The Last Witness

by John Matthews

  Elena wiped her eyes with the back of one hand and looked towards Lorena. How could she have got it so wrong. So wrong. Her thoughts about her father had guided practically everything in her life – the rebellion, her hippie years, her staying away from home, and now they’d been the foundation of her suspicions over Ryall. Another dominant man. Probably Lowndes was right, nothing was happening there, it was just Lorena’s over-attachment to her. Full house. She’d been wrong about everything. Everything.

  ‘Then with the cancer he probably did look at me and imagine an old Greek widow in a few years, and everything else crashed back in at the same time. He started to dwell on his life and things past and think of all the mistakes he’d made. He started to think that it had all been a waste: devoting so much of his life to money, building up an empire. What was it all for when you didn’t have family and loved ones around you? With Andreos it wasn’t only the son he’d lost, or with you that he’d practically lost a daughter as well by driving you away – but the fact that you could no longer have children and Andreos had died before he’d even started a family. There was no possible continuing bloodline – and the only grandchild he’d ever had, he’d given away. That was when he resolved finally to try and find George.’

  The tears brimmed over, streaming down Elena’s cheeks, and the trembling was back in her legs. They felt ready to crumple at any second. She half turned and put one hand flat on the wall for support as a truck driver in a red-check shirt approached, heading for the washroom. But he’d already noticed her distress and mumbled something in French then, with her blank look, switched quickly to English.

  ‘Are you okay, lady? Everything alright?’

  ‘Yes, it’s… it’s okay. Just someone I haven’t spoken to in a while.’

  Her mother’s voice crashed in halfway: ‘Elena? Is there someone there with you?’

  The truck driver nodded with a tight smile as he went past her, and she assured her mother that it was all right, she was in a restaurant and ‘it was just someone passing by the phone.’ Her emotions wanted to scream: ‘No, no, it’s not alright. Stop. Stop! I can’t bear it any more, can’t take more of my life’s foundations smashed down, any more illusions destroyed on which I’ve based almost every principle the past thirty years.’ But her mind was curious, thirsty, wanted desperately to know every last detail, however painful.

  ‘Trouble was, your father never was able to succeed in that final quest. He hoped that maybe if he visited personally… but in the end the nuns wouldn’t relent, wouldn’t pass on where George had gone. That final blow hit him hard, Elena. He died a very sad and lonely man.’

  ‘He was sat where you are now…’ Elena couldn’t hold it back any longer: racking sobs convulsed her whole body, and she turned to fully face the wall so that people in the diner wouldn’t see her tears and distress. She hadn’t even shown up for the funeral, if nothing else to support her mother in her moment of grief; nor troubled to phone at any time to offer her condolence. And in the years since she’d never visited, they’d only spoken once briefly on the phone. Her mother had buried the man she’d loved knowing that he’d died with a heart heavy with a lifetime of regrets, and purely because of her own past battles with her father she’d left her mother alone for all those years with that terrible pain and burden. No wonder Uncle Christos had kept urging her to see her mother. How could her mother possibly ever forgive her?

  She clutched her hand in a fist against the wall, her eyes scrunched tight to stem the flow of tears, and finally found some composure to speak. ‘But why… why didn’t he say something earlier? Or maybe you… why didn’t you call me and tell me?’

  ‘What was there to say? That he tried to find your son that he’d given away twenty-odd years ago – but in the end he’d failed? And before he died, he swore me to secrecy. He said there was little point in telling you if there could be no possible good end resolve. It would just build up your hopes only to dash them again, and besides you’d probably blanked it all from your mind long ago. Too painful to think about.’

  ‘Yes… that was partly true, I suppose.’ She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand, sniffed back the remnants of tears. She felt uncomfortable admitting that it was spot-on, that her father knew her so well; and just like her father she’d kept the truth and her real emotions buried from everyone, going one better by keeping them even from her own husband. Oh Jesus she was her father’s daughter more than she realized.

