The Lake House

by Kate Morton

  Nancy’s blue eyes gleamed with the immediacy of the memory. Sadie met the other woman’s smile but her own was tempered with pity. She understood why Nancy had come tonight and it made her sad. There was no breakthrough in the case; she simply wanted to talk about Maggie, and rather than reach out to a friend or relative she’d chosen Sadie as her confidante. It wasn’t uncommon during investigations for members of the victim’s family to develop an abnormally tight bond with the police officer in charge. Sadie figured it made sense that someone whose life had been turned upside down by the shock and trauma of an unexpected crime would cling to the person who seemed to represent solutions and safety, who seemed to be in charge and able to fix things.

  But Sadie was no longer in charge of finding Maggie, and she certainly wasn’t able to fix things. Not for Nancy Bailey, not even for herself. Sadie glanced at the digital clock on the oven. She’d been hit suddenly by a wave of extreme tiredness. The day had been long and heavy and waking that morning in Cornwall seemed like something that had happened to someone else a very long time ago. She felt sorry for Nancy, but they were going over old ground which was in neither one of their best interests. She gathered their empty glasses into a cluster near the bottle of JW. “Nancy, look, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m very tired.”

  The other woman nodded quickly. “’Course you are, sorry—I just get stuck, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “And there was a reason I came tonight.” She pulled something out of her pocket, a small leather-bound notebook. “I’ve been going through Maggie’s things again, just in case I found a new lead, and I saw in her diary she had a dinner date with a man called MT. It had been there the whole time but I didn’t realise what it was. I remember now, he was a new fellow at work.” She was pointing at the initials with a fingernail bitten to the quick.

  “You think this guy, this MT, might have been involved? That he had something to do with her disappearance?”

  Nancy was looking at her like she’d lost her marbles. “No, you duffer! I think he’s proof that she didn’t go anywhere, not by choice. Maggie never dated, not since she and Steve split up. She didn’t think it was right to confuse Caty by parading one man after another across the threshold. But this one was different, this MT. She’d told me about him, you see, more than once. Mum, she said, he’s so handsome and really kind and funny. She thought he might even be The One.”

  “Nancy—”

  “Don’t you see? Why would she walk out right when everything was coming together for her?”

  Sadie could think of any number of reasons, but reasons hardly mattered at this point. It was like Donald always said: thoughts about motive were a distraction. They stopped people from seeing what was right in front of them if they couldn’t straight away explain it. All that mattered was that Maggie had walked out. They’d found unassailable proof. “There was a note, Nancy.”

  “Note.” Nancy waved her hand, frustrated. “You know what I think of that note.”

  Sadie did know what Nancy thought of the note. She thought very little of it indeed. Somewhat predictably, Nancy was convinced the note was a fake. This was despite having been told numerous times, by more than one handwriting analyst, with high degrees of certainty, that the message had been written by Maggie.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Nancy said now. “If you knew her, you’d agree.”

  Sadie didn’t know Maggie, but there were a number of things she did know. She knew there’d been a note, she knew Caitlyn had been hungry and frightened when they found her, she knew the little girl was happy and safe now. Sadie looked at Nancy, sitting on the other side of the sofa, her face wretched with the effort of inventing endless possibilities for what might have happened to Maggie. It seemed the human brain had an unlimited creative ability when it desired something enough.

  She thought again of Eleanor Edevane, whose child had also disappeared. Nowhere in Clive’s notes had there been evidence that she’d made alternative suggestions as to where her son might be. In fact, Clive said she’d handled herself with grace, that she’d quietly let police get on with their work, that her husband had stopped her from tearing outside and helping with the search, that she’d decided against posting a reward but had donated money later to the police in gratitude for their efforts.

  It suddenly seemed to Sadie very unnatural behaviour. Vastly different to Nancy Bailey’s ferocious belief that the police were wrong, her tireless attempts to find new avenues of investigation. In fact, Eleanor Edevane’s passivity could almost be read as further evidence she already knew the whereabouts of her child. Clive certainly hadn’t thought so. He’d been convinced she was holding herself together with tremendous will and was brought unstuck only by the compounding tragedy of her friend Llewellyn’s suicide.

  But, then, investigating officers couldn’t always be counted on to look beyond the personal relationship they’d forged with families, especially a young officer just starting out. Sadie sat very still, her mind suddenly active, ticking over the possibilities. Was the donation to police actually an apology of some sort, for wasting their time and resources in a search she knew would be fruitless? The search for a little boy who was already dead? Who had, perhaps, already been buried in the grounds of Loeanneth? In the woods, maybe, that gave the house its total privacy?

  “I’m sorry. You’re tired. I should go.”

  Sadie blinked. Away with her thoughts, she’d almost forgotten her visitor.

  Nancy gathered her bag by the straps, slinging it over her shoulder. She stood. “It was good of you to see me.”

