by Emily Gunnis
‘With all due respect, George, you gave up your rights to Elvira at birth.’ Father Benjamin’s voice was calm and reasoning, as if he were giving a sermon in church.
‘I thought she had been adopted, I thought she had gone to a loving home.’ Her father sounded strained and breathless; Kitty could picture him pacing as the priest sat watching.
‘She had; she was there for the first six years of her life,’ said Father Benjamin.
‘And what happened?’ George’s voice rose slightly.
‘I don’t know exactly, but they struggled with her; said she was troubled.’ Kitty heard Father Benjamin cough, and imagined him relaxed, his legs crossed, sipping at a drink.
‘Even so, you don’t return a child as though she’s a gift you don’t like.’ George was pacing again; Kitty could hear it in his voice, feel the floor shaking gently.
‘It often happens that a couple who think they can’t have children fall pregnant after they adopt. Elvira found it very hard to adjust to the new baby and they said there were a couple of occasions when she tried to harm him.’ The room fell silent then; Kitty panicked they were about to appear and turned to dart back up the stairs.
‘So did you try and find her another family?’ said George, his voice more resigned now.
‘We did, but young couples don’t want difficult six-year-olds, they want babies,’ said Father Benjamin.
‘Why didn’t you at least tell me?’ Kitty could hear the resignation in her father’s voice.
‘Helena was so ill, George, you could barely cope with Kitty. I didn’t want to burden you. I have to say, I find these accusations quite testing. May I remind you that you came to us, begging for our help, I might add, to make this problem of yours disappear.’ The priest’s voice was harder now.
‘I know, Father, and I am grateful. It’s just so shocking for Kitty, and hard for me. To try to explain to her what happened, and why we never told her she had a sister. Dr Jacobson said I would need to give her time, but she has nightmares every night; she hasn’t been herself since this dreadful episode. And now you tell me the poor girl is dead. I can’t help but feel responsible. Where is she buried?’
Kitty held her breath.
‘In the graveyard next to St Margaret’s. We blessed her and gave her a proper burial.’ Father Benjamin’s voice was softer again now.
‘Why didn’t she go to the hospital? You can’t just bury a child without going through the proper channels.’ George’s voice was breaking.
‘Dr Jacobson wrote her death certificate. It’s all by the book, George. It was unfortunate, but it was her choice to run away on one of the coldest nights of the year. Now, you mustn’t upset yourself any more. You need to concentrate on getting Helena well, and helping Kitty through this difficult time. I think I’d better go. I’ll see myself out.’
Kitty had shot up the stairs before Father Benjamin appeared. All night she had sobbed into her pillow at the thought of the sister she had never known, and who she longed for so desperately, lying alone in her grave, cold and scared.
‘She’s not buried at St Margaret’s, you know.’ She looked up at the clock now, knowing their session was coming to a close.
Richard sat back in his chair, his body sunken now, his hands clinging to the armrests as if they were keeping him upright. He looked exhausted.
‘They’re tearing the house down to make way for a new development and they excavated the graveyard,’ she continued. ‘I got hold of a copy of the excavation report.’
‘And did it give details of what was found in the graves?’ said Richard slowly.
‘Some of the women were buried with their newborn babies. But none of the graves contained older children.’
‘So they buried her elsewhere?’
‘Or she’s still alive,’ said Kitty, watching him carefully.
‘How can she be alive?’ Richard’s eyes were wide.
Kitty shrugged. ‘Maybe she escaped and someone took her in. If they lied about what happened to her, maybe they lied about burying her. Or maybe she’s been hiding out at St Margaret’s all this time.’
Richard hesitated before speaking. ‘It seems quite unlikely. Do you not think she would have tried to find you again?’
‘Not if she blamed me for abandoning her,’ Kitty said simply. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the night my father died. The police woke me up at two a.m. I was ten years old and all alone. My mother was in hospital; my father had been visiting her and crashed on his way home.’
