Stolen (37 page)

Just as one swallow didn’t make a summer, he thought one kiss might not make a love affair. But he told himself she was a friend anyway, and there was still so much to learn about what had happened to her.

‘I know you’ve been through hell, Lotte, but try and tell me a bit more about what happened, both this time and the time before, if you remember that now,’ DI Bryan said gently.

It was late afternoon and the girls had only just woken when he got to the hospital. While he was waiting, Kim and Clarke Moore arrived, so he suggested they spoke to their daughter in Sister’s office, while he talked to Lotte. He was anxious to reassure her that this wasn’t a formal police interview, just a little chat to put him in the picture about what had taken place.

Considering the terrible events of the previous night, and the starvation of the past few days, Lotte looked surprisingly good. Bryan knew she had burns on her legs and feet, but they were beneath the covers. Aside from a few lacerations on her hands, no doubt incurred while trying to get out of the shed, she looked unharmed, except for the haunted look in her eyes.

‘All my memory has returned,’ she said, and half smiled at him, which made the haunted look vanish. Once again she was just a very pretty small blonde with speedwell-blue eyes and a soft, sweet mouth. ‘Well, at least as far as I know. How would you know for certain?’

‘You’ve got a point there,’ Bryan agreed. ‘I forget what I did ten minutes ago, and who knows what I’ve forgotten about the past!’

‘Well, it’s all come back, in as much as I can recall what happened in each month, each year,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘When you last interviewed me we were concerned about the baby I’d had and where it was…’ She broke off, the haunted look came back and she picked at a scab on her hand.

‘She’s dead, I’m afraid,’ she blurted out, and her eyes dropped. ‘Howard threw her body into the sea with me.’

‘What did she die from?’ Bryan asked cautiously.

Lotte gave a dramatic sigh and waved her arms in a way which suggested she hardly knew where to start. ‘Neglect! Well, that’s my opinion. They left her crying for hours.’

Bryan must have looked puzzled as to why she wasn’t looking after the baby.

‘I’ll explain all that when I get to that part,’ she said quickly. ‘But you’ll be able to find her cause of death when you find her body, won’t you? It’s bound to wash up on a beach somewhere before long.’

Bryan frowned, suddenly remembering a message that had been sent to the station that morning. ‘A baby’s body was found yesterday on the beach beneath the Seven Sisters,’ he said. ‘That’s near Eastbourne.’

‘She was wearing a white babygro,’ Lotte said, then, barely stopping to draw breath, she launched into the story of how Fern and Howard had invited her to stay with them at the Dorchester, when she left the cruise.

‘I supposed it turned my head to be somewhere so grand, and so I jumped at the chance of moving with them to Sussex as their housekeeper/PA,’ she said.

‘Mind you, I must have been pretty thick not to cotton on there was a hidden agenda,’ she added with a wry smile. ‘But people go and act as nannies, housekeepers and PAs all the time, don’t they? You see adverts in
The Lady
magazine. Not all those people who advertise can be weird.’

‘Of course not,’ he reassured her. ‘And we know now they were a pair of practised deceivers. Anyone could’ve fallen for it.’

She carried on telling him about her life with them quite calmly. It was only when she got to the part about where Fern and Howard suggested that she had a baby for them that she began to get distressed.

Bryan found it distressing too, for it was only the previous night, when police officers had found papers in Howard’s van relating to a babies for sale business, that he understood what had been behind all this.

Yet even so, he hadn’t imagined that Howard Ramsden had fathered Lotte’s baby. He’d had the idea that was the work of another man, and the couple had induced her to stay with them until they found adoptive parents.

Bryan could understand why Lotte was faltering now. He too was stunned by the enormity of what this couple had done to her, and he moved to perch on the bed beside her and hug her. ‘You’ve been through so much, so bravely,’ he said gently. ‘I wish I didn’t have to bring it all back with questions.’

She went on then to outline briefly how she was locked up and subjected to threats and emotional blackmail. She was too embarrassed to say anything much about the actual baby- making, and he didn’t press her. But she did describe how she tried to escape after the first time, and said she knew that was what sealed her fate because the couple never trusted her again.

