The Orphans

by Annemarie Neary

  ‘It’s Hana. Outside the café. See?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think—’

  ‘You can’t miss her, Charlie. There. She’s looking straight at the camera.’

  ‘I guess it must be archive footage.’

  ‘What the fuck? Why can’t you just tell the truth for once?’

  Charlie reaches for the remote, Ruby dangling from his hip, and switches Hana off. Ruby’s eyes dart from one parent to the other and then she starts to cry, tipping her head right back and screaming into the ceiling. She senses that her little world has fractured, and she is right. Charlie jiggles her, changes hip, but she is inconsolable.

  Desperate for news of Maya, Jess turns on the phone she’d agreed to keep switched off and the messages come flooding through. Eddie, Eddie, Eddie, Crowe, Crowe, Crowe. Sixteen missed calls, a dozen WhatsApp messages, so many emails. She tries Eddie first, even though she is ashamed, so ashamed. But his number is constantly engaged.

  She gets through to Crowe on the first attempt, and he comes straight to the point.

  ‘You need to give me your brother,’ he says. ‘If you persist in shielding him, you’ll be obstructing us. Understand? And Jess, you help me, I’ll help you.’

  She doesn’t need to ask him what he means. He is only too happy to tell her.

  ‘I want Sparrow. Understand? You give me Sparrow, and I’ll give you everything I’ve been able to find out about your mother.’

  She is so exasperated that he could still think she has any idea where Ro is that the words tumble out of her. ‘I’ve no idea where he is. But I’m on my way. We’re heading straight back now.’

  ‘You don’t know where he is?’

  ‘I sent him away,’ she says, and then the thought she can’t afford. Perhaps she should have kept him close, perhaps she could have stopped this.

  ‘I’ve spoken to Eddie Jacques, of course, and he’s beside himself. He’s told me the history, about your mother – the affair, and all the rest of it. No time for secrets now.’

  Eddie. The thought of what he must be going through brings tears to her eyes. She dreads speaking to Eddie.

  ‘We’ll find her,’ Crowe says. ‘I’m convinced of that. But first we need to find Sparrow.’

  ‘You never found my mother,’ she says. She blurts it out and is ashamed because he needs to concentrate on Maya now.

  He pauses a moment. ‘No, and I don’t think we will,’ he says.

  She is shocked just how much she wants him to be wrong.

  ‘After all this time, it’s a jigsaw. There’s no open book I can give you.’

  And even though she is aware that he might be feeding her snippets to be passed on should she be in touch with Ro, she doesn’t care. She can almost hear him calculating what it’s in his interest to tell her, and whether that might improve his chances of getting Sparrow in return.

  ‘We’ve been focusing our enquiries on a man called Dejan Gorivic. Gorivic came from Slovenia originally, had a bit of a racket going in Goa. Drugs mainly, a bit of protection too. There was a file on him, way back, but nobody made the connection with your parents. They were looking for a missing couple, of course, not a woman on her own, so perhaps that skewed things. They can’t have known that your mother and Gorivic were having an affair either. She seems to have been quite successful in keeping it quiet. Anyway, Gorivic had a serious road accident a few days after your parents disappeared and a European woman, who was assumed at the time to be a girlfriend, was fatally injured. That was on the road between Candolim, where Dejan Gorivic had various business interests, for which read rackets, and the place where you were living. Given that we now know that Sophie went off with Gorivic, that Gorivic was your father’s dealer, my best guess is that the dead woman was your mother.’

  Her ears feel as if they are stuffed with cotton wool.

  ‘We can’t be sure, of course. There was no description, nothing to identify her other than that she was thought to be in her thirties. This being India, she was cremated within a matter of days. My guess is, your mother was held against her will. Maybe it made sense to get her out of the way while they got rid of Will. Maybe she did go along with something, then changed her mind. To be fair to the authorities, things were much more difficult back then. No Internet, of course, poor communications. Took a while to link bits of information. Were proper procedures followed? I doubt that. They didn’t exactly break their arses trying to find out who she was. Why not? A woman in a car with a drug dealer? He’d have had the means to bribe his way out of trouble, for a while at least. Gorivic left India soon after the accident. He went back to Slovenia, and ended up working in the casino business in Portorož. Came a cropper himself a few years later. Knifed on the seafront late one night.’

