Stolen (11 page)

She was wearing one of the standard white hospital gowns, and her face was almost as white as the gown. Her lips were cracked, and she had flaking skin all over her face. He could see now that he’d been right to think someone had hacked off her hair, for it stood out all around her head in clumps. But even if she was a mess, her blue eyes were lovely, and when she smiled at him he saw the same pretty girl who had been in the press photograph.

‘Can I try again?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know if anyone told you, but I’m David Mitchell, the one who found you on the beach.’

She smiled again. ‘You seem to be making a habit of rescuing me,’ she said, her voice a little husky. ‘I had hoped you’d come in sometime so I could thank you for finding me on the beach, but you couldn’t have picked a better night than tonight to do it. I owe you my life.’

David smiled with embarrassment. He didn’t see himself as any kind of hero, it was just luck that he’d interrupted her attacker. ‘Did you know him?’ he asked. ‘Or have you seen him before?’

‘I don’t know,’ she shrugged, her eyes wide and scared. ‘But I didn’t get the feeling I had known him, not the way I have had with some other people. That makes losing my memory even scarier because I don’t know who is good and who is bad. But thank you so much for the flowers and chocolates.’ She pointed to the flowers which had been arranged in a vase and now stood on the locker. ‘They are lovely.’

‘Did he hurt you?’ David asked, coming closer.

‘A bit sore here.’ She put her hand up to her neck. ‘And scared witless, but don’t let’s talk about him and what happened, tell me about you.’

In just that one sentence David felt he knew all about her. A girl with no ego, and who cared more for others than herself.

‘I’m thirty-two, single, recently split with my girlfriend, and I come from a village near Bristol. I’m one of eight children, and I’m the second to eldest,’ he said, feeling as if someone had switched a spotlight on to him. ‘I’ve recently started my own company; it’s to do with telecommunications. But you don’t want to know about that, it’s boring.’

He liked the way her lips twitched with amusement at him rattling that out. ‘One of eight, eh! Your mum had her work cut out. I was told you found me on the beach early in the morning. But why were you out at that time?’

David smiled at her directness. ‘I go running. I take my neighbour’s dog Toto, because Fred’s got a broken leg and can’t do more than hobble on his crutches. But Toto ran ahead and was sniffing at you. I thought you were a sack of rubbish or something until I got much closer. Can you remember being in the water?’

‘Not really, only the very last bit as I felt the shingle scraping me. But I can remember you speaking to me and putting something warm around me. Even that’s cloudy, like a dream. I think I only became really aware of what was going on around me once I got here.’

‘Have you recovered any memories yet?’ he asked. ‘I read in the papers you were a hairdresser and you worked on a cruise ship. Did you have a boyfriend?’

‘I have remembered some things, like the place I used to work in Brighton and the people I knew there. But everything since then is still all a blank.’

‘I suppose if you had a boyfriend he would’ve claimed you by now,’ David said.

Lotte smiled shyly. ‘Not if I was mean to him! Or worse still, he may be responsible for me being in the sea!’

‘I can’t imagine any man even thinking about hurting you,’ David said.

‘Well, that one who came in here earlier hadn’t come to bring me a bunch of grapes,’ she said with a sigh. She looked at him hard, almost as if she was trying to decide if she could trust him with a confidence.

‘I wish I knew what this is all about. It’s been a horrible day. First the doctor told me I’d had a baby in the last couple of months. How can I not remember that?’ she blurted out. ‘I’m so worried about it being all alone and hurt, and now there is someone trying to kill me. Why? What can I have done?’

The baby added another even more horrifying dimension to her ordeal and David wished he dared scoop her up in his arms and hug her, but he was afraid that would frighten her further.

‘I’m so sorry, it must be awful for you,’ he said lamely, very aware that a missing baby was just about the most serious problem any mother could face, but unable to find the words to express that. ‘But I’m sure the police will sort it all out, and the doctors here will get your memory back for you.’

A nurse opened the door and told him his visit was up.

‘Can I come back again to see you?’ he asked Lotte.

‘Of course you can,’ she said. ‘I’d like that.’

‘Can I bring you anything? Food, shampoo or anything?’

‘No, I’m fine, I have a couple of friends from Brighton who have got that covered,’ she said. ‘Just bring yourself.’

