No Child of Mine (56 page)

A while later her mother was dabbing her mouth with a wet flannel as her heart pounded wildly in her chest. ‘I’ve just realised something,’ she said weakly. ‘The day I first met Ottilie at her home and I asked what games she wanted to play she said ‘not tyre’. At least that’s what I thought she said, but she’s never shown any signs of being nervous about going on a tyre swing while she’s been with us. You’d have thought she would, if the fall was what injured her so badly, but the only thing she never wants to see or have anything to do with is a tiger, which sounds like tyre, especially the way she says it.’ Her eyes went to Anna’s. ‘She doesn’t actually know what a tiger is, because when she saw one in a jigsaw puzzle, and then I showed her one at the zoo, she had no idea it was an animal with stripes.’

Suspecting where this was leading, Anna’s revulsion showed.

‘She was happy if I called it Tigger, just not tiger,’ Alex went on, starting to feel nauseous again.

‘So what are you going to do?’ Anna asked hoarsely.

Alex was trying to make herself think clearly. ‘Obviously report it to Tommy,’ she replied, ‘then we’ll have to speak to Brian Wade ourselves ...’

‘But knowing what you do, can’t you take her away now?’

Alex shook her head. ‘We still have no proof, but at least the paediatrician seems to be on our side, which isn’t
to say another one will be, and there’s no doubt that Brian Wade will demand a second opinion, possibly even a third.’

Anna seemed at a loss. ‘Well, I guess there’s always a chance he’s telling the truth,’ she ventured weakly.

‘I only wish I could believe that, but I’m afraid I can’t.’ Alex glanced at the time. ‘I have to pick Ottilie up and take her to nursery. She’s going to be with me all day, until her parents get back from her mother’s psychiatric assessment.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Anna murmured helplessly, ‘that poor child hardly stands a chance, does she? A mother who’s crazy and a father who’s very probably one of the lowest forms of human life ...’

‘Not very probably, he is,’ Alex insisted. ‘There’s no doubt in my mind about that, and what’s more, I’m going to prove it.’ Already the implications of exposing the deputy head of a primary school were starting to present themselves, but she was far from daunted. ‘If it’s the last thing I ever do,’ she declared forcefully, ‘I’m going to make sure that sly, evil bastard never lays a hand on her again.’

Chapter Twenty-Three

BRIAN WADE WAS
digging and digging, turning over huge spadefuls of earth, throwing them on to a pile that was already almost to his waist. He knew Ottilie was watching from an upstairs window and perhaps Erica was too, but he didn’t care. Since Thursday’s visit to the paediatrician he’d been trapped in a paralysis of fear, not knowing what to do or where to turn. This morning, as he was getting ready for church, it had come to him. He must create a hole large enough to bury the evidence of his shame, a grave for the proof Alex Lake was seeking.

She’d come on Friday, as usual, to collect Ottilie for nursery, but he’d sent her away. She hadn’t gone easily, had put up a terrible fight, but not so terrible that he hadn’t won in the end. Ottilie was his daughter; if he wanted to take her to nursery himself, he had every right to. The fact that he hadn’t turned up at the Pumpkin had taken little time to get back to Ms Lake, because she’d been banging on the door again within the hour, demanding to see Ottilie for herself.

He’d allowed it, briefly, then had sent Ottilie back to her room.

‘Are you taking your wife for her assessment today?’ Alex Lake had thrown out the challenge with such contempt that even if he’d been in any doubt before, which he hadn’t, he’d have known then that the paediatrician had already confided her findings.

Ottilie had fallen from a tyre swing on to a tent peg. For heaven’s sake, it happened, and it was tragic, but it couldn’t be helped
.

‘You know my wife has difficulties about leaving the
house,’ he’d thrown back at Alex Lake. ‘She can’t do it, she’s an agoraphobic ...’

‘She has far worse problems than that and you know it,’ Alex Lake had cut in. ‘You’re using her, trying to hide behind her, but it’s not going to work.’

‘If you’d let me finish I could tell you that I’m going to see the psychiatrist myself,’ he growled, but nerves were diluting his indignation, making him sound pathetic and weak. ‘I need to tell him about her, explain what’s happened in her past, the reasons why she’s the way she is now.’

