No Child of Mine (45 page)

Anna’s face turned white and for several moments, as
the word echoed horribly between them, there was a silence that neither of them could fill.

In the end, Anna said, ‘I was always afraid you might see it like that, but that’s not how it was, I swear it. What I did ... The reasons I left you ...’ She took a gasp of air as she put a hand to her head.

As she watched her Alex found herself wanting to apologise, to go back and start again. She hated seeing how shaken she was, and knowing she’d caused it, but what did she expect?

‘I’ll tell you everything,’ Anna said quietly. ‘Of course I will, it’s why I’m here, at least in part, but first I need you to tell me how much you already know. I’m sure you’ve read newspaper stories from back then, but do you actually remember anything of the ... of the time before the rector took you into his family?’

Realising with a rush of guilt how difficult it was going to be for her mother to put the events of that terrible night into words, Alex shook her head. ‘Not really. I have vague sorts of flashbacks sometimes about being by the sea with a man who keeps swinging me up and round and round. I’ve always thought it was my father, or grandfather ...’

Anna smiled sadly and seemed to nod as she lowered her eyes for a moment. ‘Anything else?’ she prompted.

‘I have dreams too,’ Alex confessed, ‘but they’re memories really, of being shut in a cupboard and trying to reach the latch ... The rector told me ... My brother, Hugo, is with me ...’ She broke off as Anna seemed to flinch.

‘Hugo,’ Anna whispered, her eyes distant, as though seeing back across the years.

Alex waited, almost feeling the torment in her mother’s heart. Whatever resentment she might have stored up towards her, she mustn’t ever let herself forget how much worse the past had been for her.

‘Go on,’ Anna said finally.

Sorry she was putting her through this, but feeling she had to, Alex said, ‘Hugo ... told me to stay where I was, that he’d come back for me ...’

Anna’s head was down, and Alex noticed how tightly her hands were clenched. ‘Do you ...? Do you remember
me telling you to keep quiet?’ she asked. ‘I said you mustn’t make a sound because evil men were coming ...?’ She broke off and brought her eyes back to Alex’s. They were so full of tragedy, a hopeless kind of despair, that Alex wanted to stop her going any further. ‘I told you I’d come back for you,’ she whispered hoarsely, ‘but I didn’t. I couldn’t ...’

‘I know how badly you were injured,’ Alex assured her.

Anna was shaking her head; there was no colour in her face now, her eyes were glazed with pain. ‘He was insane, evil,’ she said wretchedly. ‘I knew he could be cruel, I’d seen it plenty of times by then, but I never imagined he could do anything like that.’ She took a breath, as though to help her continue. ‘If only I hadn’t gone to Holland to start my gap year. If I’d listened to my friend Sarah and gone with her to Paris instead, I’d never have met him. But I didn’t listen. I wanted to go to Amsterdam, so that’s what I did, and he ...’ She swallowed hard and bunched her hands even more tightly together, as though trying to bolster herself. ‘This might be even harder to believe than it is to say,’ she whispered, ‘but he was so charismatic, so handsome, and his foreign accent and air of confidence made him impossible to resist, at least for the highly impressionable, adventure-seeking teenager that I was then. He swept me off my feet ... I’d never known anyone like him. Of course, I had no idea what he was involved in, the type of people he was mixing with, I only found out about that later. At the time I thought he was an ambitious, romantic young man who’d escaped the oppressive regime in his country and was now driving a lorry to make enough money to start his career. I don’t think he ever told me what that career was to be. I didn’t ask, I don’t suppose I cared. I was so besotted, so ready to believe in him and whatever he wanted to be, that it didn’t matter to me, as long as we were together.

‘Then I got pregnant and he didn’t even hesitate; he wanted to marry me, and it was what I wanted too, so after knowing each other for only four months we made the commitment. My parents were horrified. They hadn’t even met him, and said they had no wish to either. They
just wanted me home so they could sort out the mess I was in. They were furious, absolutely beside themselves, but at the time nothing, no one, seemed to matter to me but him. Afterwards, I realised he probably only married me to get easy access in and out of England, but I was so convinced by his euphoria on our wedding day that I truly believed he loved me.’