  ‘…He said that only if you decided to find him – when you were finally sure you wanted to fill that gap in your life – should I tell you.’

  ‘I see.’ Still her voice was uncertain, she feared she might collapse again into tears at any second. She felt nothing but empty inside, as if a team of emotional burglars had stormed through her and upended every drawer: love, hate, family closeness, hopes, ambitions. There, now you try and sort it all out. And she was left to pick through the ransacked mess, one hand braced against the wall of a diner full of strangers while keeping her head turned from them so that they wouldn’t see how destroyed she was, or the tears streaming down her face, or notice that her whole body was shaking uncontrollably with her legs threatening to buckle at any second, and meanwhile her mother at the end of a crackly line three thousand miles away had, in the space of less than fifteen minutes, told her that nothing in her life so far had been quite what it seemed.

  But there was only one possible silver lining she could see now, one way to repay how she’d unknowingly betrayed her father’s memory and left her mother to grieve alone these years past. ‘One good thing, mom… partly why I was phoning now. I think I might have found him: one of the nuns ended up giving me the details of the family that took George in. I’m seeing them tomorrow.’ She didn’t add that the one quirk of fate to stab Sister Bernadine’s conscience to finally give her the address had been her father sat in the same spot six years ago, head in hands. If he hadn’t have visited, she probably would never have got the address. It was as if an invisible hand was reaching out: ‘I tried to make good while I was alive… but at least you might now be able to succeed where I failed.’ ‘…When I catch up with George, I’ll try and convince him to come to England sometime, and we can all have a big reunion.’

  ‘That would be nice, Elena. But you know you don’t need to make promises just to make me feel good. I’d be happy enough just to see more of you when you get back. But you need to find him for yourself, Elena. To fill that gap in your heart and soul that your father was never able to fill.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  ‘You know, you’re quite a little girl for your age.’ Alphonse beamed and reached across the bar, playfully pinching Lorena’s cheek. He looked towards Elena perched at the bar stool next to Lorena, seeking confirmation.

  ‘She certainly is.’ Elena nodded with a rueful smile and took another sip of her champagne. ‘Particularly on holiday. You get twice the questions – so of course you need twice the energy just to keep up.’ She hardly looked at Lorena as she spoke; she found it hard to meet her gaze directly knowing what was coming – very likely packing her back to England in the morning, or at the latest soon after she’d seen the Donatiens.

  They’d grabbed a quick pizza on the outskirts of Montreal, then headed back to the hotel. Alphonse was all smiles, asking how their day had been. Elena didn’t want to get into the rollercoaster dramas of the day, just said that they’d finally tracked down this long-lost relative and were seeing them tomorrow – ‘So maybe a celebratory drink is in order.’ She ordered a bottle of Möet and mixed Lorena’s with orange juice. Lorena wasn’t sure she liked it at first, only warming to it after a few sips; then at the start of her second glass, she became more talkative.

  Alphonse was originally from northern Yugoslavia, ‘The part that is now Slovenia,’ and had been in Montreal fourteen years. But rather than him swap notes with Lorena on the one area they had in common – hardships of life in the Eastern Bloc – Lorena wanted to know all about Canad
a. How deep does the snow get in winter? How cold does it get? Do you go hunting? Are there a lot of bears? ‘We get some too in the mountains in Romania.’

  As Lorena deftly shifted to what to do if you were out in the forest and got surprised by a bear and didn’t have a gun, and she suggested to Alphonse that because he was big, ‘Maybe you could wrestle with it,’ he reached over and playfully pinched Lorena’s cheek. Though short with his six-pack long ago sagged to a barrel, Alphonse was extremely broad with forearms like tree boughs.

  ‘I remember a dancing bear once in Bucharest,’ Lorena commented thoughtfully. ‘He looked so sad. His owner was getting him to dance and hit a tambourine and act like he was happy – but all the time his eyes were so sad.’

