by Simon Brett
‘Just ordinary black coffee, thank you.’
‘Filter.’
‘If that’s what ordinary black coffee is, yes.’
Carole took the white mug to a table and opened her Times to the crossword page. But her eyes kept glancing off the clues, refusing to let her brain engage in unpicking their logic. She was nervous. What was she doing, a middle-aged woman setting herself up as some kind of superannuated private eye, poking her nose into things that didn’t concern her?
‘Hello. Are you Carole?’ She looked up at the sound of the voice. It hadn’t occurred to her that Susan Holland might go and get her own coffee before greeting her, but that’s what the woman had done. Her ease in the Bean in Love environment suggested that she was a very regular customer.
Susan Holland was one side or the other of fifty. She was shortish, dressed in black leggings and a grey fleece. Her features were strong and dark, suggesting perhaps some Hispanic blood in her genetic make-up. Shortish hair, coloured to a chestnutty sheen, perhaps to hide the incipient grey.
‘First thing I have to ask,’ she said very directly as she took a seat opposite Carole, ‘is what your interest is in the Lady in the Lake?’
‘A perfectly legitimate question. And one to which I feel it is difficult to give a simple answer.’
‘You will understand my caution. A lot of rather dubious people involve themselves in missing-person cases. There are plenty of weirdos out there, people with their own bizarre agendas, some whose interest is distinctly unhelpful.’
‘You don’t have to tell me that. I’ve read a lot of the stuff that’s been posted on the Internet.’
‘So you understand, Carole, why my instinct is to be extremely careful.’
‘I understand completely.’
‘Then why’ve you contacted me?’ The woman could not keep the neediness out of her voice any longer. ‘Have you got any new information? Have you got any proof that the Lady in the Lake was Marina?’
Carole felt guilty now. She should have thought, should have realized how desperate the woman would be for news of her daughter. Her email contact had been unwittingly cruel, raising hopes where there were none.
‘I’m sorry. I have nothing like that to offer you.’ The younger woman looked predictably crestfallen. ‘It’s just that I live in Fethering, so obviously I heard about the discovery of the Lady in the Lake up at Fedborough and I just . . . thought maybe it might be worth doing some investigation into it.’
Stated like that, her intention did sound painfully woolly.
‘I’m presuming you’re nothing to do with the police?’ said Susan Holland.
For a brief moment Carole considered mentioning her former career in the Home Office, but she knew it was irrelevant, so she replied, somewhat shamefacedly, ‘No.’
The reaction that prompted was better than she feared. ‘Thank goodness. They’re a useless bunch of tossers. When I asked them to make enquiries into Marina’s disappearance, they treated me like I was an idiot, just another menopausal mother who’d had a spat with her teenage daughter.’
‘On thing does strike me,’ said Carole. ‘Surely it would be very simple for the police to find out whether the Lady in the Lake was Marina or not. They’d find a DNA match with you.’
‘That wouldn’t have worked.’
‘Oh?’
‘Marina was adopted. I don’t know anything about her birth parents.’
‘But that information must be available somewhere? Through the adoption agency?’
‘You’d have thought so, but Marina had a rather unusual early life.’
‘In what way?’
‘She was found drifting in a rubber dinghy in the sea off Brighton. Only about two at the time, so very little language to give a clue to where she came from. The view was that the dinghy had belonged to a larger boat that had been smuggling in illegal immigrants. Whether that’s true or not is impossible to know. As is whether the larger boat sank, taking down her parents with it. Some people reckoned from her looks – pale blue eyes, high cheekbones – that she came from somewhere that used to be part of the Soviet bloc. No idea if that was true. All conjecture.
‘The facts, on the other hand, are that Marina was taken into care. Her name, incidentally, was given to her because the dinghy was found floating near Brighton Marina. The press at the time came up with the nickname, and it stuck.
‘Anyway, I was married back then, and it was becoming clear that we weren’t going to be able to have children, and I was keen to get on with adopting before the authorities thought we were too old. So Marina became our daughter.’
‘And your husband? Is he still on the scene?’
Susan Holland let out a derisive ‘Huh’, then added, ‘He went the way of all men. Or at least all the ones I get involved with.’
‘So how old was Marina when you adopted her?’
‘Five. And those years in care hadn’t done her much good, which, added to God knows what traumas she’d suffered before that, meant . . . Well, Marina was never the easiest child. Her father walking out didn’t help either.’
‘But going back to the DNA, surely there must have been things of hers in the house that the police could have got a match from? A toothbrush or . . .?’
‘I’m sure there were. Still are. But persuading the police that they should be channelling valuable resources into doing those kinds of tests was never going to happen. As I said, they’d written me off as the hysterical mother of a grumpy teenager.’
‘Susan, what makes you think that the remains found in Fedborough Lake might be those of Marina?’
‘Timing as much as anything. That dry summer was the year after Marina disappeared.’
The two women looked at each other. Both knew how flimsy Susan Holland’s reasoning was. And both knew the level of neediness that made her clutch at so fragile a straw.