‘I’m sorry, Kitty,’ said Richard, shaking his head.
‘I just remember telling them he was a good driver. That he wouldn’t have crashed. I wanted to ask them why they were so sure it was an accident. My father told me once that if there was no motive, you could easily get away with murder. A neighbour came round and I sat in my room until the sun came up, thinking about it over and over: maybe there was a motive, maybe someone had wanted to hurt him.’
She paused and looked at Richard, expecting him to encourage her to go on, but instead he stared through her, not meeting her eye, then slowly looked up at the clock.
Chapter Ten
Monday 23 January 1961
George Cannon sat on the hard wooden chair by his wife’s hospital bed, watching tubes of blood snaking from her pale forearm into the churning machine. He’d sat there a hundred times before, holding her hand, talking the hours away as the dialysis did what her kidneys could not. Yet tonight, as he watched her wasted body and listened to her strained breathing, everything felt wrong. Minutes seemed to drag like hours and the night felt like an endless black hole ahead of him.
He looked up at the ticking clock: 10 p.m. He couldn’t leave her before she was back on the ward; she was covered in bruises from the prodding of endless needles and, he was convinced, from being lifted too roughly from bed to bed. The bruises covered her entire body and never seemed to heal – some green, some dark purple, the cluster of five over her hip almost black, as if the devil himself had left his handprint while trying to pull her down.
Matron had insisted that he leave at the end of visiting hours; he had insisted on staying. In the end, his position as Chief Superintendent of Sussex Police had won through and he’d been permitted to stay. Not that her consent, or lack of it, would have made any difference to his resolve. He was losing control over every other aspect of his life, and nothing Matron or anyone else did would make him leave his wife tonight. Not when every waking and sleeping minute that he was not with her felt like utter failure on his part. For soon, too soon, she would be gone and he would hate himself for ever for leaving her side when she was still alive.
Tap, tap, tap. Matron’s heels grew louder as she made her way down the silent corridor towards them. George looked at his wife’s face and followed the line of her hollow cheekbones down to her mouth, where her lips were so cracked and dry they were bleeding at the edges.
‘She’s thirsty, she needs more water,’ he snapped as Matron entered the room.
‘Mr Cannon,’ she sighed. ‘She’s still on five fluid ounces, I’m not permitted to give her any more.’
‘Well, can you check again? She’s been begging me for water. Does it really make that much difference? She’s dying, for God’s sake . . .’ His voice faltered as he glared into Matron’s tired eyes.
‘I know it’s hard,’ she said, checking that the dialysis machine and all its workings were in order. ‘But there is still hope that we will find her a donor. If we do, it will help her chances. Why don’t you go home and get some sleep, Mr Cannon? We’ll take good care of her.’
‘I’m not going home.’ George stood up.
‘As you wish,’ said Matron stiffly, turning to leave the room. She turned back to him at the door, the faint whiskers on her chin catching the light. ‘Her treatment should be finished soon. Please come and find me when the machine stops and I’ll see to her.’
He was reliving it all again, the desperation, the helplessness
. Helena’s body was rejecting the kidney she had been given two years ago after he had gone to Father Benjamin and asked for his prayers. Prayers that had been answered the day their lives changed for ever.
With only hours to spare, a kidney had been found for Helena. But on the day they should have been celebrating her new chance at life, their daughter Kitty had disappeared. For two days and nights they had searched, desperate, until finally her filthy, broken body was found in a ditch two miles from Preston church. With his wife having transplant surgery in one part of the hospital and his daughter in a coma in the other, George had made a deal with God that if he had to sacrifice one of them, it should be Helena rather than Kitty. And it seemed two years later that his prayers were being remembered.
He stood glaring at his reflection in the window as the icy rain battered full pelt at the glass. He felt as if the throbbing pressure in his head was going to crush his skull from the inside. He turned and looked back at Helena. He couldn’t leave, but he couldn’t bear to stay. There was no comfort for him anywhere, no escape from himself, and it was pushing him to the brink of madness.
