Stolen (6 page)

Dale pulled a face at the prospect of having to ask Marisa. ‘We’d better,’ she said. ‘And I’ll need to call Scott. Can we meet you in reception in ten minutes?’

An hour and a half later Scott and Dale were with Lotte in St Richard’s Hospital in Chichester. She had been put in a private room on Singleton Ward on the ground floor, with a policeman on duty outside the door.

‘Shit!’ Scott murmured as he saw the uniformed man. ‘I didn’t realize they saw this as a really serious crime. They must think she still needs protection.’

If DI Bryan heard what Scott said, he made no comment, but said he would remain outside so they could see Lotte alone.

‘You’ll be less inhibited without me there,’ he said with a smile. ‘You’ll probably get more out of her too, if you don’t stand on ceremony with her. Bring up all your little private jokes, be real. Call me if she starts to remember anything. But don’t go on for too long, she badly needs rest.’

Dale gasped involuntarily as they walked into the room, for Lotte looked terrible, almost unrecognizable as the outstandingly pretty girl they’d shared so many good times with. Her hair had been hacked off in lumps, she was very thin, terribly pale and bruised, and the skin on her face was flaking off. Even the big blue eyes they knew so well looked haunted and afraid.

‘Do you know us, Lotte?’ Dale said, taking her hand. ‘I’m Dale and this is Scott. We were your best friends on the cruise ship, we did everything together.’

‘Dale and Scott,’ Lotte said slowly as if testing the names against anything remaining in her memory bank. She looked searchingly at their two faces and it was clear she didn’t know them.

Dale started to talk about the hairdressing salon and the names of the other staff there.

‘I used to call you my “slave”,’ she went on, tears prickling the back of her eyes and her voice shaking. ‘I am such a slob, you used to pick my clothes up for me and wash them. You are the best friend I’ve ever had.’

Lotte squeezed her hand. ‘Your voice kind of sounds like I know it,’ she said, a look of frustration crossing her face. ‘I’m trying so hard to remember something, but there’s just shadows, nothing else.’

‘It’s very early days yet and you’re still very weak,’ Scott said, bending over to kiss her forehead. ‘I used to call you “Barbie Girl”.’

Lotte looked hard at Scott for some little time, then sighed. ‘It’s there, I know it is, but there’s something blocking the way.’

‘We’ll find out what,’ Dale assured her. ‘We’ll come tomorrow with photos we took on the cruise. We’ll talk and talk until something gives and you remember everything.’

‘My parents came last night,’ Lotte said, her eyes misty with unshed tears. ‘Well, they said they were my parents, but they didn’t mean anything to me. Are you sure that’s who they are?’

That remark brought a lump to Dale’s throat, for clearly Lotte had picked up on her parents’ disinterest even though she probably had no memory of what love or friendship actually meant or felt like. How awful it was going to be for her when she did recover her memory and found she was unwanted by her parents, that she’d been raped, and perhaps someone had even tried to drown her. Perhaps it was better to have no memory if that was what it held.

‘It’s been a while since they saw you, and you look very different,’ Dale said, stroking Lotte’s hair back from her forehead. ‘Your hair was very long, right down your back and very shiny. You loved the colour pink, and it suited you because you were a very girlie girl.’

‘Pink to make the boys wink,’ Lotte said with a smile. But then she frowned. ‘Why did I say that? It just popped out!’

‘I expect that’s the way your memory will come back,’ Scott said. ‘A bit here and there, and one bit will loosen another memory and soon it will be a flood. But you need to sleep and get strong again. We’ll come to see you again tomorrow night.’

As DI Bryan walked back with them to the police car they told him everything that had been said. Dale asked him if he’d been in the room when Lotte’s parents saw her.

‘Yes, sadly,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen a less emotional couple. They didn’t touch her once, not a kiss, a squeeze of the hand or a pat on the cheek. Yet they had tears in their eyes when they told me about their other daughter dying. It was all I could do not to slap them round the head and remind them they’ve got another daughter here who needs care and attention badly.’

‘What will happen now?’ Dale asked.

