by Maggie James
He gazed at the older man’s face, seeking similarities with his own besides the green eyes. Howard Cordwell must once have had hair as dark as Daniel, although now his father sported a lot more grey than brown. His skin had started to fold into the lines of middle age, his neck somewhat slack, pouches forming under his eyes. He shared Daniel’s full mouth but the lop-sided smile was all his own. His father's face. Unremarkable in the physical sense, but something about it spoke to Daniel of the man's underlying strength.
His mother was speaking again.
‘Mum and Dad will be coming over later. They said they’d give us some time to ourselves first. They couldn’t believe it when I phoned and told them; Mum was laughing and crying and absolutely beside herself. Do you remember them at all, Daniel?’
‘No. I do remember you, though. My nanny, too.’
His mother’s expression hardened, but she didn’t say anything. Daniel continued. ‘What became of her?’
‘I have no idea. We had no contact with her after it happened. I couldn’t bear to see her.’ Sarah Cordwell’s voice began to rise. ‘She abandoned you. She left you in the flat all alone.’ Anger dripped from her words. ‘We trusted her to look after you. It should never have happened. Never.’
What could he say? He supposed she had a point, but for him, the one to blame had to be Laura Covey. Probably because his nanny had always been there, in his memories, and he remembered her as the laughing girl who played with him in the garden, and for that, he retained a certain fondness for her, affection for her smile and her swinging dark hair. He didn’t blame her; she’d not been the one to kidnap him, after all.
His mother got up and walked across the room, pulling a thick photo album from the bookcase. The leather cover was worn, the edges battered; the photos it contained had been looked through often over the years, Daniel thought. He stared at the old pictures, saw himself as a baby, as a toddler. His mother’s voice was proud, adoring, as she turned the pages. ‘You were such a beautiful baby, Daniel.’ She pointed to a photo of two small children. ‘Look. There’s you, with Katie, my little sister, your aunt. In our back garden when we lived in Bristol. Mum and Dad would come down from London with her, at least once a month, to stay. Wasn’t she pretty?’ She laughed. ‘She still is, of course.’
The younger version of Katie smiled at Daniel from the photograph, a miniature version of the woman with whom he’d started the heady journey into love, and it hurt. It goddamn well hurt.
‘Do you remember her, Daniel?’
Daniel shook his head, unable to speak.
‘You used to play together, as children. There’s only two years between you, after all. I called her, but she wasn’t home, so I left a message. Seemed so wrong, somehow, speaking into an answerphone about something as wonderful as this.’ His mother laughed. ‘You’ll love her. She’s so warm, so caring. A doctor.’ She sighed. ‘I wish she wasn’t, odd as that sounds. She told us, only yesterday, she’s emigrating from the UK to Australia. We knew they’d granted her the visa. Thing is, we all hoped she’d decide to stay in England. Especially as she’d found herself a boyfriend she seemed keen on. Never did find out his name. They've broken up, however, although she wouldn’t discuss the details. Anyway, what with the mess the NHS is in, I can’t blame her. I just wish Australia wasn’t so far away.’
‘She’ll come back to visit, love. We can fly out to see her, too.’ Howard Cordwell reached over to grasp his wife’s hand. ‘Daniel, we’ll make sure you two get together again before she goes, don’t worry.’
He forced himself to speak. ‘When will she be off?’
‘Eighteenth of next month, she said. We’ll have a leaving party for her, of course. It can be a joint one. A send-off for Katie and a celebration of having you back.’
Dear God. There would be no getting out of it. He had no option but to agree, because if he didn’t, he risked hurting his mother and the rest of his newly found family and it was better for him to take the hurt. He glanced again at the scars on his mother’s wrists. She shouldn’t have to suffer another unhappy day in her life.
‘Your grandparents will be here soon, my love.’ His mother looked up at the clock on the wall. ‘They adored you, Daniel. Their first grandchild.’
‘I can't wait to meet them.’ He had no conscious memory of them, but they formed part of his newfound identity. He’d paint over the blank spaces in his life with fresh, vibrant colours, and in a short while, he’d get to fill in the hues where his grandparents should be.
