Jonathan stood up. “Now, what about this tin I’ve found,” he said as if reading Tayte’s mind. “It’s in my study if you’d like to follow me.”
Parked in the lane outside the Lasseter house, screened by a tangle of brambles and low hawthorn branches, a dark green Land Rover Defender shook into life. It had been there since sunrise and the driver had been forced to start the engine from time to time to keep out the cold. He left it running and got out of the vehicle, dry leaves crackling beneath his shoes as he picked his way deeper into the verge, pushing the prickly foliage aside to get a clear view of the house.
When he found one, he removed the glasses that were pinched to the bridge of his nose and lifted a high-magnification riflescope to one eye. He used the limb of a branch to steady it, breath lingering like freezing fog around him as he scoped the house and the cars on the drive. There were two cars, but he was only interested in the silver Vauxhall that hadn’t been there when he’d first arrived. He made a mental note of the registration and continued to study the house and the windows, looking for activity until the cold began to make the lens shake in his hands.
He went back to the car where he would wait. With Buckley taken care of he’d planned on paying Joan Cartwright a visit today, but he deemed that no longer necessary - just as it was now no longer necessary to visit with Jonathan and his wife. Anything they knew about Mena Lasseter was surely now known to the American.
Two birds with one bullet.
He knew Tayte would show up at the Lasseter house eventually, but that he had come to him so soon had been an unexpected bonus. It would save time and that was all-important to him. But he didn’t want to be hasty. The American was going to find Mena for him. All he had to do now was to watch and be patient.
The tin box Jonathan had found in the attic was sitting on an old pine desk by a window that looked out onto bare fields, stripped and cold in the pale winter sunlight. Jonathan went straight to it and Tayte followed him, eyeing all the old medical books that were lined up on shelves around the room.
“Most of them belonged to my grandfather,” Jonathan said, noting Tayte’s interest. He picked the tin box up and handed it to Tayte. “And I suspect that this belonged to my grandmother, Margaret.”
Tayte studied it, turning it in his hands. It was an old cash tin. He’d seen plenty just like it before. It was black and gold with a red line around the lid and there was a gold-coloured handle on top. He could see where Jonathan had attacked it, scarring the paint and twisting the metal. The hinges squealed as he opened it and inside he found a small stack of papers. Old family papers always put a smile on Tayte’s face and this was no exception.
“I’ve been through them,” Jonathan said. “I think you’ll be particularly interested in the top two.”
Tayte lifted them out and put the tin back onto the desk. The papers were pink and thin and as he unfolded the first he saw that the writing had faded to the point of being barely legible in places. The printed detail on what was clearly a carbon copy was much clearer.
“Trinity House,” Tayte read aloud. “The Sisters of Enlightened Providence. Catholic home for unmarried mothers.” He looked at Jonathan. “It’s a consent form to a mother-and-baby home.” He scanned the faded handwritten detail and could just make out the name, ‘Philomena Lasseter’. It was dated December 1944, confirming his earlier idea that Mena had run away from home at the end of that year in an attempt to keep her baby. But Tayte knew she hadn’t kept it and he thought maybe the contents of this tin box would confirm why.
“Look at the other form,” Jonathan said, pre-empting his next move.
Tayte unfolded it, expecting to find it identical in every respect apart from the date. They were both consent forms to the same mother-and-baby home and both were signed by Margaret Lasseter, this one dated early February 1945. But there was one other significant difference.
“Mena Fitch,” Tayte said under his breath, recalling the name on his client’s original birth certificate.
The form had answered the question of why Mena was recorded under her mother’s maiden name and he supposed that Margaret Lasseter had registered her under this alias to disassociate her daughter from the family and the shame she felt her condition had caused.
“So Mena came home again,” Jonathan said. “How come Dad never knew about it? He was back from the war a few months later. Even if he hadn’t heard directly, surely Granddad Pop would have told him where she was.”