‘It’s her he needs to see, not you.’

‘I’m aware of that, but ...’

‘You’re stalling again, Mr Wade, trying to prevent us from doing our jobs, but let me tell you this, nothing you do is going to save you from what you’ve done to your daughter. There is nowhere,
nowhere
in the world you can hide from that. Do you hear me? I don’t care who you are, or what kind of defence you put up ...’

He’d slammed the door on her then and stood against it, his pounding heart deafening him as he’d waited for her to drive away. It had taken a while longer for her to go than he’d expected, but in the end she’d had no choice but to leave.

She’d be back though, there was no doubt about that.

It was Sunday afternoon now. He wondered if she’d been told that he had gone to see the psychiatrist. Even if she had, the doctor couldn’t – at least shouldn’t – have divulged what had been said, because the official request was for an assessment on his wife, and he’d only spoken about himself. He’d hijacked the appointment and told the doctor, pleaded with him to understand that what was happening to him, the things he did, weren’t his fault. He was one of nature’s victims, an otherwise normally functioning person with a terrible mix-up in the chemistry of his brain, a wrongly wired circuit that allowed no change to his default system. Everyone had urges, some much stronger than others – his weren’t as bad as many others he knew of, and he’d swear before God that he’d never touched a child that wasn’t his own.

Had he detected disgust and loathing in the
psychiatrist’s eyes? Certainly it had been there in Alex Lake’s. Occasionally his wife looked at him that way too, when she was in a sane enough state of mind to look at him at all. He knew she saw her stepfather in him, but he was nothing like that oaf, who had been evil through and through. A sadist, a lecher, an abuser in every sense of the word, and his demented wife, Erica’s mother, had been no better. Though they’d died before Erica came into his life, he’d sensed from the start how fragile, how deeply scarred she was by the upbringing she’d been forced to endure. He’d pitied her, and wanted to protect her, so he’d taken her up, married her and given her a new start in a new town.

She had much to be grateful to him for, including their children – and not forgetting,
never
forgetting, the secret he’d never told, that she, with her bare hands, had stifled their three-year-old son to death. If he hadn’t stood by her over that she’d be in Broadmoor now, or some other establishment for the criminally insane. Ottilie would have been born there, and he’d have been forced to find another mother for his daughter.

As it was they were trapped here in this house, each of them suffering in their own way, unable to communicate with one another, or with anyone on the outside. It was their prison, their punishment, their own private hell.

The hole must be at least four feet deep by now. He was perspiring so badly that the air on his skin felt colder than it was, and sharp. Blisters were forming on his hands, his heart and lungs were burning with exertion. Pains creaked through his back as he righted himself. He was parched, trembling and so afraid that he could barely summon the strength to make himself walk.

He must do something with Ottilie before everything erupted around them.

Erica was watching from the kitchen window, a faint smile on her lips and a knife in her hand. She didn’t look at the knife, or even particularly feel its weight; she simply held it and watched her husband’s activities in a wistful sort of
way as she listened to the voices in her head. Some were deep and echoey, others shrieked and whined, still others rasped and choked and mocked her in accents she didn’t understand. Threading through them all was the song her stepfather used to sing, the haunting, chilling tune with its cruelly changed words:
Round and round the garden like a teddy bear, one step two step smash her on the stair
.

Sensing Ottilie standing behind her, she turned around and hissed like a snake. It was the way her mother used to hiss at her.

Eyes wide with terror, Ottilie scampered back down the hall.

Erica returned her glassy eyes to the garden. Brian was lumbering towards his studio now, his face bloated and muddied by his efforts, his shoulders sagging with the weight of all that he carried. Erica was certain this would be the first time he’d gone in there since Thursday, the day he’d taken Ottilie for her physical exam. Since then it had sat there like a chamber of horrors, slumbering in its space under the tree, its single yellow eye closed to business. Anyone who entered did so at their peril.

He must have noticed by now that the window was gone, and would no doubt guess she had smashed it again, using the garden spade he’d just left beside the freshly dug grave.

Now would be the time, she decided, to go upstairs and carry out the first of her little jobs for today.

