The Truth About Melody Browne (26 page)

Melody paused then and waited, to see whether if she was quiet for a moment her mother might say something about her father, but she didn’t. Instead she smiled at Ken and said: ‘So, how’s everyone?’ for the second time, as if she’d forgotten that she’d already asked him.

‘Did you know?’ Melody interrupted impatiently. ‘Did you know about Dad?’

‘Yes,’ said Jane. ‘It’s very, very sad. And you …’ she looked at Melody quizzically, as if something had just occurred to her, ‘you must be feeling very sad, I suppose. Are you?’

Melody nodded sulkily.

‘But you know, he should never have been there in the first place, should never have followed her over there, given up his job, his livelihood, his daughter, just to idle by a pool all day long.’

‘And you,’ shouted Melody, ‘you should never have stolen a baby and made him come back for me!’

‘Well,’ said her mother, softly and in a considered tone, ‘perhaps not. But now we’re all paying the price for our mistakes, aren’t we?’ She said this with an air of great wisdom, as if there were some kind of divine justice at work in all of their lives rather than just chaos, madness and tragedy.

Melody didn’t want to hug her mother when they left ten minutes later. She didn’t even want to kiss her on the cheek. She just wanted to get into Ken’s sidecar and feel the icy wind against her hot skin. She wanted to feel clean and she wanted to feel free. A lot had happened to Melody over the past few years, but she barely thought about the three-year-old girl in the yellow bedroom in Lambeth these days. She had a vague recollection of a funeral and a man with funny hair and another slight feeling of having been present when her mother was in labour, but, like most children, Melody lived mostly in the present and in the future, with the occasional foray into last year, and she was old enough now to know that she would never again live a normal life with her mother and her father, and that what lay ahead of her was unconventional and slightly scary. There was no point in wallowing around in thoughts of what might have been. Clearly what might have been wasn’t going to be, and so for now her main concerns revolved around whether or not the woman from the social services would let her live with Ken and Grace and save her from a life of Jesus and too much central heating with Auntie Susie. Melody didn’t want perfection, she just wanted second best.

But even that option was going to be cruelly snatched from her that afternoon, for as Ken’s bike rounded the twists and turns of the country lanes, heading back towards the coast, something terrible was happening at Auntie Susie’s house, something that would rip gentle destiny from Melody’s hands one more time and scatter it to the winds.

‘Oh God, get her away, Ken, get her away
now
!’ Aunt Susie was standing outside the house, ashen, in a summer dress and sandals, and wrapped up in a blanket. ‘For God’s sake, don’t let her see!’

But it was too late. Melody had already seen.

The front of Aunt Susie’s immaculate cream bungalow had been daubed from top to toe in red and white paint with words like ‘Rapist’s spawn!’ and ‘Accursed child!’ and ‘Blood is thicker than water!!’ But worse than that was the fact that the front porch had been ripped apart by some kind of explosion.

‘It was a petrol bomb!’ sobbed Auntie Susie, sipping sweet tea given to her by a kindly neighbour. ‘Imagine that! Someone made a bomb and put it through my letterbox! Here, in my house, with me inside, and thank God Melody wasn’t here!’

The wall around where Susie’s front door had been was jet black, and there was still smoke coming out of the exploded side windows. ‘Look!’ she said, pointing at the gaping holes. ‘My stained glass! Gone! That was original you know, you can’t replace stuff like that. I mean, what sort of person, what sort of person … ?’

A few neighbours milled around on the cold pavement, the fire brigade had been and gone, and the police were coming back later to take a statement. But for now, Susie was left here, cold and alone, outside her violated, insecure home.

‘OK,’ said Ken, ‘let’s get some timber, get that door boarded up. Here,’ he turned to face the appalled neighbours, ‘have any of you got some old timber?’

Ken was taken to a neighbour’s shed, while Susie and Melody were soothed and comforted in the teak-lined front room of an elderly lady called Evelyn.

