The Hidden Girl (35 page)

‘Is it?’ Mark exclaimed. ‘Lovely old place. Hope the plumbing’s still working!’

Hannah shook her head. ‘Mark. This is quite strange. I mean, why would Peter Horseborrow want you to go over there, rather than use a local plumber? That was only about ten years ago, wasn’t it? If he did know Mabel, and he knew you were a Vyne, why ask you to go there, but not tell you that she used to live there? The last mention I found of her was in 1986 anyway – almost twenty years before you went out there.’

Mark laughed again. ‘Well, this is interesting. A family mystery. Dad and Uncle Stan are going to love this.’

Hannah managed to arrive back in Tornley at sunset in a taxi. The sky was violet above the marsh, the cat’s tails a field of black spikes. She brought with her a promise from Mark Vyne that he would email her when he’d heard from his father.

Each time she came home and found Will’s car not there, her disappointment at his behaviour turned more to fear.

Not once, after that first regretful mistake with his old girlfriend, had she ever doubted Will’s commitment to her. And yet now, three days before the social workers were due to visit, he’d still not come home.

The new landline phone sat on the hall table next to her laptop. It was a welcome sight.

At least now she could email Jane and tell her what was going on. Jane would believe her, even if no one else did. But first, Will.

She threw off her coat and googled the Smart Yak number. ‘He-llo,’ said a mockney voice when she rang it on the landline, cheering silently at the unbroken line.

‘Hi, Matt, it’s Hannah. Is Will there?’

‘Oh. Hannah. Hi!’ From the way he shouted, she guessed Will was sitting beside him. ‘Sorry. Yeah. He’s just gone out, actually. A meeting.’ His tone was bright and forced. She waited for him to ask her to leave a message, or promise to get Will to call back. He didn’t.

She resisted the urge to ask Matt who Will was meeting and where. It wasn’t his assistant’s fault.

‘Matt, listen, I need Will to ring me. It’s really urgent. Can you tell him that he needs to be here in Suffolk on Friday first thing, for a meeting. And if he doesn’t ring me tonight to discuss it, I’m coming to London tomorrow.’

‘Oh. Yeah. Sure. Um. It’s just, I’m just not sure what time he’s coming in tomorrow, because . . .’ Matt started pathetically.

‘Just tell him. Please.’

Hannah put down the phone.

Hannah shivered in the hall. The temperature had dropped again after a few days of spring sunshine. She went to find a jumper.

The minute she arrived upstairs, she smelt it: that familiar sour odour.

‘Elvie?’ Hannah yelled, switching on the lights. ‘Are you here?’

She searched the bedrooms, and the attic. She listened. Nothing.

‘Please, Elvie, can you come out? I just want to help you.’

She searched the downstairs rooms, discovering the sour smell in the kitchen. She saw that a new packet of bread had been opened and two apples had gone.

Yes! Elvie had definitely been here.

She was not going mad.

She checked the latch on the scullery window. How did Elvie open it from the outside – did she jiggle it till it came loose?

‘Elvie, please, come out!’

There was a tiny scrabbling sound. Hannah spun round.

Her eyes roamed the kitchen cupboards, and the bolted back door. ‘Where are you?’

Nothing.

Just that same odd feeling that she was being watched.

It was when Hannah returned to her bedroom to find the jumper that she noticed the painting on the mantelpiece. It had been turned inwards again. Why did Elvie keep doing that?

She examined it again, and the sad face of the little boy.

She lifted down the other two as well. As she did so, she spotted one of Olive’s small black squiggles on the back of one. She placed it under the light.

M.V
. it said in tiny letters, in black paint, in the bottom right-hand corner.

Feeling a rush of blood, Hannah turned it. The dark face of the Spanish señorita stared back at her.

‘Mabel?’

Initially she wasn’t recognizable. The skin was more Mediterranean in tone, the eyes larger than in real life, but now Hannah saw that the features and expression were definitely her.

So, Olive had painted Mabel?

On a whim, she ran upstairs and pulled all the other canvases out of the attic cupboard.

There were more than she realized: thirty-six in total. White mould obscured many of the images, although others were almost clean. She sorted them into two piles – mouldy and those in good condition – spotting the Acropolis, Machu Picchu and the Italian Lakes as she went.

All these exotic locations, which Olive apparently had not visited after all. Had she painted them from her imagination, or from the travel books her father had left her?

The more Hannah learnt about Olive and Peter, the more she began to suspect that they were the idle children of a rich father. She wondered if they’d sat around in the grand house that he’d left them, playing with their rich friends, painting badly and achieving nothing in life, apart from spending their inheritance – or investing it badly perhaps – and letting their father’s hard work and house fall into ruin.

As Hannah laid the Acropolis painting down on its front, another black mark became visible on the rear:
M.V.

‘Yes!’ Hannah said, turning it round. The subject was a young woman, dressed as a Greek goddess. She wiped away the dust.

A familiar pair of sulky eyes stared back.

So, Mabel had been Olive’s muse? Was that why she’d come here? Perhaps she’d lived quietly in a coastal town with her baby, and had come here to work as an artist’s model. Clearly Olive had no better way to spend her time. Hannah’s sympathy for Olive, with her private income and posh friends, was starting to fade.

She carried on, holding each painting under the light. She found more and more of Mabel, her skin painted various shades – both darker and lighter than it was in real life, her hair longer or shorter to suit the classical theme, her body ranging from voluptuous to boyish.

She started on the mouldy pile next, and saw more initials and, this time, a date: 1952.

One painting made her stop. The black squiggle looked different. Not
M.V.
, for Mabel Vyne, but . . .

‘. . .
C.V.
?’ Hannah mouthed. Who was ‘C’?

She turned it over. Behind the white film of mould she made out the image of a child dancing under a tree, waving a fan. There was a swan in the background.