But Carole Seddon didn’t comment. Instead she asked, ‘Could you tell me the circumstances of Marina’s disappearance?’
Apparently relieved at the direction of the questioning, Susan Holland was more than ready to reply. ‘All right. We’re talking seven years ago, more than that now, nearly eight. Marina was sixteen going on twenty-six. A seething vat of hormones and confusion. Every teenager reaches a point where they question their own identity. They don’t know where they’re going, they want someone to define them. They’re full of questions about who they are, what their place in life is. Well, given her complex background, Marina had more of those questions than most kids of the same age.
‘Iain – that’s my ex-husband – had walked out about a year before and, though she’d never admit it, Marina had been very hurt by that.’
‘Were they close?’
Susan Holland screwed her face up as she tried to find the right words. ‘They were, in a way. Iain had been very fond of her when she was small. She was a pretty little thing and I think he saw her as a kind of accessory. He’d show her off, at the same time demonstrating to everyone what a great dad he was. But as she grew older, the relationship changed.’
‘You don’t mean . . .?’
‘Oh God, nothing like that. He never touched her or anything. There are a lot of harsh, uncharitable things I could say – and have said – about my ex-husband, but I’d never accuse him of that. No, I think he turned against Marina just when she became less biddable. You know, suddenly she wasn’t the adorable little moppet who thought everything her daddy did was wonderful. She started to develop a mind of her own and gave us both a hard time. Pretty soon she only had two default settings – asleep and stroppy. Well, I took most of the flak. Iain just – am I allowed these days to say “in a very masculine way”? – avoided confrontation with Marina and lost interest in her. By coincidence perhaps it was also around the same time that he lost interest in me.’ She spoke these words with grim resignation. ‘Are you married?’
In some circumstances Carole might have resisted giving personal information to a stranger, but she w
as keen to bond with Susan Holland so readily replied, ‘Divorced.’
‘So you know where I’m coming from.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Anyway, Iain was off, developing his career, finding a new wife, getting a new set of kids – kids of whom he was the birth father – which didn’t do much for my confidence, as you might imagine. He was generally starting over – and beginning to make a lot of money.’
‘Oh? Doing what?’
‘He’s in the stationery business. Started very small, just bought this one ailing store and we worked very hard to turn that around.’
‘You were in the business with him?’
‘Yes. But don’t worry, I’m not about to get into that routine of “I worked my fingers to the bone for that man, but when the business started to take off, I got dumped and . . .” True though it happens to be. But I’m not bitter about it – well, not more bitter than I am about other aspects of his behaviour. And the fact that Iain’s now got a chain of stationery stores across the south coast and his kids are in private school and he’s even got time to dabble in local politics and . . . Don’t get me started.’
To Carole it seemed that she already had got Susan Holland started, so she quickly asked, ‘Did your ex-husband keep in touch with Marina?’
‘Not as far as I know. I don’t think he wanted any links with the past. He wanted to start with a new squeaky clean sheet.’
‘So you don’t think he might know what had happened to her?’
‘No. He might have been sufficient of a bastard to keep that kind of information from me, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, but he wouldn’t have lied to the police – and they interviewed him quite a lot around that time. No, I’m sure he didn’t know anything.’
‘But he didn’t take much positive action to find out what had happened to his daughter?’
‘I think her disappearance probably suited him quite well. Reducing the number of skeletons in his closet to one – namely me.’
‘Hm.’ Carole nodded thoughtfully. ‘Let’s go back to the time when your husband walked out, and the effect it had on Marina.’
‘Well, she’d never have admitted it, but she was very upset. Which, of course, affected her behaviour. She was getting well out of hand. I was doing the job at the nursing home back then, like I am now, and that involves quite a few evening shifts, so I wasn’t able to keep as close an eye on her as I should have done. So I think Marina was getting in with the wrong crowd . . . and there are quite a lot of wrong crowds in Brighton.’
‘Are you talking about drugs?’ asked Carole.
Susan Holland grimaced. ‘Probably. They’re certainly easily available round here. I don’t know. Marina was very defiant towards me. She wanted to hurt me. She seemed to blame me for her confusion. If Iain and I hadn’t adopted her, she said, her life would have been more straightforward. She could have, as she kept putting it, “gone back to her roots”. Though, poor kid, neither she nor anyone else had any idea what her roots were. But I’ve heard adopted children can often entertain the fantasy that they were born to better things. And there were a lot of things better than being brought by a harassed, hard-up single mother in one of the less salubrious areas of Brighton.
‘Marina was quite attracted by the idea that she was Russian by birth. An exotic Russian . . . I suppose in the nineteenth century she might have thought she was a princess. Now what? The daughter of a Russian oligarch? Who was going to appear one day in a Rolls-Royce, claim her as his rightful child and whisk her away from the squalor of Brighton and of me. Poor kid.
‘Oh, I understood a lot of what she was feeling. But there’s only so much understanding a busy working mother can give. And I didn’t want to let my own life and needs become completely subservient to hers. Of course there were lots of arguments.’
‘I did ask you about drugs.’
