The Other Child

by Charlotte Link

  ‘Always,’ she finally answered.

  ‘Always? As a child? A teenager? Always?’

  ‘Always. Yes, I think so. Always,’ said Gwen, and it seemed she was being sincere. ‘I always dreamt of it. I always imagined it. And over the years the desire became stronger and stronger. And now I’ve done it.’

  She smiled happily.

  Leslie realised in horror: for years she’s been a time bomb. And none of us noticed.

  18

  Jennifer dialled the number of Fiona Barnes’s flat for the third time, but again the answering machine came on.

  ‘She’s not there!’ she said in despair.

  Colin was sitting at the wheel and driving them, pushing the legal limit, back in the direction they had come from just hours ago. He asked again, ‘And you’re sure you don’t have Leslie Cramer’s mobile number?’

  ‘Yes, I am. Unfortunately.’ Jennifer knew that Colin was thinking to himself that she was mad. He did not understand what was happening.

  ‘Why are you so worried about Dave?’ he had asked at home, confused. Jennifer had replied. ‘I’m afraid that Gwen will go crazy when he tells her the relationship is off. She won’t accept it.’

  He had not seen the problem. ‘Good lord, Dave Tanner is a big strong man. What’s to fear? That Gwen will scratch his eyes out? He can defend himself!’

  ‘I’ve got a bad feeling. A really bad feeling, Colin. The fact that no one on the farm is answering the phone … seems odd to me. I wish, oh I wish I could just check everything’s OK.’

  Although Colin had felt sure his wife was in danger of becoming hysterical, he had suggested they call Leslie. ‘She could do us the favour of driving over to the farm to take care of Gwen – or Dave Tanner, if he really needs protecting.’ Yet Leslie was obviously not home.

  ‘I’ll drive to Staintondale,’ Jennifer had said in the end, picking up the car key from the kitchen table. ‘If I don’t, I won’t have any peace until I do. Call me crazy, Colin, but I’m driving there now!’

  ‘It’s almost an hour and a half’s drive! We’ve just come. I do find that a little crazy, Jennifer!’

  She had put on her coat and marched out the door. After refusing for years to drive a car, she now seemed resolved to drive off, just like that. Colin had followed her, cursing, and in front of the garage had taken the key from her hand.

  ‘OK. But let me drive. You haven’t driven in years. For God’s sake, Jennifer, what’s up?’

  She had not replied. But he had seen in the light of the street lamps that she was feeling really bad. She was very worried, and Colin asked himself – not for the first time – how many secrets his wife might be hiding from him.

  ‘If you are so worried about Tanner,’ he said, ‘perhaps you should call the police. Rather than racing through the night and depriving us of our sleep!’

  ‘I didn’t say you should come!’

  ‘In the state you’re in, I couldn’t let you drive on your own. Jennifer, what are you afraid of?’

  She did not look at him, but pressed the side of her face against the glass. ‘I don’t know exactly, Colin. That’s the truth of it. I just know that Gwen could snap if Dave breaks up with her.’

  ‘What exactly do you mean by “snap”?’

  She did not reply.

  Colin pressed her. ‘Jennifer! What do you mean by “snap”?’

  She seemed to be struggling with herself. ‘She’s wound up so tight,’ she said in the end. ‘She’s eaten up with hate and despair. I don’t know if she’ll be able to brush off this failure.’

  ‘Hate? Gwen?’

  Now she turned to him. He looked over at her briefly, before he concentrated on the dark road again. Her eyes were wide open and full of fear.

  ‘I can’t call the police,’ she said. ‘Because then I’d draw their attention to Gwen, and that might put her in a situation she can’t get out of. But I know that Gwen has hated her life for years. She sees herself as someone who has had only misfortune. She’s really angry about it. She never told me directly, but I can feel it. I just know, Colin.’

  ‘Are you aware of what you’re saying?’

  ‘Yes. But that doesn’t mean she killed Fiona.’

  ‘But you don’t exclude the possibility?’

  Jennifer again said nothing.

