Hiding in Plain Sight

by Susan Lewis

  Andee said, ‘If you want me to help him, then you’ll need to be more specific.’

  Sven smiled and nodded. ‘Of course, and I will be, but to explain properly means that first I must tell you about your sister.’ He gave a ponderous shake of his head, suggesting dismay, even sadness. ‘It still surprises me to think of her as part of another family, but of course, I’ve always known that she is.’

  ‘If you’ve always known it then why didn’t you …?’

  He raised a hand to stop her. ‘I will tell you everything, from the beginning, and hopefully this will answer your questions.’

  She regarded him carefully as, for several moments, he appeared to sink into his thoughts, until eventually his mesmerising eyes returned to hers. ‘Kate came to us,’ he began, ‘Kate is what we call her. I hope that is not difficult for you?’

  Andee shook her head, and wondered if he knew why Penny had chosen that name, if she’d even chosen it for the reason Andee suspected.

  ‘Kate came to us when she was twenty-one,’ he said. ‘We found her … I should say we were told where to find her, by John Victor, who I know to be your uncle. He is also the man who sold us her twin sons four years before.’

  Andee inwardly reeled. John Victor had sold Penny’s twin sons. So there were two, just like in East of Eden.

  ‘I realise you will think it a terrible thing that we bought two children,’ Sven continued, ‘but my wife was unable to have any of her own, and she so desperately wanted them. We could have adopted, of course, but it can take so much time and we weren’t getting any younger. So we decided on a different route. It wasn’t easy to find the right people to help us, but then I was introduced to John Victor …’

  He paused and drank more water, and used a folded handkerchief to dry his lips. ‘We were introduced, your uncle and I,’ he continued, ‘by a mutual friend whom I trusted and who assured me that Victor could help us. It turned out to be true, at least in one sense. At our second meeting Victor told me about a young girl who would willingly carry my child, so I paid him a great deal of money to keep the pregnancy and birth under the radar until it was time to bring the newborn – we didn’t realise at the time there would be twins – by private jet, to our home in Connecticut. By receiving the child there and not returning to Stockholm for a while, it would be easier for us to pass the baby off as our own. So Ana faked her pregnancy, and one day we got a call from Victor to let us know that the girl had given birth to twins. It didn’t matter. There was never any hesitation. We wanted them both. So Victor brought them to us, and Ana and I remained in America for the next two years, moving around quite a lot to avoid becoming too close to people, and of course to avoid awkward questions. After obtaining birth certificates and passports for the boys we brought them to our home in Djursholm.’

  Andee was so stunned she hardly knew what to say. To think of two tiny babies, her own nephews, as the victims of such exploitation and bartering was so shocking and unacceptable that she simply couldn’t deal with it right now.

  ‘They thought, believed,’ Sven went on, ‘that we were their parents. Their birth certificates say that we are …’

  Unable to stop herself, Andee said, ‘Why would you call one of them after John Victor?’

  Sven nodded soberly, apparently considering this a reasonable question. ‘At the time he brought them to us he was our saviour. We felt very much in his debt, even though we had paid him a great deal of money. It was his wish that one of them should be named after him, so that is what we did, altering it slightly to Jonathan. We had no idea at the time what Victor was really like, although you would say that we should have, as no normal person would have been able to pull off what he had. I guess we only wanted to think about the boys and how blessed we felt, and how blessed they were too to have parents who wanted them so much, when their own mother had only given birth to them for financial gain.’

  ‘Did you know that for certain?’ Andee challenged.

  Apparently chastened, he said, ‘We took Victor at his word, and got on with our lives.’ He stopped, took a shaky breath and drank some more water.

  ‘The boys were four years old when Ana, my wife, was seriously injured in a car accident and Alexander, Jonathan’s twin, was killed.’

  Andee felt the blow, and could see how deeply affected Sven still was by the tragedy.

  Seconds ticked by. He was staring at nothing as he eventually said, ‘When it became clear that Ana wouldn’t walk again, that she’d be unable to do many things for herself … This was when she started to believe that we’d been punished for taking the boys the way we had. She became convinced that their mother hadn’t wanted to part with them; even if she had, she might have changed her mind by now. She decided that we must try to find her, that she should be given the chance to be a mother to her son. I think she believed that only by doing this would she ever be able to forgive herself for the death of Alexander.

  ‘So I contacted John Victor and for another considerable sum he told me where the mother could be found.

  ‘It was appalling. The conditions she was being kept in were the worst I’d ever seen; I didn’t even know that people lived like that. She wasn’t alone; there were a number of girls there, and boys, barely existing in the kind of squalor I hope never to see again. She was so emaciated and sick that her captors were glad to be rid of her, but of course they made me pay. I didn’t mind, I’d have given them twice as much, ten times as much, to get her out of there. She had no idea who I was; she was in no state to know anything. She just did as she was told, collected up the few possessions she had: a hairbrush that was clearly rarely used, a ragged selection of clothing; only one pair of shoes; a toothbrush and a book.’

  A book.

  ‘East of Eden?’ Andee asked quietly.

