The Lost Child (16 page)

Elaine woke from a migraine-fuelled nightmare in a fog of pain and nausea. She had dreamed of damp, foetid darkness, fear and blood. The memory of it turned her stomach and she threw up in the bowl that Brodie had left by the sofa. She felt drunk and disorientated, as if she was still trapped in the dream and that what her aching eyes saw was a surreal pastiche of reality. Thick, velvet blackness clouded the edges of her vision with dark menace, making her pulse pound like a hammer and her head feel as though it had been battered with a meat tenderiser. She needed air.

She half crawled to the door, clinging to the furniture for support and promptly threw up again once she was outside, spattering a scrambling rose with bile and that morning’s breakfast.

Something was going on next door in Miriam’s cottage. Several cars were parked outside. An ambulance, its flashing lights battering Elaine’s still delicate senses, stood with its doors open. She couldn’t look at it, the glaring colours of its livery and the whirling lights made her want to vomit again. There was too much yellow, too much blue, too much movement. Instinct made her stagger in the opposite direction, far away from the sensory intrusion. There was no rationale in what she was doing, no consciousness, she simply staggered forward hoping to find some dark, cool place where she could lie undisturbed until the storm of pain passed.

There was a moment when she was aware of arms wrapping around her and the ground disappearing from beneath her feet. She could feel rough fabric against the skin of her face. It smelled of earth and the musk of unwashed flesh. Her stomach lurched again but there was nothing left, so she clung on, unconcerned and incognisant. Everything hurt too much for her to care. She drifted in and out of consciousness, aware of movement, aware of the changing light through her closed eyelids, and aware of being taken down into cold, dark blissful silence.

*

As gently as he could Derry placed Elaine’s inert form on the slab of marble where he had found her all those years before. Then she had been Mandy, then she had been small and then the wound on her neck had oozed blood onto his hands as he had tried to stem it with her cardigan.

She had been asleep then too, but he’d taken her outside and tried to wake her up, but she had cried and been sick and it had scared him. He hadn’t been able to stop her crying and it had scared him. Then Jean had come, she scared him too, now she was just dust under the trees and on the soles of his shoes, but she still scared him. Mandy had come back. She was big now and sad, and now she was poorly again, which scared him, so he put her back where he had found her. Now everything would be all right. Just like when Rosemary told him to put the chicks back with the hens, because she didn’t want the chicks to die. Now everything would be all right, you just had to leave things how you found them, that’s what Rosemary said.

Chapter Eleven

Brodie had never felt so awful in her life. Esther was dead and she had killed her and she couldn’t tell a soul what she had done. Misery wrapped itself around her like a claustrophobic quilt. In the lounge Miriam was weeping as she told the doctor how guilty she felt for leaving Esther, for letting her die alone. Every word brought a fresh wave of guilt to Brodie who felt like King Canute, powerless to stop the oncoming tide of responsibility.

The doctor was saying that it hadn’t been anyone’s fault, that Esther had been living on borrowed time for years and that another stroke was inevitable. Her death had been a blessing, a release from a locked-in existence worse than any prison cell. Miriam had been a saint to care for her the way she did and she should feel proud of herself and comfort herself with the knowledge that Esther was at peace now and had slipped away without pain. Brodie winced at his words, she knew different, knew that Esther had died in an agony of silent unspeakable things conjured up by a bitter, angry girl.

Esther’s body was still in her chair, covered with a sheet, waiting for the undertakers to arrive and take it away. Jack Pearson had stayed for a while, his appearance not impacting Miriam in the way that it could have under the circumstances. He had hovered around, made tea in the big brown pot and had eventually made his excuses and left them to it, probably relieved that something had happened to divert Brodie from her mission. Brodie was glad he’d gone, convinced that her guilt was writ large on her face and that he would sense it and be forced to act.

In an agony of self-pity she looked up as Miriam, her pudgy face tearstained and fraught, came into the kitchen. ‘Brodie love, do you think you could pop next door to Elaine’s for a bit? Only the undertaker is on his way and I don’t want you to have to see her being taken out.’

