by Sarah Ward
Bridget’s eyes were like hard pebbles of granite. ‘After your mother dumped him, he heard that she was pregnant but never thought anything of it. Just assumed that she’d moved on quickly. But then Justine was born and it must have got him thinking. Men can be incredibly dense sometimes. It takes nine months to make a baby.’
‘So Justine helped precipitate everything.’
‘You leave Justine out of this. It’s got nothing to do with her. All I’m saying is that it suddenly made him think through the dates. And then he saw that picture of you at the school fete. You and your mother standing side by side. And it was obvious. You look like him. You were standing there and suddenly everything clicked.’
The photo, thought Rachel. That photo, frozen in time, of her and Mary determinedly enjoying themselves on a blustery summer’s afternoon had started all this. How utterly random and depressing.
‘And after everything had happened, I just couldn’t get over the sheer stupidity of it all. Everything ruined because of a compulsion to see you.’
‘So you kidnapped us both just so he could have a conversation with me?’ Rachel suddenly felt sick to the teeth of everything. ‘You kidnapped me and killed Sophie so your brother could see me.’
‘No!’ Bridget Lander held up a hand. ‘Sophie died accidentally. It was my fault. I got some chloroform from the hospital where I worked and used too much on Sophie. Either that or I held the pad over her nose too long. She struggled. Unlike you, who passed out straight away.’
The memory of the sickly smell assailed Rachel’s nostrils again. Nauseated, she forced herself to concentrate.
‘Where did she die? Sophie, I mean. Was it in here?’
Bridget shrugged. ‘It was here that we found out she wasn’t breathing. I tried to resuscitate her but it was no use. She’d gone. It’s harder with children – resuscitation, I mean. I learned that over the years in the hospital. Often when they’ve gone, they really have. Miracles rarely happen.’
Rachel sank to the sofa, oblivious of her surroundings. ‘But you’re a nurse . . .’
‘We didn’t mean to kill her, I told you. It was an accident.’
‘Where was my father during this?’
‘He was waiting here to see you. I was bringing you to him. But, in the end, he spent no time with you at all, as soon as we realised the other girl had died.’
‘So you decided to bury her in Truscott Woods.’
Bridget looked angry now; red blotches had appeared on her neck. ‘We weren’t animals, you know. We panicked. James wanted a look at you and a chance to get to know you. We thought if we picked you up with a friend, it would be easier.’
‘You mean you were planning to return us back to our mothers after the kidnapping? How would have that worked? Were you expecting us not to say anything?’
‘Of course not. But you were old enough to be talked to and James wanted to explain the situation to you. Say that he was your real father and that he loved you even though he wasn’t allowed to see you. So we chose a time when you’d both be together so that you could reassure each other. But the minute I started driving with you both, I knew we’d made a mistake.’
‘She started screaming.’
‘Well, it was you who noticed I’d made a wrong turn at the top of the road. You whispered something to her and she started wailing like a banshee.’
‘But why the sunglasses? Was it supposed to be a disguise?’
Bridget could only stare at Rachel. ‘I didn’t want to be recognised by either of you afterwards. It was James who wanted to see you. I was only helping him out. I was going to help him pick you up and then I wanted nothing more to do with you.’
‘What about the chloroform?’
‘The chloroform was only supposed to be in case of any problems. Instead, it sealed our fate.’
‘Sealed your fate?’ Rachel spat the words out. ‘Your fate? What about my fate? What do you think my life was like after the kidnapping? I was treated like some kind of freak. And what about Sophie? Her fate is to be buried in some grave with no proper funeral. And Mrs Jenkins and my mother. What about their fates?’
Bridget Lander was looking at her with cold eyes. ‘I’ll take on board everything you say about everyone except your mother. It was she who started this. She denied James access to you for no reason so he had no option but to try and see you in secret. James was your father. He started seeing your mother and the minute she got pregnant she dumped him. What woman in her right mind would do that? He was only a father wanting to see his child.’