  Colin took a hand from the wheel and rubbed his forehead. His skin felt cold and damp. ‘The alibi,’ he said. ‘The stupid fake alibi. You didn’t want to protect yourself, but her. You had an inkling, and instead of telling the police you made sure you got Gwen out of danger as quickly as possible. That’s crazy, Jennifer. That’s really crazy.’

  ‘She shouldn’t suffer any more.’

  ‘But she might have killed someone!’

  ‘But we don’t know!’

  ‘And it’s the police’s job to find out. It was your duty to tell them everything you know. All hell will break loose now. Do you realise?’

  Instead of answering, she asked, ‘Can you drive faster?’

  ‘We have to call the police now, Jennifer.’

  ‘No.’

  With a loud curse Colin put his foot on the accelerator pedal. Breaking the speed limit hardly mattered now.

  19

  ‘Your father will die if no one helps him soon,’ said Leslie. She could barely stand. She did not know how much time had passed. She felt that Gwen did not know how to get out of the situation she had put herself in. The minutes were ticking away and Chad’s chances of surviving were trickling away. Dave Tanner’s too. And there was nothing she could do. She had to stand opposite this madwoman and hope she did not panic and pull the trigger.

  Gwen shrugged. ‘Let him. That’s the point. Fiona dead, Chad dead. He controlled my life, and she helped him do it. And what’s more, the two of them have my mum on their consciences. Because Fiona refused to let go of my dad, and because he was unable to show Fiona her place, my mother got ill. Or perhaps you think she enjoyed having your gran here on the farm day after day? Your gran even cooked for my dad, took care of him when he was sick, shared his worries. Sometimes the two of them acted as if neither my mum nor I existed. We just weren’t there. That’s how Mum got cancer. And I …’ She stopped there.

  ‘You became mentally ill,’ said Leslie. She weighed her every word with the utmost care. ‘And I can understand. I’m so, so sorry not to have paid attention, not to have seen how things were. You had a horrible childhood and youth, Gwen. But why didn’t you leave, later? When you were eighteen? Why did you stay?’

  ‘I wanted to leave. You have no idea all the things I tried! You thought I was reading those stupid romance novels and living in dreamland. Instead I was …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I think I answered over a hundred personal ads. Met I don’t know how many men. Over the internet too, in the last few years. I know all the matchmaking sites. I know all the systems. I’ve spent hours each day at the computer. And many evenings on dates with men.’

  Leslie would never have guessed it, but by now little could surprise her. ‘You didn’t meet the right man,’ she suggested lamely.

  Gwen laughed shrilly. ‘You’re too much, Leslie! You’ve always got a wonderful way of describing the shittiest things! You didn’t meet the right man … Nice way to put it! Thanks for your tact! No, I didn’t meet the right man. The man who would have wanted someone like me. The horrific truth is there was never a second date. They saw me, they tortured themselves through an evening with me, maybe they paid for the meal, which they had wasted on me, and then they made off. Relieved it was over. And they never wrote again. Didn’t even reply to my mails. Let alone try to see me again.’

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Yes, it’s sad, isn’t it? Poor, unfortunate Gwen! But the evenings when they struggled to keep a conversation going with me were good days. Do you know what often happened? Imagine you’re in a restaurant. You’re nervous. You’re waiting for the man who might -might! - be Mr Right. You’ve
made an effort to look good. You know that you aren’t pretty and that you’re not good at doing yourself up, but you’ve done your best. You’re trembling with anticipation. And then the door opens. The guy coming in doesn’t look bad. Nor unfriendly. You know it’s him. The man you’ve been chatting to on the internet for weeks. You slowly get a feel for it, you know? You don’t need any sign, a red rose or a particular paper under your arm, anything like that. You just see. And he does too. His gaze wanders round the room and fixes on you. He recognises it’s you, just as you recognise it’s him. And you see he’s startled. Because you aren’t at all what he had hoped for. In a flash he feels queasy at the thought of having to spend the evening with you and that he’ll have to fork out for it, too. And you immediately know he won’t have the decency to stick around for the evening and then make a graceful exit later.’

  Leslie knew what was coming next. ‘So he acted as if he were in the wrong place, and left.’

