The Other Child (20 page)

‘But?'

‘But I think it's not up to me to decide. You are Fiona's granddaughter. You have to decide what to do with it.'

‘What is it?'

He lowered his voice. ‘Text files. Attached to emails that Fiona Barnes sent to Chad Beckett.'

She looked at him in surprise. ‘Chad Beckett can work a computer? And has an email address?'

‘Well, “work the computer” might be an exaggeration. But he has an email address, yes. Because Fiona insisted, Gwen said. The two of them kept in touch by email. Not infrequently.'

‘And?'

Colin seemed unsure of how to express what he had to say. ‘Fiona and Chad have known each other since childhood. And – it seems out of the need to make sense of certain events for herself – Fiona wrote down their story. At least the main points. And gave it a strange title, although that riddle is solved as you read it.
The Other Child
. She immerses herself in the past, describes their first meeting – you know: the evacuation, her arrival here at the Beckett farm …'

Leslie was now fully alert and increasingly irritated. ‘I know the story. Fiona often told me it. How touching, that she wrote it down for Chad and herself. But what I don't quite understand … is how you have a printout of it? Aren't they files which were meant only for Chad?'

‘Absolutely. And that becomes even clearer when you read it. Their story. When you read what really happened.'

‘What really happened?'

‘I'm fairly sure,' said Colin slowly, ‘that you heard a censored version from your grandmother. Just as Gwen only knows part of the truth. And with her, all of us too.'

Leslie had a thought, and in spite of her sorrow she had to laugh. ‘Do you mean that Fiona and Chad had a relationship? Does my grandmother describe wild orgies in the hay? You know, of course she never said anything of the sort, but I was always convinced something had happened between Chad and her. And that doesn't really shock me. I don't think it would help the police any.'

He looked at her in a strange way. ‘Read it. And then decide what to do.'

She looked back at him icily. ‘Where did you get this? How did you get access to Chad's emails?'

‘Gwen,' he said.

‘Gwen?'

‘She uses the same computer as her father. She tried to … spy a little. It wasn't hard to find the password he used.
Fiona
. That was it.'

Leslie gulped.

He had loved her. She had always thought that.

‘And then she snooped around in his emails?'

‘She opened the files and read the story. When she finished, she was so shocked that she printed it all out. As soon as we arrived last week, she gave it to Jennifer to read. Yesterday morning Jennifer gave me the pages, with Gwen's permission. At that point of course none of us knew anything about the crime. I read all of it, yesterday and last night.'

‘OK. So three people now know all about things which are actually only Fiona and Chad's business?'

‘Read it,' he asked again.

She felt anger rising inside her. What a betrayal of two elderly people who were nostalgic for the old days. She could just about see why Gwen, once she had found the beginning of her father's life story, had not been able to stop herself from reading it. But why had she shared it with two outsiders? She might have had a close friendship with the Brankleys for many years, but they were not family. She would have liked to protect her grandmother, but she knew that it was too late now.

‘I'm not sure if I want to read it,' she said. ‘You know, I always respected Fiona's private life.'

‘Fiona is the victim of a horrific crime. This story could throw some light on her death.'

‘Why didn't you give all this to Detective Inspector Almond while she was here?'

‘Because the story also throws light on Fiona. If what she describes here,' he said pointing to the pile of paper, ‘is made public, which is more than likely if it lands in the hands of the police, and it arises there's a direct link to Fiona's murder, then it could be that Fiona won't be remembered at all fondly here in Scarborough.'

Leslie now made no effort to hide her annoyance. ‘So what did she do? Rob a bank? Was she a kleptomaniac, a nymphomaniac? Did she have perverse desires? Did she cheat on her husband? Did she and Chad cheat behind Chad's wife's back? Did they support the IRA? Was she a member of a terrorist organisation? What did she do?'

‘Read it,' he said for a third time. ‘Take the sheets home. Gwen and Jennifer don't need to know for now that you have them.'

‘Why not?'