  “Nancy—” Sadie stopped. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to say. I’m sorry it didn’t work out differently. I’m sorry I let you down. She wasn’t a hugger, and yet in that moment Sadie felt an overwhelming urge to embrace the other woman. And so she did.

  * * *

  Sadie sat for a time on the sofa after Nancy left. She was still tired, but her mind was too restless to sleep. She cursed herself for having returned Fictional Escap(e)ades before leaving Cornwall; she could have used a good sedative right now. The other woman’s sadness, her loneliness and the evident betrayal she felt in the face of her daughter’s absconding, had left a shadowy echo behind in the flat. It was a great pity she felt cut off from Caitlyn, but Sadie was glad for the little girl that she had another parent, a loving father with a second wife prepared to take on somebody else’s child. There were some good people in the world, people like Bertie and Ruth.

  When Sadie had found out she was pregnant that summer there’d been a dreadful series of rows with her parents. They’d been adamant that “people mustn’t know’ and had demanded that she “get it taken care of’ as quickly and quietly as possible. Sadie had been bewildered and frightened, but she’d refused; things had escalated, her father had blustered and threatened, and then finally—she couldn’t remember now whether it was he or she who’d given the ultimatum—Sadie had left home. That’s when the Social Services had got involved, asking whether there was anyone else she could stay with while things cooled down, family or friends who might take her in. Sadie had initially told them no. It was only when they pressed that she remembered the grandparents she’d used to visit when she was younger. Vague memories came to her of the drive in to London, the roast Sunday lunches, and the tiny walled garden. There’d been a falling-out, she remembered—her parents, like many of the blinkered and unyielding, were often falling out with people—and Sadie’s mother had broken contact with her own mum and dad when Sadie was four years old.

  Sadie had been nervous when she met Bertie and Ruth again after all those years. The circumstances of the reunion made her feel ashamed and therefore indignant. She’d stood with her back against the wall of the shop, shy disguised as surly, while Mr and Mrs Gardiner exchanged neighbourly pleasantries with the grandparents she could barely bring herself to look at. Ruth had chatted whi
le Bertie stood quietly by, his wise brow furrowed, and Sadie focused on her shoes, her fingernails, the framed postcard by the cash register—anything other than the well-meaning adults who’d recently assumed control over her small world.

  It was while she was standing there, looking at the postcard, a sepia photograph of a garden gate somewhere, that she’d felt the baby kick for the first time. As if we shared the most amazing secret, that tiny hidden person and I, Eleanor had written to Anthony on the ivy-rimmed paper, and that’s exactly what it had felt like for Sadie, too. Just the two of them, against the world. That was when the whisper of the idea had first crept in, that perhaps she could keep her baby, that maybe everything would be all right so long as they were together. It made no practical sense: she was sixteen, she had no income or prospects, she knew nothing about raising a child—was still one herself; but the longing was so strong it knocked all sense out of her for a while. Hormones, or so the nurses told her.

  With a sigh, she picked up the pile of mail from the end of the table and started sifting through, sorting bills from junk. She was almost finished when she reached an envelope that was neither. Her address was handwritten, the writing itself instantly recognisable, and for a split second Sadie thought it must be the same one she’d returned last week, that the postman had got it wrong and delivered it back to her rather than to the sender. Then she realised that of course it was a whole new letter, that Charlotte Sutherland had written again.

  She poured herself a fortifying slug of whisky.

  There was a part of Sadie that didn’t want to open the envelope, but another part was itching to see what was written on the letter inside.

  The curious part won. It usually did.

  The first half of the message was very similar to the previous one, formal and polite, explaining who she was and telling a little about herself, her achievements and hobbies, her likes and dislikes, but when Sadie reached the last paragraph she noticed that the handwriting lost its composure, becoming jagged. A couple of lines in particular leapt out: Please write back—I don’t want anything from you, I just want to know who I am. I don’t recognise myself, I look in the mirror and I don’t know who I am anymore. Please.

  Sadie dropped the letter as if it burned. The words rang with truth. They might have been her own, fifteen years ago. She remembered vividly the pain of feeling she no longer knew herself. Of looking in the mirror at Bertie and Ruth’s house, the tight swelling of her usually flat belly, the sensation of another life moving there. Worse, though, was afterwards, her skin bearing marks from the experience she’d been through. Expecting to be as she had been before, and realising, too late, that it was impossible ever to go back.

  They were advised at the hospital not to name their babies. It was easier that way, apparently, and everyone was very concerned that things should be easy. Nobody wanted a scene. They had one every so often, the nurse had confided, no matter how careful they were. It was inevitable, she continued with quiet wisdom; regardless of how good a system they had in place, there were always some. There was one girl, dark-haired and Italian-looking, whose screams Sadie still heard sometimes. I want my baby, give me my baby. Running down the white-painted hallway, her gown gaping and her eyes wild.