  ‘Lovely situation, isn’t it?’ said Gwen. ‘You’ve just told the waiter you’re waiting for someone. Now you have to explain to him somehow that the person can’t unfortunately make it. You pay for the glass of water which you’ve been holding the whole time, get up and leave. You feel the staffs pitying looks. They understand too and feel sorry for you. You creep back home. Humiliated. Rejected. And your hatred grows. It becomes stronger than anything else. It even becomes stronger than your pain at some point. The time comes when you have the feeling that you are nothing but hate. And you think that you’re going to explode, unless something happens.’

  Leslie understood. She understood what had been building up in Gwen. She knew that hate which is hidden behind such a smooth and smiling surface for so long becomes a tornado, highly unpredictable. Yet she felt compelled to question the logic which Gwen saw and based her actions on.

  It might not be sensible to raise objections to a mentally ill woman who is facing you with a revolver, but she did it anyway. An instinct told her that one thing should not happen in any case: the conversation should not be interrupted.

  ‘Two things, Gwen, that I don’t get,’ she said. ‘First, why blame Fiona and Chad for all of that? And secondly, why didn’t you ever think of trying to find a way out of your situation, apart from finding the perfect man? Why not an education? A job? Your own money and independence? That’s the direction you should have taken.’

  Gwen looked at her in astonishment. ‘I could never have done that,’ she said, and seemed really surprised that Leslie could have such an idea. She was so astonished that Leslie understood now. It would be nearly impossible, in the short term, to make Gwen realise that she was intelligent and capable, and that she could have learnt a career like any other person and gone her own way. Probably months of effort could not do it. It would certainly need a very well trained psychologist. Decades of Gwen’s life would need to be worked through too, starting with her earliest childhood, and there would be no guarantee whether even that would be of help.

  ‘Oh Gwen,’ she said gently. She did not insist on an answer to her first question. It was now clear to her. Gwen’s hatred of Fiona and Chad, and her blaming of them, had led in the end to the murders. The self-doubt that ruled her life, her fear of really living and her inability to take responsibility for herself and her future – these were at the bottom of her hatred. Her life was pure pain, uncertainty and a feeling of constant inferiority. Her experience was of being rejected constantly. She was clever enough to realise that her life had been determined in her childhood by her indifferent father and by Fiona, who had destroyed her parents’ marriage over the years. Add to that the death of her mother, which she probably rightly attributed to the unfulfilled and therefore unending affair between Chad and Fiona. In casting blame, Gwen was not mentally ill. The reasons for blame seemed completely logical to Leslie. But the course of action that Gwen chose, that was sick. Yet for someone like her, who had felt like her back was against a wall for all her life, it was the only way out, however bitter it was.

  Gwen had not been able to bear it any longer. And she had begun to fight back.

  ‘As I said, I spent many hours at the computer,’ said Gwen. ‘And so I came across the mails your gran sent to my dad. I could hardly believe what I read. And yet what happened to poor Brian Somerville was just like them. It fitted my dad’s autism, and Fiona’s almost sick selfishness. If you couldn’t defend yourself against them, you’d go under. That’s what they were like. What they were always like.’

  ‘And you thought you could use Brian and Semira for your plan,’ stated Leslie, not without bitterness. It seemed particularly tragic to her that these two people, who each in their own way had suffered so much, were then used as pawns by a mentally ill murderer.

  ‘It was a perfect opportunity,’ said Gwen.

  ‘Did you plan to frame Dave right from the start?’ asked Leslie. Dave had certainly, she thought to herself, done a fine job of making himself look suspicious. Panicking that he could be found guilty, he had tangled himself up in ever more lies. First he had not said that he had left his house a second time on the night of the crime, and when that story was blown, he had made it worse by making up the night spent with his ex. It had been easy for Gwen to put him in a rather suspicious light.

