Beneath the Surface (25 page)

Turning the key a notch further, she held her breath as the engine rumbled. The only thing against this crazy idea, other than the fact she was essentially stealing, was that she’d never learnt to drive. Not properly anyway. Morrie had taken her out in his own car on many occasions. A couple of times he’d driven to a large open parking area that was always desolate in winter and let both girls have a go behind the wheel.

‘You take to it well,’ he once told Hannah. ‘I think you’re a natural. Now just don’t tell your mother what we’re doing,’ he added, laughing.

Without giving the idea any more thought, she thrust the gearstick to Drive, gave one more cursory glance towards Dom’s figure bobbing in the sea, and drove off, across the gravel and onto the road.

The car sped off through the roads leading out of the Bay far too quickly. Her manoeuvres were jerky, her braking too hard and often too late. She didn’t feel in control but then she wasn’t anymore, and unsurprisingly none of it mattered.

The main road was ahead and Hannah attempted to indicate right but instead of reaching the indicators she had flicked on the windscreen wipers, which began swiping furiously at the screen in front of her, obscuring her vision. The sound of a lorry’s horn, loud and constant, aggressively sounded out and Hannah realised she must have cut right in front of it without seeing it coming.

‘Concentrate, Hannah,’ she told herself. ‘Just get yourself to Lauren.’

Her phone started to buzz on the passenger seat and she looked down to see Dom’s name appear on the screen. ‘No,’ she murmured as she reached for the phone and tapped the red button to cancel the call before throwing it back onto the seat. Her eyes flicked back to the road and then back to the phone as she waited to see if he would call back. A beep indicated he’d left a message.

Hannah reached for the phone again and pressed the voicemail button, taking her eyes off the road for a second too long, unaware of the red braking lights of the cars in front that had come to a sudden halt.

Kathryn hung her head over the toilet and threw up for a third time. Standing up to wipe her mouth, she stared at the reflection gaping back at her. She no longer recognised the woman in the mirror. That woman was pale, with such dark rings beneath her eyes they suggested utter exhaustion with life. The whites of her eyes were now red, making her look like a wild animal.

‘What have you done, you stupid woman?’ Kathryn asked. ‘You stupid,
stupid
old woman! What do we do now?’

She clutched the sink and continued to stare, waiting for a response.

She had never been good at discovering answers for herself. Eleanor had always been on hand to provide those. At the slightest suggestion of something going wrong Kathryn was on the phone to her mother, asking her, begging her to tell her what to do. Now everything was falling apart and she had no idea how to stick it back together again.

‘You should learn to stand on your own two feet!’ Peter once snarled at her. That could have been on any one of a number of occasions, all of them blurred into one long tragic life. ‘She rules you, Kathryn, but the saddest thing is you let her.’

‘Yes,’ she told the ghost in the mirror. ‘Well, you were right, Peter. And don’t you worry because I’m paying the price now.’

She’d seen the disgust in his eyes as he spat out the words at her. He might have been a useless father and abandoned his daughters, but she was worse. She was a mother – no mother should do that.

‘Why do you have to be so weak?’ Abigail once said to her. ‘Why can’t you stand up to her, put me first for a change?’ When had that been? Kathryn searched her memories. Not that it mattered. None of it mattered, but she wanted to remember. It was when Robert died. No, Abigail was too young. It was when she fell pregnant. Yes, that was probably it. Abigail had needed Kathryn, and Kathryn in turn had found herself a cupboard and hidden herself away.

‘The girls will never know the truth,’ her mother had said.

Kathryn started to laugh. How adamant Eleanor had been, that it was right to leave.

‘But they do, Mother,’ she shouted at the mirror. ‘And where are you now when I need you to tell me what to do about it? That’s right, now the shit’s hit the fan you’ve checked yourself out. But you created this mess, not me. You did this.’

Eleanor hadn’t been right. The real truth was alarming, and once she had worked it out, it all seemed so obvious. The thought had been haunting her for a while, but since seeing Peter it was practically jumping into her head and kicking away at her skull. Eleanor hadn’t told Kathryn what to do for the best. Not for Kathryn anyway. Not for the girls, and definitely not for Abigail.