  So sad. She should have been pleased seeing Lorena come out of her shell, become more lively, animated. Except for the sessions with Lowndes when the reminder of her problems would weigh heavy again, Lorena had been better each day since leaving England. But Elena’s first worry with her talking so openly, excitedly, was that Lorena would suddenly say the wrong thing and give the game away. Elena herself sometimes forgot who they were meant to be each time: Elena Waldren and daughter Elena for Lowndes; daughter Katine for customs and the police, and now Alphonse as well because she’d had to show her passport on registration.

  Perhaps Lorena’s liveliness and change of spirit confirmed Lowndes’ finding that it was all a ruse just to get her attention: Lorena had got almost nothing but attention these past days, no wonder she was happy. But what if she was wrong? What if the smiles were coming back to Lorena’s face purely because she was free of Ryall’s clutches, and tomorrow she’d be sending her back to England to…

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes, fine… bit tired, that’s all.’ She gripped her champagne glass firmer to mask her hand shaking. She was still far from wound down from the day’s slings and arrows, and this final nagging doubt with Lorena wasn’t helping.

  Alphonse repeated the bit of conversation Elena had faded out: ‘What Lorena says is true – you do share the same first name with Ceaucescu’s wife.’

  ‘I know.’ Elena grimaced tautly. The ex-Romanian Dictator and his wife were blamed for most of the country’s orphan problems by encouraging couples to have large families. Elena reached across and lightly pulled Lorena to her for a second, but still she avoided direct eye contact. ‘One Elena to cause the problems, another as saviour. Hopefully she’s forgiven me by now.’ Her driver Nick used to joke about it whenever they got a difficult border guard or policeman. ‘Just tell them your name, and they’ll quickly do the sign of the cross and wave us on.’ But she was careful not to add that: right now she was Elena the mother, not the aid worker.

  She decided in the end to delay her decision about Lorena till 1 am that morning and her call to Gordon – her main reason for bar-sitting now, to kill the time – by when, 8 pm in England, Gordon thought he’d be back from seeing Mikaya Ryall in Durham.

  Making the call finally at 1.03 am – having put Lorena to bed just after 11.30 pm and ambled along St Catherine until she found a cocktail bar to kill the remaining hour – she spent the first ten minutes with the day’s ups and downs and the final elation of getting an address. She didn’t go into the whole messy drama of her father visiting the orphanage or her phoning her mother – that was going to take another heart to heart, her secret life part-two, when she returned – she just said that one of the nuns had a sudden change of heart about passing on the address. Gordon was full of bonhomie and well wishes for her meeting with the Donatiens the next day, then finally they got to how it went with Mikaya Ryall. No great revelations – except that Gordon was almost sure Mikaya was hiding something.

  ‘…Something which made her very uncomfortable, very quickly. She practically ran from the café halfway through.’

  Elena agreed that it was suspicious, but she’d practically reached the end of the rope with sessions. ‘There’s nowhere left for me to go with this, and it’s just not enough for me to be able to hang on to Lorena. I can hardly walk back into Lowndes and say that he’s got to probe deeper because Lorena’s sister too is now having panic attacks at the mention of possible interference from her stepfather.’

  ‘I know. I know you need something more concrete, and I’m already one step ahead of you.’ Gordon had been uncomfortable after the meeting, so on the way back he’d put through a call to an old contact, an investigator who worked for the banks and insurance companies. ‘I thought – if Ryall can dish the dirt on you, then maybe we should try turning the tables on him. I gave him everything I knew, and told him to dig particularly deep around the time of Mikaya Ryall’s pregnancy.’

  ‘When’s he coming back to you?’

  ‘I told him it was urgent, and he’s already been on it half a day. He said he’d try and get back with as much as he can by midday tomorrow.’

  5 pm by then in Montreal. Four hours after seeing the Donatiens. But then if they gave her an address and he didn’t live far away – she might well be going on to see him later. Elena liked the idea of reversing the tables on Ryall, giving him a run for his money – but overall she couldn’t help feeling that they were stretching, clutching at straws. On one hand the delay made her nervous, having to keep running the gauntlet with the police; yet on the other she felt relieved at putting off breaking the bad news to Lorena.