  Sadie hadn’t shouted. She’d barely spoken. And when Bertie and Ruth came to collect her, when it was all over, she walked down that hallway with her old clothes on and her eyes on the door, as if nothing had happened and the whole episode could be left behind in that pale-green room with its crack in the wall, shaped like the River Nile.

  During the course of her work Sadie had dealt with young mothers and she knew that agencies these days worked with the mums to arrange adoptions. They were allowed to see their baby after the birth, name the baby and spend time with them. In some cases, it was possible to receive updates on their child’s progress, even to visit them.

  But things had been different back then. There were more rules, different rules. As she lay in the bed, her arm still strapped to a monitor on the table beside her, nurses moving this way and that in the great bustle that follows a baby’s birth, she’d held a strange, warm bundle in her arms, of skinny limbs and a rounded belly and cheeks that felt like velvet.

  Ninety minutes.

  Sadie had held her baby for ninety minutes before she was carried away, a small shaky hand startling over the top of the yellow-and-white-striped blanket in which she was wrapped. It was the same miraculous little hand Sadie had spent the past hour and a half stroking and cradling, that had closed tightly around her finger as if to claim her, and for a moment a void opened up in the room between them into which flowed all the things Sadie wanted to tell that baby girl, the things she wanted her to know, about life and love, the past and the future, but the nurses had a system and before Sadie could think, let alone speak, the small parcel was gone. The echo of her cry still made Sadie shiver sometimes. The warmth of that tiny new hand made her wake in an ice-cold sweat. Even now, here in her sitting room, she was cold, very cold. Sadie had only broken one of the hospital rules. She had given her daughter a name.

  * * *

  The pints with Donald, the whisky with Nancy, the fug of general maudlin thoughts had left her spent, and although it was only nine-thirty Sadie must have dozed, for the next thing she knew her mobile phone was ringing. She blinked in the dull light of her flat, trying to remember where she’d put the damn thing.

  The charger. Sadie stumbled to answer it, shaking her mind clear. Her head was full of babies. Lost babies, adopted babies, abandoned babies. Maybe even a murdered baby.

  She reached for her phone and saw a heap of missed calls on the screen, all from a number she didn’t recognise. “Hello?”

  “DC Sadie Sparrow?”

  “Speaking.”

  “My name is Peter Obel. I work as an assistant for the novelist A.C. Edevane.”

  Alice. Sadie felt a surge of adrenalin. Suddenly, she was very wide awake. “Okay.”

  “I’m sorry to call so late, but it’s rather a delicate matter and I didn’t want to leave a message.”

  This was the bit where he threatened legal action if she didn’t leave his employer alone.

  “Ms Edevane received your letters regarding the disappearance of her brother Theo and asked me to call you.”

  “Okay.”

  “She’d like to set up a meeting to talk with you about the case. Does midday Friday suit?”

  Twenty-three

  London, 2003

  Alice’s first real memory of her father was of a day spent at the circus. It was a few weeks after she turned four, and the red-and-yellow tents had arrived like magic toadstools in a vacant field outside the village. “How did they know it was my birthday?” she’d asked her mother, wide-eyed with delight as they passed the site. Excitement built over the next few days, posters appearing on walls and in shop windows, featuring clowns, lions and, Alice’s favourite, a girl flying high above the ground on a glittering swing, red ribbons streaming behind her.

  Little Clementine was suffering with a chest infection, so when the big day finally dawned, Mother stayed at home while they set off hand in hand across the fields. Alice skipped along beside her father, the skirt of her new dress bouncing pleasingly, trying to think of things to tell him, shy but filled with a sense of her own importance. It occurred to her now that Deborah must have been there, too, but Alice’s mind had conveniently erased her sister from the memory. Upon arrival, they were hit with the smell of sawdust and manure, the sound of fairground music, children squealing and horses whinnying. A giant tent rose before them, its dark mouth wide and gaping, its pitched roof piercing the sky, and Alice stopped where she was to stare saucer-eyed at the jagged yellow flag hoisted up top, flapping in the breeze as tiny starlings sailed the wind currents above. “It’s whopping,” she said, pleased with the word, a new one she’d overheard Mrs Stevenson using in the kitchen and bee
n waiting to deploy ever since.

  A line of people were jostling at the entrance, children and adults chattering excitedly as they filed beneath the big top and took their places on the raked bench seating. Static tension was in the air as they waited for the show to begin. The sun was hot and the smell of baking canvas mingled with the stench of anticipation, until finally a drum roll pummelled around the circle, silencing voices and bringing everybody to the edge of their seats. The ringmaster strutted and puffed, lions roared and elephants carried dancing ladies around the ring. Throughout it all Alice was transfixed, her attention leaving the action only occasionally and briefly to glance sideways at her father, to drink in his focused frown, the hollow of his cheek, his sharp hairline and shaved jawline. He was still a novelty, the completing puzzle piece, the thing they’d been missing in the war years without even knowing it. The smell of shaving soap, the pair of enormous boots in the hall, the deep warmth of his whiskery laugh.