  He nodded, though he didn’t appear to find her accurate guess either surprising or relevant. ‘I brought her here, to this apartment,’ he continued. ‘Ana and Jonathan were still in Djursholm. I didn’t want them to see Kate, as we came to know her, until she was well. It took a long time to get her well. I hired a nurse to help take care of her. She had the best medical and psychiatric attention, but it was still more than a year before she was able to converse without forgetting her words, or eat without vomiting, or even walk down the street without thinking someone was coming to get her. The psychological effects of her ordeal were profound.

  ‘Eventually, when the doctors declared her well enough, I took her to Djursholm to meet Ana and Jonathan. By then she’d chosen her new name and we decided that she should also have ours, so she became Kate Sylvander. We did everything we could to get her started in a new life, and she did everything she could to help care for Ana.’ He paused to take a breath. ‘We could see right away that she was finding it difficult to bond with her son,’ he said, ‘and she showed no outward signs of upset when she was told about Alex. We understood that she had been forced to internalise her emotions for so long that she was still afraid to show them, so we simply continued as we were. Jonathan called Ana Mamma and me Pappa and that was the way it stayed.’

  His luminous eyes came to hers, and seemed to leave his own thoughts behind to penetrate hers. ‘You are wondering,’ he stated, ‘how much we knew of Kate’s background when we brought her here.’

  He was right, she was asking herself that, along with many other things.

  ‘The truth is, we knew everything, because John Victor had told us before we entered into our agreement. He would not get his money unless he provided us with a full history of the mother. There could have been medical or psychiatric issues, and we needed to know what sort of legal complications we might face if she ever found the boys and wanted them back.

  ‘In the event it was never a problem. After we took her in she was happy to stay with us. She felt safe, she said, as though she belonged. She and Ana became close, and I knew it would break Ana’s heart to lose her, so there was never any question of her leaving and returning to you. It was he
r choice, never forced on her by us.’

  His eyes remained on Andee’s, slightly defiantly, showing that he’d known then, and knew now that he’d done wrong, but he wasn’t sorry.

  ‘You are wondering,’ he said, reading her mind again, ‘if she ever asked about you and your parents. The answer is no, she didn’t. That isn’t to say she didn’t use the Internet to read about her disappearance, because she did, and she frequently Googled your name during the time you were with the police to find out what you were doing. But she never talked about you, at least not to me or Ana. We tried to encourage her, told her that we’d understand if she wanted to be in touch with you, but she insisted that she didn’t. By then she’d begun working with me, helping to manage our properties here in Sweden, also those in London and the United States. She was very adept; a quick learner and as it soon turned out, a shrewd businesswoman. I promoted her through the ranks of the company with far greater speed than I had with anyone else, which didn’t make her popular, but she never seemed to mind about that. She wasn’t in it to be liked, she would tell me, she was in it to repay me and Ana for our kindness, and to do whatever it took to help girls, or boys, who, through no fault of their own, found themselves in the same position as I’d found her.’

  Andee sat quietly as he drank more water. She had the sense that he was moving forward too quickly, glossing over things to try and show his Kate in a good light, but there were shadows, far too much obfuscation for her to let it go that easily. However, for now she’d let him speak and if he didn’t mention John Victor again, she’d come back to it.

  ‘Of course I couldn’t help but admire her ambition,’ Sven continued, putting his glass down, ‘and I was more than ready to support her personal project, which she’d been working on quietly and diligently almost since her health had been restored. It was unusual, to say the least, but I was soon persuaded. Ana, on the other hand, was not. In fact she was very much opposed to it. We tried hard to persuade her to see things our way, but she never did, and I wasn’t prepared to back it without her blessing.

  ‘In the end it went ahead, but not until after Ana died.’ He swallowed hard, and so did Andee. Ana had objected to Penny’s idea, and now Ana was dead. Kate Trask had removed the madame from the path of her ambitions in East of Eden and had gone on to achieve them all, foul and depraved as they were. So how had Ana died?

  ‘The project was not without its dangers,’ Sven was saying, ‘and this was a big concern to me, which is why, when we decided that we would press ahead, I wouldn’t allow Kate to undertake it alone. We sought expert advice and hired people to escort her to various parts of this great continent to meet with the traffickers.’ His eyes were boring into Andee’s, gauging her response.

  Traffickers. Her mouth turned dry, her heart began a heavy, dull thud. ‘What were they trafficking?’ she asked, matching his even tone.

  ‘People,’ he replied.

  Again he showed no emotion, while she was finding it hard to stop herself reeling.

  ‘Her project became very successful very quickly,’ he continued. ‘She gained a reputation for paying well and in cash, and she never divulged the whereabouts of the traffickers to the authorities.’

  And this was a good thing? What kind of world was this man living in?

  ‘Her operations have become more refined over the years, but they are still …’

  Forcing a calm she was far from feeling, Andee said, ‘What kind of deal is she doing with these traffickers?’