‘A psychiatrist will be coming in tomorrow morning to see her,’ the policeman said. ‘Let’s hope he has some way of unblocking her memory. We are of course going to run pictures of her in the press again and ask members of the public to come forward if they remember her.’

‘What if whatever happened to her was so bad her brain has blocked it out to help her recover?’ Dale asked. ‘I read somewhere that can be the reason for amnesia.’

‘Yes, I believe that is so,’ Bryan said. ‘And it’s very frustrating for us police when we need to know who is responsible for her trauma and apprehend them. But I have it on good authority that this kind of amnesia is not permanent.’

Lotte lay back on the pillows, staring up at the ceiling. It was after eleven now, dark outside and much quieter everywhere. The main lights in the room had been turned off earlier and the nurse had just left the reading lamp above the bed on, turning it away so it didn’t shine down on Lotte’s face.

People kept asking her how she felt, but she couldn’t explain because she had no idea what she felt like before she ended up in the sea. She wanted to sleep for ever, her whole body ached and there were sore patches which the nurse said had been caused by the shingle of the beach. She kept looking at the purple marks on her wrists, wishing she could recall the face of the person who tied her up. The way Dale and Scott had talked to her made her think she must have been a nice person, so why would anyone want to restrain her?

Everything in the room felt oddly familiar, not necessarily as if she’d been in here before, but somewhere just like it. But then she supposed most hospitals were more or less the same.

She found it weird that loss of memory was so selective. It hadn’t stopped her being able to speak, read, use a knife and fork or use the toilet, yet when she was told her name, she didn’t know that.

‘Pink to make the boys wink,’ she muttered to herself again. ‘Why did that pop into my head?’

She could see the colour pink in her mind’s eye, just as she could name the purple flowers in the vase on the window sill as tulips. Her parents had brought those in with them; her mother said they were from their garden. But perhaps she’d also said they were called tulips.

No one had shown her pink, though, she just knew what the colour was. She reached out for one of the magazines and kept flicking over the pages until she saw a pink dress, pink lipstick and a picture of a room with pink walls.

She continued to turn the pages, and halted suddenly at a picture of a child on a beach. She had a bucket and spade and she was wearing a bikini. Suddenly Lotte remembered.

A pink bikini, pink and white spots with frills across the back of the pants. Her sister had one exactly the same. She even knew it was the summer when she was five and Fleur was nine. They had gone to Camber Sands for the day. Her mother said ‘pink to make the boys wink’, and Fleur asked why would they want to make boys wink.

As the memory unfurled it was like watching a video. Lotte could see them all getting out of the car in the morning, and her mother piling the picnic and beach stuff into her father’s arms so he was almost hidden.

Lotte was given only the buckets and spades to carry. Fleur had the picnic blanket which was rolled up and tied like a big sausage. Mum and Dad carried everything else up over the sand dunes and down on to the beach.

It was her first time on a sandy beach. She loved the way the sand squidged up, warm between her toes, and it was exciting climbing up the big dunes not knowing what was on the other side. But it was even better once they got to the top because they could just slide down the other side to miles of smooth golden sand in both directions. The tide was going out, and it had left small pools of water that were just right for paddling.

Dad hit his hand with the mallet when he was trying to put up the striped canvas windbreak, and Mum laughed at him. He chased her with the mallet, and as Mum ran up on to the dunes to get away from him, he grabbed her by the ankle and pulled her down, laughing at her.

They were like that all day, teasing each other and making jokes. When they went paddling they splashed each other, even though they both had their clothes on. Lotte remembered it was a very long way down to the sea when the tide went right out, and they could see tiny holes in the sand that Dad said were made by winkles.

Fleur sang Madonna’s new record, ‘Papa Don’t Preach’, using one of the spades as a microphone as she danced about on the beach. Dad said he wished he’d brought the new cine camera with him, but he’d been afraid of getting sand in it. He said Fleur would have to do it again for them when they got home so he could film it.

Lotte didn’t need a cine film to remind her of anything. She could see Fleur, her face flushed with the sun, blonde curly hair caught up in two bunches on either side of her head, like pom-poms. She urged Lotte to jump right across the pools of water left when the tide went out because there might be a human-eating octopus in one.