His grandmother definitely exuded the colour of melted chocolate, he decided, when half an hour later he found himself looking into her brown eyes, so evocative of Katie. She was an older version of her daughter, all wide mouth and sassy confidence. ‘Daniel. I can’t believe it.’ She pulled back from the tight hug she’d wrapped Daniel in to look at him. ‘Do you remember us at all? No?’ as Daniel shook his head. ‘Well, you were so young, it’s not surprising. My God, look at you! So tall. So handsome.’
India Trebasco stepped back to allow his grandfather to pull him towards him. He heard Richard Trebasco speaking, his breath warm against his ear. ‘Welcome home, Daniel. None of us are ever going to let you go again.’
‘No way.’ His mother’s voice shook with tears. ‘We have an awful lot of catching up to do.’
‘Yes. I know so little about you all. You’re my family, but I don’t really remember much, being so young when that woman took me.’ He found it impossible to say kidnapped; the word was too brutal.
‘They must have arrested her by now,’ Howard Cordwell said.
‘I hope they throw her in jail for the rest of her miserable life,’ Sarah Cordwell said. ‘I wonder if they’ll find out why she abducted Daniel. She can’t ever have been a mother herself. I wish to God she knew the agony of losing a child.’
‘Perhaps she was mentally ill, Sarah.’
‘I don’t care, Howard. I wouldn’t be able to trust myself if I ever came face to face with her. There’s no excuse for what she put us all through. None whatsoever.’
‘I never believed she was my mother. Never. Even though she took good care of me, did all the motherly things.’ Daniel was mindful his mother had to believe he’d been happy with Laura Bateman. ‘I had memories, you see. I remembered my nanny. You too. I always thought something wasn’t right.’
‘Was it just that, Daniel? You didn’t think of her as your mother and you needed to find out why?’
‘Not only that, no. Someone told me about how it was unusual for me to have green eyes, with parents like mine.’ Daniel was careful not to let his emotions about Katie bleed into his words. ‘Laura Bateman has blue eyes. Thing was, though, she’d always told me my father – she said he'd died when she was pregnant – had brown eyes. Anyway, the eye colour thing made me think. I ended up doing a DNA test, with some of her hair, and the results proved she wasn’t my mother. That led me to check out old kidnap cases and…’ Daniel smiled. ‘Here I am.’
His mother stroked her fingers down his cheek, her gesture almost unbearable in its tenderness for Daniel. She’d been waiting twenty-two years to touch him again and she didn’t intend to stop anytime soon. ‘Indeed you are. Welcome home, my darling.’
21
BREAKING POINT
A couple of weeks after my visit to the flat, I went to clear the table after the nanny and Daniel had left, and there, on the red plastic of the bench seat, was a set of keys. There were several on the ring; at least one would be for the basement flat in Clifton, where my Daniel lived.
I looked around. The other waitresses were all busy; nobody noticed me with the keys. I picked them up.
‘I’m going to take my break a bit early, if you don’t mind,’ I called out to Kathy, the manager.
‘You go, love. You’ve hardly stopped since you got here.’
I grabbed my coat and walked as fast as possible to the little key-cutting shop nearby.
‘One copy of each of these. Quickly, please
. I don’t have much time.’
I left the shop with a duplicate of all the keys on the nanny’s ring. I walked back to the café, looking at my watch; I’d been away for twenty minutes. I figured it would take the nanny at least fifteen minutes to walk to the flat, longer if she stopped along the way, and the same again to walk back once she realised she didn’t have her keys. I tried to slow down my breathing, to appear calm. Sweat prickled the back of my neck.
I pushed open the door to the café, and put the original set of keys behind the counter.
‘Kathy? I forgot to tell you before I went on my break. The dark-haired girl who comes in with the child. She left her keys behind. I’ve put them here, for when she comes back.’