Eleanor had been so scared everyone would find out about the girls. When it came to the end she had been adamant what they had done would never be revealed. She had said she was worried they would take Hannah away, and Kathryn believed her. Because of the way Abigail was being, she had thought her mother was right, and she was scared too.

But what if it really wasn’t like that? What if she remembered wrong? After what Peter had told her, Eleanor certainly had other things to lose.

Kathryn slammed her fist against the mirror. ‘You stupid,
stupid
woman!’ she screamed again, pounding harder and harder until the mirror shattered and she yelled in pain, her balled fist sliced with a shard of glass. Blood quickly rushed to the surface, dripping into the basin. For a moment she watched, mesmerised by the bright red drops splattering against the stark contrast of the white porcelain. Pulling a piece of toilet paper from the holder and wrapping it around her fist, she haphazardly created a bandage to soak up the blood that still flowed.

Hannah would tell Lauren what she now knew.

Hannah would want to find Abigail.

None of them would forgive her; none of them would want to know her. She would never forgive herself.

She would be all alone; she would have no one. That was too unbearable to think about. She had to to do something, anything – but what?

Kathryn backed out of the bathroom. She couldn’t look at herself any longer without the rush of bile rising in her throat. Running down the stairs, she picked up her jacket and fled through the front door. She had to get out, to where she didn’t know; she just had to go somewhere.

*****

It was five hours later when Kathryn returned to the house. The church bell was chiming two o’clock as she unlatched the gate and shuffled up the path. She couldn’t explain how she’d passed five hours walking, trying to make sense of what had happened, how much truth there was in what Peter had told her, what the future held in store. She had decided to come back and call Peter; to get that call out of the way.

Inside the house she hung her keys on the hook and picked up her mobile that she’d left behind in the rush to escape. It was flashing away at her angrily. She pressed a button and the screen lit up.
You have 14 missed calls
, it told her, all from numbers she didn’t recognise. Her fingers unsteadily jabbed at the Voicemail button when the shrill ring of the landline made her jump. Grabbing it from its cradle she called into the receiver.

‘Hello?’

‘Mum?’ the voice cried out. ‘Where have you been? I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours.’

‘I’ve been out, I’ve been walking, I was … Lauren, what’s happened, is everything OK?’

‘No, it’s not,’ she sobbed. ‘I’m at the hospital. I, oh, Mum! You need to get here. You need to be here! I even had Morrie looking for you. No one could find you.’

‘Lauren, tell me what’s happened,’ Kathryn begged.

‘Hannah was in an accident. The car went into a tree and—’ She broke off, crying.

‘What do you mean, car? What’s happened? Is she OK?’

‘I don’t know all the details but I think it’s serious.’

‘How do you mean, serious? She’s going to be OK, isn’t she?’

‘I don’t know, they’re doing a scan on her at the moment to find out what’s wrong. They said something about internal bleeding. She looks awful, Mum. Her face is so swollen I hardly recognised her and they said she might have concussion. I’m sorry,’ Lauren wept. ‘I really don’t know what they were saying, it’s all too much.’

‘No,’ Kathryn cried. ‘God,
no
!’

This was all her fault. It was karma coming right back round for her with a vengeance.

‘Don’t take away Hannah,’ she sobbed as she hung up the phone.

Dear Adam,

I’ve found Eleanor. I took the plunge and figuring my grandmother would be the easiest person to start with, I looked on Rightmove for her house in Yorkshire. Lordavale, it came up straight away. Turns out all you need is a postcode and you can find any property that’s been put on the market in the last few years. I didn’t expect to see it because I hadn’t believed she would leave her precious house, but there it was, clear as day in all its eerie glory. Photos of each room, as stark and cold as they were in reality. I felt as if a ghost had swept through me when I saw it again.

Another few clicks and it appeared her neighbour, Doris, hadn’t put her house on the market. I say ‘neighbour’, she lived a good five hundred metres from the haunted house, but anyway, Doris, whose telephone number is still listed, was easy to get hold of. I told her I was an old school friend of Kathryn’s, that we’d lost touch years ago, and I was trying to trace her to invite her to a reunion. Doris told me she knew all about what had happened to Eleanor, yet didn’t manage to be very specific.