  ‘Okay – let’s wait till then to decide what to do.’ And having said it, she felt as if a weight had been lifted: it was no longer inevitable, a foregone conclusion that Lorena was going back to Ryall. There was still some hope left, however slim.

  Or was it mainly for herself that she didn’t want to dwell on the problem? To keep her mind clear for the big day ahead: meeting the Donatiens and then hopefully later her son. Once again pushing Lorena into the background because her own score card was full. 29 years? Her mouth was suddenly dry at the thought. What would she say? How would she even begin to explain? The prospect was far more daunting than perhaps finally having to let down Lorena.

  Elena didn’t sleep well that night. She thought she might, given that she’d finally reached the end of her search and was so utterly worn out from the nervous anxiety and lack of sleep of the past days.

  But the excitement of the day ahead kept her mind churning as to how she might broach everything and how it might go. Then there was some commotion with sirens not too far away that seemed to go on endlessly: in the end it was over two hours before she finally drifted off.

  And suddenly the sirens were coming for her. They were all around and policemen were pounding up the stairs – she couldn’t escape. Then she was outside in chains on the pavement with a crowd of people looking on, pointing. Lorena was also standing there in chains – though it was Ryall holding the other end, not a policeman. He was smiling crookedly at Elena. ‘I’ve got her back now, and she’ll never get free again. Now dance and clap your hands and try and look happy – there’s people looking.’

  And she thought: Yes, I should be happy, I’m seeing my son tomorrow. But all she could see was her father as she’d left him by Andreos’s graveside, and everyone else had also turned their backs and left him alone. She rushed over to comfort him, to say sorry for having deserted him for all those years. But as she got closer, it wasn’t Andreos’s name her father was muttering as he looked down at the grave: ‘George… I tried to find you, really I tried.’

  And she rushed breathlessly to tell her father that she’d found him, pointing to his figure at the end of the chine. ‘Look, he’s there! There! I found him, I found him!’ Though still he was like the young boy she pictured in the orphanage, not a grown man; and in that moment George turned and she was afraid that he’d move away before her father looked up and saw him. But the chains were still on her legs, and she didn’t seem to be getting any closer to attract her father’s attention… and as George finally turned away, the light too at the end of the chine faded, leaving her in darkness.

  The darkne
ss was total, a black shroud. She couldn’t see her father or George any more, could only guide her way by grappling at branches and feeling for trees where she remembered them. Then suddenly there were other footsteps behind her in the pitch darkness, the fall of their breath competing with her own in the new silence, and getting closer, closer… bearing down quickly, their breathing more rapid with each step and so close now she could feel it against the back of her neck, making her shiver… and she wasn’t sure if it was Ryall or the police or…

  She woke up, her breathing ragged. She went over to the mini-bar and opened a bottle of mineral water, felt the first few slugs cut through the dryness. Oh Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. She let out a heavy exhalation to ease the tightness in her chest. Hopefully after tomorrow she’d no longer need the sanctuary of the chine to try and bury the ghosts of what she’d done.

  The man in the back of Roubilliard’s four-wheeler shrank back a few inches as the heavy, bulldog face suddenly appeared at the front side window, peering in.

  ‘What do you think?’ Roubilliard half turned round from the front driver’s seat, joining Frank Massenat in his appraisal of the back seat passenger.

  Massenat wrinkled his nose questioningly. ‘Take of his glasses?’

  Roubilliard’s henchman beside the passenger obliged. The passenger suddenly appeared more anxious than at any time during the fifty-minute wait, his eyes dilating wide and his breathing falling heavy: from what he remembered from his schooldays, this is what usually preceded a fist landing on your nose.

  Massenat squinted doubtfully a moment more. ‘Nah, not him. Close, but no cigar.’