  There is no comfort in any of this. If anything, it is simply the cue for a whole new set of nightmares. It would break Ro’s heart.

  ‘I don’t want my brother to be told.’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that, Jess, when I track him down. I don’t think he’ll have gone far. But he’s not in Riverton Street anyway. We’ve been in there already.’

  She visualises a boot in her beautiful grey door, though she knows that’s venal of her. But apparently the neighbours were obliging with the keys, and while her marriage has been shattered, her hopes too, the grey door is still intact.

  19

  They drive back to London straight away. Ruby is asleep before they’ve even joined the motorway, and the dread that is always there, lurking at the pit of Jess’s stomach, cranks ever tighter as they approach the city. They sweep through Hammersmith and down the Fulham Palace Road, then through the zig and zag of side streets towards the bridge. From the back seat, she can hear her phone, thrumming mutely in the depths of her bag. She strains to reach it, but it’s too far away. It’s hard to find anywhere to park on Riverton Street, which is crammed with the chunky seven-seaters that are the vehicles of choice around here. There are no journalists on the doorstep – she is grateful to Inspector Crowe for that at least – but as they walk into the hall, she realises with a shock that the police have taken up residence in her house. She starts to say something to Charlie, but he has already passed ahead of her, and is climbing the stairs with Ruby slumped in his arms.

  Two plain-clothes men are slouching in the drawing room, peering at a screen. Two more are in the kitchen, making coffee from her machine. They look up briefly, nod at her, then return to what they were doing before she walked into her own home.

  She should have heeded the warning signs, the desperate infatuation that seldom turns out well. She longs for Ro to be stretched out on a sofa, watching one of those programmes he likes – unsolved mysteries, the renovation of perfect family homes. She imagines him restored to shining innocence and planning his next trip.

  But there is no Ro.

  And it is all making sense now – the missing items from the cellar, the obsession, the feeling she had that he was still somehow close. She can hear Auntie Rae in her ear – reaping and sowing. Rae was a great one for telling you what you should have done.

  The policemen don’t seem to want to interact with her, and that makes her wonder if they suspect her too. She takes what she needs upstairs – the shoeboxes of photos, a bottle of Chianti Classico with a single glass – while Charlie tucks Ruby into the bed that Jess will never share with him again.

  The story of Maya is ripping its way through her, its various implications and dark possibilities coming at her in squalls of realisation. By comparison, the end of her marriage is just a small black cloud, hovering overhead and fat with rain. She locks herself in the spare room with her phone and these new comforts. Even the past is less frightening than the future.

  She reopens the Clarks box, the one with the earliest photos. There is still no one she recognises in there, except for a plump, sour-looking girl in shorts who could, just possibly, be Evelyn. She wonders if it is possible to chart Eddie’s love life, the transfer of affections from one girl
to the next by his subjects, some of whom he has concentrated on to a forensic degree. Visual essays on knees and shoulders. If there was anything more obviously erotic in there, it has been removed.

  The Nike box, Goa 2, is where her parents are. In the handful of pictures she can find of him, her father is reclining – on a brightly coloured rug, surrounded by cushions that are equally bright, on a patch of scuffed grass under a tree. His features are out of sync with one another, as if his eyes have forgotten that his mouth is happy. His interaction with the camera is uncertain, the mood he projects impossible to decode. There are pictures she finds hard to look at. The one she has to turn face down has her father kissing someone who could only be Mags Madden. Twenty-five years ago, Mags must have been in her mid-thirties, probably only a year or two older than Jess is now. She is tiny and very, very white with a great shock of bright red hair. In another image, Mags is clinging on to Pa and gazing straight at the camera, as if daring it to look away. Her determination is arresting, even now.