From what she could see, the child had lighter colouring than Mabel.

She stared. Was this the child Mabel had been pregnant with? The date suggested it could be.

She turned over more of the mouldy paintings. There were three more of the same child, at different ages. On others, the black initials had worn off in the damp, or were so mouldy that they were unreadable.

Tired now, Hannah put the last one down and decided to go and do some more painting. She was running out of time to finish the child’s bedroom.

In her own bedroom she changed back into her painting clothes, regarding the image of the Egyptian boy. Was that Mabel’s child, ‘C’, too?

On impulse, she held the painting up to the light bulb. The white mould had marked most of the back. Yet there at the bottom, behind the mould, she saw a dark squiggle, with another date. To her surprise it said: ‘1982’. Mabel’s daughter would have been in her late thirties by now. Who was this new child?

Two initials, so worn out they’d practically disappeared, sat next to the date. Yet they were not
M.V
. or
C.V.
this time. Hannah screwed up her eyes. An ‘L’?

‘
L.V.
’ Hannah read out loud.

It was as she was putting the painting down on the mantelpiece that she heard what she’d just said.

Long shadows danced in the bedroom under the light bulb.

Hannah sat looking at the child’s face. She could see it now. The blank, brown eyes. The anger. The tufty hair shorn tight.

My house!

Elvie as a child.
L.V.

No wonder she looked like Mabel. If C.V. was Mabel’s daughter, then that made Elvie what – C.V.’s child. Mabel’s grandchild?

This was exciting.

Then Elvie was Mabel’s granddaughter, not Frank and Tiggy’s child. Somehow Hannah knew she was getting closer to the truth.

Her phone buzzed. She picked it up, desperately hoping it was Will.
Have emailed you! Mark.

Rushing downstairs, she opened her laptop and found a message.

Burstein?

Hannah grabbed the old letters from the mantelpiece.
D. Burstenstein
.

There was no doubt now.

Somebody – she now suspected Peter – had written nonsensical letters to the GI who got Mabel pregnant in 1945, then hid them, instead of sending them. Mabel was illiterate, so it wasn’t her. Had Mabel believed the letters had gone to her lover? Had she been waiting for a reply? Hannah thought of the dull gaze in the young woman’s eyes, and knew that she’d been unhappy. Waiting for the father of her child to come and take her away.

On the contrary, it seemed he had never come. And instead Mabel had lived in Tornley Hall her whole life, and possibly had a child, C.V., and even a grandchild, Elvie, here.

Yet the families who lived in Tornley denied that Elvie existed.

Why?

Hannah thought of Laurie’s cynical, concerned face the last time they met, yet knew she had no choice. She’d have to beg her to help again.

She rang Laurie’s phone. It went straight to voice message.

Sighing, she called up Laurie’s email address and, for good measure, CC’d in Jane. Jane wouldn’t doubt her. Hannah needed to tell someone what was going on. The rest could make up their own minds.

She began to write an email that listed everything that had happened since she’d arrived in Tornley. It took ten minutes, and she included as much detail as possible. She reminded Laurie that she had to keep the police out of this because of the adoption, but Hannah needed Laurie to persuade her police-officer friend, Jonathan, to look further into the truth about Tornley; into an old missing-persons case involving a woman called Mabel Vyne from Ipswich; and the vulnerable woman who, Hannah suspected, was her granddaughter, Elvie – all without involving Hannah directly. She also told Laurie about the strange, and possibly illegal, activity that had been going on in the house before they moved in.

Then Hannah pressed ‘Send’.

Nothing happened.

She tried again. She checked the wi-fi signal on her screen. It was gone.

How had—?

The bedroom light clicked off.

Hannah’s stomach lurched.

The whole house fell silent, as if everything electrical had been turned off.

She tried the bedroom light switch, then the one in the dark hall. Nothing. It was a complete power cut.

Hannah stood in the pitch-black house, knowing that her nerves couldn’t take any more. She’d tried, but the dream of Tornley Hall was dying. This place, with its long corridors and creaking floors, was starting to scare her.

It was bad enough being out here on her own, with the hostile force of Dax, and Madeleine next door, and Elvie wandering around at night scaring her. She couldn’t possibly sleep here without lights.

She tiptoed down the corridor to fetch the torch from the toolbox. Then, with the beam in front of her, she made her way downstairs. The fuse box was in the scullery. If this wasn’t just a simple tripped switch – if it was a real power cut – then she was ordering a taxi right now – bugger the money – and staying in a hotel in Thurrup. In fact she’d stay there every night till Will came home.

Hannah reached the downstairs hall.

Shadows disappeared into black corners. She flinched as a branch waved outside the hall window.

No, she was done now. Her bravado had gone. She didn’t want to be out here alone any longer. Sadly, Hannah realized she was starting to want not to live in Tornley Hall, full stop.

The dream was over.

Fumbling her way into the scullery, she found the fuse box next to the sink. The cover was lying open.

Behind her was a rustle.

‘Elvie?’ she whispered, her heart thumping hard.

No reply.

Trying to control the shaking that was starting in her legs, she tiptoed back into the kitchen. In fact she had to get out of here – right now. Her nerves were shot. She’d ring a taxi from the hall phone, then lock herself in the sitting room until it arrived.

Hannah tiptoed towards the hall table. Suddenly a shape in the hall moved in front of her.

She jerked back.

Its form was so strange that she couldn’t make it out – it was a huge, wide mass of curves and lines.

‘Elvie?’ she whispered.

No reply. The shape moved again. A chorus of breathing in the hall.

Then she knew.

This was not one person. This was people.

People were standing in the hallway. Lots of them.

For a second, Hannah felt a hopeless sense of relief. Crowds were safe. Then her torch picked out a face.