‘On no account does Gwen want the police to know their content. For her, it's mainly about her father. Jennifer is on her side, as always. Both of them would be angry with me if they knew I was letting you have them. But I think …'

‘What do you think?' asked Leslie after he had paused.

‘I think you have a right to know the truth,' said Colin. ‘And that you, and only you, have the right to decide whether the truth is made public. I would completely understand if you didn't want that. But the solving of the crime might depend on this. And that's for you to decide too: whether your grandmother's murder should remain unpunished. You might prefer that.'

She was scared. She knew she would not get an answer, but she still asked, ‘What, Colin? What, for God's sake, does it say?'

He did not need to say
Read it
a fourth time. He just looked at her.

It was almost a pitying look, it seemed to her.

The Other Child.doc

4

Life on the Beckett farm proved not to be all that bad. Quite the contrary: in a short time I had settled in surprisingly well.

Emma Beckett was as nice and kind as she had been when we arrived. She was more gentle than Mum, and not as strict. You could always ask her for something delicious: a little bit of bread and ham to keep you going between meals, a glass of homemade apple juice, sometimes even a piece of chocolate. She was convinced that I must be dying of homesickness, and I did nothing to dissuade her from the belief, as there was more in it for me that way.

Her son Chad, though, saw right through me. ‘You're a cunning little thing,' he said to me once. ‘You play the lost sheep to my mother, but you don't want to go back to London one little bit!'

Not one little bit – that was not true. I missed our old house, the street, the children I had played with. Sometimes I missed Mum too, although she had always nagged so much. But after the night of bombing I had lost my home in any case. I certainly had no fond memories of Auntie Edith's overcrowded flat. I do remember bawling one night when I thought of my father. Although he had drunk so much and had never given Mum any money, he was my father. I would see Mum again, London too, I was sure. But my father was lost for ever.

Emma's husband Arvid was no substitute father to me. He was not out-and-out unfriendly, but he acted as if I were not there, and that is how things remained. From the beginning I had the impression that he had not agreed with his wife's idea to take in an evacuee. Probably it had not been easy to persuade him. Perhaps the money the government gave host families had been an incentive. But a second child,
the other child
, as he called Brian, had turned up, more or less by mistake, and there was not even money for him. That did not exactly improve the situation.

‘The Red Cross will soon take charge of Brian,' Emma said whenever Arvid moaned about another mouth to feed. In fact, no one came for Brian and I thought I sensed Emma's relief. She did not want Brian to go to an orphanage. She herself would do nothing to put his stay on the Beckett farm at risk.

I liked life on the farm. You could not imagine a greater contrast to life in London. The empty spaces that seemed to go on for ever, the wide stone-walled pastures dotted with hundreds of grazing sheep. The scent of the sea. I loved to clamber down to the bay which belonged to the farm. It was a dangerous, secret path that went along a deep gorge and almost disappeared as it went through a primeval wood at the foot of a rock face. I fought my way through grasses and ferns, which were dark in the winter and bathed in a strange green light in the summer. I imagined that I was one of those great discoverers I had heard about in school: Christopher Columbus or Vasco da Gama. The natives could be lying in wait for me anywhere, cannibals – on no' account could I fall into their hands. I jammed a stick between my teeth. It was my knife, my only weapon. Every snap in the undergrowth, every shrill cry of a bird made me jump and gave me goose pimples all over. The only thing I missed in these moments was other children. In our street in London, in the maze of its backyards, we had always gone around in a crowd of ten, sometimes even fifteen or twenty children. I was all alone here. Of course I went to school in Burniston and got on with my classmates, who found me a rather exotic creature, but unfortunately we all lived far too far apart to meet outside school hours. For miles there was nothing but sheep pastures, punctuated by the odd farm. You would have had to walk for ages to get from one to the next.