As David left, he glanced back and she gave him a little wave of her hand. He knew right then that he’d be gutted if a boyfriend did turn up.

Lotte was violently sick during the night. She only just managed to get out of bed and into the bathroom attached to her room before the retching began.

Frightened by it, she pressed the bell to call a nurse.

‘It’ll be shock that’s brought it on,’ the nurse who answered said in sympathy, as she wiped Lotte’s sweaty brow. ‘You’d have to be made of steel not to react to someone trying to kill you. But you can rest assured it won’t happen again. The policeman outside has been given orders he can’t leave for any reason until he is replaced by someone else.’

Even after the sickness had stopped, Lotte was still shivering one minute, then overheating the next, and as she lay in the dark feeling wretched, tears rolled down her cheeks because she felt so terribly alone.

Almost everything she had remembered about her life so far had proved it to be a miserable one, and although Simon, Adam, Dale and Scott had all claimed she was liked and loved by many, she had still ended up half drowned on a beach. That suggested there must be something deeply repellent about her that had made her a target for hate.

Her parents didn’t like her, there was no boyfriend. And someone wanted her dead.

But far, far worse to her was that she’d had a baby, yet until the doctor told her, she hadn’t the faintest inkling about it. While she could accept without any guilt that she couldn’t remember anything else in the past few years, she had a terrible sense of shame at not having some fine-tuned undeletable memory of her child.

She’d always been told that mothers had a sixth sense where their babies were concerned, so why wasn’t hers working? Just a couple of months old but she’d already failed it.

Supposing it turned out she’d run away and left the baby alone? A baby couldn’t live long without milk, and it could die before the police managed to find it. That would be murder, surely?

Not to know the sex of her baby, who the father was, or anything about it at all, was so frustrating that she felt like screaming and battering her head against a wall.

At ten the next morning one of the nurses popped in to tell Lotte they’d just had a phone call from Simon. ‘He said he’d like to come over this afternoon and tidy up your hair. I said I thought you’d be fine about it. Was I right?’

Lotte nodded weakly. A couple of police had already been in to see her this morning, asking her more questions about the attack the previous evening. The attack and then the sickness during the night had left her feeling really rough, and she certainly didn’t care what her hair looked like, but she desperately needed to talk to someone who knew her well. And Sundays were really the only time Simon was free to visit. When he’d come earlier in the week he’d had to cancel several of his clients’ appointments.

While Lotte was having a bath earlier, she had noticed her stomach was flabby and there were some stretch marks too, which was proof she really had given birth. But who had hacked off her hair, and why? It didn’t make any sense to do that if they had planned to kill her. Unless of course they just wanted to humiliate her.

‘Are you OK?’ the nurse asked, perhaps sensing her anxiety. ‘I heard what happened yesterday – it must have been awful.’

‘I’m fine now,’ Lotte lied. ‘I’ll be even better with my hair cut properly.’

Simon arrived at two carrying a large red holdall. ‘I’ve got all the stuff to make you gorgeous again,’ he said, giving her a hug.

Putting the holdall on the bed, he got out a present wrapped in silver paper and trimmed with a purple bow. ‘This is from everyone at the salon.’

Lotte opened it to find two pairs of silky pyjamas, one pink, one turquoise. ‘That’s wonderful,’ she said with an appreciative smile. ‘I feel hideous in this hospital gown.’

Simon dug further into the holdall and pulled out a small carrier bag. ‘This is from Adam and me, just some things we knew you’d need.’

Lotte peeped in and saw a pair of slippers, a packet of three pairs of knickers, face cream and various cosmetics. Suddenly she couldn’t hold back her tears.

‘What on earth is it?’ Simon asked in alarm. ‘Was I overstepping the mark getting personal stuff? I’m sorry, I was just getting what I thought you’d need.’

‘It was so very kind of you,’ Lotte sobbed out. ‘Just like you to be so thoughtful. You haven’t overstepped the mark, it was just that after all the bad things that have happened, I didn’t expect anything lovely ever again.’

Simon hugged her tightly to his chest and let her cry until she was ready to tell him what had been going on.

She began with the previous night’s attempt on her life, telling the story baldly with hiccuping sobs. From there she went on to say that she felt whoever hacked off her hair was trying to humiliate her, and finally she told him that the doctor said she’d had a baby.