She tried to shorten the details about her pregnancy and the birth which took place on 20 February, so Bryan frequently had to stop her and ask for more detail, for it was vitally important he understood fully how she’d been treated.

It was very telling that she said nothing about how she was after the birth, only that the Ramsdens kept going out, and must have often left the baby behind because she heard it crying. She might not have wanted a baby, and hated Howard and Fern, but her instinct was to protect her child and it must have been torment to be unable to. She said she sensed the baby was growing weaker and needed medical help but this was not forthcoming, and eventually she died.

‘I know I never got to hold her when she was born, and that I hated the way they forced me to have her, but she was still mine, and I felt so much pain when I knew she was dead,’ she sobbed out. ‘I’m quite certain she died from neglect. She was plump and healthy when she was born, but two and a half months later she was dead, and that’s really why I killed Fern. God, I hated her with all my being for that!’

Bryan could only stare at Lotte in shock, unable to believe what he’d just heard.

‘You killed Fern?’ he asked incredulously. He had imagined the woman to be in hiding somewhere, it hadn’t crossed his mind she was dead. He certainly would never have imagined Lotte killing her.

Had Bryan got Lotte’s story second-hand, he had no doubt he would have pooh-poohed her being unable to escape. If truth be told, he thought he would have believed much of the story to be too far-fetched. But aside from the honesty in those clear blue eyes, and Lotte’s obvious distress, Bryan had been at the house in Itchenor the previous evening following the call from David Mitchell. What Mitchell had said, about the man he had seen and the blue van, was enough for Bryan to obtain a search warrant.

There was absolutely no doubt Lotte and Dale had been kept there in the basement room. He found dark and blonde hairs on the crumpled sheets, saw the heavy lock on the outside of the door, and the way the wardrobe had been pushed under the window and the glass smashed out was all evidence of imprisonment.

There were fresh bloodstains on the basement room carpet, so he’d called in forensics immediately to go over the entire house. The kitchen had been cleaned thoroughly but they found further splatters of blood on the plinth below the kitchen cupboards.

Last night, before they had test results, Bryan had thought the blood belonged to the girls. It was only this morning, when they were able to take samples of Howard’s blood and compare them, that they discovered it was his blood in the basement. But they were still none the wiser who the blood in the kitchen belonged to, until Lotte admitted she had stabbed Fern there.

Bryan was still reeling from the shock of Lotte attacking Howard with the axe, and then to hear she had dispatched Fern well before that took some getting his head around. Lotte was the kind of girl he wouldn’t expect even to steal a sweet from Woolworth’s Pick and Mix. He would expect her to run from a spider, to cry at old movies. He would have staked his reputation on her being incapable of any violence.

Because of that he took her very carefully through the evening prior to her being taken out to sea, when they brought her up to the kitchen and she had the knife in her pocket.

Lotte told the story clearly and dispassionately, from the moment she asked for a glass of milk to the stabbing. Then she described the subsequent moments when Howard chased her round the table while his wife grew weaker, to when she was sitting in the hall bound hand and foot, waiting for him to finish tying Fern into the picnic rug.

‘I told him to ring the police,’ she said calmly. ‘I told him I would admit it was me. But he wouldn’t listen.’

Finally there was only the ride to the boat, to be loaded aboard with Fern and the baby, to tell him about.

‘We sailed for quite some time; it felt like hours. Then he got me out of the cabin, sat me on the side of the boat and untied me. Then he suddenly pushed me in and threw the baby after me,’ she stated.

She stopped short, her lips quivering, and took a moment or two to compose herself. ‘I had to make it to the shore to make sure he was punished. If only my memory hadn’t gone then, I’d have been able to tell you where he was and everything.’

Bryan was afraid that in a court case, the prosecution would tear her story about amnesia apart, suggesting she invented it because she wanted to hide the stabbing. They were likely to suggest that she entered into this ménage à trois of her own volition, and killed Fern to have Howard all to herself.

But Bryan did not harbour such thoughts. He felt that Lotte was actually incapable of lying or any kind of deception.