The grinding noise of the dialysis machine and the ticking clock were eating through his eardrums. It took every ounce of strength not to smash them both to pieces. He sat back down and closed his stinging eyes again, his whole body throbbing, begging him for sleep. He tried to control his breathing and calm himself, but as soon as he relaxed, he felt himself falling, down and down like sand through an hourglass. He jerked himself awake, barely able to breathe through the tightness in his chest. His eyes strained to focus as they wandered up Helena’s motionless body. Her legs were so swollen she could no longer lift them, and he ached as he recalled a time when she had been free of all this pain. Images flashed into his mind of when they had first met – her hand outstretched, her wavy blond hair falling forward as she’d removed her glasses and smiled. He hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her.
Before long, he lived to be with her; he had never met anyone like her. She was so strong and fearless, no one could ever have guessed what was going on inside her perfect body. When she had started getting dizzy and tired less than a year after their wedding, they’d presumed it was the baby they longed for, but within a week they were sitting in disbelief in Dr Jacobson’s office, grief-stricken and unable even to look at each other. There was no baby, nor would there ever be, and their married life – their future as they had envisaged it – was gone.
George made his way out into the tiled corridor and crept past beds of sleeping patients towards Matron’s mottled glass door. He knocked quietly, then slowly turned the handle. A wireless crackled in the corner of a pristine space furnished with a coat stand, a filing cabinet and a wooden desk, upon which sat a china cup half filled with tea. The room was empty.
‘Hello?’ he whispered.
‘George?’
The voice from behind him startled George so badly that he stumbled into the desk, sending the teacup and its contents crashing to the floor. He looked up to see the familiar face of Dr Jacobson, his family doctor of twenty years, who was peeling a snow-sodden coat from his arms and shaking the flakes from his greying hair.
‘Are you all right?’ He peered with concern at George over his half-moon glasses. George could feel the freezing night radiating from the doctor’s face; could see the burst blood vessels on his nose glowing purple against his pale skin.
‘Yes, I’m fine. Have you seen Matron anywhere, Edward? Helena’s treatment is finished and I need to get back to Kitty.’
‘Not yet. She’s probably doing her rounds.’
George lifted the telephone from its cradle.
‘You’re wasting your time,’ Dr Jacobson said. ‘All the lines are down from the storm. Are you sure you’re all right?’ He hung his coat up on the stand. ‘I can see to Helena if you need to leave.’
‘Can you? Will you stay with her until I get back?’
‘Of course,’ said Dr Jacobson, crossing his arms and lowering his voice. ‘George, how is Kitty doing?’
‘Despite what you said, she doesn’t seem to be getting back to her old self,’ George replied curtly. ‘She’s terribly worried and upset about her mother. She didn’t want me to leave her tonight.’
He knew it wasn’t hard for Kitty to sense his anxiety, and that nothing he did alleviated it. Not the whisky he drank before he finally fell asleep at dawn, nor the assurances from Dr Jacobson that they would find Helena another kidney. His daughter had been troubled since coming so close to death two years previously. She spoke often of meeting her twin the day she went missing, something he thought was impossible when she first told him about it in the hospital, but which to his horror had turned out to be true. Elvira had been returned to St Margaret’s by her adoptive family and had then escaped. And now she was dead and he would always blame himself.
He had never even met the child, but he would never forget Father Benjamin walking into Mother Carlin’s office at St Margaret’s. ‘You have a beautiful daughter, George, though I’m sorry to tell you that her mother didn’t survive.’
George had sat down heavily. ‘That’s terrible. Did she suffer?’
‘No, she delivered them both and then she had a bleed. It was very quick; there was nothing we could do.’ Mother Carlin had rested her hand on his shoulder.
‘Both?’ he had said. ‘There was more than one child?’
‘She had twins, George, but the other child got a little stuck, so she took a while to breathe. She’s alive, but we need to keep her here and care for her. When she’s well enough, we’ll find her a lovely home.’