‘Dreadful thing,’ she tutted quietly, ‘a dreadful, dreadful thing,’ in a tone of voice that suggested that she was always half expecting dreadful things to happen so when they did she was only half surprised.

But Melody was concerned not so much with the dreadfulness of the situation as with the detail of it. Why had someone called her a rapist’s spawn? She knew what a rapist was. Grace had told her one day when she’d heard them say it on the radio. A rapist was a man who had sex with someone who didn’t want to have sex. A rapist was a bad, bad man. And it was as she was wondering about this strange detail and thinking that she might ask, but feeling that it wasn’t very nice to talk about things like that in front of an old lady, that she saw a copy of the
Kentish Gazette
on Evelyn’s armchair and saw a headline that nearly took her breath away.

BABY SNATCHER IS AU PAIR RAPIST’S SISTER-IN-LAW!

Melody discreetly perched herself on the armchair and turned to read the text beneath the headline:

It emerged today that Jane Ribblesdale, the Broadstairs Baby Snatcher is in fact the sister-in-law of Michael Radlett, the infamous Au Pair Rapist. Radlett, 41, is married to Mrs Ribblesdale’s older sister, Margaret Radlett, 37. Last year Radlett was convicted in the Crown Court of six counts of rape committed against young women. He has been dubbed the Au Pair Rapist due to the occupation of five of his victims. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and is currently carrying out his term at Pentonville Prison in north London. Mrs Radlett refused to comment on this story from her home in Ealing, West London.

Melody couldn’t read everything but she absorbed enough to understand why there was paint on Aunt Susie’s house. She put her hands in her lap and sighed. She thought of her cousins, Nicola and Claire, and wished she could see them again. She thought of poor, sad Auntie Maggie, and of the last time she’d seen her. She thought about all the adults she knew and how difficult they all made it seem, just the ordinary business of getting on with life. And then she thought of Ken, the only person she knew who made being a grown-up look like something she might one day want to do, and hoped that this terrible unfolding of events might just have a silver lining, that it might make someone at the social services think she’d be much better off being taken away from her aunt and sent back to the house by the sea.

Melody
was
taken away from her aunt, a few days later, after someone posted a packet of human excrement through the letterbox of the newly refitted front door, but she wasn’t sent to Ken’s house by the sea, she was sent somewhere altogether different. She was sent to Canterbury to live with a couple called Clive and Gloria Browne.

Melody had never been into an internet café before. She’d never even been on the internet before. Stacey, who worked in an office and did most of her shopping on-line, always teased her about it: ‘You’re a sodding troglodyte, Melody Browne!’

So she felt slightly nervous as she set her handbag down on the worn blue carpets of the easylnternet Café at Trafalgar Square on Sunday afternoon. The café was half full: European teenagers in generic jeans and T-shirts, their hair and skin dulled by insufficient showering facilities in scruffy hostels; tourists in shorts and sandals; immigrants applying for jobs and instant-messaging their friends and families.

She looked at the computer screen. She’d paid in advance for an hour. An hour should be enough, she assumed, though having never really used a computer before she had no idea how long this was going to take. She really didn’t know where to start and the clock in the corner of the screen was ticking down the minutes.

‘Excuse me,’ she said to an overweight Chinese teenager sitting to her left. ‘How do I look things up on the internet?’

The girl eased herself away from her computer and silently pressed a few buttons on Melody’s keyboard.

‘There,’ she pointed at a box in the middle of the screen, ‘put in what you want find there. Put these …’ she made quotes with her fingertips, ‘around words for make it more acoorut. OK?’

Melody nodded gratefully. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You saved my life.’

‘No probs,’ said the girl, returning to her seat and to a website that appeared to be selling dancewear.

Melody opened her pad, the one she’d written in on the fire escape this morning whilst fending off her hangover with full-fat Coke and four slices of toast:

People to Find
Emily Elizabeth Ribblesdale/Sonningfeld?
Charlotte (Sonningfeld?)
Jacqui Sonningfeld
Ken Stone
Grace (Stone?)
Seth (Stone?)
Matty ??
JANE RIBBLESDALE (NEWSOME?)
Susie/Susan Newsome
Mum and Dad (?)