Ten minutes later, the nanny rushed through the door, Daniel in tow. My breathing speeded up; I thought of the duplicate keys, safe in my coat pocket. Kathy was nearest to her; I was clearing tables at the back of the café, thank God. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to behave normally around her.
‘Have you found a set of keys? I can’t find mine anywhere, and I definitely had them when I came out. Please say you’ve found them.’ Panic shook in her voice.
‘Got them right here, love. Came across them after you left.’ Kathy didn’t mention me, which was good. I wanted no association in the nanny’s mind between those keys and me. She left, thanking Kathy profusely, and my shoulders sagged in relief. I had got away with it.
Thinking about it afterwards, I couldn’t say why I’d made a copy of the keys. At that point, I had no conscious thought of taking Daniel. I acted first and rationalised later, I suppose. I think in some way they reassured me, made me think I was closer to Daniel. To me, having those keys in my possession, it was as if I really did live in that basement flat as Daniel’s mother. They fuelled my fantasies. I’d run my fingers over them, imagining myself walking down the side passage, unlocking the front door with one hand, the other one wrapped tight around Daniel’s palm.
Although now, with hindsight born out of long hours spent in retrospection since my arrest, I’m able to admit the real reason behind my copying those keys. My growing desperation to lay claim to Daniel as my own was the driving force. An omen, had I stopped to take notice, foretelling what I’d end up doing.
Daily life at the café went on as usual. The nanny still brought Daniel in a lot, but she didn’t come in as much as she used to anymore. I got panicky on the days I didn’t see him; he had become essential to my well-being and I lived for those brief half hours when he came into the café.
I mentioned it in a joking way one day, asking if she’d found somewhere that did better chocolate cake than we did, and she said yes, she’d started going to a little café in Redland some days where they did excellent brownies, something we didn’t do.
‘I’ll ask the manager if we can start doing those,’ I said, my forced smile hiding the anxiety threatening to choke me.
My only connection to my boy was through this tenuous link of coffee and cake and it might be snapped at any time. Any number of things could break it. The nanny getting another job. Daniel’s so-called parents deciding to move away. Daniel was four as well and at some point soon, he’d be starting school.
The fear inside me grew daily. I spent most of my time thinking about Daniel and the thought of not seeing him regularly was unbearable. It wasn’t enough any longer to be able to look and not touch. I yearned for more, to cuddle him, play with him, hold him on my lap and read to him.
I had no idea how to achieve my dream, though.
A month or so after the keys incident, the nanny let slip his parents intended taking Daniel up to London for the coming weekend, to visit his grandparents.
I went to the flat on the Saturday afternoon. I’d just finished my shift. I’d not seen a lot of Daniel during the week; I think I simply wanted to be close to him. I walked up to Clifton, the duplicate set of keys in my pocket.
I turned the corner into the road where Daniel lived, and slipped quickly down the side passageway. Nobody was around. My trembling fingers closed around the keys and I pulled them out. I didn’t see any visible signs of an alarm system. I’d have to run like hell if I’d got that wrong.
The door had two locks, a Yale and a Chubb, and I tried one of the Chubb keys on the ring. It worked, the mechanism turning smoothly round. The second Yale key I tried fitted the Yale lock, and I pushed the door open, getting ready to slam it shut and run if I heard the warning screech of an alarm.
Only silence greeted me.
I went inside, into the hallway. It ran down the right side of the flat, with the rooms off to the left, the doors all closed. My heart pounded hard against my ribcage; I was petrified Daniel’s parents might have cancelled the London trip and still be in the flat.
After a couple of minutes, I heard only my breathing.
I wrapped my sleeve around my hand so I’d leave no trace of my fingerprints, took hold of the handle of the door in front of me and turned it, pushing as I did so.
I stood in the living room, the size of which was big enough to swallow up my bedsit completely, the thick plush carpet underfoot so different to the threadbare rug in my tiny room. Several photos were lined up on the mantelpiece, mounted in heavy silver frames. I looked at the woman who claimed to be Daniel’s mother, holding a much younger Daniel, probably about eighteen months old, in her arms. He was all dark curls and angelic smile, and an overwhelming surge of love washed over me. Love mixed with anger about being deprived of that stage of his life; so much of his development, such as his first words and steps, had been denied to me.