Brodie nodded and stood up, then on instinct turned to the kind woman who had never done her any harm and hugged her. ‘I’m so sorry’. The apology had a hollow ring.

Taken aback, Miriam froze for a moment, then wrapped her arms around the weeping girl and began to stroke her hair, ‘Oh bless you my love, don’t be upset. She had a good life, she’s at peace now.’

Her words only served to make Brodie cry more and she clung to Miriam like static clings to nylon, ‘Hush now, come on, or you’ll start me off again. You go and see Elaine and I’ll call for you when everything’s sorted out, all right?’

Still snivelling, Brodie extracted herself and made her way over to see Elaine, wondering if the woman she barely knew, but who she had bonded with so quickly, would be able to help her make sense of what she’d done. Would Elaine still want her if she knew she was a murderer?

*

Dan arrived at Meadowfoot Cottage just as a body was being wheeled out of the house next door. Not for the first time that day he wondered what on earth he was walking into. His reservations were compounded when he entered the open door of Elaine’s temporary residence and was confronted by the sight of a weeping child who was nursing a bowl of vomit.

Through the cacophony of teenage misery and garbled conversation he managed to establish that the child’s great-aunt had just died and that she had been sent to sit with Elaine. But Elaine wasn’t there and the girl had no idea where she had gone.

Feeling completely unequal to the task of calming down the overwrought child Dan plied her with tissues and hoped the crying would burn itself out. ‘I’m sorry about your great-aunt,’ he said lamely.

This kindness only served to refresh the bout of hysterics. Though he managed to establish, through a garbled saltwater and snot mess of words, that the girl thought it was her fault the aunt had died. ‘I scared her to death,’ the girl declared with miserable resignation.

As the only responsible adult in the visible vicinity Dan felt obliged to try and deal with the kid’s distress. ‘And how on earth did you manage that? You don’t really strike me as the terrifying sort, a bit moody maybe, but not frightening,’ he said, hoping the wry humour would jolt her out of her angst.

Haltingly, Brodie told him the story of the dog and what she had done to Esther in her desire to solve the mystery. Unburdening herself to him, a complete stranger, seemed to have a calming effect, and as she talked her words became less stilted.

Dan considered her story for a moment, ‘Well, not that I know the circumstances exactly, but it sounds to me like she might have had good cause to be shocked, and maybe that was what tipped her over the edge and brought on another stroke. But whatever it was, it had to be pretty bad to cause that. Nothing shouts louder than a guilty conscience, so perhaps you were right and she did know more than she should,’ he paused, aware that he probably wasn’t making her feel any better. ‘Look, what I’m trying to say is that maybe you shouldn’t have done what you did, but all you’re guilty of is not being very nice at that moment. Whatever killed her was inside her. It didn’t come from you. If she was more involved with what happened than she let on, she’d been nursing that for years. What you did was just a catalyst wasn’t it?’ He really wasn’t sure he was helping at all and was starting to have fond memories of the traffic jam. It had been less traumatic and frustrating than this.

Brodie nodded unhappily, better a catalyst than a murderer, ‘I still feel crap though. If I hadn’t done it she’d still be alive.’

‘But you’d still be none the wiser about the toy, whether it had any significance or not. Now you know it was important.’ What was he saying? He really didn’t know what had come over him, or why on earth he was embroiling himself in this mess. He felt like this girl had just presented him with a bigger spade so that he could dig himself a deeper hole.

Brodie sniffed. ‘Anyway, I’m going to take a guess and assume that you’re the sexy builder, Dan. Elaine doesn’t really know anyone else. Why are you here?’

She had used the word sexy. He wasn’t sure whether to feel gratified or surprised by the description, but that fact that Elaine had used it impressed him. That she had shared the thought with a stroppy teenager who went round scaring old women to death was slightly more worrying… ‘I’m Dan, yeah. But who are you? I mean I know your life story and all but you still haven’t told me your name.’

Brodie had the grace to blush, she had poured out everything to a man she didn’t know and looked worried that she had scared him off Elaine for life. It was hard to imagine that her day could get any worse. ‘I’m Brodie, Elaine’s my friend,’ she muttered, looking thoroughly ashamed of the way she had behaved in front of him.