‘I don’t think I fully understood exactly what damage Howard had done to me until the moment I saw him sleeping in that van, after we escaped from the fire,’ she said a little later. ‘I knew exactly what he’d done of course, after all I remembered all the details, and I’d talked about it to Dale and mulled it over in my head. So I wasn’t under any illusions about him, I knew him to be a very nasty piece of work. I just didn’t see the effect it had had on me.

‘But it was different when I saw him sleeping. He thought he’d burnt us alive, yet he could fall asleep watching it! What sort of a man did that make him?’

‘A very, very evil one,’ Bryan said. ‘He had it coming to him; no one could feel any sympathy for him after what he did to you.’

‘But why did I go so far?’ she asked in a small voice, her blue eyes brimming with tears. ‘One whack with the axe would’ve stopped him coming after us. It would have shown him I wasn’t quite the mouse he took me for. But I kept on and on.’

Bryan’s sympathy for her brought a lump to his throat. He knew exactly why she couldn’t stop. Each whack was for all the injustices which had been piled on her, from her parents, the sweetheart who was run over, the rapist, to all that the Ramsdens had done to her. He felt nothing but understanding and empathy for her. Furthermore, he fervently hoped that Howard Ramsden would survive, so that he would never walk again, never father another child, and would have to stand trial for all his crimes either here or in the States.

‘He deserved all those whacks,’ he said, his voice cracking with emotion. ‘You had so much courage to confront him, and I promise you will get through this and have a good life again.’ He paused, cleared his throat and smiled at her.

‘Now, I happen to know there’s a man dying to see you. He’s walked miles, talked to hundreds of people on your behalf, did everything in his power to find you. So I’m going to get out of the way and give him a chance to spend some time with this very special lady.’

‘Do you mean David?’ she asked in a small voice.

Bryan laughed. ‘We ought to call him Chief Inspector Mitchell,’ he joked. ‘If it hadn’t been for his questions around the villages, coming up with someone who had seen Fern Ramsden, and most importantly spotting the blue van at the house in Itchenor, we’d still be searching fruitlessly around Selsey.’

David stood in the doorway of the room just looking at Lotte for what seemed like ten minutes, though she knew it couldn’t have actually been more than twenty seconds. He looked more handsome and rugged than she remembered, wearing a dark business suit and striped shirt and with his light brown hair just a little tousled.

‘I’m sorry to stare,’ he said eventually. ‘But there’ve been times when I thought I’d never see you again.’

‘I’m surprised you want to,’ she said with a shy smile. ‘I’m nothing but trouble.’

‘I saw Dale outside in the corridor,’ he said, walking over to the locker and putting down a large bar of Cadbury’s chocolate and a bunch of freesias.

‘I thought she was with her parents?’

‘She was. They’ve gone to check in to a hotel near here and they are coming back later. She said she was going for a walk because she had cabin fever.’

‘We’re both suffering from that,’ Lotte said with a smile. ‘But I suspect she was just being diplomatic and getting out of the way. And thank you for the flowers and chocolate. Freesias are my favourite, they are so delicate and smell heavenly. And I’m a real pig with chocolate. I’ll probably stuff myself with that tonight.’

‘Then I’d better get you started,’ he said with a grin and broke off a couple of pieces, giving one to her.

‘Has anyone told you what happened?’ she asked, her mouth full of chocolate.

He knew without asking that she meant the axe business and he nodded.

‘I’ll have to stand trial for it, and killing Fern.’

David hadn’t been told about Fern, but he swallowed hard and pretended he knew.

‘You’ll be acquitted,’ he said staunchly. ‘No one will blame you; they both deserved all they got.’

‘Back away now, David,’ she said softly. ‘I’m not what you need.’

David looked at her for a moment or two without answering. She looked so young and vulnerable, yet he already knew from Dale that she had not only kept her head in the fire, but pushed her friend out first. She was brave and resourceful, but he suspected she wanted him out of her life because she was afraid she was too damaged ever to be able to form a full sexual relationship with any man.

‘I think that’s up to me to decide,’ he said. ‘Besides, just now all I am is your friend. If you don’t want me to be anything else, then that’s fine.’

She turned her head on to the pillow, and he saw a tear rolling down her cheek. He moved closer and gently wiped it away with one finger.