  At first, Jess is astonished that there don’t seem to be any photos of Sophie at all. And then she finds, in a brown envelope near the bottom of the box, an entire bundle of Sophies. The shock of it is overwhelming, but while Jess cries harsh, raw tears, Sophie is unperturbed. She gazes back – smiling, pensive, coquettish – fiddling with her plait or strumming on her guitar. Now and then, she is even playing with her children. But none of those pictures has been taken on a beach.

  Whatever the setting or her expression, the message Jess receives from these images is always the same. I am dead, gone. Nothing more to see here. Move on.

  In one of the last photos in the bundle, Sophie is sitting at a bar beside a thickset man with a comic-opera moustache. She doesn’t even need to ask Evelyn. She is sure that this is Dejan. He is glaring into the camera, as if challenging the photographer, who has responded by slicing his face in two. She feels a rush of hatred for him.

  Jess opens the bottle of wine and works her way steadily through it, quarter-glass by quarter-glass. As she reaches the halfway point, she starts forcing it down like medicine. Around three in the morning, she goes upstairs, all the way up to their room, where Charlie is asleep, still fully dressed, as if he might have to make a swift getaway, with Ruby pulled tightly in to him.

  She picks up the phone to try Eddie again, and sees there are three voice messages. One is from the woman at the Daily Post, one from another journalist and the third from someone who is also probably a reporter. She calls herself Amanda Rowley and says she works at the café on the Common. She got Jess’s number from a neighbour and could she call back urgently please. Jess doesn’t know anyone who works in the café, and besides it’s the middle of the night now anyway.

  Dialling Eddie’s number, it breaks her heart to hear the dart of hope in his voice when he picks up.

  ‘It’s only me,’ she says. ‘I guess there’s still no news.’

  ‘If he so much as—’

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘But he won’t.’

  ‘You heard they think he killed Mags. Kicked her in the head. Jesus Christ.’

  ‘That’s only a rumour, Eddie. There’s no basis for that at all.’

  ‘It’s time to face realities,’ he says.

  And he’s right, of course. It feels absurd now to think that Charlie and she might have been standing in the middle of a field tonight, glass of champagne in hand, looking at the moon, while her own brother was holding Maya hostage. Now, her marriage is over and her brother is a kidnapper, perhaps worse. But because this is a night of realities, terrible and frightening and unforeseen, it seems just possible to ask Eddie about an old love while the new one is in such danger. She approaches it as gently as she can.

  ‘I’ve been to see Evelyn,’ she says. ‘You never told me.’

  ‘How do you tell a child that you’ve been sleeping with her mother?’

  ‘Haven’t been a child for a while now, Eddie.’

  ‘I decided it was better to say nothing. Besides, it was over by then. She had left. What was the point of upsetting you?’

  ‘She told you something, though, didn’t she? I really need to know what it was. Will you tell me?’

  He is quiet. She can hear his breath rise and fall.

  ‘She told me she was going away with Dejan. Just for a few days. She said she had to find a way to keep him off Will’s back, that she didn’t love Dejan but that Will owed him so much money they could never have paid him back. She told me she was leaving Will, but she had to get him back to England first, get him into rehab, all that. Look, Jess. It’s hard to say this now. But I thought she loved me. I didn’t realise there was such a queue.’ And he laughs so bitterly to himself that she finds herself compelled to apologise on behalf of a mother she never really knew.

  ‘And I began to question everything. She had a cold streak, Sophie. I worried about what she asked me to do. I began to worry that I’d been used.’

  She forces down another mouthful of wine. It tastes thick now, sour. She hardly dares ask the obvious question.

  ‘What did she ask you to do?’

  ‘She told me you were all going to the beach that day, that she would slip away so as not to upset you kids by saying goodbye. Although she left you with Will, she didn’t really trust him not to fall asleep, to remember to feed you, all that, so she asked me to nip down and make sure everything was OK.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘When I got there, Will was gone, she was gone. You kids were at the water’s edge.’

  ‘And you were in the trees. But you didn’t come over, you didn’t do anything.’