‘Well, she’s my friend too, I hope. So where is she?’

It was a good question, but Brodie had no idea. ‘I don’t know, I saw her this morning but she wasn’t well. I left her here, on the sofa. But the door was wide open when I came in.’

‘What was wrong with her?’

‘A migraine I think.’ She handed him the strip of pills that she had left on the coffee table.

Dan studied the tablets; they were hefty stuff familiar to him from the occasions his mother had been laid out for days at a time with tortuous headaches. ‘Hmmm, that’s worrying. These things could fell an elephant at forty paces. It’s hard to imagine she would have gone wandering off with these on board. How many did she take?’

Brodie looked concerned, ‘I only gave her two, do you think she’s all right?’

‘I don’t know, but I think it might be a good idea to try and find her.’

*

Jack Pearson had made it halfway home before curiosity finally got the better of good sense and forced him to turn round and drive back to Hallow’s End. Despite his better judgement the kid was right, that dog had raised more questions. For thirty years he had nursed his failure to find Mandy. If he were honest he would admit that it had eaten away at him, eroding his confidence both as a man and an officer of the law. There had been many disappointments in his career, criminals caught but released on technicalities, others let out too soon to repeat their misdeeds, but failing to find Mandy had been the worst. His own daughter hadn’t been much older at the time and he could clearly remember going home after every shift and just watching her, pleading with fate to keep her safe. Shirley Miller hadn’t been afforded that luxury and maybe it was time he did something about it. Finding the dog would probably lead to yet another dead end, but he had to try. If only to appease that pushy kid and stop her cluttering up his nice peaceful retirement. He concluded his thoughts with an absent smile, he had to admit he kind of liked her.

As he rang the heavy doorbell of Hallow’s Court he wondered if Ada and Albert Gardiner-Hallow would remember him as the man who had spent weeks trudging all over their sensibilities in his jack boots? He remembered them all too well, Ada with her starched, old colonial, defensiveness and Albert, hiding his obsessions and compulsions behind aristocratic eccentricity. It was a sad façade; evidence of lives lived unloved and unfulfilled. A legacy of unhappy childhoods spent with inadequate people. As he recalled, during the investigation they had found out that the pair had arrived at Hallow’s Court as children, refugee’s from the partition of India in 1947. Their father had been some kind of diplomat who had never returned home and had died there of some exotic disease. Ada and Albert had been sent ‘home’ to their grandmother, who had been ill equipped to take on two traumatised and grieving children. They’d had a lonely and difficult childhood in the company of a cold and unloving woman. When she had died, the house passed to Albert. Poor Ada had experienced history repeating itself when all she had inherited was the unlovely offspring of her half-sister, Alicia. Jack remembered the child, a pouting and needy boy called Alex. He was sure he had read something about him in the papers recently, something about big political aspirations.

His musings were interrupted by the appearance of a squat, fierce looking woman who had opened the door to him.

‘Yes, I help you?’ she said in a manner that conveyed that the last thing she wanted to do was to help anyone.

Jack gave her the once over, noting the flour on her apron, a smear of which adorned her brow; he had obviously interrupted a baking session. ‘I’d like to see Miss or Mr Gardiner-Hallow please,’ he said.

‘Mr Gardiner-Hallow is in the hospital, Miss Gardiner-Hallow says no visitors.’ She made to shut the door on him. An action which he prevented by inserting his foot between it and the doorframe.

‘Please tell Miss Gardiner-Hallow that Jack Pearson is here to see her,’ he said, with a polite but insistent smile.

He could tell the woman knew that he wasn’t going to give up. With a scowl she opened the door and directed him to wait in the hall.

‘I go tell her.’ She disappeared off into the labyrinth of the house, which Jack remembered so well. Nothing had changed, except the staff. The last time he had rung that bell it had been Esther Davies who had answered, impeccably starched and unhurried, embodying the perfect archetype of the old family retainer. The Gardiner-Hallows had fallen far if they’d had to resort to foreign labour.

The little woman reappeared, ‘She say to go to drawing room, follow please.’ Without waiting she turned, shedding a powdery trail of dry flour as she led him to Ada.