Why Don’t You Come for Me (37 page)

‘Well, that’s no secret. Rebecca Ford is my adopted daughter, and her mother, Heidi Ford née Parsons, was my friend. I adopted Rebecca when my friend and her husband died. As it happens, I can’t have children myself.’

‘You’re just saying that,’ said Jo, but her voice wavered.

‘I cannot believe that you have come over here to confront me with such a half-baked tale. Imagine how upset Becky would have been if she had heard what you said. And how dare you obtain a copy of my daughter’s birth certificate! Whatever possessed you? It’s horrible to think that you must have been checking up on us, watching and spying …’ Gilda appeared to be gripped by a mounting sense of outrage. She stood up and took a few steps towards the window, before returning to grip the back of her chair as if she could hardly contain herself.

‘I didn’t get a copy of her birth certificate. I looked it up on the internet.’

‘I don’t believe you. I don’t believe people’s birth certificates are on the internet.’

‘Not exactly – not the whole certificate.’

‘I should think not.’

‘She’s the same age,’ Jo said. ‘She’s got blonde hair—’

‘So has half the population.’

‘And – and I didn’t believe you’d been married.’

‘I suppose you tried to check that up, too.’

‘No.’

‘I suppose you just took that as read. It would be like you to assume that I couldn’t get a husband if I wanted one.’ A strange smile crossed Gilda’s face. Bitter, while at the same time knowing and in control. The smile of one who knows their adversary, and is capable of inflicting great damage. It was the sort of look which made Jo instinctively want to flinch away.

‘I thought I saw you there – in Barleycombe – that day she was taken. And then you were watching the night when I went to the rendezvous on the postcard.’ Jo’s voice shook. She knew that at any minute she would succumb to tears.

‘What postcard? What on earth are you talking about? You know what the trouble with you is, Joanne Savage? You’re as barmy as your mother. When I first knew you it just manifested itself in your being a nasty little piece of work, but now you’ve gone completely over the edge – just like she did. Look at yourself. You’re a wreck, a laughing stock. Oh, you thought you’d got it made, with your nice little business showing rich tourists where Wordsworth ate his supper, but it’s all gone wrong again now, hasn’t it? Of course they’re still at the stage of being sorry for you, Maisie and Shelley and the others, but they don’t know the half of it, do they? Did your first husband see it coming, when you pushed him over the cliff? You got away with it, too, didn’t you? Not like your mother. Still locked up in Broadmoor, is she? And how about Marcus, is he watching his back? Because he certainly ought to be.’

‘Stop it!’ Jo stumbled to her feet. ‘Stop it. My mother’s dead – and I’m not Joanne Savage any more. That’s all behind me now, all those terrible things.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Gilda spat. ‘I don’t think anyone forgets that easily. I don’t. Remember that time you all got me in the toilets, shoved my head down and flushed the chain? Or burning my homework with Colleen’s cigarette lighter, so I’d get into trouble for not handing in my assignment? Remember the names you called me? That way you all had of sticking out a foot, so that I tripped over it? You see, I don’t forget things, either.’

‘But that wasn’t me. It really wasn’t. I didn’t do any of those things – it was the others. I should have stopped them, I know I should, but I was afraid of them, too.’

‘It wasn’t
me
,’ Gilda jeered. ‘Oh, yes – it’s always someone else, isn’t it? You picked on me at school and you think you can do the same now.’

‘I don’t. I’m not. I’m truly sorry about what happened to you at school,’ Jo sobbed. ‘But my child – someone took my child.’

‘Well, maybe that was your punishment. Maybe that’s how life works: what goes around, comes around. You give someone hell, and it comes back at you in a hotter form. And being the victim is still your trump card, isn’t it? It kept you out of trouble at school –
poor
Joanne, we have to make allowances because she’s had
such
a rough time – and now you think you can come here and make accusations, and then when someone calls your bluff, you turn on the tears and start to bleat.
Someone took my child
,’ Gilda mimicked cruelly. ‘How dare you come into my home, trying to upset me and my daughter, pushing your particular brand of lunacy into our lives.’