She swallowed, took a breath and started again. ‘We moved to Liverpool quite soon after the wedding – at least I did. His work commitments meant that he had to spend most of his time in Europe, but he came to see me at least once a month, more often after Hugo was born.’ She seemed to drift for a moment, caught in the memories of a time Alex suspected felt almost unreal to her now.

‘It was wonderful being close to my parents again,’ she continued. ‘I’d missed them so much, more than I’d realised, and for Hugo’s sake they tried harder with Gavril. I knew they still didn’t trust him, and I’m sure he knew it too, but I don’t think their opinion ever mattered to him. He was pleasant enough to them though, and even seemed grateful at times for the care they took of me and Hugo. I never told them, because I couldn’t bear to, that I’d realised even before Hugo was born what a terrible mistake I’d made. I knew they’d try to make me divorce him and I was afraid of what he might do if I did. He’d never been violent with me, but by then I’d started to suspect what his business was, so I knew his morality, as well as his background, was very different from mine. Worse, far far worse, was the fear that he’d take Hugo away.

‘So I stayed married to him, even pretended to love him and be pleased to entertain the friends he brought home. They were always men, hard drinkers, smokers, gamblers ... They spoke so many languages, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, that I could never understand what they were saying, but I didn’t have to be fluent in anything to work out what they were talking about. It made me sick to my stomach to think of the young girls, kids most of them, that they were smuggling into the country to sell on for prostitution. Perhaps they were doing the pimping themselves, I never knew. I couldn’t allow myself to know too
much, it would be too dangerous and I had to think of Hugo.’

She lifted her tea, but didn’t drink, and Alex could hardly begin to imagine the hell she was reliving.

‘Hugo was about eighteen months old when my parents decided to buy a house overlooking the sea in Kesterly,’ she went on. ‘It was where we used to go for our holidays as children, and they’d always planned to retire there. For the first couple of years they had the place they were still working, so we only used it in the summer, and at Christmas, but then my dad had an accident at the docks and had to take early retirement. So they sold up in Liverpool and moved down south, and because my job at the local chemists was easy enough to give up, I talked Gavril into letting me and Hugo go with them. The intention was for Gavril to sell our house in Liverpool so we could buy somewhere close to my parents, but it never happened. Gavril hung on to it – I guess it had become too handy a meeting place close to the docks for him to give up. I was glad of it though, more than glad, because by then I hated him almost as much as I feared him, so the last thing I wanted was him coming to Kesterly too. What we were all hoping for, more than anything, was that he’d get caught during one of his smuggling operations, or that he’d at least run out of interest in me and Hugo and leave us alone. But for almost two years he came every month to see us, taking over our lives, our home, practically everything we did, scaring us all half to death, even Hugo who he prized above everything, or so he said. Then you came along, and he was so besotted with you that he began insisting we move back to Liverpool where he’d be able to see more of us. The thought wasn’t only horrifying because of having to be near him, but because of what he might do to us if he ever found out the truth about you.’

Alex’s heart caught a beat as she frowned in confusion.

Anna’s eyes came to hers and she smiled tenderly as she said, ‘You don’t know, do you?’

Alex was barely breathing. ‘Know what?’ she whispered.

‘Gavril Albescu wasn’t your father.’

Alex reeled, and almost gasped. She couldn’t take this in; it was too much, too strange, too unexpected ...
Gavril Albescu, the maniac, the murderer, wasn’t her father
. All her life she’d been afraid of her genes, ashamed of her birthright, and now ... She stared at Anna. ‘So ...?’ she faltered. ‘So who ...?’

In a voice that was as prideful as it was gentle, Anna said, ‘Your father was Nigel Carrington.’

Alex’s mouth fell open. She didn’t understand. Wasn’t he her aunt’s boyfriend? Quite suddenly dry, racking sobs began tearing from the depths of her.
The monster wasn’t her father. She had a normal father like everyone else
. Someone she could feel proud of, talk about, even think about ... As she struggled to catch her breath, Anna came to put her arms around her.

