The Lost Child (20 page)

The officer took his time, despite the apologetic glances of his female colleague, but eventually they left. It was well into evening time by then, and Elaine had been acutely aware that Brodie had been peering through the window at them every five minutes for the last hour.

‘Let her in will you?’ she said, looking at Dan and feeling as if she was going to pass out from sheer emotional exhaustion at any minute.

Brodie bounded through the door like an enthusiastic Labrador, ‘Tony says I can come with you.’ She was clearly excited at having secured yet another victory.

Fortunately the girl didn’t see Dan’s reaction to the news as he was standing behind her. But the rolling of his eye behind Brodie’s back wasn’t lost on Elaine. She might have smiled if she hadn’t felt so utterly wiped out.

‘He wants to see you, is that OK? He’s over at Miriam’s – I can go and get him.’ Brodie’s eyes were bright with enthusiasm at the prospect of reuniting the long lost siblings.

Something inside Elaine started to fray and unravel. The uncoiling of sorrow and despair made her question whether she wanted to meet a man who would let his sisters be taken by strangers, no questions asked. He’d had an excuse with her, he’d been a child, but he was a man now and it ought to have been different for Brodie. ‘No, it’s not OK. I’m sorry Brodie, but I’ve had enough for one day, really. If he’s still here tomorrow I’ll see him then. I’m going to bed, I need to sleep. I need to not talk, and I need to not think. Enough, OK?’

Brodie had never heard Elaine speak like that and it shocked her, ‘OK, aren’t we going tonight then?’ She had brought her bag with her and was ready for the off.

Elaine had stood and was making her way towards the stairs, ‘No. I doubt I could crawl to the car if I tried. We’ll go in the morning.’

‘But what about the papers?’

Elaine paused and turned back to the girl. ‘Fuck the papers Brodie. If you want to stay here tonight you can, it’s up to you. But I’m done.’ With that she hauled herself up the stairs and shut the bedroom door. A second later she opened it, ‘Dan, will you make up a bed for Brodie on the sofa and then get up here please?’ She slammed the door, leaving them in no doubt that she meant business.

Dan and Brodie exchanged astonished glances, ‘Well, I guess that told us then. You go and tell your brother that Miss Otis regrets and all, and I’ll make your bed up, if you still want to stay that is?’

‘Too right, I’m not staying next door. Tony can have my bed if he wants to stay. I’ll tell them.’ As she reached the door she paused, ‘So, what about you? Where are you going to sleep?’

Dan shrugged, and held his hands out as if to say that her guess was as good as his, ‘In the van?’

Brodie shrugged. ‘Whatever.’

‘Brodie, before you go I wanted to say sorry, about earlier. I was pretty nasty to you and I shouldn’t have been. I suppose we’ve all forgotten how this must feel for you.’

Brodie shrugged. ‘S’all right. Everyone was a bit stressy. I’m sorry too, I shouldn’t have been so pushy, but I want to stay with her, and I did say sorry to Miriam.’

‘Good, and you are welcome to stay as long as you both want to.’

Brodie nodded. ‘Cheers. Right I’ll go and tell Tony. See you in a bit.’

When she had gone, he made a bed on the sofa, using the blankets that had been wrapped around Elaine in Hallow’s Court. He didn’t know where anything else was kept. When the bed was made he made his way upstairs and knocked tentatively on the bedroom door. Elaine called for him to come in.

She was sitting at the dressing table, a glass of water pressed to her forehead, ‘My head is killing me, I don’t suppose you know where my pills are, do you?’

As it happened they were still in his pocket, where he had put them all those hours before when he and Brodie had gone searching for her. He popped a couple out into his hand and passed them to her.

‘Thanks.’ Gratefully she pushed them into her mouth and washed them down with the water. ‘It’s been a long and very trying day and I admit I’m not thinking straight, Christ I don’t know whether I’m Arthur or Martha right now, let alone Mandy or Elaine,’ she said with an incredulous laugh. ‘This is a one bedroom cottage, with one bed, and I’m assuming Brodie is going on the sofa. So I’m offering you half a bed.’

Dan looked at her then looked at the bed, ‘Wouldn’t you be better off sharing with Brodie under the circumstances?’

Elaine shook her head, which made her wince, ‘No, she’ll want to talk to me, and I’m all talked out. It’s half a bed Dan, nothing else, no agenda.’