‘I knew my mother. There’s no way she would have kept a father from his child without good reason. And there was one.’
‘What?’
Rachel reached into her pocket and pulled out an A3 piece of paper folded in half. She handed it over to Bridget. ‘You don’t think she might have had a reason for stopping me seeing my uncle?’
Chapter 46
Sadler stared into the flickering fire as the wood creaked and sparks spat angrily up the chimney. James Lander had without a doubt been involved in the kidnapping of Rachel and Sophie. The reasons for the abduction could only be half-guessed but, given the physical resemblance between James and Rachel, he must be the man who had made Mary so keen to hide their very existence from the world. Rachel’s father. And yet, it was Nancy Price, he was sure, who was the key to the whole case. Strands were coming together but he was failing to see the whole.
So, if James Lander was the man, who was the woman? Not Penny, his wife; she’d been teaching the day that the girls were abducted. No, if James Lander was the man, then Bridget Lander must be the woman. But could they arrest her on this supposition? She was curiously protective of her brother. In this investigation the old adage, that blood was thicker than water, was taking on strange resonances. Blood secrets and family ties were intermingling to produce a kaleidoscope of possibilities.
He heard a noise. A soft knock on his door. He prayed it wasn’t Christina. Then it came again. A loud thump. He smiled. Connie. With her tiny frame and loud movements. He moved to open the door, but, just in case, picked up the poker by the fireside on his way.
As she walked in, Connie didn’t remark on the poker, although he saw her glance at it. ‘I’ve parked the car out front. I hope I’m not taking up anybody’s space. I did think about walking here; I only live round the corner, it turns out.’
‘What made you change your mind?’
‘I’m not brave enough to take the canal path in the dark. If there’s a problem I don’t fancy being stuck with a wall on one side of me and a stretch of water on the other.’
‘Very wise. Do you want a drink?’
‘Why not? One will be fine, won’t it?’
As he walked through to the kitchen she shouted after him. ‘We’re nearly there, aren’t we? On the case, I mean. We’ve nearly cracked it.’ He could hear the excitement in her voice.
‘We’ve cracked part of it.’ He came through to the living room and tried to swallow the annoyance he felt as she sprawled across his sofa. ‘I’m pretty sure I know what happened in 1978 and why.’
Impatience was rising off her like steam. He needed to slow her down. There had been too many hasty assumptions in the early days. Suppositions that had been allowed to go unchecked.
‘I can’t believe you made the connection between the photograph of James Lander and Rachel. I saw her at Richard Weiss’s house that time and I never spotted a thing.’
‘You weren’t looking, Connie. We were focusing on Penny. But Rachel has the same facial features as James Lander. A family likeness.’
Connie heard the hesitation in his voice. ‘What? What is it?’
His brain was beginning to make a connection that seemed both fantastic and logical. ‘It’s a very strong likeness,’ he said to himself.
Connie looked annoyed and responded by sinking further into the sofa. ‘Our problem is that we don’t know what precipitated the more recent deaths.’
‘Yvonne Jenkins’s suicide?’
‘Yes, for a start. Why did she commit suicide in the Wilton Hotel?’
Sadler sat down in the chair opposite. ‘The package that was handed over by Penny Lander appears to be the catalyst to the more recent deaths. For a start it was given to Yvonne Jenkins in the Wilton Hotel. The location must have had a profound effect on Yvonne. She went back there to kill herself.’
‘Yes, but why? What was in the package?’
Sadler thought back to the yellowing newspaper cutting that he had found amongst Penny’s notes and jottings.
‘A connection was made by Penny Lander that may or may not have been correct but, in any case, proved to be the final straw for Yvonne Jenkins.’
Connie grimaced.
‘We’re both childless, Con. Can you imagine what it’s like to lose your daughter? I can’t, and I doubt . . .’