‘Yes, I was getting there, sorry. Marina told me she was taking drugs. She told me she was having sex too. Both things may have been true, but the way she said them to me, it was more a kind of defiance. As if she was challenging me, seeing how far she could push me before I snapped and said something unforgivable to her.’
‘Something unforgivable?’
‘Yes. Like that I didn’t love her. That’s what she wanted to hear from me. She kept telling me she hated me and she wanted me to hit back in the same way. She said I couldn’t love her – not properly – because I wasn’t her real mother. According to Marina, the only reason I’d taken her on was because I wanted a baby, any baby. It wasn’t her specifically. And the love I gave her was the love I would have lavished on whatever baby I happened to end up with.’
‘It sounds exhausting even just to hear it described.’
‘Believe me, Carole, it was. The same arguments time after time, sawing away like a serrated knife through broken flesh. I was dead on my feet by the time she finally disappeared.’
‘And what caused that? Why did she finally go? Did you have some even more enormous row?’
Susan Holland was silent. She’d been swept along by the momentum of her narrative, but now her grief and bewilderment caught up with her. ‘No. I wish there had been something. I wish there had been one enormous flare-up, a bigger one than all the others, something I could have looked back to and said, “That was it. That’s where I went wrong. That’s what did it.”
‘But I don’t have that satisfaction. Oh God, I’ve asked myself that so many times. What did I do? What was the trigger? In what Marina would have regarded as the long catalogue of my offences what was the one thing that pushed her too far, the one thing that made her go?’
‘And you’re sure she did go of her own accord?’
‘As opposed to what?’
‘As opposed to being abducted. If you are thinking of Marina being the Lady in the Lake, then you’re thinking of a murder victim.’
‘I see what you mean. No, she left home of her own accord.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘There was a note.’
‘Had she ever done anything like that before?’
‘Left a note? Oh yes, she was always doing it. I’d come back from an evening shift, find a note on the kitchen table saying she hated me and she’d left and she never wanted to see me again. The first few times I panicked. After that I got used to it. She was always back within twenty-four hours. Back when she was hungry. Or needed clean knickers. Very fastidious Marina always was about personal hygiene.’
‘And where do you think she went those nights when she was away?’
‘Slept over at a friend’s house.’
‘Boyfriend?’
‘I don’t think so. That’s what she wanted me to think. She wanted me to be shocked. But I think it was probably just one of the girls from school.’
‘And then there was this one time when she didn’t come back.’
‘Yes, Carole. At first I thought it was the same routine as usual, but as the days went by, I realized this was different.’
‘Was the note she left that time any different?’
‘God, I’ve asked myself that so many times. I’ve looked at it and looked it, trying to find some secret message. You try, by all means. A fresh eye may make all the difference. You see if you can find what I’ve been missing for the past eight years.’
Susan Holland reached into her handbag and produced a transparent plastic folder containing a much-creased sheet of paper. She handed it across.
‘May I take it out?’
‘Be my guest.’
A piece of A4 copy paper, worn and frail along its folds. The writing in blue ballpoint was pitifully faded but in a tidy, firm hand. And it read: Goodbye. I hate you and I know that you really hate me. I’m going to find someone who really appreciates me. And this time I really won’t be coming back.
Carole observed, ‘The last sentence sounds pretty final.’
‘She wrote that every time. If I hadn’t thrown them away, I could show you another dozen notes w
ith virtually identical wording.’
‘And you sure it’s Marina’s handwriting?’
‘Yes. That’s one of the things that I thought too – that someone had abducted her and forged the note. So I went to a graphologist who checked it against other stuff Marina had written and yes, it’s hers. She wrote it.’
‘Hm.’ There was a long silence, then Carole Seddon said, ‘You’ve been very open with me, Susan.’
‘Why shouldn’t I be?’
‘Well, as you said right at the beginning of our conversation, there are a lot of strange people out there and you don’t know me from Adam – or should that be Eve?’
‘No, but you do seem to be genuinely interested in what might have happened to my daughter – and it’s a long time since I’ve met someone with that qualification.’
‘It’s the only qualification I do bring to the table, I’m afraid.’
‘Don’t worry about that. If you think you really can find out something about Marina . . .’
‘I don’t know whether I can. But I’m prepared to try.’
‘Well, it’s probably hopeless. It all happened so long ago, and the few trails there ever were have gone very cold. But if you would like to pursue it further, Carole . . .’
‘I would, Susan.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose I’m just nosy.’
Susan Holland grinned. ‘Nosy is good,’ she said.
THIRTEEN
‘Ah, hello. Is that Tom Ruthven?’
It was the Friday evening. Jude had tried the number Oenone Playfair had given her a few times before, but this was the first time she’d got more than an answering machine.
‘Yes, it is,’ the precise elderly voice at the other end of the line confirmed. ‘Who is it speaking?’
‘My name’s Jude. We met on Wednesday with Piers Targett at the Lockleigh Arms after your game of doubles.’
‘Oh yes, of course. And after that morning’s terrible shock.’
‘Mm.’
‘Well, it’s delightful to hear from you. You’re not ringing to say you’d like to join us next Wednesday, are you?’
