‘I look forward to that.’
‘I bet you do. We can be friends, Peter—’
‘Kit.’
‘Kit, if that’s what you want. We can be friends if you remember two things: keep your hands off my girlfriend, and keep your hands off my money.’
‘By money you mean—’
‘What’s coming to me in my mother’s will. Get it?’
‘Oh, I get it.’
‘What did you and Dan talk about?’ his mother asked, when he went back to the party.
‘Oh, just his hopes for the future and that,’ said Kit vaguely, but not feeling at all vague.
In the taxi on the way home Isla said: ‘There, now you know most of the family … The grandchildren are lovely, aren’t they?’
Kit agreed, uncertain how far the implications of the analysis were meant to be understood by him. Whatever was the case he did understand them, and wondered at his birth mother feeling the need to make such base insinuations. The undercurrents in this family clearly ran strong.
CHAPTER THREE
Past History
When Kit went up to the enquiries office of the police headquarters in Leeds he was still largely unsure of what he wanted to see, who he should ask for, and how he should present himself and his case. He had spent the wakeful hours of his night in bed thinking over his new family, deciding they were a mixed bunch among whom he definitely disliked Dan and definitely liked Micky. Footballers these days – he remembered no earlier times – had a presumption of dislikeability stamped on their foreheads from even before their emergence from obscurity. He doubted very much whether Dan was ever going to make his emergence into footballing glory, and he had to admit he was glad of that. Dislikeability was all the better for not having instant fame and fortune attached to its coattails.
The sergeant at the desk was a middle-aged man, beginning to run to fat, a comfortable mix of geniality and firmness.
‘Now, young man, what can I do for you?’
‘It’s a bit difficult,’ mumbled Kit, conscious of not making a good impression. ‘It concerns a kidnap that took place in 1989.’
‘Before my time,’ said the man, staring at his computer screen. ‘What is it you want to report? … I suppose that’s why you’re here?’
‘Yes … Yes, I suppose it is. It concerns the kidnapping of Peter Novello, who was three at the time.’
He was subjected to a concentrated stare.
‘Oh? Kidnapping’s pretty rare these days. Where did this one take place?’
‘In Sicily.’
‘Sicily? That explains it. Dicey sort of place in my experience. And what’s the information you have that you want to report?’
‘I am the child that was kidnapped. I lived at that time in Leeds with my mother whom I’ve now been reunited with, and my father, who is in a nursing home and I haven’t met yet.’
‘Ah … I wondered.’ The stare was resumed momentarily, then he pressed some keys on his computer. ‘Ah yes. I have it here … Well, you’ve done the right thing. Will you take a seat? Do you still answer to the name of Peter Novello?’
‘Not as a rule,’ said Kit, dallying by the desk in the vain hope of seeing anything on the screen. ‘But I suppose I’ll have to get used to it. The name I’ve always – nearly always – gone by is Christopher Philipson. Usually Kit.’
‘Right. I’ll give you a call when I’ve found someone to talk to you.’
Kit went and sat in a corner, looking around surreptitiously at the collected specimens of the indigent and the indignant gathered there. It was twenty minutes before a large man (once a sportsman, Kit guessed, but one no longer) came in, leant over the sergeant’s desk, and had Kit pointed out to him. He came over, hand outstretched, and Kit felt obliged to submit to the finger-crunching ritual.
‘Mr Novello? I’m Sergeant Hargreaves. Pleased to meet you. I’m not sure what we can do for you, but I’ve lined up an interview room, so come this way.’ He ushered him through a door, taking them away from the public area, and then led him to a small office. ‘I’m going to be starting from scratch here, so I wonder if you’d mind if we recorded the talk. It would give me a record to check things against if they get complicated – as I suspect they could.’
‘I’d welcome it, and yes, they could get complicated. You realise I’ll often be very vague myself …’
‘Eh? Oh, I see. Being very young when it happened, I suppose. You probably don’t have many memories of your time here.’
‘Hardly any, and nothing very useful. I remember my father’s feet, and my mother’s smell when she took me in her arms – oh, and the smells of her cooking. Not very useful. And to tell you the truth I’ve got better memories of my bedroom – a real child’s one, full of animals and cartoon characters.’
Hargreaves nodded and turned on the tape. For the next ten minutes Kit went over all his vague memories of his first family, of how everything had ended in Sicily and how the ‘kidnap’ had terminated with his being handed over to the Philipsons.
‘A Glasgow family, you said,’ Hargreaves muttered, perhaps relieved at hearing the last of the Sicilian end. ‘So how did you get there?’
‘Air, I think. I’ve just a memory of having flown when I was very young, and how I expected it to be exciting, and it wasn’t.’
‘You’re not wrong,’ said Hargreaves. ‘Mostly cloud and things below impossible to pick out. Who was with you?’
‘I don’t remember. People I’d never seen before, I imagine, and never since either. Anyway I have no picture of them in my mind. A couple, that’s all. Sort of couriers, I suppose.’
‘That seems likely. Have you any memories of being left with the Philipsons?’