Connie’s phone was ringing in her pocket. He watched as she fished it out and answered it. She listened without speaking, all the time looking at him.
‘Hold on, will you?’ She covered the phone with her hand.
‘It’s Richard Weiss. He’s concerned about Rachel. She was due to be at his house about an hour ago. She’s not answering her phone so he called a neighbour of hers – a woman called Jenny. She left in her car about ten minutes ago. He wants to know if we have any ideas where she might be headed.’
Chapter 47
Rachel spent her professional life roughly sketching out family trees on scraps of paper: backs of envelopes, pieces of wallpaper, once even on the back of her hand. The diagram on the sheet of paper she handed to Bridget Lander looked no different from those others hastily put together. She could draw the trees freehand and this one, sketched in anger and passion, held the key to much more than family secrets. Bridget opened the paper and scanned the contents, a red flush spreading from her neck up into her cheeks. And still it continued, onto her forehead and into her hairline. For the first time, Rachel saw the suppressed emotion and wondered if, finally, she would come to harm from this woman. Bridget Lander seemed unable to believe what she was reading.
‘Is this some kind of sick joke?’
‘It’s the reason that my mother was preventing your brother, or should I say adopted brother, from having contact with me.’
Bridget Lander stared at the paper, clearly horrified.
‘Did he know he was adopted?’ asked Rachel watching the angry flush fade.
The woman’s head shot up and she looked at Rachel, her eyes two pins of hatred.
‘Of course he did. We were both adopted. So what? We were both babies and we never knew anything other than the family our parents made for us, for better or worse.’
‘And he never expressed any interest in who his natural parents were?’
‘What for? It’s not like today where everyone wants to know the ins and outs of everything. Employing people like you. We didn’t care then. James and I were like any other brother or sister. It didn’t make any difference at all.’
‘And he never thought to find out his true origins?’
‘There was no need. Our parents brought us up as true siblings and neither of us were interested in finding out where we came from.’
We. Whenever Rachel asked about James, Bridget responded as ‘we’. Rachel wondered how truly united they had been as siblings, and what her father must have thought about the events that had occurred. And what had she meant by her comment that they were a family, for better or worse?
She walked over to Bridget Lander and jabbed at the A3 paper that the woman was still puzzling over.
‘Those are his origins. He was the son of Nancy Price and a soldier she had a one-night fling with. The date of birth of your brother tallies with the date that Nancy had her baby in hospital. I think he was given away to your parents by Mair, his grandmother and my great-grandmother.’
Bridget was shaking her head.
‘And that should have been the end of it. Bampton’s a small town but there was no reason why he should come into contact with his real family. Nancy was working class and your parents lived much more affluent lives. But that isn’t what happened.’
‘He met your mother.’ Bridget’s voice was calm now. Too calm. ‘He met that woman who decided that he would never see his daughter.’
‘She must have found out,’ said Rachel, almost to herself. ‘It’s the only thing that makes sense. Why else would she break it off like that?’
Nancy, today, was convinced that Rachel’s mother hadn’t known that she had a half-brother and, yet, what other reason could there have been for the break? If Mair was the only family member who had known what had happened to the child, then it was Mair who must have told her granddaughter Mary that she’d been sleeping with her half-brother.
Rachel, who days earlier had panicked at the thought of a close family relationship with Richard Weiss, could well imagine the dread her mother would have felt. Had she also known she was carrying his child? Perhaps. But she’d gone on to have the baby anyway and had set off a train of events that would result in the death of little Sophie Jenkins eight years later. And then the death of Yvonne Jenkins over thirty years after that. But perhaps this was where it would all end. Could there possibly be more reverberations?
‘The question I want to know is – why kill Mrs Lander?’
‘Penny? She found out. Threatened to go to the police with what she’d found.’
‘But how? How did she find out?’