He looked at the bed, and looked at her again, ‘Mind if I have a shower first? I’m still covered in muck from that tunnel.’

‘Dan, I couldn’t care less if you were covered in pig shit right now, but help yourself. I just need to sleep.’

When he emerged from the bathroom, followed by a cloud of steam, Elaine was already asleep. She was modestly swathed in pyjamas and wrapped in the duvet, as good as her word. All he possessed in the way of nightwear were the same pair of boxer shorts he had been wearing all day. On the occasions when he had indulged himself with thoughts of sharing a bed with Elaine, this set-up wasn’t quite what he’d had in mind.

He crawled in beside her and lay on his back, unable to relax, wondering if he should have attempted to sleep in the van after all. Before he’d showered off the grime of the day, the thought that he should have got in the van, driven away, changed his identity and moved house had crossed his mind several times. But that was unfair, Elaine was innocently embroiled in this mess just the same as he was. No, not the same, for her it was much worse. He would be ten kinds of bastard to walk away from her now, and an even worse one to brush the kid off. Now that it was quiet, and he had time to think about it, the fact that Brodie’s own brother was prepared to let her stay with strangers bothered him profoundly. He felt rubbish that he’d shouted at her, and wondered what on earth had got into him lately; it felt as if an evil twin possessed him. His thoughts spiralled and came to nothing while sleep found him and nursed him into rest. Maybe it would all look much better in the morning.

*

Brodie launched herself back into the cottage, bursting to tell Dan about Tony’s reaction to Elaine’s rejection and how Miriam was fit to burst over the whole debacle. She was surprised to find the room empty. He had made up a bed for her on the sofa as promised and had disappeared. Disappointed by the lack of an audience for her tale, she sat down on her makeshift bed assuming that Dan had gone outside to sleep in his van.

As quietly as she could, so as not to wake Elaine, she crept upstairs to the bathroom. Surprised to find it damp and steamy, she assumed that Elaine had had a shower. Not wanting to make more noise than she had to, she had a quick lick around with a face cloth, cleaned her teeth and slipped into her onesie. Halfway down the stairs she paused, mildly amused by Elaine’s snoring, she suppressed a giggle and made her way to the sofa. For the first time in hours she was left with entirely her own thoughts, and they were strange and thrilling. She had found Mandy.

Ever since Jack and Dan had told them about the things in Elaine’s house and had showed them what had been found, she had been studying Elaine to see if she could find a trace of the little face which was so familiar to her. In Brodie’s assessment only the dimples had remained. Anything else Mandy-like had disappeared long ago. She wondered how her mother was going to feel when she heard the news; she hoped it would make Shirley happy, though in her gut she doubted it. Happy and Shirley used in the same sentence were strange bedfellows.

She turned over under her blankets, and thought about Dan, deciding that she did like him after all. At least he’d had the guts to say sorry, most blokes that she knew would have rather died than say they were sorry, which made her think about Steve, who didn’t bear thinking about on any level. She tried to think about something else to put him out of her mind and ended up thinking about children, which brought her back to Mandy, and the fact that even though she had been found, no one knew exactly what had happened that day. Except maybe Derry, and she wouldn’t see him now, not if they were going to Dan’s house. She drifted off to sleep with the vague thought of finding a medium floating around her fifteen-year-old mind, someone who could communicate with Esther from beyond the grave and make her spill her secrets.

***

Elaine woke just as the first tendrils of dawn light began to ease through the curtains. For the first thirty seconds she felt fine, until the scenes of the day before began to intrude much less gently than the dawn.

She was aware of a weight over her body, and looked down to see that Dan was holding her in an unconscious embrace. Oh God, had she really asked him to share her bed? With no idea of what had come over her the night before she cautiously extracted herself and made her way to the bathroom. Brodie’s clothes lay in a crumpled heap, damp with condensation and the sink was streaked with dribbled toothpaste. With a sigh she cleared it up and hung the clothes on the landing to air.