Tayte thought about that. It seemed probable that whatever plans Mena had when she left home didn’t turn out how she’d hoped they would. Or maybe she had been found and brought back against her will. He thought about Mena’s visit with Joan, when she’d taken her letters and her pendant to her for safekeeping, perhaps knowing that they would be confiscated either by her mother or the Sisters of Enlightened Providence. It was in late January, Joan had said. Mena clearly meant to return for them, but she had not - or she had been unable to. He began to wonder how long Mena might have been detained at Trinity House. He picked up the tin again and began to scratch through the contents looking for similar forms.
“Was there anything else from this place?” he asked.
“Not that I could see,” Jonathan said.
Tayte kept looking. “Many of these mother-and-baby homes were little more than sweatshops,” he said. “A throwback from the Victorian era.” He found a receipt for something and quickly dismissed it. “In many cases you could only get out again if a member of your family came to claim you.” He looked up from the tin and eyed Jonathan seriously. “Right now,” he added, “I’m guessing that as your father didn’t know what became of Mena, and as your grandfather doesn’t appear to have mentioned anything to him either, I suspect that your grandmother, Margaret, was the only person in the family who knew Mena was there.”
Tayte reached the bottom of the tin and a chilling thought gripped him. He hadn’t looked into Mena’s wider family. This assignment had so far been all about finding Mena - making the connection. Charting the family tree was something for later if his client wished it.
“When did Margaret die?” he said.
Jonathan scratched his chin. “Now let me think,” he said. “I remember Dad telling me she died before I was born - that was in 1950. I only knew Granddad Pop and I was about five or six when he died.” He scratched at his chin some more. “Now wait a minute. I know this one,” he added, like he was in the middle of a quiz game. Several seconds later, he said, “George Orwell!”
“What, 1984?” Tayte said, confused.
“No, when the book was published. That was in 1948. Dad was a big Orwell fan. He was always filling my head with things like that.”
“Are you sure?” Tayte said. “Or should I get my laptop out?’
“No, I’m positive. Margaret died in 1948. Just don’t ask me what she died of.”
“Three years after Mena went into the home,” Tayte mused. “It’s not long after, is it?”
“What are you thinking?”
“Right now I’m thinking the worst,” Tayte said. “But I hope I’m wrong. If Mena was still with the Sisters of Enlightened Providence when her mother died, who else was there to go and claim her if no one else knew she was there? Under a partly false name she would have become lost in the system.”
“I see,” Jonathan said. “So she could have been there for a very long time?”
Tayte gave him a slow nod. “There, or she could have been transferred someplace else. There were numerous institutions like this around at the time - many of which still operated to the Victorian moral standards in which they were established.”
“Well let’s hope Margaret collected her before she died,” Jonathan said. “Although, wouldn’t Mena have come home if she had?”
Tayte had been thinking the same thing but he’d concluded that they couldn’t know what Mena might do or where she would go. He thought that after being forced to give up her baby, maybe she didn’t want to go home.
“I was planning on visiting the local record office today,” he said. “I might get some more answers there and these consent forms should give me a head-start. Maybe you’d like to come along?”
“I’d love to,” Jonathan said. “I’ve nothing planned for today. That’s if you’re sure I won’t be in the way.”
Tayte smiled. “Believe me,” he said. “I need all the help I can get and I might have some more questions for you yet.” He flicked a hand at the consent forms he was still holding. “I’d like to go and check out Trinity House first, though,” he added. “It’s probably the quickest way to find out if it’s still there and I like to visit locations to get a sense of place whenever I can.”
Jonathan leaned in and read the address. “It’s just north of the city,” he said. “Shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes.”