Down at the sea they held hands and jumped over the waves. Fleur could swim and she tried to teach Lotte by holding her under the tummy while ordering her to move her legs like a frog. She let go several times and Lotte got a mouthful of sea water, but she didn’t mind, she was brave when she was with her big sister.

Later that day Fleur tried to teach her how to do a cartwheel. She could do a dozen, one after the other, right down the beach. She could walk on her hands and do back flips, and Lotte wanted to be just like her.

The memory faded sharply, just like a film that was suddenly cut in half. One moment watching Fleur doing back flips, the next nothing. She didn’t remember going home, or anything after that.

She didn’t mind too much. After all, it was a start, something good to tell the doctor in the morning. Funny though that the couple who said they were her parents were nothing like the happy couple in her memory. They looked like them, only older, but they weren’t happy like that any longer. And where was Fleur now? No one had mentioned her.

Chapter Four

The morning after visiting Lotte, Dale walked into the spa and found Marisa waiting for her. One look at the woman’s tight expression and she knew it wasn’t a social call.

‘Can I do something for you, Marisa?’ she said as pleasantly as she could. ‘I’ve got time before my first client if you want a manicure or some waxing done.’

‘I don’t want or need any beauty treatments,’ Marisa replied waspishly. ‘I came here to say that if you think you and Scott can run out of here whenever you feel like it, just because some girl you once worked with has lost her memory, then you are mistaken. She needs a psychiatrist, not a beautician.’

Dale gave the older woman a scathing look. ‘I take it that when you were born you didn’t get a visit from the good fairy that doles out compassion?’

‘What is that supposed to mean?’ Marisa asked.

‘Think about it,’ Dale snapped, and walked into one of the treatment rooms and shut the door. She hadn’t even thought of going to see Lotte during working hours, but it wasn’t being told she couldn’t which had made her angry, it was that Marisa hadn’t even asked how Lotte was.

Dale knew that in the past she’d been fairly careless about people. But she was absolutely certain that she would always have been curious about how someone young and pretty ended up half drowned on a beach. And if the girl had been a friend of people she worked with, she’d have felt involved and sympathetic.

Yet the worst of it was that Dale was sure Marisa was looking for an excuse to sack her. She didn’t know why, but the woman had had it in for her since her first day here. She had been harsh to Rosie and Michelle too, at first, but Dale could see that that was to bring them up to the standards she expected in the spa.

Dale knew she had always had that high standard. Marisa couldn’t fault her technique, standards of hygiene or client care, she just didn’t want her there for some reason.

Marisa had sat in on her interview, but it was Sophia Renato and Quentin Sellers, the joint owners of the hotel, who had presumably selected her from the eighteen hopefuls. They hardly ever came into the spa, and Carlos the wine waiter said they only checked the hotel about once a week and left everything to their managers.

Frankie thought Marisa wanted Dale out because she was confident, bright and a natural leader, and once this became apparent to Renato and Sellers, they might well find it more cost-effective to make her spa manager and get rid of Marisa.

Dale liked the idea that they might think her capable of running the spa, but if truth were told she wouldn’t really want the job. It would be too much responsibility and very little more money. She’d rather get a little salon of her own in Brighton where the profits were all hers and she didn’t have to work such long hours. But that was in the future. She couldn’t afford to make Marisa angry enough to sack her, not yet.

Yet she also felt compelled to help Lotte. How she didn’t know, for a sixty-mile round trip to the hospital without a car was going to be difficult. But she was determined to be involved in bringing back her friend’s memory and to get her back on her feet, whatever Marisa thought about it.

Scott had said he was going to ask Michael the chef if he could borrow his car to drive over to Chichester tonight. But even if Michael agreed, they wouldn’t get there much before eight-thirty, which the hospital might say was too late for visiting. And they couldn’t keep that up nightly anyway.

Their transport difficulties were insignificant compared with Lotte’s problems, however. Rape was bad enough to deal with, but it looked as if whatever had happened to her in this last year was much worse, or her mind wouldn’t have blocked it out. How would she deal with it when her memory came back?