  Gwen shook her head energetically. ‘No. Only after I gradually realised that he … was not serious about me. I’m not stupid, you know. I bet you all asked yourselves how I could be presumptuous enough to think that a guy like Dave would really be interested in me. Probably each of you urged the others to open the eyes of the poor, naive girl that I am! You were all worried about me, and about the rude awakening that I would have one day … But, frankly, Leslie, I’m not half as stupid as you all took me to be. From the first moment I could see that Dave wasn’t the typical guy to be courting a woman like me, and I watched him closely. I didn’t need your gran’s help to get the idea that he might just be after my property. More and more things suggested it. And that hurt. Because you know, in spite of all my scepticism and reservations, I had fallen in love with him. It was a wonderful time with him. His attention and his efforts – even if they weren’t really done for me – were something special. I hadn’t ever experienced anything like it. It was beautiful. There were moments I could really enjoy. They were out of a dream.’

  She sounded sad. I could glimpse the old Gwen, the one who was always a little melancholic and willing to please.

  And Leslie thought: we didn’t see that she was mad. But why didn’t we at least notice how sad she was?

  ‘Why did you shoot him?’ she asked. ‘It puts paid to your plan to frame him for the crimes against Fiona and Chad.’

  ‘There was nothing else I could do,’ said Gwen. ‘Sitting in a room with him, having to say goodbye and feeling how he was straining to get away from me, seeing that he was only sitting out the few hours out of decency, while inside he was quivering to go, because he couldn’t stand me any longer, because he wanted to get away, away … It hurt so much. It hurt so bad. I couldn’t let him go. I wouldn’t have been able to bear it.’

  ‘You persuaded him to walk down to the beach with you?’

  ‘I said I had to go out. I asked him to come too. He didn’t want to, but I think he felt sorry for me. So he came. I think his only concern was to end things decently. And part of that was not leaving me on my own after breaking off the engagement. He wandered down to the bay in complete resignation. I had stowed away the gun. I didn’t know what I would do, but I knew I wasn’t going to let him walk away.’

  ‘Are you sure he’s still alive?’ asked Leslie.

  ‘No idea. He was alive when I left. Either he’ll bleed to death or the tide will take him. I don’t care either way. It doesn’t matter any more, does it?’

  She said it with a resigned voice. Leslie grasped the opportunity. ‘It does matter, Gwen,’ she said urgently. ‘Your father is still alive. Dave might still be alive too. Let’s call for an ambulance. Please. You can still save bot
h of them. It’s—then it wouldn’t be two murders which you—’

  Gwen interrupted her with irritation. ‘No, just Fiona’s murder and two attempted murders. Do you think that’ll help me much? Do you think prison will feel nicer? Rubbish, Leslie. And you know it!’

  Leslie could see that Gwen was a complete contradiction right then. On the one hand she had a good understanding of her situation. She knew she would end up in prison, and she was resolved to try to prevent that. At the same time she did not seem to grasp the mess she was in. Did she seriously think she could get out of this untouched? Shoot down her father, Dave, Leslie, and then carry on as if nothing had happened, without any police suspicion alighting on her?

  Everything she had done revealed two sides. On the one hand, she had calmly made sure people around her knew about Brian Somerville’s story, ensuring a motive for the murders of Chad and Fiona was getting around and would sooner or later reach the police. She had also thought carefully about how to increase the suspicion which was in any case already falling on Dave. And then she had suddenly sabotaged herself, by losing control of her emotions and shooting Dave, unable to accept and bear his leaving her.

  She was more sophisticated, knowing and tactically clever than anyone had given her credit for, but she was not as calm and untouched as she would have liked to be. She remained unpredictable to others – and to herself.

  That made her, as Leslie realised with a shiver of fear, a terrifying and highly dangerous enemy. You could never foresee what the next moment would bring.

  ‘I left Dave lying there and came back to the farm,’ said Gwen indifferently, as if she were recounting some minor occurrence. ‘And then I saw a torch beam roaming around. You were going towards the bay, but I thought: who cares, even if she finds Dave, she’ll have to come back here. You never get reception on your mobile, which has its up side, as we can see. My father had locked the front door, just as you asked him to, I imagine, but of course he opened it when he heard my voice. And after I had put him out of action, I just had to wait for you. I sat at the top of the stairs. I took the precaution of taking the key out of the study door. I thought you’d try to call from there.’