Motherlove (30 page)

And Gillian. The woman who had so zealously tried to protect an abandoned child and failed miserably. For five years now, Vicky wanted to attack Gillian, to beat her with her fists and howl. The violence had been lurking behind every sullen look, every polite rejection.

But Gillian hadn't failed her because she was evil, or callous, or a part of Joan's twisted plot. Her tragedy was simply that she was an ordinary inadequate woman. A woman who tried her best in the face of overwhelming odds.

Joan, she was damaged all right. Vicky couldn't even try to humanise her.

But the other woman, the other hamlet on the map… Vicky covered her face with her hands, remembering. Rounding in her own savage misery, she'd embraced a story that wasn't her own and stalked the woman, wanting to make her suffer. As if she hadn't suffered enough. She was the real victim in all this. A victim beyond imagining, and Vicky had made her suffering worse.

There were emotions she needed to acknowledge now. Before they had been wrong, and she'd let anger and hatred drown them out. But this time they were justified and they were shouting at her.

Guilt and shame.

She could refuse to be a victim if she liked, but someone else could not.

iii

Kelly

What the hell had Kelly thought she was doing, driving off like that so late in the day? And getting lost. Was she surprised? She should have stuck to the motorways.

But they were too inhuman. The human being in her, frail and vulnerable, wanted human contact, someone to talk to, someone to reach out and touch across this disintegrating cosmos.

She wanted Ben. Under the trees, in the dark lay-by, she ached for Ben. But he was about love and happiness, her Ben. He didn't belong in this dark place. How could she even begin to explain to him what it was all about?

But she wanted to. She had the phone in her hand. No, not yet. She had to get it straight in her own head first. Then she would turn to him. Besides, it was the middle of the night. She couldn't wake him. He had work to go to. But not the journey to Wales; that was out now. No blissful weekend playing meet the family. She'd better text him.
Don't go Wales. I'm going Lyford. Speak tomorrow.

Now she needed to work out on this stupid map where exactly she was. The Midlands? She'd got onto the wrong road somewhere. There was a sign to Stratford-upon-Avon. Way out. Get an hour's sleep, start again with a fresh head. No point in arriving too early anyway, not before anything was open. She'd grab some sleep. Don't think about talking to Ben. Not yet.

iv

Vicky

The blank walls and ceiling of a Travelodge. Headlights moving across it. The low rumble of heavy lorries edging onto the slip road. A muffled moan of never-ending traffic on the motorway.

Vicky lay in the dark, staring at nothing. She needed this, a white alien bed in a nowhere place, where she could stop and think. She kept conjuring all the faces dotted around the peculiar road map of her life. Gillian. Roz. Kelly. Mrs Parish. People hurting. All pieces on the board, as she had allowed herself to be. Liberation was taking charge of the game, and she could do it. She could make something right.

v

Kelly

At five o'clock, Kelly drove along to the next village, found it on the map and figured out where she was. Too far north but she could see her way. Cross one major road, head south on the next, get on the motorway. She stopped at a service station, bought herself a serious shot of caffeine. Gone six now, late enough; Ben would be awake, surely. She tried his number. His phone kept ringing. He was probably in the shower. Then it stopped ringing. Hell! Battery low. It needed charging and she hadn't brought the charger. How could she be so bloody incompetent?

She was in Lyford long before the office workers and shop assistants. Early enough to find the car park over the shopping centre almost empty. Should she find a payphone? Except that Ben would be on his way to work now. She couldn't discuss all this while he was squashed in with other commuters. Give him time to reach the office.

She started walking towards the concrete headquarters of the
Lyford Herald
, then changed her mind. Old editions, she wanted; twenty-two-year-old news, not this week's bullshit. They'd have old copies at the town library. Much better. No chance of her giving someone a punch in the eye in the library. If she visited the
Lyford Herald
again, she might just be tempted to make her feelings understood. The utter crap they'd written…

But it hadn't all been crap, that was the problem. They'd added and subtracted, but they had worked on the story Kelly had handed them on a plate.

She found the library, in Queen's Square. A couple of hundred yards from the Linley hotel and Rick's Place. Beacons in that other life, when the mystery of her birth had been an exciting adventure.

A façade of glass etched with open books, quills, music notes. Double doors waiting to open at nine o'clock and not a moment before. She sat in the square outside, among the clipped ornamental trees and the pigeons, and was first through the doors, the moment they opened.

There were microfilm readers in the reference library, if she wanted old copies of the
Lyford Evening News
. Or bound copies of the weekly
Lyford Herald
. She settled for the
Evening News
. If the story was there, she wanted it day by day, blow by blow. And she wanted the privacy of the cubicles that housed the microfilm readers. She didn't want to sit at a central table exposing her history to the whole world.

Start with her own birth date. Alleged birth date. Tuesday 13th March, 1990. Lorry jack-knifed on the bypass, an engineering firm closing, football club scandal. What was she expecting? Roz would hardly have put an announcement in the papers. Wednesday, Thursday – nothing through the entire week. Into the next, and there it was, Tuesday 20
th
March.

Baby found in Mall.

God, it was true. Roz had really abandoned her baby. This was that Victoria.
A girl, thought to be less than a month old, was wrapped in a towel.
Kelly could see Roz doing it, thinking it was the best thing to do. Poor Roz, poor helpless young mother. Kelly could understand what had driven her. But she could see, too, why Victoria Wendle had been so upset. To know that your mother had just left you in a doorway – and then taken another child.

That was the really terrible thing: the taking of another child. And it hadn't been a fantasy, not Victoria putting the wrong two and two together. Roz had admitted it. In the park, she had said.

