Stranded (38 page)

‘What’s happened?’ I say. I have not focused on anything, properly, since I saw the look on Daisy’s face as Katy fell.

‘You’re free,’ Ed says, turning in the front passenger seat. This, I notice, is Chris’s car, the same one we drove to Cornwall in.

‘Why, though?’

‘Because Katy’s made a full recovery,’ says Chris. ‘Though you still don’t get to go round stabbing people in the back with bread knives. And because the whole story came out, thanks to Ed here. And those Americans. And the Australian woman. Once that whole episode came to light – can you imagine how the press love the “stranded” element of the story? When it became clear that there was a hell of a lot more stacked up against them than there was against you, and Katy wasn’t in a position to press charges, they decided to let you go. But Esther – you should know all this. Didn’t they explain it to you?’

I shrug. ‘I didn’t listen. Where are we going? Where’s Daisy?’

‘Daisy’s in Brighton,’ says Ed, ‘with Chris’s mum. Everything’s going to be OK.’

I think of her face. ‘It’s really not,’ I tell him.

I am out of prison, but they have still won.

Four weeks later

‘Daisy,’ I say. ‘You know Ed.’

‘Hi, Daisy,’ says Ed. He is shifting around from foot to foot, looking from my face to hers, and back again. ‘It’s lovely to see you again. Are you OK?’

She shrugs. ‘Yeah.’

I look at her. She tells me she is all right. I am not sure that she will ever actually get over what has happened to her over the past two months. We have come to Scotland to get away from home and to spend some time together. She barely spoke to me on the train.

‘You know when we were on the island? Your mum did not stop talking about you. Not once. Seriously.’

Daisy smiles a sad smile. I take her hand and squeeze it. She looks up at me. People pass by, parting to walk around us. Waverley station is busy in the summer, it turns out.

‘Didn’t you?’

‘I’m afraid I didn’t.’

She nods. She is still pale and scared, and I am constantly eaten alive by fear about what this whole episode might have done to her psyche.

‘Good,’ she says. ‘That’s one good thing.’

‘I’ve got the motor,’ Ed says. ‘If you’d like to follow me, ladies, I’d be honoured to drive you to your destination.’

I sit in the back, hoping Ed won’t take offence at this. I cannot bear to be away from Daisy for the moment. I sit in the middle of the back seat of what I assume to be Ed’s parents’ car; it is a black four-wheel drive and so shiny and well-hoovered that it looks and smells brand new. Daisy sits beside me, her thigh pressing against mine. In the four weeks that I have been home, she has refused to speak to me about anything that has happened. She will not tell me what they said to her at the Village. She refuses to address what I did in St Ives.

‘I did it because I was desperate,’ I told her, making a shaky effort to hold myself together. ‘Because they were going to bundle you into that car and I had no idea how Dad and I would find you again. I did it because it was the only thing I could do to stop them.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, looking away from me. ‘I know.’

She has grown up. She does not want to go out walking dogs any more. All the pony posters have come down from her bedroom walls. She wants to read scary books now, or stare into space. Often I find her appearing to watch television, her eyes unfocused and her gaze clearly turned inwards.

‘Mum,’ she says quietly, just after Ed points out Edinburgh Castle to us. ‘Is this going to be OK? Not a trap?’

I push her hair off her face.

‘Darling,’ I say. ‘I am absolutely, completely certain it’s not a trap. Ed is one of the good guys. We’re going to have a nice time staying at his mum and dad’s house. It’s a bit of a holiday. We can both relax and start to feel normal again. They live in the countryside and there’ll be no one around but us and them.’

‘And Daddy?’ Her face is so anxious that I want to cry. ‘He’s on his own.’

‘Daddy’s fine,’ I tell her. ‘You know he’s fine. No one’s going after Daddy.’

‘Are you and Dad going to stay friends?’ Daisy whispers.

‘Yes, we are,’ I tell her firmly. She has asked me this time and time again: I have always given her a firm ‘yes’, and oddly enough, it is true. I set off on my trip to Asia, a million years ago, hating Chris with what felt like a passion that would endure for ever. Now I could not imagine a better friend. Saving your child from the clutches of religious madwomen is, it seems, a bonding experience, even for us. We did it together, and we seem to have developed a respect for one another that we never had before. ‘Don’t worry,’ I say. I have said this so many times. Daisy’s world has been rocked to its foundations, and she has been seeing a counsellor about her fears, which include the specific fear that she will be snatched from her bed at night by strangers who tell her her mummy doesn’t love her any more.