Simon’s jaw dropped. ‘Hell, babe! That’s too much for anyone to take in all at once,’ he gasped. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

He was silent for what seemed a very long time to Lotte, sitting on the bed looking blankly ahead. ‘I’m OK, Simon,’ she ventured. ‘I remembered about you and Adam, so I’ll remember everything else before long.’

‘Your amnesia isn’t as worrying as this man trying to hurt you,’ he said. ‘Have they caught him?’

Lotte shook her head and then explained about David Mitchell turning up in the nick of time and going after the man. ‘Thank heavens for him! A few more minutes and I think he would’ve throttled me.’

‘No wonder that policeman outside questioned me and searched my bag like I was a suspected Jack the Ripper!’ Simon said.

‘I’m so scared, Simon,’ she admitted. ‘Not so much of the man who tried to kill me, I believe the police will protect me, but about the baby. I can’t bear the thought I don’t remember the birth, who the father was, but most of all I’m terrified there’s no one looking after the baby now.’

‘But surely there’s a record of his or her birth?’ Simon exclaimed, dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief.

‘The police can’t find any. The policeman who came in earlier today said they thought the birth may have been in France, and that I was coming back to England in the boat, and either I jumped or was pushed out. They’ve sent some men over there to investigate.’

‘You poor love,’ Simon said, and put his arms around her again and rocked her. ‘This is nightmarish stuff, but the police will leave no stone unturned. Are they going to put it in the papers?’

‘I think it may be in the Sunday papers already, and on the news tonight,’ she said. ‘Certainly all the nationals tomorrow.’

‘People will respond to a missing baby,’ he said firmly. ‘I bet the police will be inundated with information. And you’ve recovered so much memory already, I’m sure the rest will come back pretty soon.’

‘Dr Percival, the neurologist, will be coming round a bit later to see me again,’ she said.

‘Then I’d better finish making you gorgeous so he falls in love with you like everyone else does,’ Simon said, but his smile didn’t reach his eyes. ‘Then he’ll go the extra mile for you.’

Half an hour later, with her hair washed and conditioned, Simon had her sitting on a chair, a gown around her shoulders and another on the floor beneath her to catch the hair he was snipping off. He had been unusually silent while washing her hair and Lotte guessed he felt as helpless as she did.

‘Why on earth would anyone hack off such lovely hair?’ he said suddenly, proving that he had been mulling it over. ‘It was half-way down your back when you left Kutz’s, so sleek and shiny everyone admired it.’

‘It seemed to me it might have been a punishment,’ Lotte said.

‘I can’t imagine you doing anything bad enough to justify such a punishment,’ he said as he ran a little hair gel through it with his fingers. ‘But at least it will be easy to look after now, and it looks great.’

Lotte thought she looked like an elf with the feathery cut all around her face, but she liked it.

‘It makes you look even younger,’ Simon said, looking at her intently as he whipped the gown from her shoulders. ‘Now, off into the bathroom and put on the new pjs and some face cream, and you’ll feel like a new woman. I’ll just collect up all this hair.’

Five minutes later Lotte came out of the bathroom wearing the pink pyjamas. Her face looked far less flaky as she’d rubbed cream into it. She’d added a little blusher, mascara and lipstick too.

‘Wow, babe, that’s more like the old Lotte!’ Simon exclaimed.

‘I feel much better,’ she said shyly. ‘The marks on my wrists and ankles are fading now, but look how bruised my neck is!’ She held up her chin and Simon could see thumbprints on her windpipe and three finger imprints on each side of her neck.

‘They’ll fade very quickly,’ Simon said. He was really shocked by the marks, but he’d purposely played it down as he didn’t want her to sense his alarm. ‘Now, hop back into bed because I’ve got some photos for you to look at. I thought they might help jog the old memory.’

Simon was a photography enthusiast. He took his camera to every party, to every major event, he even snapped his clients if he did a style he thought was really good. He was equally diligent in putting the pictures in albums, all dated with a caption under each one.

Lotte put aside her worries in the joy of seeing so many familiar faces and occasions she’d been part of. There were various staff parties – birthdays, Christmas, engagements and leaving ones. Some were just staff nights out, with everyone dressed to kill. She giggled at Simon in a white tuxedo, and another picture of Adam roller skating along the promenade wearing only Speedo swimming trunks and carrying an umbrella. She remembered he did it for charity.