The Hidden Girl (32 page)

She was so distracted that when the window was finished and she moved the ladder to fill the crack on the wall, she forgot about the loose floorboard from earlier on. As she climbed up, the ladder leg dipped down, nearly toppling her over.

‘Great! That’s just what you need now,’ she said out loud. ‘A broken neck.’ She went to fetch the hammer and nails from the toolbox by the window.

Outside, the light was starting to fade.

She stopped and stared at the garden below. The garage doors were wide open.

Her heart leapt. Was Will back?

Dropping the hammer, she ran down and flung open the front door.

Disappointed, she saw the driveway was empty. It could be Elvie, though. At least, if she found Elvie, that would be a start to Will and Laurie believing her.

‘Elvie?’ Hannah called, approaching the garage. She scanned the dusky shadows for the looming shape of her. It still smelt of the donkey.

She pressed the light switch, ready to peer up on the roof shelf. There was a click, but no light.

Too late, she saw glass on the ground under the light fitting and heard a scrape of metal.

Hannah turned.

Madeleine and Dax were pulling the garage doors shut behind them.

‘What are you doing!’ she yelled. She tried to push herself out of the gap between the closing doors, but Dax blocked her way.

‘We’s bringing you a welcome gift,’ Madeleine said, slamming them shut.

They towered over her in the dark garage.

She backed off, the threat clear. Her voice trembled. ‘Let me out now, or I’ll call the police.’

‘Found your phone, have ya?’ Dax asked.

Hannah touched the wall to steady herself. As her eyes adjusted to the gloomy light, she could see the likeness now. The height and broad shoulders, and Madeleine’s grey hair, which could once have been black, like Dax’s.

‘You need to keep your nose out of our business,’ Madeleine said, prodding at her.

Hannah glared. ‘Well, that won’t be difficult, will it, as the person I saw you beating doesn’t seem to exist, does she?’

‘Who’s that then?’ Madeleine asked Dax.

‘Some vagrant, I expect.’

He stepped forward. Hannah tried not to flinch.

‘How’s that adoption of yours going?’

Why had she ever told him?

‘How’d your social worker – Barbara, is it? – like to hear about our dirty little romance down on the beach, when she comes back with your little girl’s social workers?’

Hannah froze. He
did
have her phone. And the new text message from Barbara about Friday’s meeting that she’d never received.

‘You know the police can trace where calls are received?’ she said, ashamed at the tremor in her voice.

‘Then I expect they’ll find your phone on the beach, where you dropped it then, won’t they? Just before you and me had our special moment, eh?’ Dax winked in a way that made her want to shower.

Hannah struggled to hold his gaze. ‘Nothing happened between you and me, and if you say again to anyone that it did, I’ll take legal action and you’ll have to prove it. I know you’re all related round here – so nothing would hold up in court.’

Dax grinned. ‘Well, see, I don’t think you will. Way I see it, you need to do what we say, or you don’t get what you want.’

He stepped closer again. This time she backed away, catching her shirt on the hook she’d used to tie the donkey up. She found herself becoming less certain about what Dax would be prepared to do.

He already knew nobody believed her.

‘You know what I heard,’ Dax said. She could smell the oil, and the stale cigarette smoke on his breath, now. ‘That there’s all these Londoners move to the countryside, then realize they’ve made a mistake. It’s not for them, see? They go home.’

The menace in his words hung in the air.

‘Anyway,
honestly
,’ Dax said, turning without warning and opening the garage door again, ‘it’s
actually
been very nice to see you.’

‘And you be careful out in those marshes,’ Madeleine said. ‘Shooting season soon. You don’t want some old boy to get you mixed up with a wood pigeon.’

As quickly as they came, they were gone.

Hannah stumbled out after them.

On the front doorstep was a wicker basket. She could smell its rancid stink before she reached it. A dead pheasant was squashed into it, its feathers and beak a muddy mess of matted scarlet, blue and grey.

Maggots crawled in its feathers.

Retching, Hannah ran to the fence and threw the basket as hard as she could into Madeleine’s field, then returned and double-locked the front door.