“Great,” Tayte said. “See, you’re helping already.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
I
t took little time to discover that Trinity House was no longer at the address printed on the old consent forms. It was evident as soon as Tayte turned the car onto the road it once stood on that the whole area had been redeveloped into what was now a sprawling housing estate to accommodate city expansion and the inevitable growth of Leicester’s population. The home for unmarried mothers that had once stood in the middle of it all was now a shopping arcade, which according to the plaque set above the main entrance, had originally been built in 1959 and it had since been expanded and modernised. That information set Tayte wondering what had happened to all the girls who were interned at Trinity House when it closed. As he turned the car around and headed back towards Leicester, he hoped he would soon find out.
The record office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland, was located in the town of Wigston, which neighboured Oadby to the southeast, and although Jonathan hadn’t been to the record office before, he knew the area well enough to tell Tayte where Long Street was. They took the ring road around the city and it didn’t take long to get there in the late morning traffic.
Tayte parked in the visitor car park, collected his briefcase from the back seat and he and Jonathan strolled the short distance to the record office entrance. He thought it looked like a converted schoolhouse that had been extended over the years into the complex it now was. It had sections of tall, white-painted windows set into the red brick walls, behind which he could easily imagine school assembly and gym classes taking place.
As they drew closer, Tayte felt his pulse rise. He knew that adoption agencies and homes like Trinity House were originally only required to keep records for twenty-five years - a requirement that was extended to between seventy-five and a hundred years from the 1970s - but on so many occasions he’d found exceptions to the rules. That was what he liked about local record offices: you never really knew what you might find until you started looking.
Inside, Tayte handed over his briefcase in exchange for a numbered locker key and they had to register before they were allowed access to the archives. They were directed to a high-ceilinged room that had document boxes stacked on shelves around the perimeter, and in the middle of the room they passed a line of chairs at a long table loaded with microform readers. At the end of the table they came to an annexed reading room where a few visitors were sitting hunched over documents. To their left, a middle-aged woman sitting behind an L-shaped desk smiled and greeted them as they approached.”
“Hello. How can I help?”
Tayte returned the woman’s smile. “I’m looking for information about a local mother-and-baby home that operated in the 1940s. I know it’s a long shot but do you keep anything here from that time?”
The woman’s head started to shake even before Tayte had finished his enquiry. “I’m sorry,” she said, “So few records of privately run homes for unmarried mothers survive today. We don’t have anything here at all.”
Tayte’s shoulders slumped. He thought there might have been something.
“The main items we have that might be of interest to you,” the woman continued, “are for the Diocese of Leicester Board of Social Work - formerly the Leicester Diocesan Moral Welfare Association. It was established for young people in moral danger, such as unmarried mothers, and it became an adoption society in 1943, although that function ceased in 1980.”
“Of what religious denomination is the Diocese of Leicester?” Tayte asked, thinking there might still be some hope if the Diocese was Catholic.
“Anglican,” the woman said, killing that hope dead.
Tayte sighed. “I see. Well, thanks for your time.” He turned away and headed out.
“So that’s it?” Jonathan said as he caught up with him.
“I need a coffee,” Tayte said. “I saw a machine on the way through. I need to think.”
The coffee machine was in a small rest area close to the main reception desk. They stood with their drinks as they talked.
“If Mena went to Trinity House in 1945,” Tayte said. “Then as I see it there are only three ways that she left. Reason one - someone claimed her. Two - she died while she was there. Three - she was transferred, either in 1959 when the home closed or sometime before.”
“I think we’ve already ruled out option one,” Jonathan said. “If Margaret - perhaps being the only person who knew she was there - had claimed her, she would have brought Mena home again and I know that didn’t happen or Dad would have said.”
Tayte agreed. “And I’m pretty sure that we can rule out option two. If she’d died while at the home, I would have found a record in the local indexes. I’ve already checked them for Mena Lasseter and Fitch.”
“So you think she was transferred?”
“It seems the most likely scenario of the three and that raises two new questions. Where and when?”
“But isn’t there a fourth scenario?” Jonathan said. “She could have escaped.”
Tayte had considered that but he’d ruled it out for the simple reason that if Mena had escaped, she would have gone to Joan for her letters and pendant.