‘None. The earliest remembrance from those early days is a bear in a tartan kilt, which I’ve probably still got in a cupboard somewhere.’
‘You still live in the same house in Scotland?’
‘Yes,’ said Kit, feeling some need to apologise. ‘I inherited everything when my new parents died. Only child, of course.’
‘Ah, I thought you would be,’ said Hargreaves. ‘But people with children, or an only child, do adopt quite often – “to make the family complete” they usually say.’
‘Adopt, yes. Take a kidnapped child as their own – I wouldn’t have thought so.’
‘Point taken. Now, do I understand that you gradually accepted the Philipsons as your own family – your birth family as they say these days?’
‘Yes, I did,’ said Kit at once. ‘I must have asked about my birth mother at first, but she soon slipped out of my mind. I was so young. My memory of her – her smell when she kissed me – could have been anyone: grandma, maid, housekeeper – whoever.’
‘And your new parents put it around that you were adopted?’
‘In so far as they said anything, yes.’
‘How far was that?’
‘The two neighbours were the local people my mother knew best. I’ve talked to them in the weeks since she died. And she must have said something to her department at the University. Glasgow University. She had leave from them at first, then worked part-time and, when I was about twelve, went back to teach full-time.’
‘Yes. So some people knew—’
‘Or thought they knew. Yes. The woman next door said my mother informed her they were not going to tell me I was adopted till I was old enough to understand. That age was left vague, so the neighbour never took it up with me. She said she never thought twice about it.’
‘Yes, people take adoption pretty much in their stride these days. You don’t hear silly talk about “bad blood” anymore.’ Sergeant Hargreaves stretched his long, tree-trunk legs under the table. ‘Still, you came here, came down to Leeds, and found your real mother, knew where she was. So at some time you learnt or thought you did that you’d been adopted, and at some time, too, you learnt what had really happened was that you’d been abducted – am I right?’
Kit nodded.
‘First
things first: the adoption that never was. My mother, Genevieve Philipson, found she had breast cancer just over a year before she died. So she and I had that year together, knowing it would be her last, and making the best of it.’
‘Your adoptive father was already dead?’
‘Yes. Jürgen Philipson died five years ago. He was deputy editor of one of the Glasgow newspapers. Well, my mother and I used that year in all sorts of ways, but in particular I wanted to know about myself and my background. At first that meant the Philipsons, but I soon came upon something odd: in the family snap album there was only one snap of me as a baby. You’d have thought, having waited so long for a child, that they would have been snapping me all the time. Then I went over in my mind what I’d been told about myself as a baby, and I realised there was nothing. No stories about my first step, my first word. I had really come up with the answer to the mystery before my mother told me.’
‘Ah, she did.’
‘Yes. She thought I ought to know before she died. She was a fantastically truthful person, hated a lie. Yet she’d been living one for twenty years. One evening, when she’d gone to bed, in great pain, she told me that I was adopted, and I said I’d guessed as much. That pleased her. It meant that the lie had been less of a lie. I’d discovered the truth beforehand.’
‘The truth?’
‘Well, the fact that I had only come to them when I was three.’
‘How much did she tell you that night?’
‘Not much more than that I’d been adopted – only she said “you came to us”, which must have been her love of truth asserting itself again – when I was three.’
‘Didn’t you ask questions?’
‘Oh yes, we talked about things. I remember I nearly used the phrase “who I really was” once, but I caught myself in time and substituted “who I was for the first three years”.’
‘You have a good memory.’
‘It was only a year ago – less. It was when the cancer really started to … to bite. Poor Mother. She wanted to be brave, but often couldn’t be. And there I was – always asking questions, suspecting she really knew the name of my birth mother. She fobbed me off with “the adoption people have a lot of rules and regulations” which didn’t seem to tie in with the fact that people have a right to know the name of their birth father. In the end I told her – she loved the truth after all – that after her death I’d try to find out who my birth mother was.’
‘How did she take that?’
‘Not well at first. She wasn’t thinking straight. When she could she realised that she couldn’t stop me. And shouldn’t. It was my right to try to find her, and she shouldn’t put obstacles in my way. She only asked that I wouldn’t do anything – act on the information, I mean – until after she was dead. I could say that without any difficulty. We were looking to fill every day when her illness allowed it to see or do something. I let my degree course lapse for the moment, with the university’s permission, and we had as near to a whale of a time as was possible under the circumstances.’
‘But what had she told you?’
‘That my mother was a Mrs Novello, who lived in the Leeds area.’
‘Nothing more than that? No Christian name or address? No reason why Mrs Novello had put you up for adoption after nurturing you for three years? That must be unusual.’
‘Yes, I suppose it must be. Unless there’s a sort of cumulative inability to cope, perhaps. Anyway that’s what my mother told me. Do you think that at the time of the adoption – the handover, let’s call it – she wanted to know as little as possible? That way she could not let anything slip, or have things forced out of her.’
‘That’s a bit melodramatic, isn’t it?’
Kit shook his head.
‘There’s something I haven’t told you: my adoptive father was a Jewish child refugee to England. He arrived by special train a week or two before war broke out. It could have been he who wanted to know as little as possible.’