The next room was the kitchen, a small galley affair, with saucepans hung from racks and a multitude of cookbooks and potted plants; I wondered when Daniel’s mother ever bothered to cook, if she didn’t even have enough time to look after her son.
The next room I looked in was obviously the master bedroom, with a huge sleigh bed and matching heavy furniture. More family photos, all with Daniel in. The wardrobe door stood partly open and I saw women’s suits, clearly for an office environment. She must get dressed here each morning, I thought, putting on those soulless suits in order to abandon her beautiful son and go into the world of work she so obviously preferred.
I clenched my fists. The bitch. She didn’t deserve to be a mother.
The second bedroom at the far end made me want to sink to the floor and cry. It was my Daniel’s bedroom. Tears stung my eyes as I stood where my beautiful boy slept, drinking in the essence of him.
It was a little boy’s room all right. The walls had been painted pale blue, apart from one done in a darker shade to resemble the night sky, with a silver crescent moon and a space ship hurtling towards the ceiling. I stared at the small bed, picking up the pillow and holding it close to my face, inhaling the scent of talcum powder. I ached for Daniel, to hold him, love him and never let him go.
A large plastic box stood in one corner, full of toys. I went over to them, picking them up carefully, my sleeve still wrapped over my hand. I held a red building brick in my palm, a letter on each side of the plastic cube, and pictured myself sprawled on the thick carpet, Daniel beside me, whilst we formed the word mummy out of bricks.
Several more plastic crates stood stacked along one wall, full of toys; wooden trains, a plush chocolate-brown puppy, more building blocks. I lost myself in fantasies. In them, the toys from the crates were scattered all over the floor and we sat amongst them, Daniel stroking the soft fabric of the puppy, and me building him a tower with the bricks that he laughingly knocked down as soon as it reached a certain height.
I picked up a wooden xylophone, and Daniel and I were still on the floor and this time we were making music together, something I had no ability for in real life. We laughed as my boy banged the keys, the perfect mother and son, secure in the cocoon of my imagination. In my fantasies, measles and scabbed knees and night terrors didn’t exist; we lived in a perfect world where Daniel and I played and laughed and loved and never stopped.
/> I stood in his bedroom for a long time, absorbing Daniel, breathing him in, pulling him deep inside me. Eventually I dragged myself away, my reluctance to leave begging me to do the impossible and stay. I walked outside and pulled the front door shut behind me. Nobody would ever know I’d been at the flat.
I didn’t sleep that night.
About a week afterwards, the nanny said the words that hit me hard in my gut and made me grateful I had my back to her when she spoke. My reaction would have shown on my face otherwise, ripping off the mask of neutrality I’d been so careful to cultivate.
‘Won’t be able to come in for much longer. I’ll miss the chocolate cake in here, for sure. Not half so much as I’ll miss this little darling, though.’ I breathed deep and long, forcing down the shock caused by what she’d said. I managed to get some control over my emotions and turned to face her.
‘Oh? How come?’
‘The family’s moving up to London. Daniel’s daddy, he’s a banker; he’s landed a promotion in the City, and his mummy, she’s got herself a job up there as well. So I need to find myself a new poppet to look after.’
‘When do they go?’ Tension knotted itself in my stomach.
‘Not for another three months or so. Daniel’s daddy has to finish his job here and because he’s a high flier, he’s on a long notice period. They’ll be putting the flat up for sale next month. The rest of the family all live in London and I think they’d like Daniel to grow up closer to his grandparents and Sarah’s little sister. Katie, she’s only two years older than Daniel is and they’re great playmates. Whilst I know it means I’m out of a job, I can’t help but think it’s the right thing for everyone.’
London. They were taking my Daniel to London, away from me.
No. God, no. That mustn’t happen.
I’d already lost him once. I couldn’t lose him again.