’s will. Philip said that we were right to stay away, that sometimes in life you have to make difficult choices.’
Robin closed her eyes. And Miriam had listened to him. But at that point, she thought, given her situation, perhaps she’d had to, for her own sanity. Because otherwise she’d given up her life, destroyed her family, for – what?
More quietly, Miriam said, ‘How could I ever go back when I killed my father?’
‘You didn’t. You didn’t kill him. And you didn’t kill your mother, either. They loved you, Miriam. Jude still does.’
There was silence on the line then a wrenching sob. ‘How could she forgive me?’
‘If you told her what you’ve told me, I think she would. I really think she would. More than anything, I think she’d just like her sister back.’
Miriam started sobbing so hard, Robin thought it must hurt. Once in the darkest days, when Lennie was tiny and she hadn’t been able to see a way forward, she’d cried so hard she’d pulled a muscle in her back. ‘It’ll get better,’ she told her, ‘thing
s will get better, I know. I promise.’
A couple of minutes went by before she was able to ask her last questions.
‘Where did Philip go after Salvador, Mimi? Do you know?’
‘Africa.’ She gulped then crooned. ‘To travel for a while, then decide. A few years ago, I saw him in a picture online.’
‘Where?’
‘With a charity in Zimbabwe.’
Robin’s heart sank. ‘Did he have any connection to Birmingham that you know of?’
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘Family here – friends? Did he ever mention Birmingham at all?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Never.’
Chapter Forty-one
Last night, her dad had been clinging to the idea that Luke had merely accompanied Billy to the protest (of course, being a white supremacist’s plus-one was much better) but he knew the whole story now. When he came to the door at Mary Street, Robin could see it on him, lowering his head, rounding his shoulders. Like them, he was cowering, waiting for the hammer to fall.
That hammer. He still didn’t know about the one over Lennie’s head, or how Luke might use it.
The powerlessness was excruciating. To see Lennie so frightened and be unable to help her. She couldn’t even give her information because there hadn’t been any more. People cared about Shaun Palmer and the student but once they knew he’d regained consciousness, no one mentioned the skinhead. She couldn’t ask Samir again, especially after the look he’d given her before. Mid-afternoon, she’d thought about calling the investigating team herself but she couldn’t risk drawing attention. Interesting – why do you want to know? she imagined someone asking, making a note.
Lennie knew she was powerless, and that hurt, too. Robin had assumed she’d sleep in her room again, that she’d want the comfort of being together as much as she did, but she refused. ‘No. I need to be on my own.’
‘I’m here, Len,’ she said. ‘You’re not alone.’
‘I never will be, will I,’ she said, voice like a slap, ‘when I’m in jail.’
Though she’d promised herself she wouldn’t, when she turned off the light, Robin reached for the sense memories of Samir again. She found, however, that she couldn’t quite conjure them. They’d faded, lost their colour, and the slipping away struck her as a parallel for Samir himself. She saw him nearly every day, they talked all the time but, like Lennie at the other end of the landing, he was a thousand miles away, out of reach.
Robin felt a vacuum open up in her middle, an aching sense of loss. Eyes open in the dark, staring at the furniture outlined by the streetlight, she acknowledged what she’d spent eighteen years trying to deny: she still loved him. She’d never stopped.
And it was still over, even if she did know now why he’d ended it. Eighteen years. She’d had a baby, he’d married Liz, and had Harry and Leila. They were friends now – colleagues and friends – and that was that.
Well, she might have been in denial, she realized, but other people knew. She remembered Lennie in the car back from the hospital. Maybe you don’t want to get over what happened. Because if you do, it’ll mean you’ve finally accepted it. That it’s done and dusted – actually over.
And Kev, that first night in his room. You all right? Is it Samir?
Then she remembered Samir’s eyes the day he’d lost his temper. Did it have to be Kev, Robin?
Yes, she realized, it had had to be, and now she understood that, too. Because Kev belonged to those times, he’d been part of that scene, their friend. Because he was connected to Samir.
Chapter Forty-two
As she swam up towards the light, catastrophic scenarios loomed at her like deep-water fish: Luke was dead; her mother was dead; the white supremacist was dead and the police were coming for Lennie. She opened her eyes to find her heart beating far too fast, her T-shirt soaked. The alarm said 5.07.
She got out of bed too quickly, giving herself a head rush, and went to Lennie’s room, afraid that the doom-scenarios had been an unconscious animal awareness of danger but Lennie was curled in a ball under her duvet, asleep and unhurt.
In her own room again, Robin fetched her laptop from the chest of drawers and brought it back to bed. Propping it on her knees, she typed ‘Zimbabwe charity Brother Philip Hatton John Philips’ into Google. Nearly three million results. She skimmed the first six pages – obituaries, articles from school magazines and various American foundations, nothing that struck her as relevant. Remembering Varan’s strategy, she entered the same terms into Google Images and got a single page of bright photographs of children in school uniform, women in a market garden, posters for HIV fundraisers.
