Stolen

by Lesley Pearse

  Even the front garden was stark: no daffodils or trees in blossom, just the narrow, tunnel-like passage through the hedges to a wider paved area in front of the house. There were narrow flower beds on either side of the path to the front door but aside from a few clumps of weeds, they were just bare soil.

  ‘Isn’t it cute!’ Fern exclaimed yet again as they went in with the suitcases and bags of groceries. ‘So very English!’

  Lotte wanted to say it wasn’t English at all, that it had a nod towards Scottish Baronial perhaps, but she thought the architect needed locking up. She said nothing of course, even though it was gloomy inside as a result of the narrow windows. The kitchen was brighter because it had a window set in the ceiling, but the decor all over the house was in keeping with its style: dark reds, browns, blues and russets.

  ‘Our office,’ Fern said, indicating the room next to the front door. ‘And the dining room,’ she went on, opening the door beyond the office to a room painted dark blue, with several model sailing ships in cases on the walls and various other nautical items including a large compass. Even the table and chairs looked as if they’d come from a ward room, of dark reddish wood with seats of brown leather. The kitchen too had many nautical items, a brass ship’s clock, sets of complicated knots in glass cases and the like. There was even a ‘cookie’ jar, as Fern called it, shaped like a lighthouse.

  Upstairs the master bedroom took up the whole front of the house, and it was only here that the slit windows looked quite stylish, for there were four, right down to the floor with its dark red carpet. Lotte actually liked the dark Victorianstyle wallpaper and matching curtains, and she supposed it was this room with its vast bed and whole wall of wardrobes that had sold the house to Fern.

  She was glad her room was at the back and had slightly wider windows. The russet decor wasn’t as oppressive as some of the other rooms, and over the hedged-in garden she could see fields and dozens of trees in blossom.

  Even that very first night Lotte sensed something odd. As she and Fern put food away in the kitchen, it seemed strange that Fern already had a firm plan about where everything should go. People weren’t usually like that in a strange house. When a light bulb fused in the hall, Howard went straight to a cupboard by the front door and got a new one out. It wouldn’t have occurred to Lotte to look there. While she was glad they seemed so at home, it felt kind of supernatural that they were.

  Lotte didn’t realize that there was a room and another bathroom in the basement until a couple of days later. When she drew Fern’s attention to the door leading to them, thinking she didn’t know about it either, Fern seemed to find that very funny.

  However, despite thinking the house was weird, and wishing she hadn’t lost all her friends’ addresses and telephone numbers, because she really would have liked to contact some of them, Lotte was happy. Fern and Howard were undemanding, easygoing people who ate whatever she cooked, didn’t hold her to a rigid timetable and appreciated her looking after them.

  They went out most days, sometimes just for a couple of hours, sometimes to sail down on the harbour, for they’d bought a little cabin cruiser and had it moored there. They got any shopping needed and brought it home with them.

  Lotte would clean the house and do the laundry in the mornings, and in the afternoons she usually went for a walk. It was around a mile down to West Itchenor and the sea, but she loved it so much she went there most days. Chichester harbour was a vast natural one, with Hayling Island on one side, West Wittering with its lovely sandy beaches on the other, and little villages like Bosham, Birdham and West Itchenor scattered between.

  There wasn’t much at West Itchenor, just a pub, a boatyard and some pretty old cottages, but there was a little ferry boat from there across to Bosham, and Lotte loved seeing the sea and the sea birds and feeling the wind in her hair. Down there the events in Ushuaia seemed to fade away.

  But hardly a day passed without Lotte thinking of Simon and Adam. She didn’t have the excuse that she didn’t know their address or phone number for not contacting them, for these were stamped firmly on her mind. It was fear of them turning up here to see her which prevented her. She knew only too well that Fern and Howard wouldn’t welcome an openly gay couple. If she asked her friends not to call they would know that was the reason, and she could almost hear Simon asking how she could bear to work for anyone with such prejudices. But the longer she left it, the more difficult it became, for she knew they would be hurt and worried by her silence.

  As the weather improved through April and May Lotte turned her attention to the two bare flower beds in the front garden. Her parents had been very fond of gardening, and although she’d never been allowed to do anything more than weeding and watering, she knew one flower from another and the conditions they liked.

  There were several keen gardeners in the village who offered plants for sale that were surplus to their needs. They had them on a table by their gate with an honesty box for the money. Fern gave Lotte twenty pounds pocket money every week, and she had nothing to spend it on, as she hardly ever went into town, so she bought plants with it.

  The lemon geranium was among the first batch of plants she bought, but she planted it up in a flowerpot and put it by the front door because she knew it wouldn’t be hardy when winter came and it was so nice when its scent wafted out as you brushed by it.

  She made the two flower beds in the front garden look very pretty with penstemons, lavender and hardy geraniums, and once the summer really got underway they would billow out on to the path and soften the ugliness of the house.

  One evening she asked Fern and Howard over dinner if they thought their landlord would mind her making a flower bed in the back garden as if would mean digging up a bit of the lawn.

  ‘There’s no point,’ Howard said quite abruptly. ‘We won’t be here long enough.’