I was a child who liked to play, and who took advantage of the freedom and endless possibilities of life on the land. I was also a girl just entering puberty. Mum had always said I had matured early. That might be true, at least for the forties. I found a few rubbishy novels in my bedside table and devoured them, red with embarrassment. They were old and worn, and I wondered if Emma had devoured them with the same passion as me. ‘Passion' – that was the word which best described the books' content too. That is all they were about. Beautiful women, strong men. And what they did together made my cheeks burn. I wanted nothing more so much as to grow up quickly and to experience for myself everything that I was hearing about here. It was an almost inevitable development for me to imagine Chad Beckett as the man at my side, a strong, good-looking hero.

I had an immense admiration for him. I think I was even in love with him. Unfortunately he only saw me as some uninteresting girl his mother had brought home and who would hopefully disappear again soon. He treated me with almost more indifference than his father did.

The only male who was around me, whenever he could be, was Brian.
Whenever he could be
meant whenever I did not manage to shake him off. Over time I perfected the art of disappearing, and then he would wander around like a lost lamb, crying quietly to himself, as Emma told me each time with a gentle rebuke.

I countered that by saying that he just got on my nerves. ‘He's so much younger than me. And he doesn't say a word! What should I do with him?'

It was true. Brian still could not speak. Emma always wanted to know if he had spoken in the past. She thought I should know – after all he had lived in my neighbourhood.

With the best will in the world I could not remember. Had any of us in the street really paid attention to little Brian? I could only tell Emma that people had always said the Somerville children were all pretty thick. This expression made Emma angry – and it was the first time, by the way, that I had really seen her angry. ‘How can people just declare that?' she exclaimed. ‘About children who can't stand up for themselves? How can people make such sweeping statements?'

I did not want to make things worse, otherwise I would have pointed out that it did seem to be true in Brian's case. An eight-year-old – or perhaps he was already nine, no one knew when his birthday was – who could not speak? That was not normal. The children in my school said the same thing once, when Emma came by on her bike to bring me the breakfast I had forgotten to eat. Brian was sitting on the bike's rack. It was break time and he slid off the bike and rushed over to me making indefinable noises. He babbled something which no one could understand.

‘Your brother's got a screw loose,' the class representative said to me later.

‘He's not my brother!' I shouted, and I must have been looking daggers at her, because she stepped back in surprise.

‘It's all right,' she said gently, as you would talk to an angry dog.

It was incredibly important to me that no one thought I was related to the little moron. That's what I called him in my head: little moron. I could not say that out loud, at least not in Emma's presence.

That sounds very cold and harsh. And perhaps that could be said of me; that I did not behave in a particularly nice way to this disturbed little boy. But you also have to think about who I was in 1940 and 1941. I was a child who liked adventures, and at the same time a girl who read romances and. was experiencing confusing emotions about a fifteen-year-old boy. From one day to the next I had left London, where all was familiar, and was suddenly on a sheep farm in Yorkshire. My father had died, my mother was far away. I had sat in the cellar of our house when it had collapsed above us, hit by a German bomb. I had a lot of things to come to terms with, I realise that now.

It was not as clear to me at the time. I only felt that Brian's clinginess, his love, was suffocating me. I felt completely overwhelmed by him. The presence of this silent, traumatised child was too much for me somehow. I fought it tooth and nail. Maybe that was not so unusual considering my age.

What would have been normal would have been for Emma to take him to a doctor. It was clear that the little boy needed help, whether medical or psychological. And no doubt Emma saw that too. I never had the opportunity to speak to her about it, but I now believe that she was simply afraid she would wake sleeping dogs if she took the child to any official institution. No one had got in touch from London. Probably Brian had been lost somewhere between the nurses noting down his name that dark November evening after his arrival in Staintondale, and the authorities responsible for him in London. Emma was convinced that he would not cope with a transfer to an orphanage, so she was happy that no one seemed to have remembered him. She did not take him to the doctor. Nor did she send him to school, for which she did not need to feel bad, as it would have been immediately clear to anyone that Brian was in no way able to keep up with children of his age or even younger.