Was he still in Zimbabwe? Miriam said she’d seen the photograph three or four years ago. He’d been in Salvador for four years, Northumbria about the same, as far as they could tell. Maybe he’d moved on. What name was he using these days? And what did he look like? She still had no idea. She’d asked Miriam to email a photograph but she said she’d only ever had a few – Surprise! Brother Phil was camera-shy – and Matias had destroyed them all in his rage when he’d learned the truth about Hannah.
She’d asked her to find the photograph online and send the link but nothing had arrived so far. She’d call her again as soon as she reasonably could but that was hours away – it was too early here, and Buenos Aires was hours behind.
Robin ran her eyes down the page. In all the pictures put together, thirty or forty, there were, what, three white people? She knew how old he’d be now: fifty-three. How many photographs of middle-aged white men working at Zimbabwean charities could there be?
Still in Images, she broadened her search to ‘Zimbabwe charity’ and started scrolling. The answer to her question, she saw almost immediately, was, far more than she’d hoped. Was this him, this guy with his arms around a bunch of schoolboys, doling out food at a buffet? Or this, standing with a group of adults in a nondescript conference room? She had no idea – how could she? He was a continent-hopping, name-changing, camera-avoiding shape-shifter. She kept scrolling anyway – at least while she was doing this, she didn’t have to think about Luke or Lennie and whether the light starting to filter through the curtains was the beginning of the day when one or both of them would be arrested.
She reached a picture of a long single-storey building with a corrugated-iron roof, a group of people gathered on the dry grass in front, largely black with a handful of white faces at the back. Robin double-clicked to zoom in and ran her eyes along the row – woman, woman, man in his thirties, girl in her late teens or twenties, probably volunteering on a gap year. She moved on then stopped. Going back, she put her cursor on the girl’s face and zoomed in again.
She looked, then looked again to be sure. Yes. Her hair was different, blonder, and she was very tanned, but yes.
It was Victoria Engel.
She texted both Samir and Malia, Ring me ASAP, then got out of bed and paced the room. Could it be a coincidence? What were the odds? Long, they had to be – very long.
Her notebook was in her bag in the kitchen. She crept downstairs, skirting the creaking steps. She wanted Lennie to sleep as long as possible before she woke to the nightmare again. She also needed time to think.
Back in bed, she turned to a new page and started scrawling down notes, trying to make sense of how it all fitted together – if it did. Hannah had died in Birmingham; Victoria was from here. She’d vanished five years ago, when she, like Miriam, had been fifteen, and now she’d rematerialized in Zimbabwe, in a small town not far from Harare, working for what this new charity’s webpage said was a shelter for vulnerable women and teenagers (God, the irony). Zimbabwe, last confirmed whereabouts of Brother Phil.
If he was involved in Victoria’s disappearance, what did that mean? That he must have been here in Birmingham or nearby at some point five years ago. He’d have been forty-eight then – surely getting towards the end of his days of dazzling teenage girls with his physical charms but maybe not quite at the
end. One last hurrah? But when Miriam talked about him it hadn’t been about physical attraction, had it? She’d thought Brother Phil would help her lead a good life – a moral life.
With a start, Robin remembered Martin Engel outside the station – ‘She wanted to be a force for good in the world,’ he’d told her. Bloody hell, was that how he did it? Was that how he’d persuaded Victoria to up sticks thousands of miles overseas with a man three times her age: she’d wanted to be good? Good, yes, maybe, but also, Robin thought, it was a powerful thing to be wanted. Wanted a lot. And at that age, by an older, charismatic man who promised you a life in which you made a difference, you mattered? Teenage earnestness, Robin wrote, wanting to change world, awakening sexuality & perceived power over older man = heady, powerful? Drama & excitement, Africa/South America, travel, adventure versus school, exams, powerlessness, being a kid.
She imagined being able to tell Martin Engel that Victoria was still alive, ending his five years of mental torment. He’d have pictured the worst every single day. If the photograph was anything to go by, she didn’t look miserable. But then, like Miriam, if this was what had happened to her, she’d been worked on psychologically in some way, convinced that she was in love, that a life of adventure waited where she and this good but older man could be together.
But where had she met Brother Phil?
She wanted to be a force for good in the world – Martin had told her that. She used to volunteer with me.
Victoria had volunteered. Matias Lopez had volunteered at Un Lugar Seguro, it was how he’d met Miriam.
The Zimbabwean picture was open on her laptop, the long low building with the crowd outside. She clicked over to their website again, then on a link to ‘Who We Are’. Tariro Yangu, she read, was a shelter and soup kitchen.
A soup kitchen.
Was it possible? Quickly, as if the idea might slip away, she opened a new window and searched for ‘Good Hope Kitchen Birmingham’. A well-designed home-page with a pen-and-ink sketch of the building itself told her about Good Hope’s ‘mission’ to provide warm meals and a sense of community for those in need. She clicked on ‘Who We Are’.
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