by Ann Troup
Charlie began to drive. ‘So tell me, before we get there. I need to know so that I can be prepared. I want to know what kind of reaction to expect.’
Pushing aside her last thread of reluctance, Angie embarked on her story and began to explain to Charlie the pattern of their investigation and how it had culminated in the arrest of his ‘mother’. ‘A lot of this you will already know, so excuse me if I’m repeating stuff, but it helps to tell it in a logical sequence. Valerie and Delia knew each other as kids. Valerie – as you know – was brought up by her aunt, who was the local abortionist. We can only suppose that Valerie was supposed to take up the mantle at some point.
‘Anyway, we know that there was a botched abortion, which left Delia unable to have children of her own, and the scandal of which alienated her from her family. From what we can gather, they were a pretty brutal family anyway, so it’s likely that whatever damage was done to Delia’s psyche was done a long time ago. Of course, she blamed Valerie for her misfortunes, and when she found out that Valerie had married, she approached her and more or less blackmailed her into financially supporting her.
‘According to Valerie’s diary, it was the threat of revealing her past to William Porter that swung it. When William “died”, Delia had already been involved in assisting the birth, and likely the death of Stella’s child, so by then their fates were equally intertwined. Neither would gain anything by betraying the other. They both had enough dirt on each other to bring each other’s worlds crashing down. Of course, Valerie knew you couldn’t possibly be Delia’s child, and Delia knew not only about Valerie’s history but also about William’s incestuous relationship with Stella. They were locked together in it, like a stalemate.’
‘Tell me more about the baby,’ Charlie asked. ‘Why did they do what they did to it?’
‘As I said, he was Stella’s. It appears that Valerie had the idea of “preserving” the body and hiding it. She wrote about having read something about mummified remains in Sicily, and had applied the process to keep him. We don’t know, but our guess is that she just thought it was a good way of disposing of him. We know from both the diary and Frances that Stella had fixated on the body and kept it for days. I suppose Valerie felt she had to hide it somehow.’
She noticed Charlie wince at the thought.
‘I know, it’s pretty sick stuff. We think that she was pretty far-gone mentally even at that stage. We know that William had syphilis, and it’s likely he passed it on to her. It’s a disease that can have a profound effect on mental health in the long run apparently. So it might explain some of the more bizarre behaviour she displayed.’
‘Did my moth … I mean Delia … did she kill the baby?’
‘Honestly, we don’t know. Stella stated that she did, but she wasn’t exactly reliable. The pathologist thinks not, Ratcliffe has his suspicions, and I just have to accept that we will likely never know now.’
Charlie gritted his teeth. ‘OK, so what about Rachel? Why was she told that she was the result of incest? What the hell was all that about?’
‘Stella claimed that Rachel was hers, but the story you told me from the London neighbour makes more sense. She and Stella shared some DNA, but not enough to let us believe that Stella was her mother. Cousins fits the bill perfectly though. We think, and this is sheer guesswork based on what little Frances chooses to tell us, and what we can piece together, that Stella fixated on Rachel when she was a baby and convinced herself she was hers. Bizarre I know. You know about the room in the flat with all the dolls? Yeah, grim. But it does show us that she remained obsessed with and oppressed by motherhood, babies and guilt. We do know that Lilian paid money on a regular basis to Valerie. We assume it was to finance Rachel’s upbringing.’
She waited a moment while he digested the information.
‘It seems that Rachel served a purpose for everyone one way or another.’
‘So it’s not so much of a mystery why they lied to her about me is it?’ he said bitterly. ‘I don’t suppose they thought there was anything unusual in it by then.’
‘The diary tells us that Delia and Valerie hatched that plan between them: Valerie because she thought it would bring Rachel and her money home, and Delia because she wasn’t prepared to let Rachel take you and Amy away from her.’
‘Given recent and past events, I don’t get why she tolerated my relationship with Rachel at all. Why not try and put a stop to it sooner? Why let it go on so long – they were pretty effective at disposing of people by then.’
This was the part that Angie hadn’t been looking forward to, not that she had been relishing any of it. She took a breath. ‘Because they both knew that Rachel had witnessed what really happened to Patsy. She actually saw the whole thing.’ She paused.
Charlie swung into a side road and stopped the van. ‘What?!’
‘Before you go on,’ she interjected rapidly, ‘Rachel never hid anything from you. They doped her up with her epilepsy medication. The only bit she could ever recall was seeing you come in after the event. She had no memory of the events before, well no accessible ones anyway. In short, they were terrified of her, that one day she might remember what had really happened. They all became very frightened of what Rachel might do, say or remember. She had the heads-up on them all. While she was a child they could discredit her, but as an adult it was much more difficult.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ was all he could say.
‘Like I said, she had no conscious memory of the event itself, only seeing you afterwards.’ As this story had unfolded during the investigation, Angie had often wondered if it was this single happening that had brought Charlie and Rachel together in later years. The two innocents, clinging together.
Charlie was getting angry – she could sense it. ‘Tell me about William, about the flat and what you found,’ he said, changing the subject, but not necessarily into more comfortable territory.