‘My memory,’ she kept telling me. ‘It’s not what it was.’

Doris is in her mid-eighties and couldn’t hear well. She kept asking for my name so eventually I made up the name Nancy, and she said, ‘Oh, yes, dear, I remember you.’ She couldn’t recall much about Kathryn and didn’t know what had happened to her but told me she could probably find the address for Eleanor, if that would help.

I told her it definitely would. ‘Well, hold on a moment, dear, and I’ll have a look in my drawer,’ she said. Her voice went in and out of earshot as she carried the phone with her. I could hear her rummaging and tutting, ‘No, no, maybe I don’t have it anymore.’ As she searched, she peppered me with snippets about the family.

‘Of course when dear Charles passed away four years ago it took its toll on her,’ she said. ‘The big house was such an upkeep.’

It threw me to hear my grandpa had died. I hadn’t really thought through what I might learn from the call, so when she dropped in his death it was a shock. Grandpa was an elusive presence flitting between his office and the dinner table, always absorbed by his work. He wasn’t an unkind man – he just had absolutely no interest in anything other than business. So I wouldn’t say I was particularly sad to hear about him dying, I just hadn’t given him any thought.

‘And then it was about a year ago she moved to the home.’

‘The home?’ I asked. ‘Do you mean a care home?’

‘Yes, dear. And Lordavale was sold to a young family. Bit of a saga all that was of course, with all Charles’s debts. I don’t think Eleanor saw much money in the end.’

‘He had debts?’ I asked.

But Doris didn’t answer me. ‘Oh dear, I can’t find this address. I’m really not being too helpful, am I?’ she said.

‘Don’t worry,’ I sighed. ‘It was a long shot anyway.’

‘It’s in a place just to the West of Darlington,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember the name, a grand place though.’

‘That’s great, Doris,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

I hung up the receiver and took a deep breath. My hands were shaking; I hadn’t realised how nervous I was. But it had been easy – too easy. I felt a fluttering of excitement as I tapped another search into Google. There are twenty care homes in that area and so I starting calling each one in turn. By the fifth I struck lucky. Eleanor, they told me, was in Elms Home. A huge Victorian building and, according to their website, ‘the pinnacle of all care homes, where everyone wants their loved ones to be looked after’.

The person I spoke to asked who I was. ‘I’m a granddaughter,’ I said, ‘of her cousin Mabel. My name is Katie.’

Another lie, though Mabel did exist: she died when I was young and her family then moved to America, so even if Eleanor had no interest in seeing her cousin’s granddaughter, I hoped she’d believe the story. I told the nurse I was in the area and wanted to see Eleanor, and the woman said she was happy for me to visit as long as I made an appointment.

I put the phone down and reality hit me: I had found my grandmother. A major link to the girls, and my mother, yet I didn’t know if I could face her. What would I say? Hello, Grandma, remember me? Well, it’s been a while, but here I am and I just wondered if you wouldn’t mind being awfully kind and giving me my mother’s address. You wouldn’t mind? How wonderful! Well, I’ll just pop along and say hello to her, then.

This was Eleanor. But this wasn’t any ordinary grandmother: this was the force behind our lives, the woman who had dictated everything. This was the evil bitch who had made me hand over my baby daughter.

But then if I didn’t go and see her, what would I do?

*****

And so I am going today, Adam. Right now I am sitting in a hotel room, surrounded by a sea of beige and mustard. There are putrid yellow plaid curtains and a dull carpet covered in stains. I dread to think what they might be and have to hotfoot it over them to get from the bathroom to the bed.

I have been pacing the room since 6 a.m. this morning and knew if I only had myself to talk to, most likely I’d get cold feet, which is why I’m talking to you. I’m hoping you’ll give me some courage. I need to keep my end goal in mind, finding the girls. I can’t let Eleanor win again without even confronting her. I only hope that when I do, I don’t fall apart – I don’t want all my hard work with Maggie to be pulled from under my feet the moment I lay eyes on Eleanor. Because she has a way of doing that, making me feel like I’m nothing.