  ‘It’s my greatest regret. But I wasn’t meant to be there. I panicked.’

  ‘Weren’t you afraid for us?’

  ‘I knew Will was in danger from Dejan and that lot. But then again he might just as easily have wandered off. I didn’t put two and two together like I should have done.’

  ‘But you didn’t even try to comfort us.’

  ‘I wasn’t, like, some kind of scout leader, Jess. Times were different then. You knew where the Yellow House was, after all, and you were a self-possessed little girl. I knew you would look after Sparrow. It was only when Will didn’t turn up, and people were saying that Dejan had killed him, or had him killed, that I got worried. When you didn’t arrive back at the Yellow House, I went to the police station and claimed you. They let me take you back there until Rae was able to come and get you.’

  He hasn’t mentioned working for Dejan himself. She doesn’t mention that either for fear of closing off his flow.

  ‘And the photo?’

  ‘It was mine, yeah. I sent it to the papers. I thought it would drive her to her senses, bring her back. But I never heard from her again. I don’t think she left India, Jess. My guess is she thought she could play Dejan, and found she couldn’t. My guess is she tried to get away from him, but …’

  He doesn’t finish, and she is glad of that, because she doesn’t want to hear the end of that sentence. Her throat feels constricted, as if someone she has never met has got his hands around it and is pressing hard. The silence between them holds the weight of their shared loss, and yet there are questions too.

  ‘One more thing, Eddie. I just don’t understand why you didn’t mention that Mags was in Goa, too.’

  He seems to choke up then. ‘Do we have to talk about this now, Jess? All I can think about right now is Maya.’

  And Jess has no option but to accept that this is not the time.

  Ro has talked and talked, but his mother has said very little. She has been shivering, sobbing quietly to herself. When she catches a coughing fit, it seems to turn her inside out, and he feels every gasp and splutter. She has accepted more water, but nothing else – no food, and nothing from the hip flasks. He tries to drape the pink and green blanket, so soft and light, around her shoulders but she shrinks away.

  ‘My inhaler,’ is all she will say.

  ‘Hold out your hand,’ he s
ays, and she begins to whimper.

  He is shocked by her reaction. ‘Oh no,’ he says. ‘No, no. I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to look, that’s all.’

  He has seen that expression before; it’s one the supposedly sane give people they think are mad. But gradually she moves her hand towards him. She turns away, as if she can’t bear to look, and her fingers curl. Gently, he flattens them out and scrutinises the deep lines that cross her palm, the scrape of fate, the finer cuts of life and sun and heart and head.

  ‘You see?’ he says, though she isn’t even trying to, sitting there with her eyes shut. ‘We are the same. Your life is just like mine. Your fate—’

  But she seems unable to keep her hand still, and her palm becomes a blur. Her reply is almost swallowed by another coughing fit, but he catches it. ‘Not the same,’ she is saying.

  Guilt, he thinks. Denial.

  The cottage gets darker with the day, and there is nothing to be done about that. He has come prepared with a small blue camping cylinder from the back of Jess’s cellar, a contraption he dare not use that produces stark white light. If he could have a candle or two he would, but he is afraid to chance it.

  To soften her heart, he starts to tell the story of the beach. He concentrates hard on her face, but she is refusing to look at him. He understands how it must be shaming to hear him talk about that day. But she is barely even listening. Most women do him the honour of that, at least.

  He searches for the moment in the story that hits home. He can see she is awake but the light has grown too dim to work out whether the expression on her face has changed, whether he has moved her yet. When he gets to the bit about the cut foot, the tears, the blood and salt, she seems to lift her head. And there is hope now.

  ‘Mama,’ he says. ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘If I said I was your mother, Sparrow,’ she blurts out, ‘what good would it do? It isn’t true. It will never be true.’ Her voice sounds husky, and he can’t help thinking that she’s been crying, which is good.

  ‘Acceptance starts with denial,’ he says. He came across that somewhere, perhaps that therapist at school, perhaps online.