‘William left the day after Daniel was born. He had been in tacit agreement with the arrangement that Delia should dispose of the “issue” as Valerie described it. As it transpired, Frances and Stella closed ranks for once, and as Frances had learned a lot from her mother about how to make people pay for what they’d done, William couldn’t take the thought of facing the results of his actions on a daily basis, so he left.
‘I can’t even begin to explain to you why Stella maintained a connection with him. I don’t get it, so don’t ask me to make sense of it. Anyway, it seems the dolls were down to him. He used to get them for Stella – God knows why. We can’t work out whether it was to torture her or compensate her. Some warped conscience thing, we think. Put it this way: I personally never thought that Delia was likely to have a working knowledge of Latin, so it was always likely to be someone else.’
Charlie had known about the thing with the dolls for a while. They had interviewed him about it when Delia had been arrested, shown him shudder-worthy and chilling photos of the scene. It had been like looking at the stills from a bad 1980s horror film, both faintly ridiculous and the stuff of nightmares. Given Delia’s penchant for collecting dolls, he had assumed it was she who had staged the chamber of horrors, though God knows why. ‘So why did she try and burn the place down?’
‘We think Delia thought the diary might be in there. That’s what she told us anyway.’
Charlie nodded. ‘Answer me this. Why would someone with so much to hide, so much shit to cover up, keep a diary?’
Angie shrugged. ‘I have no idea, but she did. I agree that it’s totally odd. The only explanation I can think of was that she wanted it as some kind of insurance policy, that if anything happened to her it would all come out and she wouldn’t be painted as the sole bad guy. Leverage I suppose.’
Charlie started up the van again. ‘What was it again: Peccavi, peccavisti?’
‘Hmmm. Something like that.’
‘It’s bloody right though, eh?’
They didn’t speak for a while, just drove. Eventually Charlie said, ‘H
ow much of this do you think Rachel knew?’
Angie shrugged again. ‘Not much as a child, not consciously anyway. Frances is adamant that Rachel knew nothing, never suspected that Valerie wasn’t her real mother, didn’t know that William existed, though she had seen him several times hanging around the shop. They told her he was an old tramp.’
Charlie nodded as he pulled the van up in the hospital car park. He switched the engine off. ‘So the question is, how much do I tell her? Do I tell her at all?’
Angie turned to look at him. This had aged him, but there was still an appeal about Charlie Jones. ‘I don’t know, Charlie. What would you achieve?’
***
Charlie screwed his eyes shut and shook his head. Rachel had barely survived the attack by Delia, but for some reason she had found the will to live and was now almost well enough to come home. She had come out of the experience a changed person, better in some ways. At least willing to let go of the past and move on. She had asked him to clear the flat, and he had felt as if she were asking him to cut down the bars of her prison. He’d been glad to do it.
Maybe she was just clinging to him because there was no one else, maybe it was because he had Amy, and it was clear that she very much wanted a relationship with her child. Her legitimate, unsullied child.
Whatever.
She was back in his life, and it was better than it might have been under the circumstances. Part of him felt that she was owed the truth too, but now he had heard it for himself he had to wonder if the lies were mildly more palatable. He shook his head from side to side as if the movement might shake something loose and everything would fall into some logical order.
Angie watched him for a moment. ‘Can I ask you a question?’
‘’Course. What?’
‘Do you still love her, or do you just have some warped sense of responsibility towards her?’ Though Angie’s feelings of antipathy towards Rachel had mellowed somewhat in recent weeks, she still had reservations. Frankly, women like Rachel scared her. Too much damage.
Charlie frowned at her and started to climb out of the van. ‘What kind of question is that?’ he said, irritation peppering his tone.
‘What are you going to do?’ she called, scrambling out after him.
‘I’m going to tell her what I think she needs to hear.’
‘And which bits do you think she should hear?’ Angie asked, aware of her apprehension.
Charlie paused and slammed the van door. ‘That everything is going to be OK and whatever bits of all this bullshit that will prove it.’
***
Rachel watched them from the window of her hospital room. Her bag was packed, her medication lay on the bed ready for her to take away, and the jagged scar that ran down her leg throbbed in time with the beating of her heart.
There had been a moment when she had contemplated making her escape, but she hadn’t been able to think of anywhere to run to. Now Charlie was coming, ready to save her, to take her back to his cosy little house where they would coyly play at happy families. Whatever one of those was.
She wasn’t sure she could be saved, or that he should even try – but now that she’d found Amy, she didn’t want to let go. Whether what she and Charlie had was love, she didn’t know. Part of her felt that she wouldn’t recognise love if it leapt up and bit her in her skinny arse, but Diana kept saying that where there was life, there was hope.
Most of her wasn’t buying it, but there was a tiny stirring of something inside. Like the unfurling of wings.
It was the merest flutter of possibility and that was enough.
Loved My Mother, The Liar? Dive straight into another gripping novel by Ann Troup. Turn the page to sample the beginning of The Forgotten Room…
Prologue
A clutch of people had gathered to see the breaking of the earth, their breath mingling in the cool morning air where it lingered and collected as a cloud of light mist. They watched as giant metal teeth bit into the ground, tearing it asunder in the name of progress. Some clapped, others thrust their hands deep into their pockets and huffed out stale air in small wet puffs as that thing called progress made its mark on dead land.