For a moment, Bridget looked stricken. ‘James died suddenly. It was a shock to us all but Penny started to clear out his things straight away. She discovered a package that James had kept. The photo, the one of you at the fete. He kept it for some reason. And your sock, the one you left behind in the car. He put the two together in a package and hid it.’
Bridget was looking directly at her and Rachel held on to the curtain as the room began to spin. ‘My sock. The one I lost that day. It was you, wasn’t it? In the bungalow. I climbed out of the window but you’d come to get the sock back.’
‘Penny told me she’d met Yvonne and handed over the sock to her, thinking it was Sophie’s. I didn’t want the police to find it.’
‘It’d link you to the kidnapping.’
Bridget took a step closer to Rachel. ‘It was never about me. Don’t you see? I’m trying to protect your father’s reputation. It wasn’t his fault. I suggested to him that we take you for a day so you could get to know him.’
Rachel felt the cool fingers at her throat. It would be a funny way to die, with these strong hands around her neck. Rachel had always seen herself as a survivor and, during the unravelling of the case, she realised that her mother Mary, grandmother Nancy and great-grandmother Mair had passed on the survivor gene to her. But all the genes in the world couldn’t negate the twin forces of desperation and opportunity. She’d arrived at this house in her usual blasé way and she would now face the consequences.
She wanted to live very much, she realised, and the reason for that was Richard Weiss, the casual friend she’d grown to love. Someone who was prepared to accept the person she’d become, even if it had been moulded by her history. Because, as she’d gradually realised over the last few weeks, there was nothing she could change about what had been done to her then. But by trying to take ownership of past she had jeopardised her future.
There was a new generation inside her, and when she’d guessed and then checked, with that thin blue line which confirmed everything, she’d been glad. And she didn’t care if it was a boy or a girl. Because, unlike her mother and great-grandmother, she liked men. Nancy’s influence had given her that legacy. Nancy, the flirt who even after years of marriage to Hughie had been able to turn men’s heads. Well, she hadn’t inherited Nancy’s beauty, but the child inside her would be loved whatever its gender.
The fog in Rachel’s head cleared. The baby. Of course, the baby. Wasn’t it time that a child had a chance to live?
The power
of Bridget Lander surrounded her. Her resolution to do Rachel harm and her experience of violence felt too much to overcome. With all the strength she could manage, Rachel struck out at the woman and twisted her head so that her neck felt less exposed. For a moment, Bridget faltered. Rachel grabbed hold of Bridget’s head and pushed her body against her. Together they toppled over and hit the floor hard.
The impact stunned Rachel and her arm wrapped protectively around her stomach. What had the jolt done to the baby? It was a moment of weakness that Bridget Lander had been looking for. Once more, two hands grasped at her neck and slowly Rachel’s eyes began to dim.
Chapter 48
Connie jammed the accelerator to the floor of her small car, which was struggling to keep up with Sadler’s. He’d insisted on separate cars in case Rachel wasn’t at Bridget Lander’s house and they needed to split up to look for her. Procedurally it made sense of course, but she was wasting precious time when they both knew full well where Rachel would be. She was following his grey Audi, although she didn’t recognise the route that they were taking to Bridget’s house. For someone who had been brought up in Bampton he was literally going around the houses. He decelerated suddenly and, sick of following him, Connie swung her car left and sped through the back streets.
They’d suspected that Rachel might reach the same conclusions as them but hadn’t anticipated that she’d strike out and act on her own. The problem was that Connie wasn’t sure which one of those women would be doing harm to the other. She scrolled down her contacts list and tried Rachel’s mobile, which still went on to voicemail.
She threw the phone onto the passenger seat and it squawked alarmingly. Frowning she picked it up and saw an incoming call again from Richard Weiss.
‘Yes, Mr Weiss?’
‘Where are you? Do you know where Rachel is?’
‘We’re heading towards an address is Baslow Crescent. Stay where you are and I’ll call you when we have more information.’ The line went silent. Connie looked in alarm at her phone. They were still connected. ‘Hello?’