Jo stood up and made her way unsteadily into the hall, almost falling over the roll of carpet on the way. ‘I’m sorry. I can see that it was wrong … I just thought …’

‘I don’t want to hear any more. Get out of my house.’ Gilda marched down the hall behind her, a threatening presence before which Jo cowered at the front door, where it took her an age to fumble her feet into her wellingtons, while tears cascaded on to her hands, blurring her vision, muffling her voice, as she repeated over and over again that she was sorry, that she should not have come.

The cold outside took her breath away. Gilda had shut the door at her back, but the outside light was enough to see by. Her own footprints were mixed up with the tracks made by Sean and Rebecca earlier in the day, all of them now frozen into a lethal skid pan. She picked her way around this bumpy patch of ice, seeking the relative safety of the virgin snow. Shame lashed her as she trod a wavering path across the lane. How had she reached such a dark place? How could she not have foreseen this obvious flaw in her perverted logic? Gilda’s daughter was
adopted
. She had followed a false trail, wrought of her own imagination and despair. If Gilda was right, then she should end it now, before she did something really terrible. If she walked the other way along the lane, turned up the footpath through the woods and carried on until she reached the moor, she would only have to sit down among the cluster of rocks in her drawing place and she would surely be dead by morning. She had once read that hypothermia was not a painful death. Strangely, it was not the thought of death that deterred her, so much as the thought of the darkness among the trees. It reminded her of the night when she had gone to Claife Station, not knowing what unseen horror might be waiting for her there. And if she killed herself, who would be left for Lauren?
Unless
, said a voice in her head,
Lauren is already dead. Maybe Lauren wants you to do it. Maybe she is waiting for you on the other side. Perhaps that is what lies just out of sight, those shadowy watchers that you are afraid to confront … maybe it’s Lauren and Dom, hand in hand, waiting for you.

But it was already too late. She had reached the house and was stamping the snow from her boots. When she got inside she ran upstairs, buried her face in the duvet and wept hysterically.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Sean had not realized that his stepmother had left the house, but he was aware of her return because he heard the front door slam and her feet on the stairs, followed by the sound of her bedroom door closing. When she had not emerged by eight o’clock, he put a frozen pizza in the oven, then went around the ground-floor rooms, switching on lights and closing the curtains and blinds. He did not like uncurtained windows after dark, with their ever-present sense that someone might be on the opposite side of the glass, looking in. Not that there was ever anyone around, but it felt spooky – even on nights like this when the combination of moonlight and heavy snowfall made it easy to see into the garden without switching on the outside lights. It occurred to him that it would be pretty neat to go sledging by moonlight. Maybe it was something they could do when Harry came.

He looked forward to Harry’s visits. He sometimes talked to his old mates online, but it wasn’t like being able to hang out with them. The kids at school were OK, but they already had their own friends, who they seemed to have known for ever. They didn’t deliberately exclude him, but they didn’t bother to include him either. He missed his old mates, and the comfortable familiarity of a mother who could be relied upon not to take off without telling anyone where she was going, who would always provide meals at predictable times and who could yell at him with impunity because she didn’t have to be seen to be making a serious effort to like him all the time.

He remembered the artificial jollity of his first Christmas at The Hideaway – in less than a week they would be playing out the same farce again – except that
she
was getting worse and worse at managing to play her part. You never knew where you were with her. Only that morning she had appeared to be in a fairly reasonable mood, but there was something up with her again now. At one time she had seemed quite scary (he still had the knife, currently slipped into an old box which had once housed
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Seven
), but lately she just seemed pathetic. He wondered what she was doing now. Just sitting on her own, staring at the carpet, probably.

He couldn’t imagine why she was so interested in Becky. He had not minded being asked to find out her last name. In fact, he was pretty pleased with the way he had managed it. Nor had he really minded taking Becky out sledging, because things like that were more fun when there was someone else to have a laugh with and he had sort of said he would call for her again tomorrow.