A single watcher stood firm and still, refusing to show reaction and wondering how long it would be before old, long-extinguished life would be revealed. Her bones had been planted long ago. Her flesh had nourished the earth and made gluttons of the worms, while maggots had grown fat on the meat and the memory of her. The watcher wondered if any human remembered her now. If they didn’t, they would soon. The metal teeth were chewing the earth a mere fifty feet from where she lay; it was just a matter of time. When she saw the light of day again she would be greeted with an urgency she had never known in life. They would want to know all about her then. The watcher was sure of it.
A glance towards the proud developer, who oozed abundance in his expensive coat, who rubbed his hands in anticipation at what he believed would come. Wealth, recognition, kudos. The watcher smiled with a wry twist of the mouth. The man might as well build his houses out of glass and pray that no one would cast the first stone. It was all as fragile as that. They were standing on a teetering precipice between past and present, on earth as crumbling and friable as that which fell in crumbs and clods from the bucket of the JCB.
The watcher turned away and began to walk. All things must come to an end and the peace of Essen Grange would come to an end too. The watcher could feel it and hear it in the grind of the machinery. Everything that was familiar and safe was breathing its last in the screech of metal and gears.
The watcher was as broken as the ground that was succumbing to change. Everything had to alter eventually and the bones would mark the beginning.
Chapter One
In the moment that Maura turned into the drive and caught her first glimpse of Essen Grange, she knew she had made a mistake in accepting this job. A dire mistake.
She’d had her first sneaking suspicion of it fifteen minutes before when she’d stopped at the village shop. The man behind the counter had shown an interest at seeing a stranger in the area and had asked her where she was heading. The mention of Essen Grange had caused him to raise his eyebrows and look at her as if she was at least one sandwich short of a picnic. The woman waiting behind her had said, ‘Want to be careful up there, love. There’s them as go in that never come out.’
The woman’s words had resulted in a protracted nod of agreement from the man and a hesitant, defensive smile from Maura. What was it with villagers and local “colour”? She had taken her pack of mints and her change and walked from the shop shaking her head in amused disbelief.
It was only when she caught her first glimpse of the house that was to be her temporary home that she began to wonder if their casual gossip had been a warning. She might have made more of it at the time if it hadn’t been for the distraction of a little girl outside the shop. The girl was wearing a nurse’s outfit and bandaging a doll while she waited with her mother on a bench at the bus stop. It had made Maura smile. She’d been that girl years ago, all dressed up and ready to tend to the world and its ills. She still was, but it wasn’t so thrilling when you were all grown up and the patients were real and had a habit of bleeding or puking on the uniform and communicating with a vocabulary consisting mostly of base profanity. That too made her smile and it was a good sign. It had been a long time since she’d felt the urge to smile.
Swathed in ribbons of winter mist, the Grange loomed, a monolith of ugliness unredeemed by any sense of heritage. It was like a rotten tooth rising proud in a diseased gum and stood in stark contrast to the bright new housing development she had just driven through. Essen Grange had a brooding menace that made the hairs on the back of her neck rise and prickle.
‘The house that Frankenstein built,’ she muttered, suppressing a shudder as she looked at it through her windscreen. It had been stitched together over centuries by the looks of it, but with no plan – just the fads of the day tacked on without thought
or design. The only thing that softened it was the ivy, though even that hung in drab, heavy swags that added more atmosphere than charm. There had never been any roses around the Grange’s door, she was certain of that. It made her own modest home look like a haven of comfort in comparison, and that had been a lonely enough place of late.
It was too late to turn back. The deal was done; she had agreed to take the job. Not that she had taken much persuading. Like a desperate idiot, she had jumped at it – had even been flattered to hear that she had been personally requested, though she hadn’t had the foresight to ask who had made the request. Besides, there was nothing to go back to. Just an empty house with nothing to do but sit there night after night, the ghosts of the past competing with her rage and grief to see which of them could defeat her first. One of them had been ringing Maura incessantly throughout the journey. Not a ghost, but someone who might as well have been: a sister who had a committed a cardinal sin and now wanted forgiveness. Maura could neither forgive nor forget – not yet – and had almost thrown the phone out of the window in sheer frustration. Instead she had switched it off and thrown it into the foot well of the car. She might be angry; she might even be running away – but she wasn’t stupid. No one travelled into unknown territory and threw away their phone. Not even women who took jobs without asking sensible questions.
Maura’s head told her that, for all its sinister countenance, the Grange had to be a better bet than home and constant harassment by her sister. Her gut did not agree. It lurched like a drunk on a boat as she looked up at the house. Her instinct insisted that something was off, something wasn’t right, and it would not agree with what her head was telling her: that she should pull herself together, stop being an idiot and get on with it. She should have run then. She should have climbed back in the car, turned around and driven away in a cloud of dust and skidding gravel. But Maura had decided to be guided by her head, not her feelings. Feelings had proven most unreliable in the past and had led her into places she never wanted to revisit.