She started to type. Nothing came up for Emily Elizabeth, nor for Charlotte (though without her surname, she hadn’t expected it to). Jacqui Sonningfeld on the other hand, brought up a few pages.

As she read through the results, Melody learned that Jacqui was born in Leicester in 1950, that she’d been nominated for an Oscar in 1994 for her makeup effects in a film called
Beatlemania
and that she lived in Beverly Hills with her husband, a film editor called Tony Parry, and their two teenage children. There was no mention, that Melody could see, of any former husbands or older children, but the picture that accompanied one of the articles showed a dyed-blonde woman in designer glasses with a slightly leathery mouth and very thickly applied mascara who was, Melody was absolutely certain, the woman with whom she’d stayed in the thin house in Fitzrovia.

She made a note of Jacqui Sonningfeld’s agent’s phone number and address and then began to look for Ken Stone. This was harder, as where there was only one Jacqui Sonningfeld, there seemed to be dozens of Ken Stones. There was no way Melody would be able to uncover precisely the Ken Stone she needed from amongst the hundreds of results that came up, so she tried Grace Stone instead. This brought up an interesting selection of results – including barbecues and duvet covers – but one in particular caught Melody’s eye – a yoga instructor in Folkestone. The location was right, as was the occupation. She made a note of the accompanying mobile phone number and then took a breath. She was about to search for her mother.

As she’d suspected, there was only one Jane Ribblesdale in the world, and that Jane Ribblesdale had done only one thing of any note – she’d stolen another woman’s baby. She found a couple of references to her, but nothing to suggest what might have become of her since her sentencing over twenty years earlier, so instead, Melody looked up the name of the prison where she’d been kept on remand and took a note of the phone number.

She found no mention of a Susie or Susan Newsome, and was about to slide her notepad back into her handbag and leave when she realised that there was one person on her list she hadn’t looked for. She typed in the name ‘Seth Stone’ and to her amazement, Google came back with more than thirty thousand results. Seth Stone was famous! Seth Stone was the lead singer of a band called The Mercury. Melody had heard of The Mercury. She’d even, now that the context had changed, heard of Seth Stone. She quickly checked a biography on a fan site, just to be sure, and there it was: Seth Stone was born in 1977, in Broadstairs, Kent.

She scrambled through the results, looking for a contact number, looking for an address. She found the details of his record company and his management company and then, just as she was about to see if she could find any more biographical details, the screen went blank. Her hour was up.

Ed was out when Melody got home half an hour later. It was a dirty grey summer’s afternoon, with gathering rain clouds on the horizon and a dank breeze stirring the litter on the ground, but it was warm enough to sit outside, so Melody pulled a kitchen chair out onto the fire escape and opened a can of Sprite. She rested her notepad against her knees and took the lid off her biro with her teeth. She wanted to write a letter to Seth Stone. Seth Stone was, she’d decided, by far the best person to begin this search with. He would definitely know where his father was, his mother, his brother, and once Melody had found Ken, the rest would fall into place.

‘Dear Seth,’ she began. ‘I’m sure you don’t remember me, you were only a baby the last time I saw you, but …’ She stopped, and tutted, unable to decide what to say next. It seemed such a simple thing to ask: what happened to my family? What happened to my friends? What happened to me? But she couldn’t find the right words, and the longer she stared at the sheet of paper, the fewer ways she could think of to continue.

She rested her notepad on the floor and she stared at the comings and goings of the estate beneath her feet. Two small Ethiopian boys played with a football, an old lady called Violet sat on a candy-striped deck chair, resting her arms on a stick, a man called Peewee with an autistic condition polished his boots in a patch of sunshine, and a Cambodian baby in a pram sucked on a large pink dummy and stared into the middle distance while her mother chatted at high speed to a friend in the doorway. There was nobody to wave at, no one to call out a cheery hello to.