Hannah sat on the hall stairs, dazed. Something sinister was happening here in Tornley that she didn’t understand.

Frank and Tiggy were lying to the police about Elvie.

Dax and Madeleine were trying to intimidate her into leaving.

Everyone in the village, in fact, was lying. Why?

Outside, the fledgling spring sun fell weakly from the sky. Shadows gathered on her newly painted walls.

Hannah tried to think. She knew from professional experience that tyrants usually won. TSO campaigned for people who were threatened for trying to speak and work freely as educators. Yet its success stories would always be in the minority. The tyrants had the power. She’d seen them threaten victims and witnesses, and their families. Chase them out of jobs and homes and into hiding. Discredit their stories and reputations. Hide the evidence.

She thumped her fists on her thighs.

But she
knew
these people in Tornley were lying.

She had photographed Madeleine hitting Elvie. Frank and Tiggy had lied to the authorities about the existence of a vulnerable woman that Hannah had met. Dax had told a shocking lie to Will, to discredit Hannah and shut her up.

Elvie is
not your business
, Laurie had said.

But if Hannah didn’t speak out for Elvie, who would?

Your business is talking to Will, and starting your family
, Laurie had said.

Yes, but what kind of person did Hannah want that little girl to see, when she arrived?

She stood up and returned upstairs to the child’s bedroom with renewed determination. Dax and Madeleine were hiding something. They were possibly coercing people – including Frank and Tiggy – to do the same, and it had something to do with Elvie. She was going to discover the truth, get help for Elvie and expose Dax’s lies. Then she was going to persuade Will to come home.

Until then, she would carry on exactly as she’d planned.

She was going to adopt a child with Will, and bring her up in this home, where he was going to start his business. And nobody in bloody Tornley was going to stop them.

An hour later Hannah had painted the front wall by the window a pale yellow, and had formed a new plan.

First, she had to prove that Elvie existed. If the residents of Tornley were going to deny it, she had to enquire further afield, beyond the village. Elvie was so distinctive – someone must know her.

Then, as Hannah reached upwards to touch up the last patch, someone entered her mind.

Gemma – the postwoman. Perhaps the only person who came to Tornley regularly and who didn’t live here. Gemma must have seen Elvie.

Hannah leapt down, checking her watch. It was nearly seven o’clock. Gemma delivered the post around ten in the morning. Tomorrow, Hannah would be waiting for her by the gate.

Tonight, however, she’d get this room done.

She moved the ladder to the next wall, over the faded patch of wooden floor where Peter Horseborrow’s bed had once been. She climbed up and yelped as the ladder listed to the right, remembering once again – too late – the loose floorboard.

Cursing, she fetched the hammer to secure it. She pushed one end of the yard-long floorboard, to see where nails were required. To her surprise, it see-sawed up at the other end. The whole board was clearly just resting on a joist below. This was dangerous. Presumably, if it had been hidden by a bed for ninety years, nobody had ever noticed.

Hannah picked up the hammer. Just as well she’d noticed it, before a social worker stepped on it. She took a nail – then stopped.

Twenty small black nail-holes ran along the edge of the floorboard. It wasn’t one or two nails that were missing – it was every single one. Why?

Hannah lifted up the floorboard.

She stared at the sight that met her. A pile of postcards and letters was tucked against the joist.

Two minutes later Hannah was sitting, against the wall, with the secret stash spread out in front of her. Her face broke into a shocked grin as she flicked through a pile of sepia and black-and-white postcards. ‘Naughty Peter,’ she said out loud. It was an extensive collection of faded Victorian or Edwardian porn. Young women, either naked or semi-dressed in lace dress and petticoats, sat astride each other or on various well-to-do gentlemen sporting handlebar moustaches and black socks, and occasionally a birch stick. One of the oddest images was of an older man wearing a monocle, top hat and morning coat, lying back on a chaise longue, his erection taking centre-stage. Hannah’s mind flicked briefly to the snow-penis in the garden. Had Elvie seen this postcard?

She sat back. Peter had never married, by all accounts. This little hiding place under the floor had presumably been his only place of privacy from his sister.