Sure that the events of yesterday were just some elaborate confusion, she undressed and climbed into the shower, hoping that the water would wash away the fog that was clouding her mind. She leaned against the cold tiles letting the hot water stream over her, convincing herself that none of it could be true. People had false memories all the time. The incident with the barbed wire had just been a flash, an image that had whipped through her mind as quickly as a lightning strike. It couldn’t be a memory, memories were concrete and known. No, it was something she had manufactured as a result of the circumstances and the suggestion that she was the missing child. That had to be a more rational explanation than acknowledging that she had grown up with a woman who had abducted her. Whatever had happened to Mandy was a tragedy, but it couldn’t possibly be related to her. The whole thing was just a series of weird coincidences, which was all it could be.

As she soaped herself her fingers slipped over the scar, it had stretched and distorted with the passage of time, but it had never really faded. Her mother had said that it was the result of her falling into a pane of glass in the garden. It was a logical explanation, kids were accident-prone. It had always puzzled her that Jean hadn’t felt the need to take her to hospital and have it stitched, but that was Jean – averse to medical interference to the point of phobia. No, the scar was the result of a simple childhood accident, not the manifestation of a nightmare. She was Elaine Ellis, thirty-three years old, neurotic and shy, and that was that. Everything else had been a horrible mistake. Awareness dawned that she would have to break the news to Brodie, and apologise to the world and his wife for wasting their time. It would be awful, but not as awful as continuing the pretence. Resigned to her task she switched off the water and wrapped herself in a towel.

On the landing she bumped into Brodie, who was coming out of the bedroom. The girl looked her up and down with pained disappointment. ‘I made you a cup of coffee when I heard you get up, you should have told me I needed to make two’ she said with a note of contempt, which made Elaine feel even more naked than she was beneath the towel.

She called after her, ‘Brodie…’

Brodie was stomping down the stairs in her onesie, looking like a sulky oompa loompa who had traded its orange complexion for radiant puce. She raised her arm, presenting the flat of her palm to Elaine, ‘Whatever.’

In the bedroom Dan was sitting on the edge of the bed sipping the coffee that Brodie had relinquished with the grudge of ages. It was probably the bitterest coffee he would ever drink.

‘Well, that went down like a pair of lead knickers didn’t it?’ he said, not looking at Elaine. ‘What’s with that kid? It’s like she’s in love with you.’

Elaine pulled her towel tighter and sat at the dressing table, ‘I suppose that with everything that’s happened she feels a bit protective of me. I don’t suppose she sees me as an adult really. I dread to think how she’s going to react when I put her straight.’

‘What do you mean? Put her straight about what?’

Elaine blinked at him with wide-eyed innocence, ‘That I’m not her sister, that I can’t be and that this has all been some horrible confusing coincidence.’

Dan paused and looked at her, coffee cup halfway to his mouth, ‘Is that what you think?’

‘No, it’s what I know. It’s impossible. My mother was a strange fish but I don’t think she was the type to snatch a kid. Whatever was going through my mind yesterday was just a result of the hypothermia, I must have been hallucinating or something.’ She was convinced by her own logic.

Dan put the coffee down, ‘Wait there, I’ll be back in a minute.’ He slid off the bed and went downstairs.

Whilst he was retrieving the envelope and regretting the fact that the police had taken the bag, Brodie walked in from the kitchen, a second cup of coffee in her hand, ‘Are you two going to be sleeping together when we go to your house?’ She scathed him with a look of abject disapproval.

Dan looked at the envelope, then across at Brodie, ‘Nothing happened, we just shared the bed that’s all. Or would you rather I had frozen to death in the van?’

Brodie raised an eyebrow as if to tell him that in her opinion it would have been a preferable outcome. ‘It’s July,’ she said pointedly.

Dan sighed, ‘Look, if anything ever happens like that between me and Elaine I promise I will respect her in the morning, and every other morning for that matter. In the meantime we have bigger problems.’

Brodie gave him another scathing look. ‘Like what?’

‘Well, our favourite lady is currently enjoying a gentle cruise up a river in Egypt.’

Brodie was confused, ‘Eh?’

Dan sighed again, ‘She’s in denial. Thinks it was all a horrible mistake. I think we need to convince her otherwise.’ He waved the envelope, ‘Time to show her this again, I don’t think she really took it all in yesterday.’

Bemused, Brodie followed him up the stairs.

*

Elaine looked at the array of newspaper cuttings that Dan had spread out for her on the bed, ‘This doesn’t prove anything, just that my mother had a thing for collecting cuttings. I’m sure that whatever happened to Mandy was compelling stuff at the time, I expect lots of people showed some curiosity.’ She was interested but dismissive.