Kelly scrolled on. Friday.

Baby Vanishes in Park.

Kelly covered her face with her hands. Could she bear to read on? She had to. Not that there was much to read. A large headline to make up for a scant article. Stop-press stuff, the paper trying to put something together quickly with nothing to work on. A blurred picture of ‘the park' as if that would help.

Police are searching urgently for a baby snatched from her pram today by the lake in Portland Park. The mother, named by the police as Mrs Heather Norris, of Linden Close, is understood to have left the pram briefly, while attending to another child. When she returned, the baby girl, Abigail Laura, was missing. Police have as yet no clues as to the identity of the person or persons who might have snatched the child, and are appealing urgently for witnesses. They would like to hear from anyone who visited the park today, between 1.30 and 3.30 p.m.

Abigail Laura. Was that who she really was? And Mrs Heather Norris. Was that her real mother? The woman left with an empty pram. A terrible crime.

She had to go on. The next day the paper was full of it. Parents were
too distraught to give a statement.
Distraught. Kelly's parents. People she didn't know, who had been no part of her consciousness until now. Heather and Martin Norris. What had happened to them? Where were they now? How long had they been distraught? How long before dull acceptance had driven out the worst of the pain? What do you do if someone steals your baby?

Police had spoken to people who had been in the park, but as yet there were no leads. An interview with a mother who had noticed a suspicious stranger loitering around a nearby infants' school. Fear stalks the streets of Lyford. There was a summary of previous abductions and some distasteful speculation on the intentions of the abductor.

More on the Monday – photographs of Heather and Martin Norris, snapped as they were bundled inside their home by police officers. Kelly sat staring at them. Grainy photographs, even more indistinct on a ghostly microfilm, but there they were. A totally normal couple. Nothing to set them apart from all the other couples who lived in that suburban street. That should have been her home, that house, with its tile-hung walls and cramped little porch, and its clipped pocket-sized front garden, indistinguishable from the houses to either side. They should have been her parents, that sad couple. He was just an average man, nothing heroic, nothing villainous. Wavy hair. She could see that much. And a face that would probably have been quite nice if his jaw was not set and his eyes were not glassy and unseeing.

Daddy.

She was even less clear, Kelly's mother, Heather Norris. Shoulders hunched and head bowed, her hair falling over her face. Broken.

‘Mum. Roz. What have you done?'

‘Find what you were looking for?' asked a librarian, passing her cubicle.

‘Yes, thanks,' said Kelly, hurriedly. This was private. She didn't want to share it with a librarian.

She wanted to share it with Ben. He'd be safely at work by now. She could ring him, pour it all out. She left her bag and coat by the microfilm reader and went down one floor to the rank of public telephones by the newspaper room. Tried his mobile. It was switched off. He did that, she knew; switched it off when he was in a meeting. Maybe she could try his office, leave him a message.

A woman answered, bright and businesslike. ‘Good morning, Claims, Jane Danby speaking.'

Kelly tried to collect herself. Office Speak. ‘Hi. Good morning. Is…' How stupid that she didn't know his surname. She racked her brain, trying to remember what his mother had been called. Parish. ‘Is Mr. Parish there? Could I speak to him please?'

‘Parish? Sorry, no one of that name here.'

‘Ben Parish?'

‘Sorry.' Kelly could hear Jane Danby's strident voice away from the phone. ‘Anyone know anyone called Parish working here?' Back to the phone. ‘No, sorry, you've got the wrong number, I'm afraid.'

‘Okay, thanks.' Kelly put the phone down. It was all part and parcel. Parallel worlds. She'd slipped through, and Ben was in another world, no longer part of hers.

She went back to the
Evening Post
. Tuesday. A plea from the father, her father, for whoever had his child to come forward. More biographical details of the parents. Heather Norris was twenty-seven, born in Nottingham, had worked in a library. This one. Kelly looked around. This one or its predecessor. It looked like a new building. Martin was twenty-eight. A stock controller. Kelly pictured him rounding up cattle. Born in Lyford, he had been a champion sprinter for his school and his mother Barbara was a stalwart of the St Michael's Amateur Dramatics Society.

Details. Snippets that she should have known all her life. She wanted to see their faces.

She found them on the Wednesday edition. Someone had given the
Post
a wedding photograph. Martin and Heather cutting the cake, he beaming broadly, she, with veil pushed back, revealing a slightly anxious smile. The tone of the article had changed. Quotes from neighbours about how stressed Mrs Norris had been, long before Abigail had gone missing. Hints of a nervous breakdown.

On the Thursday the gloves were off.

Police have confirmed that they have taken Heather Norris in for questioning about the fate of missing baby Abigail. No charges are imminent at this stage. Grandmother of the child, Mrs Barbara Norris, said, ‘I cannot bring myself to believe that Heather could have harmed her own baby, but if she has, I beg of her to tell us the truth now, so this agony can end.'

Pages, day after day, of evidence and rumour and innuendo. Diatribes in the letter columns. A solitary plea from a vicar to bear in mind that we are all innocent until proven guilty. And then the story petered out.

Police have confirmed that Heather Norris, mother of missing baby Abigail, is not being charged, although investigations will continue. ‘The case will remain open until the fate of the child is finally uncovered,' said Superintendent Barry Trufall.

It was all there, and it wasn't enough. She wanted more. She asked for the old bound copies of the
Lyford Herald
. A weekly paper, with more considered coverage. Not more enjoyable reading though. At least the pictures were clearer. A more recent photo of the husband and wife. Her father and mother, and their little son. Barbara Norris, her grandmother.

A map of the park, showing where and when. A photograph of the lake.