‘Why ... Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?’ Alex managed to choke, pushing her away. ‘All my life I’ve lived with the horror, the terrible shame of being his ...’

‘I know, and I’m sorry, I truly am, but it was the only way of keeping you safe.’

Alex couldn’t take it in; it wasn’t making any sense.

‘I loved your father, I wanted to be with him more than anything, but I was terrified of Gavril ...’ She inhaled raggedly. ‘He found out, of course, I don’t know how, but that wasn’t the worst of it. It was when he realised you weren’t his that he ... He couldn’t stand it. He adored you ... He told me we’d all pay for what we’d done to him and ...’ She swallowed. ‘... we did.’

As she turned away Alex watched her go to the window and put her hands over her face, as though blocking out the appalling memories of that night. She regretted pushing her mother back there, in spite of what she’d learned about herself. How terrible it must be, even after all these years, to revisit the horror of those she loved being massacred in front of her very eyes. Her parents, her sister, her son and the man she’d loved.
The man she’d loved
. The man who’d fathered three-year-old Charlotte; the man she, Alex, as Charlotte, should have grown up with.

Nigel Carrington was her father.

Her throat was tightening again. It was so hard to take in.

She knew so little about him. All these years she’d thought he was her aunt’s boyfriend, an innocent victim who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. In fact, he’d probably been Gavril Albescu’s main target that night – and so had she. The miracle of her survival was far greater than she had previously thought. Indeed, the only conceivable reason she and her mother had survived was because fate had decided that it wasn’t their time.

Why them and not her grandparents, or her aunt, or her brother, who’d all been blameless in the deception that had driven Albescu over the edge?

‘Are you all right?’ she whispered, as her mother came back to the table.

Though she was horribly pale, Anna forced the ghost of a smile as she said, ‘I try never to think about it, but I knew I’d have to today.’

‘I’m sorry, I feel as though ...’

‘No, don’t apologise. You have a right to know what happened back then, you’ve always had that right, but it simply wasn’t possible to tell you before.’

Alex searched her eyes. ‘So why is it possible now?’ she asked.

Anna took a breath. ‘Because Gavril Albescu is dead,’ she replied.

Feeling an unsteadying rush of relief at the words, Alex struggled for something to say, but what was there to say about the death of a man who’d robbed her of most of her family?

‘For as long as he was alive,’ Anna continued, ‘I never dared to come near you in case he was having me watched. He said he would, and made sure I knew it, because he sent someone to the hospital while I was still recovering to give me a message. He said that I would never escape him, that he would always be there, in the shadows, and one day he would make me take him to you. He said many other things that I feel it best not to repeat now; they were the threats, the
ravings
of a madman. The trouble was, he’d already shown me what he was capable of, so I never
doubted that he meant you harm. He meant it for me too, which was why, when I left the hospital, the police arranged for me to go to a safe place while my name was changed and papers were drawn up for me to start a new life. I think they might have considered using me as bait to try and catch him, but someone must have decided that I’d already been through enough, because they never did.

‘The only person from my past I was allowed to remain in contact with was Sarah, my best friend from school, the one I should have gone travelling with. She’d moved to New Zealand with her husband around the time you were born, and when she heard what had happened she flew over to visit me in hospital. She said that if I ever needed a home, I’d always have one with her, so when the time came, I got in touch with her. It wasn’t only that I had nowhere else to go, and no one else I could trust, it was that New Zealand felt far enough away for Gavril never to find me.’

She looked at Alex, and Alex could almost feel the pain that showed in her eyes. ‘The only problem was the biggest problem of all, leaving you. I couldn’t bring myself to go without you, and yet I knew for your sake that I had to. I had no idea if Gavril or any of his people were watching me, but I felt that they were so I couldn’t take the risk of leading them to you.’ She bit her lip and pushed herself past the emotion. ‘Before I left the country the rector came to see me. He was such a sweet man. I knew you were with good people, and he assured me you’d settled in well with his family and that you and his daughter were already close. I asked him if you called his wife Mummy and he said that you did. It broke my heart all over again, but I realised that to take you away from the people you’d come to think of as your family would be an unforgivably selfish thing to do when I knew I’d be putting you in danger.’