She pushed the postcards aside and undid a bundle of three yellowed envelopes. What were these? Letters to a secret lover?

To her surprise, the letters were still sealed. They had never been opened. There was a blue stamp on each, with a photo of King George V1 and a price of ‘2½d’.
Air Mail
was written by hand on the left, yet there was no post-office stamp. The addresses made no sense, either:

Feeling strangely uncomfortable about invading the privacy of a man who had died, Hannah opened the first envelope and pulled out a letter. It was written in old-fashioned copperplate on two sheets, but again in the same gobbledygook verse of nursery rhymes. The date at the top was 19 August 1945. Who was D. Burstenstein? Had Peter Horseborrow’s secret lover, in fact, been a man? It would have been difficult, she supposed, for him to have been openly gay back then.

She checked the envelope again and found a photo inside.

It immediately appeared to disprove her theory. The black-and-white image was of an unsmiling girl, around sixteen years old, standing against an ivy-strewn wall. There was something familiar about the girl, but it wasn’t Olive. Olive had pale features and a round face. This girl’s face was narrow, her eyes and hair dark. In the teenager’s arms was a newborn baby. Hannah stuck out her bottom lip, surprised. She’d always assumed from what Brian, the estate agent, had said that Peter had been unmarried. Perhaps that wasn’t true. Perhaps he’d had a family early on, then lost them and returned to live with Olive?

Hannah followed the handwriting to the bottom and saw a signature. It appeared to have been scrawled by a three-year-old:
MaBeL vYnE
.

‘Hello, Mabel Vyne. Who were you then?’ Hannah asked, opening the second envelope. The letter inside was almost identical: two pages of nursery rhymes with the same scrawled signature. In this one, however, the date was 30 January 1946, and Mabel Vyne – if that’s who she was in the photo – stood against a tree holding the baby, who was now around six months. The baby shared the teenager’s dark hair and eyes and unsmiling face.

Why was Mabel Vyne writing nursery rhymes and putting them in envelopes? And why was Peter hiding them under his bed unopened? Tornley was turning out to be a place of more than one secret. Hannah opened the third envelope.

The same two-page letter and a photo dropped out, this time dated 15 August 1946. The baby wore a dress and had short hair brushed to the side in curls. Its gender still wasn’t clear. Mother and child sat side-by-side, awkwardly. Mabel wore a plain dress and flat shoes. Her hair was now cut in a bob, pushed to the side with a pin. Within a year she’d transformed herself – a grown woman now. Hannah examined the photo closely. The young woman’s face was even more familiar now.

Something was . . .

Hannah peered closer.

A stained-glass curve of feathers was visible behind Mabel’s shoulder. That was the peacock window. That was the hallway in Tornley Hall.

She dropped that photograph and checked the other two. The wall behind Mabel in the first shot: was that their Victorian garden wall, behind the kitchen? And in the distance behind the tree of the second image: was that a group of spiky cat’s tails in the marsh across the lane?

Hannah frowned. This young woman, Mabel Vyne, had been standing here, downstairs in Tornley Hall, with a baby in the mid-1940s, nearly seventy years ago. Had she lived here with Peter and Olive? Who was she? And why were these letters sealed and never sent?

Hannah sat back, wishing she had the Internet to do a local-history search. Somebody, somewhere, had probably documented life around this area in the 1940s.

Then she remembered.

Five minutes later Hannah stood bent over in the attic, rummaging through the boxes of books from the sitting room. The idea had come as she’d rechecked the dates on the letters.

The old Tornley Hall household ledgers were in a book near the window. She yanked them out and sat on the dusty floor, searching for the 1940s domestic accounts.

Now she thought about it, skimming through them, there was something strange about these ledgers. Decades of household costs for Tornley Hall, yet no foreign travel costs listed, anywhere. And neither was there a single week when groceries had not been purchased. It was almost as if Peter and Olive had never left Tornley, let alone visited the exotic foreign locations of their books and paintings.

The ledger she wanted finally appeared in the middle of the pile:
1940–1950: Household Accounts
.