‘Daisy,’ says Ed, as he drives out of the city and takes a big road heading north. ‘You have had a hell of a time. What can we do while you’re here that would cheer you up? Would you like to go horse-riding? Or we could take a boat out? Fishing? Tennis? Or we could just spend loads of time watching telly and playing games and messing about?’

I see him looking at her in the rear-view mirror. He smiles, and she smiles tentatively back at him.

‘Yes please,’ she says quietly. ‘That. The one with the telly and the messing about.’

Ed’s parents are distantly welcoming to me, and make an enormous fuss of Daisy.

‘Well, hello, young lady!’ says Ed’s mum, or ‘call me Patricia’, as she says to Daisy, so I assume it applies to me too. ‘You’ve been through the wars rather, I hear, is that right?’

I watch Daisy nod solemnly. ‘It actually did feel like a war,’ she says. ‘I just wanted it to stop. And Mummy and Daddy came and rescued me. But Mummy had to hurt someone to get her off me and that got Mummy into trouble.’

‘Yes,’ says Patricia. ‘Well, she did what a mother has to do. And thank goodness it’s worked out. Esther, welcome – Edward will show you to your room. He said you wanted to be in with Daisy?’ I nod. Daisy nods so hard I worry she will harm her neck. ‘Well, I have to say, that’s a first. Normally I’ve had to lay down the law about the boys bringing lady friends home and sharing a room. Never before has one actively
not
wanted to share a bedroom with him.’

‘Oh, Ed and I are just friends,’ I say firmly, and I see her raise her eyebrows and say nothing. Her husband walks into the room. ‘Malcolm and I are off to dinner with friends,’ she adds airily, ‘but Edward will look after you. Patch and Alice might call in, you never know.’

Malcolm snorts. ‘In case you don’t speak Patricia-ese, that means Patch and Alice will definitely be calling in to get a good look at you, as will the twins and possibly David too. They’re all curious to meet you, I’m afraid, Esther. The famous Esther. We’ve had our share of reflected glory, as the parents who didn’t even notice their son was missing for a month.’

‘Oh, right,’ I say. ‘Um. I look forward to meeting Patch and Alice too. I’ve heard a lot about everyone.’

It comes out, I fear, sounding sarcastic, and I catch Ed sniggering.

Daisy falls asleep more quickly than she has done since the whole affair began. It helps, I think, that we are in an old-fashioned bedroom tucked into the eaves, with ancient dark-wood floorboards, a dormer window and a sturdy wash basin in a corner.

‘It’s like a bedroom in a book!’ she exclaimed when she saw it, and went and sat on one of the high beds with iron bedsteads, both of which had floral counterpanes pulled tightly across them. I knew what she meant: it is an evacuee’s room from a war story.

I sit at her side until I am certain she is sleeping. It is only seven o’clock, and the light outside is like midday; I am glad she is allowing her watchfulness to waver for a while. I creep out of the room, leaving the door wide open, and down the small set of wooden stairs, followed by the much wider carpeted ones that lead down to the hallway.

This is the grandest house I have ever been in, and as soon as I see Ed, I burst out laughing, knowing we are alone.

‘This is your family pile?’ I say, and I hug him tightly, burying my face in his chest. ‘God, it’s weird, you having clothes on, you know. So lovely to be back with you again.’

‘Don’t let my mother hear you saying that. It took me weeks to convince her that you weren’t the worst woman in the world. She kept saying, “Of course you didn’t realise what she was like, because she had designs on you! I know what women are like, Edward. You don’t.” It was only when it said in the paper that it was all Katy and Cassandra’s fault that she believed me.’

‘She’s nice, though. She was nice to Daisy and that makes her OK with me.’

‘She loves little girls. Never got one of her own, as she still likes to remind us at every opportunity.’

‘How’s it been?’

‘All right. Anti-climactic. From the moment we got off the island and nobody was anything more than mildly surprised and inconvenienced to see us back. When we were there, it felt like our disappearance must be the most gigantic mystery, and everyone must have been scouring the oceans for us. I know I used to say no one would be missing me, but after a week or so I was pretty sure they had to be, because I thought they would have been alerted by the huge amount of publicity about the rest of you disappearing. But they weren’t. And then we get back and it all starts to fall into place because of Daisy. Bloody Katy.’

‘Did they try to find us?’ I ask. ‘Piet and Jonah, I mean. You thought they might.’