Alex was standing on the front in Kesterly. Pounding waves were rearing off the sea wall behind her as she stared across the road at the smart white Georgian house that was to be her home from the beginning of November. It hardly seemed real: indeed, since her mother had left on Friday almost nothing had felt grounded in truth. It was as though she’d made everything up, from the tentative, awkward moments she and her mother had first laid eyes on each other, to the ache of standing at the Vicarage door watching her driving away. The feelings inside her then had been awful, far worse even than she’d feared, as the dread of not seeing her again rose up from the past to engulf her.
She’d felt like a small child, shut in a cupboard, unable to get out and desperate for her mother to save her.

They’d spoken yesterday. Anna had rung from Dubai where she was changing planes. By now she should have landed in Auckland. Bob had promised to meet her there so he could make the short hop to Keri Keri with her, where no doubt other members of their family would be waiting to treat her to the kind of welcome that made Alex feel both envious and proud. She had no trouble imagining how delighted they’d be to see their stepmother, aunt, grandma. As Alex had found, she was the kind of woman who lit up people’s lives, so why wouldn’t they love her?

Looking around at the gloom of her surroundings as daylight began merging slowly into dusk, she felt almost burdened by the austere drama of the steel-grey estuary and forbidding sky. By comparison she saw the Bay of Islands as flamboyantly exotic, full of light, constantly warm. It was odd to realise that it was already Monday over there. Tonight had come and gone, and tomorrow was their today. Anna had said she’d take until Tuesday to recover from the flight, then she’d be throwing herself into plans for the party with the same sort of relish as Bob threw himself in for a dive.

Could their worlds possibly be any more different? Of course she’d known her own would feel drab and empty as soon as her mother left, how could it not when she’d wafted in like an artist’s paintbrush, adding so much vibrancy and meaning to her daughter’s drooping and dreary hopes, so many new dimensions to her dreams that she, Alex, was only just waking up to what her life could actually be like.

She’d made the mistake of saying that to Gabby when Gabby and Martin had come to Mulgrove earlier to pack up Gabby’s old bedroom and transport everything down to Devon. The hurt and confusion in Gabby’s eyes had made Alex feel wretched, just as she did now, remembering it. How could she have been so insensitive as to make everything Myra and Douglas had done for her seem colourless, maybe even worthless, now she’d been reunited with her real mother?

Before she’d left Gabby had said, ‘I know Anna’s much more glamorous than Mum, and younger too, so I understand why you think she’s something special. I expect I’d feel like it too, if I were you, but Mum and Dad loved you, you know. And they did their best.’

Gabby was right, they really had done their best, and in her own way Alex would always love them for it, in spite of the difficulties they’d had. What they’d never been able to do, however, was make her feel as though she really belonged, but maybe that was as much her fault as theirs.

Never underestimate the power of a child’s mind.

She remembered that from her studies, and she’d seen it, been stunned by it so many times in her work that it was as though she was having to revisit the advice, the lesson, over and over again. Children could be as crafty and resilient as they could be vulnerable and needy, as well as manipulative to a degree that was shocking, sometimes even dangerous. The barriers they put up around them when afraid, or confused, or simply tired, could be immovable, and often took months, even years merely to start bringing down. Ottilie’s defence was her silence, and yet her need to be loved, to bond with someone, anyone who was ready to show her kindness, had spilled over the barriers straight into Alex’s heart.

All of the children in her care mattered to her, and she’d do anything in her power to help them, but from the very first day she’d laid eyes on Ottilie, in Dillersby Park, it had felt as though Ottilie was calling to her in some special kind of way. It was why she’d noticed her, sitting alone on the swing, and why she’d gone over to speak to her. Even as she’d watched her walking away she’d felt a connection to her that was as impossible to explain as it had been to ignore. In some curious way Ottilie had reached for her, and in that very same way, which was as incomprehensible as it was powerful, she could sense Ottilie’s need now.

It was always there, whether at the centre of her attention, or waiting in the wings. She wondered what she was doing at this moment, whether she was alone in her room with Boots, or sitting at the top of the stairs trying to decide if
she could come down. Perhaps she was somewhere with her father ...