  He nodded, clearly ready to come on to that. ‘She selects, she buys, the prettiest girls – and boys – the traffickers can offer and takes them under her wing. Everything is explained to them ahead of their departure, so if any of them don’t want to go they are free to stay where they are. Of course, once they find out what Kate – or Michelle as she is for her business – is offering, they always want to come. She turns their lives around in a way that would never have happened if they’d stayed in their homelands, or with those who’d promised them a better life. This is not the only way she finds people. These days she now has many scouts and intermediaries working for her in several parts of the world. I do not get closely involved myself; she doesn’t need my help, and now I am in no position to give it even if she did.’

  Andee started as he waved a hand towards the open window, and Selma quickly went to close it.

  ‘Do you need a blanket?’ Selma offered, clearly concerned. ‘Maybe you should take a break for a while?’

  He shook his head and gestured for her to sit down again.

  ‘You must be wondering,’ he said to Andee, ‘what Kate is offering these young people that is so irresistible to them. It would be easy to say a way out of poverty, a means of helping their families, we all know that is why most people leave their countries and those they love, to seek a new life. With Kate, instead of being cheated and lied to, beaten, raped, sold on to other traffickers and forced into prostitution and slavery, they are brought to Stockholm or Paris or London and installed in the various apartments we own around these cities. They are taught how to present themselves in the best way possible, so their hair is cut into sophisticated styles, their skin is given help if it needs it, they visit dentists, doctors, personal trainers, and then they are videotaped talking about themselves. They say their names and ages, where they are from, what sort of hobbies and ambitions they have, all sorts of things. These videos are then shown to couples in America, the Middle East, Asia, wherever they happen to be, to see if the girl is suitable for them. The girl’s task is to carry a child for people who are unable to have children of their own. If they like the look of the girl Kate has selected for them – and they almost always do as she is very good at putting people together – then everyone meets. If they are still sure about going through with it, the necessary papers are drawn up and so it begins. Sometimes the husband will donate his sperm, or even have relations with the girl, I am told, but where that isn’t possible a suitable donor is found. The fertilising process is carried out at one of the medical centres Kate owns in America. Surrogacy is legal in many states over there, as I’m sure you know.’

  Whether Andee did or didn’t hardly began to rate on the scale of issues being raised.

  ‘There are so many people in the same sad position Ana and I once found ourselves in,’ he continued, ‘eager, desperate to have children but denied by nature. They are prepared to pay very handsomely for someone – a healthy and beautiful young girl – to carry a child for them. If a sperm donor is being used then he too is very carefully selected. From conception the child belongs to the couple the surrogate mother has entered into an agreement with, and when she is safely delivered the infant is handed over to the happy parents.’

  Instinctively knowing it couldn’t be that simple, or as perfect as he was trying to paint it, Andee said, ‘And the surrogate mothers? What happens to them?’

  He smiled fondly. ‘They are free to go home, if this is what they wish to do, or they can help another couple to have a baby, which many of them do. Or Kate and her team will help them to find jobs and places to live until they are ready to return to their families, if they have one. Sadly, some don’t.’

  ‘What sort of jobs?’ Andee asked, wondering if she already knew the answer.

  He held up a hand to stop her. ‘This is not important,’ he declared, ‘and I’m afraid I am getting tired, so we really need to talk about Jonathan and why he needs your help.’

  Andee gestured for him to continue.

  ‘For some time,’ he said hoarsely, ‘Jonathan has been working with his mother, mainly in an administrative role, but they rarely see eye to eye. It is odd, given what she does to help others, how Kate seems to have very little maternal instinct of her own. She is not comfortable with her son, or with strong feelings, I have always known that. She is very focused on her work, which she finds much easier than many people would. Over the years I have heard her described as anything from a psychopath to a narcissist to a s
adist, but I have heard many good things about her too, and it is on them that I prefer to dwell. She has brought us a lot of happiness, not least through her boys, especially Jonathan, who is the gentlest, sweetest soul you could wish to meet. It’s hard sometimes to believe they are related. I think the fact that he isn’t more like her is what frustrates Kate the most about him. She considers him weak, which is not the truth at all. He is as determined and strong-minded as she is, but over different issues, which is why she is rarely kind to him. I doubt she has ever told him she loves him, and this could be because she doesn’t. To be honest, I don’t know how capable she is of love in the way we know it.’

  Certain that she wasn’t, Andee said, ‘Does he know who his biological father is?’

  Sven’s eyes narrowed as they came to hers. ‘Do you?’ he countered.

  She could feel herself tensing as she said, ‘Is it John Victor?’

  He shook his head.

  Experiencing an unsteadying relief, she continued to regard him, meeting his unflinching gaze with one of her own. ‘Then it’s you?’ she said quietly.

  He didn’t deny it.

  Andee looked at Selma.

  ‘We never told Ana,’ Sven said. ‘It felt like a betrayal, to sleep with a girl I didn’t know, to be able to produce a child when Ana couldn’t … I wanted her to feel that we were equal parents. And when Kate came to join us … It would have been too hard for Ana if she’d known the truth. She was confined to a wheelchair, she was so helpless and we were unable to be close, in a physical sense, any more. She would have looked at Kate, and me, in a different way. Please believe me when I tell you that apart from the time the twins were conceived there has never been anything of that nature between Kate and me. She is like a daughter to me.’