‘They both emailed, separately, after the publicity. Both feeling bad about not trying harder. The guys at Paradise Bay told them I’d checked out. My bag was gone. They were a bit confused, but they both thought I’d gone off somewhere with you.’

‘Which you had.’

‘In a way.’

I nod, and follow him into the enormous kitchen/dining room, where I sit at a huge pine table and watch Ed make gin and tonics with great care.

‘Here you go,’ he says. ‘Welcome, and it’s lovely to hang out with Daisy. She’s gorgeous, and you got her back. I think she’s going to be fine. Thanks for coming, Esther. I’m really glad you did.’

I smile at him. ‘Thanks.’ I want to say ‘thanks, sweetheart’ or something similar, but I am too shy, suddenly, for endearments. ‘I wanted to come here all along, you know. But I had to be sure Daisy was ready for a trip. She is, by the way. I think getting away from Brighton and doing something with me is exactly what she needed. This is the first time she’s slept peacefully since . . .’ My voice tails off.

‘I know.’

I take a sip of my drink. ‘This is perfect,’ I tell him. ‘Thank you.’ I hold up my glass and we clink. ‘To Gene,’ I say, and Ed nods solemnly. Gene was the real casualty of our expedition. It has been too easy to forget that he died: Jean has not answered any letters or emails directly, but she spoke out to the press, which I know she must have hated, to support my story. I want to fly over and see her in Brisbane as soon as I can afford it.

I am aware that I am being slightly too polite. I feel awkward. It took being abandoned off the east coast of Malaysia for me to drop my defences, and now they are back and tripled. I cannot relax with Ed, partly because I am attempting to quash a fierce desire, and I do not believe that he reciprocates it. When we were on the island, I spent almost all the time shaking him off and retreating into myself, while he was by far the strongest of any of us. Ed and Jean were the ones who kept us going. We thought, at the time, that it was Katy. She was pulling our strings, in her manic Village way.

Because I pushed him away, however, and never took any of our many opportunities to sneak into the jungle together, never did anything more than kiss him, he has probably moved on from thinking about me that way. He was not spoiled for choice out there: now, doubtless, he is. I am a damaged older woman with a child in tow. I am his friend, and that is all.

‘So,’ he says, sitting opposite me and grinning. He looks nice in a grey T-shirt, with more muscles than he used to have. Being clean-shaven suits him. In fact he looks like a model. ‘Katy. She stepped in and took your identity. Where did she come from? Do we know?’

‘Apparently they started doing some outreach with addicts and homeless people. That was where Cassandra met Katy. She rescued her and Katy went at it with a convert’s zeal. She and my mother deposed Moses, which I cannot imagine, because that place was all his, and Katy took over. I don’t know what her original name was. But she stepped into my shoes. Cassandra must have loved that. A new daughter, and one who wasn’t going to run out on her.’

‘And the island thing?’

I smile. ‘That just proves how crazed the two of them were together. Once they discovered – however they did, I have no idea – that I was going there, they got a huge plan in place.’ I have managed to piece most of this together after the event, with Martha’s help. Martha has been wonderful, and now that Cassie has vanished and Katy is out of action, she is in the process of daring to leave the Village. Philip doesn’t know yet. ‘She’d actually been to the island before she engineered my meeting with her, waiting for the boat. Planted the satellite phone there.’

Ed shakes his head and sips his drink.

‘No wonder she found the water supply and saved us all. Nice of her to let us almost die before she did it.’

‘I know. She wasn’t meant to leave it that long. It was just for fun, according to Martha. She waited for us to find the spring, and when we didn’t, she had to step in and do it herself. Enjoyed seeing us suffer, I imagine.’

Ed puts his feet up on the chair next to him. He has green socks on.

‘So she was you. Does that freak you out?’

‘Of course it does. She’d been living as me for twenty years. Sometimes I think I should have made the connection between Katy and Cathy, my original name, but then I realise how ridiculous that is. But it makes complete sense that Cassie replaced me, because that’s how crazy they are in there. And also that they made an elaborate plan to grab my child to get their twisted revenge on me. That, I knew they were going to do. They try that one with everyone. I think that they particularly had it in for me, though, because I’d always been such a good girl and had tried so hard, so when I ran away they were extra furious. Martha said they were raging and Moses swore revenge on me. But when Katy arrived, the dynamic changed and Moses ended up being sidelined. It was him, did I tell you that? Who paid for our rooms and took our bags away. God knows what he did with them. Not Gene at all, and not a cover story by that poor boy, the way we thought it was. Moses, sent to do Cassandra and Katy’s dirty work. Impossible.’