‘Can I see her?’ he had asked.
‘No, she’s in the infirmary. Please don’t worry, George, you have a beautiful daughter to cherish, and one is quite enough for you to manage.’
At that moment, the door to the dark office opened, and as the light came into the room, so did Kitty. She was in a Moses basket, and so quiet, George wasn’t sure there was even a baby in it until he peered over the top. She had looked up at him with her huge brown eyes and instinctively he had put his hand on her cheek. She had reached up and clutched his finger, her fist was so tiny but her grip was so strong and she wouldn’t let go; it was the start of their unbreakable bond.
He missed the way Kitty used to be before she went missing, his carefree, happy Kitty. He should never have left her alone. He suddenly felt a desperate need to get away.
‘I’m sorry, but I really think I should go, I don’t want to leave Helena, but I’m very worried about Kitty. She was terribly upset when I left; her nerves since she went missing are only getting worse.’
Dr Jacobson patted his shoulder as Matron reappeared. ‘Yes, George, of course. You go.’
‘Thank you.’ He turned, making his way hurriedly through the entrance and down the icy steps of the hospital into the falling snow.
His car was barely distinguishable as he trudged across the car park in the dark, but eventually he found it and fumbled at the lock with freezing fingers. The door creaked open and he climbed in, pushing the key into the ignition and turning it several times before it caught.
The engine groaned in protest, the wipers batting ineffectually at the thick layer of snow on the windscreen. He forced the freezing gears into reverse and pumped on the accelerator, but the car stood still, rocking against the snow pressed up against its tyres. Losing patience, he slammed his foot to the floor, and it skidded backwards over the ice and into a vehicle parked in the next row. He had no time to assess the damage; he had no time even to think – he just had an overwhelming need to get to Kitty. Frantically he righted the wheel and rubbed at the windscreen with his arm before inching slowly across the car park and out onto the pitch-black road.
He had hoped that the road would prove less treacherous, but the snow and sleet had turned other cars’ tracks to black ice. As he slid around a sharp bend, a clump of snow fell with a great thud from the trees above onto his windscreen. The wipers conti
nued to jerk and drag at the snow so that for some time he could see nothing at all. When it finally cleared, he was startled to see a crow pecking at the guts of a dead rabbit in the middle of the road. It launched itself skyward just as the car was upon it, its long black wings beating frantically as it flew over the bonnet to safety.
George felt his heart racing in his chest and tried to steady his breathing as the road ahead of him became a white carpet once more. Devoid of life, so innocent-looking, he thought, yet utterly deadly. He pumped his foot on the accelerator, his pulse throbbing in his ears. Slow down, slow down. You’ll skid, you’ll crash. Speed up, she needs you. Get home.
His frantic breathing seemed to suck up the oxygen in the car, the heater making no impression in the frozen air. His foot shook as it hovered over the accelerator. Just get home and you can put this right. She’ll be fine. She’s ten years old, she’s exhausted, she’ll have fallen asleep. Calm down.
He hit another sharp bend and looked down at the speedometer. The needle was hovering at 45: much too fast even on a clear summer’s night. He was no use to Kitty dead; he needed to slow down. Another bend and the wheels tugged at the steering wheel as he fought to keep control. Why was this taking so long? Where was the main road?
‘Damn it!’ he yelled out in frustration. He had done this drive a thousand times before with Kitty beside him, smiling, chatting, laughing, easing the stress of their visits to Helena, reading his mind, saying what he needed to hear. ‘She’ll be fine, Daddy. She looked better, don’t you think? I read in the newspaper that there are more people than ever signing up as donors.’
Why had he left his daughter when he knew she was so anxious? He should have taken her with him. What if she did something stupid, took it upon herself to venture out into the blizzard and try and make her way to the hospital. The image of her walking through the snow flashed into his mind’s eye, torturing him on his painfully slow journey back to her.