‘I suppose escaping Nazi Germany was bound to leave scars,’ said Hargreaves, not able to hide a degree of scepticism.
‘He left it when he was very young – hardly more than a baby. With his sister. I think he felt guilt, and the guilt built itself up as the world learnt more and more about what happened in the death camps. He and I did lots of things together, but he was never a happy person, except in his private life. In his professional life the death camps were a sort of shadow floating around and over him. He was always feeling he had to explain.’
‘I see. And somehow this pair of people, intelligent, cultivated people – have I got it right …?’
‘Oh yes. Very much so.’
‘I’m not very cultivated myself, so I’m having difficulty connecting with them. This very cultured pair somehow connected up with people who were either prepared to kidnap to order – they wanted you – or who kidnapped and then sold you to the highest bidder.’
‘Yes, it seems like that,’ sighed Kit. ‘I have difficulty in seeing the Philipsons as the highest bidders. But I suppose desperation could change things.’
‘You mean they wouldn’t stoop? I tell you, desperation changes almost everything. Well, there’s nobody for you to ask now, is there?’
‘No. Not so far as I know. I think I would have known if my mother had had some kind of confidant – someone she always told everything to.’
‘Have you tried the newspapers?’
‘Yes, the Scottish ones. That’s where I saw the only reference to an abduction. It was a tiny paragraph in my father’s paper, in one of those columns that rakes together this and that. It said that police in Leeds denied reports in a Sunday newspaper that the Novellos had received ransom demands after the abduction of … and so on. About five lines, but that’s how I learnt I’d been abducted. It seemed a strange way to learn.’
‘I found that information just now in our file, of course. There wasn’t a great deal more from newspapers, but I’ve taken copies for you. There’s no reason you shouldn’t have anything that’s been in the press. At least the cuttings show you that you really never did become a national issue.’
He took out a red pen and circled small items in five different newspapers. None of them was a lead story by any means. The longest was two paragraphs.
‘No,’ said Kit ruefully. ‘I’m not going to get a great deal from newspapers of the time.’
‘I’m a bit surprised at that,’ admitted Hargreaves. ‘The Madeleine McCann case was exceptional, but still, “Angelic, fair-haired English toddler kidnapped in Mafia country” makes a pretty good story.’
‘Yes, I suppose it does … It never felt at the time like I was being stolen. It felt like I was being found a new home. Because that’s what they told me: a new home while my mother was ill.’
‘Don’t you remember anything else about “they”?’
‘No, nothing. I was very young, remember.’
‘Yes, of course. But I am surprised the newspapers didn’t play up the possibility of your being taken by a paedophile ring or some such thing. It was a real possibility, after all … What is it you think we could do for you, sir?’
‘Ah …’ Even after all they’d just discussed Kit found it difficult to be specific. ‘I’m not very clear in my head about that. I take it you’ve got nothing in the police file that could be DNA tested against my DNA?’
‘No, nothing. You’d like to prove that you are who you think you are?’
‘Something like that. Though no one in the Novello family has questioned that yet.’
‘Try anything of the child’s still in Seldon Road: furry animals, kiddies’ books and so on. Both are possibilities, but lack of things to compare with is just typical of your problem: for us the kidnapping never became a case. We have on our files mostly bulletins from the Palermo police, translated over there, and sometimes quite incomprehensible. But in general I get the idea that they were telling us that they didn’t want to know – or at least didn’t want us to know.
And we accepted that the crime took place on Italian soil, so it was mainly their affair. The Novello family never pushed hard for an investigation. So we did bugger all about it – pardon my Italian.’
‘And yet there is this coincidence – let’s call it that: I came back to British territory, flew back with an escort, with all the dangers of the crime being discovered as we all came through passport control or customs. Somehow, surely, there has to be a British dimension to this?’
‘I think you’re right. But we at the time knew nothing about that, of course.’
Hargreaves seemed to feel that the Leeds police had hardly distinguished themselves and needed to be apologised for.
‘No, no … I’m going to see my birth father as soon as I can. He’s where I got my name from – and possibly a lot more as well.’
‘Novello. Not a common name, though a well-known one. There was a solicitor’s firm with that name in it in Leeds at the time. Not primarily criminal stuff: wills, divorces, property disputes, compensation claims. Don’t think it exists anymore.’
‘That could be him. He’s in an old people’s home at the moment. People disagree about his condition, but they do seem to agree that he has lucid days, or comparatively lucid ones. It will be a bonus if he’s having one when I go to see him, but I don’t suppose they can be predicted.’
‘I don’t think we can be too much help to you there, sir. But I’ve just wondered—’
‘Yes?’
‘If the fact of your return will lead to new developments, new discoveries or revelations. That could bring a lot of tensions or worse into your little family. I think the best thing we can say at the moment is that we’re aware of you, who you are – or claim to be – and we are interested in seeing the whole abduction matter finally settled. And there’s something you could do, sir.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You could make your connection to the police, your lifeline to us, known as widely as possible, particularly in your family.’
Kit frowned.
A Stranger in the Family Page 4