Jo lay on her bed for a long time. She tried to empty her mind completely; not to facilitate remembrance, but in order to forget. Imagine if the accusations she had levelled at Gilda travelled beyond the four walls of The Old Forge. Gilda could easily tell other people what she had said – she might even go to the police and make a complaint of some kind. Harassment. It might constitute harassment. Suppose Gilda did something spiteful, like sell the story to the papers. Tell them how she, Jo, went about accusing innocent widows of having stolen her child. That awful excoriating shame of publicity. Everyone would know who she was. Marcus and the business would get dragged in; he and Melissa would be furious.

She crawled under the duvet without bothering to remove her clothes, then lay there trying not to think. If only she could blot everything out by falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.

After a long time she sensed that the room was becoming lighter. It was an uneasy feeling, as if an unseen hand was turning up the dimmer switch millimetre by millimetre, the better to spy on her. It took her a while to realize that it must be the moon, moving around the house until it shone in at the window.

The moon made her think of the path along the cliff top at Shanklin; she and Dominic, hand in hand on their honeymoon, looking at the stars while the moon reflected silvery patterns on the sea. Happy – so very, very happy. Not caring that they could not afford a Caribbean island. She had the strangest feeling that if she turned to look out of the window he would be floating just outside, beckoning her to come away with him, out into the cold pale moonlight and away to the dark places where there is no more feeling, no more pain, no more doubting what is real and what is true because there you know everything.

The feeling was so overwhelming that she rolled over to look, but there was nothing to be seen except the skeletons of the trees, the uppermost edge of each shiny black branch highlighted by a coating of snow. Ransoms grew among those trees in springtime, and beautiful carpets of bluebells, but that was a long way off. Maybe she would not be here by then.

She slept for a while, then woke suddenly in the darkness, crying out in confusion. The air felt cold against her face. For a minute she thought she must be in a sleeping bag, camping out on the fellside – not that she had ever done so. Then she remembered that the heating would have gone off for the night, and with the weather being so bitter, she should have set it to override the timer.
Cold as the grave
, said a voice in her head. She had once driven through a part of the municipal cemetery set aside for the interment of children. A terrible place of soft toys and withered balloons. She had not wanted that for Lauren. She would have done anything – anything at all to give Lauren the chance to live and have a happy life. After a time she fell asleep again. In her new dream Lauren was riding a pony. The pony kept breaking into a trot, and although she could hear Lauren laughing and encouraging it to go faster, she was afraid for her. Surely Lauren was too small to be on the pony by herself, without someone there to hold the reins. She tried to catch them up but the pony was always a bit too fast for her and full of cunning tricks, getting itself on the far side of a hedge or the opposite bank of a stream. The girl in the saddle seemed to have grown – she turned to look over her shoulder, and Jo saw that it was Gilda’s daughter after all. The girl pressed her knees into the pony’s sides and the animal galloped away.

When she next awoke it was to broad daylight, and Sean’s voice was coming from the other side of the bedroom door. ‘I’m going out,’ he shouted. ‘I’m taking the sledge.’

‘OK.’ Her first attempt to respond was just a croak. She tried again, and her response emerged more clearly, although she was uncertain whether Sean had waited for an answer.

She rolled over and looked at the clock. It was approaching eleven in the morning. She dragged away the duvet and stood up, straightening one sleeve of her jumper which had become twisted around her arm, dragging up her socks before they completely parted company with her feet. She went downstairs slowly, reaching the sitting room just in time to see Sean dragging two sledges into the gateway of The Old Forge. She ought to have warned him that he might not be welcome. She waited anxiously at the window, but it appeared that whatever animosity Gilda might entertain towards Jo, she was not taking it out on her stepson, because after what seemed like an age Sean and Rebecca emerged from between the gateposts, he pulling the larger wooden sledge, she the cheap plastic job. As they turned away down the lane, she saw them both raise a hand in acknowledgement of someone she could not see.

While she was waiting for Sean to reappear, she saw a large green Jeep drive slowly along the lane. The world was waking up and moving along without her. The world, in fact, did not need her. She went into the kitchen, which bore evidence of both Sean’s breakfast and supper. He had actually remembered to put his cereal bowl into the dishwasher, although the crumbs from his toast lay forgotten on the worktop.