  Fern looked flustered at his remark and passed it off by saying that they had always said they might be going back to the States.

  ‘Yes, of course you did,’ Lotte said, looking from one to the other in puzzlement because she knew there was something going on that they weren’t telling her. ‘Oh, don’t feel bad about me,’ she added, thinking they were afraid of leaving her in the lurch. ‘I can go back to Brighton. I’m OK now.’

  She felt she was fine too. She’d stopped getting heart palpitations every time a lone man walked towards her and sometimes she even fancied a night down at the pub, or would’ve done if she’d had anyone to go with. She missed Dale and Scott so much that she would have given anything to be able to ring them up and arrange to meet them again. And if she was really honest with herself, she was a little sick of all the praying she was expected to do.

  Fern and Howard said prayers before they left the house in the morning, and again at night. On Sundays Howard liked to read long passages from the Bible. It had been comforting at first, she’d even found that praying on her own worked like meditation and calmed her down. But she didn’t find that necessary now and it was a bit irritating that she was expected to bend to their beliefs.

  ‘We do feel bad about leaving you because we had hoped you would be with us when we had our baby,’ Fern suddenly blurted out.

  ‘You’re having a baby?’ Lotte exclaimed. She had imagined that at past forty Fern was too old for that. ‘How wonderful!’

  ‘Oh no, I’m not having one. I can’t, I’ve never been able to bear a child,’ Fern quickly replied. ‘What we mean is that we’ve been trying to find someone here willing to give us a baby.’

  ‘You mean you’re going to adopt?’ Lotte asked.

  ‘No, it will be our baby, well, Howard’s at least.’

  Lotte frowned. ‘You mean you’re going to find a surrogate mother?’

  ‘Yes, that’s about the size of it.’

  Over a couple of brandies Fern told Lotte the sad story of how she lost several babies when she first got married, and then eventually had to have her womb removed. She went on to say how much she a
nd Howard had to offer a child, a lovely home in the States, money in the bank and so much love. She told her they wished they’d tried to adopt years ago, but now the societies said they were too old.

  They had been to several different organizations in England who offered to arrange contact with young women willing to have a child by donor sperm, but when they looked into it they felt the women were either low life who used drugs, or slightly unbalanced people who might act irrationally when the baby was born.

  ‘Now a woman in Romania has been put forward as being perfect for us. So that was where we were intending to go next, not straight back to America. But I’ve still got a heavy heart about it. This woman doesn’t speak English, so we won’t be able to be sure about anything.’

  Fern looked so sad and troubled that Lotte hugged her. ‘I never knew you wanted a baby so badly,’ she said with real sympathy. ‘I wish I could do something to help you.’

  ‘You help us by just being around,’ Fern said, patting Lotte’s cheek affectionately.

  Fern and Howard went to R0mania, but returned after only two days. ‘She was almost as old as me,’ Fern said, looking really down and disappointed. ‘We think she had been a prostitute; she looked raddled and grubby.’

  ‘Just doing it for the money then?’ Lotte said.

  ‘Well, that’s all any of them would do it for,’ Howard said.

  ‘I wouldn’t, I’d do it for love,’ Lotte said.

  The words just slipped out without thought. What Lotte had meant was that having a baby for someone else should only be an act of love. Like a woman having a baby for her infertile sister. But Fern’s face lit up. ‘You’d do it for us?’ she said, her voice husky with emotion.

  That was the pivotal moment when Lotte should have firmly explained she was speaking in general, idealistic terms, not actually offering to do it for them.

  But Fern and Howard never gave her a chance to say that wasn’t what she meant. They were so busy hugging each other, offering praise to the Lord for sending her to them, that Lotte found herself unable to say they had misunderstood.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘You agreed to have a baby for them?’ Dale interrupted incredulously.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ Lotte retorted. ‘I only agreed that it should be done for love. But Fern was like a bulldozer, she just brushed everything I said aside. I did get my courage up a day later to say she’d misunderstood me and that I couldn’t possibly do it. But she laughed at me, said I just had a touch of the collywobbles and I’d be OK soon.

  ‘Before I knew it she was making plans, drawing up ovulation charts and explaining how she’d have to take my temperature each morning so they knew when I was at my most fertile. I can’t tell you how freaked out I was, and I knew that I was going to have to make a run for it.’

  ‘Speaking of making a run for it,’ Dale said, ‘shouldn’t we try battering down the door?’

  ‘It’s impossible, I tried it.’ Lotte sighed. ‘It’s solid oak, only a chainsaw would get through it.’

  ‘Who do you think is up there?’ Dale cocked her head to listen.

  ‘I doubt anyone is,’ Lotte said. ‘Howard probably was there, but I think he’s gone away now. I can’t hear anything. I don’t think he’ll come back until he’s decided what to do with us. Even then he’ll probably send someone else to do his dirty work.’

  ‘Does that mean we won’t get any food?’ Dale asked, her voice faltering.

  Lotte hesitated. ‘I don’t know,’ she said weakly.

  Realizing that was Lotte’s gentle way of preparing her for starvation – after all, there was no point in feeding people you were planning to dispose of – Dale made a conscious effort to subdue the terror and panic rising within her.

  ‘Right, so we’d better make plans for how we are going to overcome the men when they come to collect us,’ she said, far more brightly than she felt.

  ‘I thought about that a lot when I was down here before,’ Lotte said. ‘What I came up with was that I’d pretend to be out cold on the bed. That way, whoever came for me would have to pick me up. I planned to stick my nail file in his eye, and hopefully as he was screaming and carrying on, I could rush out.’

  ‘But that didn’t work?’ Dale raised an eyebrow.

  ‘That wasn’t how I was taken. Do you want me to continue about what happened to me?’

  Dale nodded. She needed something to take her mind off how serious their predicament really was.

  ‘They went out a couple of days after this stuff about wanting a baby had come up,’ Lotte said, sinking back against the bed rail as she recalled exactly what had happened.

  She had woken to the sound of rain lashing against the window, and when she went to have a shower she was shivering despite it being the end of May. Later, as she put on one of the print dresses Fern had encouraged her to buy, all at once she saw how incredibly awful she looked. It was a defining moment, for suddenly she could cut through all the stuff which she’d seen as kindness and care, her own need to be loved, and realize that Fern and Howard had been playing a long game with her.

  They had sucked her into their way of life by taking her to a luxurious hotel, giving her a wonderful time, and at the same time separating her from her old friends, under the guise of protecting her. They had even disposed of her old clothes and got her to buy new ones as a way of reinforcing her paranoia of men looking at her. Once down here she had the illusion of freedom – after all, she could walk out of the door whenever she chose. Yet they had actually been getting her into a state of mind where she was so indebted and dependent she had no will of her own.

  But they hadn’t quite got her to the point where she was prepared to have a baby for them. And now she understood that was their plan, she knew she must get away from them as quickly as possible.

  ‘We’re driving up to London today,’ Fern said over breakfast. ‘Would you like to come with us?’

  Lotte’s heart leapt. Not at being offered a trip to London, but the perfect opportunity to leave. They’d be gone for hours, and although it was cowardly not to tell them she was going, she couldn’t face Fern doing the emotional blackmail bit about how good they’d been to her.

  ‘I think I’d rather stay here, if you don’t mind,’ she said. ‘It’s such horrible weather, and if it’s the same in London I won’t be able to walk about and explore while you’re busy.’

  Neither of them looked concerned at her decision, and they left about half an hour later, saying they doubted they’d be back before eight that evening.

  Lotte washed up the breakfast things, swept and tidied the kitchen, and on an impulse decided to have a look through all Fern and Howard’s papers in the office before she left for good.

  She wouldn’t normally poke into anyone’s private things. But she supposed that she’d feel less guilty about running off if she found something in the office which pointed to them not being quite the God-fearing, honourable people they purported to be.

  There was nothing unusual in any of the desk drawers, just receipts for petrol and other expenses and a couple of invoice books for the sportswear company they owned in America.

  The filing cabinet was locked though. Lotte had never seen it open, and for all she knew it could have stuff locked in it which belonged to the people who owned the house. But as she pulled down one of the box files on a shelf above the desk to see what was in there, a small key fell down.

  The box file contained more correspondence, most of it recent letters pertaining to a commercial property the Ramsdens were buying in Southampton. Lotte had heard them discussing this openly on many occasions. It was a semi-derelict warehouse which they were hoping to pull down and build an office block in its place, but strangely all the correspondence was addressed to Mr and Mrs Gullick, not Ramsden.

  She didn’t bother looking in any of the other box files for they’d all been here when they moved in – she supposed they all belonged to the landlord – and instead tried the small key in the fil
ing cabinet. The key turned and she could open all three drawers.

  There in the top drawer, sitting among several small boxes, was her old mobile phone.

  It was unmistakable, for even though it was a common black Nokia Lotte had personalized it by sticking a row of crystals round the screen.

  She felt as though someone had punched her in the stomach and winded her. Tears sprang into her eyes because they had lied when they claimed not to have seen it, called the car hire company to ask if they’d found it, and later, when she was upset at losing touch with all her friends, they’d suggested someone had picked her pocket at Southampton docks.

  How easy it must have been for Fern to slip her hand into Lotte’s bag while they were in the car and take it. The perfect way of cutting her off from everyone she knew!

  Doing such a thing proved their intentions had never been honourable.

  After all this time the battery was completely flat of course, and sadly she’d thrown the charger away back at the Dorchester, but she was delighted to have found it anyway, and she could buy another charger in Chichester and access all her numbers again.

  The second drawer of the cabinet held many suspended cardboard files, all of them with single names which meant nothing to her, but one was labelled ‘Drummond’, the name of the house, so she pulled that one out.

  The letter on the top of the file was a completion statement from a solicitor in London. It was dated September 2000 and related to the purchase of ‘Drummond’, by Mr and Mrs Gullick, for the sum of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds.

  Lotte thought the file belonged to the landlord and was about to put it back in the cabinet when she noticed a handwritten note stapled to the card file. It was merely a list of items, a filing cabinet, desk and bookcase among them, but this was in Fern’s writing.