by Gayle Curtis
The funeral was interesting in the way that a lot of people attended but none of them seemed to have much to say about her – they were all of a similar ilk, with quite a lot of potential but no inclination to do anything about it. What was there to say about Cheryl? She drank tea, she smoked, tried to control a chaotic house and wrote plays on the train. That’s all her friends and family knew about her. Even her husband didn’t know who she truly was and couldn’t remember the person she had been when he’d first met her.
It was her brother who helped her become posthumously famous through her work. I read an article about it in the newspaper some years later. Cheryl’s husband had boxed up all her notebooks and given them to her family. Her brother discovered some very gritty stories she’d written about the estate where she lived and they were published. That would never have happened if I hadn’t met her on the train. It is of no consequence to me where you are when you achieve greatness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THEN
The children had set up trestle tables inside the old summer house situated at the bottom of Ray’s garden, and Elise was shocked to see the changes that had been made in the room. It was another punch in the gut – the realisation of how little attention she’d paid Ida and Miles the last few months. Elise and Nathaniel had tried to recreate something similar on the garden terrace of their apartment, but nothing would ever match what Ray did for the children. It was their own fault; they were so wrapped up in their work, in themselves, taking for granted the fact that Ida was a teenager and could take care of herself – and Miles a lot of the time. She recalled Ida shouting at her the morning before she’d disappeared, and how even then Elise hadn’t taken much notice of her. She’d put it down to a teenage strop, told her they’d have a nice dinner for her birthday and sent her off to school.
Elise peered at the carefully constructed scenes Ida and her brother Miles had painstakingly put together. Both her children spent more time here than they did at home with her and Nathaniel. She could understand the fascination; she loved the old Victorian villa with its expanse of private lawns. Ray was far more interesting than their boring old parents who worked all the time – and who, when they weren’t doing that, didn’t have time to listen or play because they were too busy doing grown-up things that they deemed far more important. Ray, being a semi-retired psychiatrist, was far more exciting to her children. He knew how to engage with them and hold their attention.
The children loved him; he told them things that other adults tried to hide. One example being the doll’s house Elise was scrutinising now. It was based on a book Ray had told Ida and Miles about, but Elise couldn’t remember the name now. Doll’s houses and furniture, along with figures, were used to reconstruct crime scenes, a well-used technique for teaching students who were studying forensics. Ida and Miles were in awe of the book, so Ray had helped them build their own house and they’d spent the last few months carefully filling the rooms with tiny items, all leading to a murder scene. Elise didn’t know whose murder or what scenario they were reconstructing – she hadn’t taken the time to ask.
Elise wandered around the cold room, fascinated by the detail in the miniature rooms they’d created and how much work the children had put into them. She was about to leave the summer house when one of the rooms she’d walked past made her turn back for a closer examination. It looked like the orangery attached to Ray’s. To imitate the glass and wood frame, Ida and Miles had fashioned it from cellophane and lollipop sticks. Inside, the room contained a small doll lying on the floor, her dark hair plaited against her head, just as Ida wore hers. The entire scene was weird and felt very different to the others, although Elise could recall only too well Miles shouting, ‘You be the victim, Ida, and I’ll be the one that finds you dead in the house! Please Ida, please!’ He’d begged and begged, excited by their gruesome little game.
She stared at it for a few moments but decided she was being paranoid, brushed it off and pulled the door closed behind her.
Elise stood on the damp grass thinking about the times they’d laughed at the macabre project, seen it as a game, and now she couldn’t help feeling as though it had encouraged the children to create some kind of reality. Elise shook the thought away as she saw Ray walking across the garden with a cup of tea.
‘They’ve spent hours out here, working on this bloody project.’
‘And a fortune.’ Ray smiled. ‘Ever since I showed Ida that book.’
Elise didn’t say how odd she thought it all was, because if she said it out loud, that would somehow make it all real. Even though it was real, and Ida’s body was now lying in a mortuary.
‘It’s freezing out here,’ Ray said. ‘Why don’t we go and sit in the kitchen?’
‘You can. I just want to be outside for a bit. I need some air.’
Ray turned away from her and Elise expected him to go back to the house, but he didn’t. Instead, he walked up the steps to the summer house and pulled open the door.
‘It’s quite amusing, like a tragic set of plays suspended in time.’ Ray peered into the rooms, reminding her of a scene from Alice in Wonderland where Alice looked through the windows of the house she was too large to fit in.
‘Did you notice if Miles was awake?’
‘He was awake when I got home – said he’d had a nightmare – but he was fast asleep when I checked on him just now.’
Elise was slightly rattled that Ray had heard her son and she hadn’t – guilty that she’d relied on the zopiclone to knock her out.
‘It’s not unusual for Miles to have nightmares. It’s to be expected, especially now.’
They stood looking at each other for a long moment, and then she said, ‘Why are we skirting round the subject?’
‘I’m not skirting around anything, Elise. If you want to talk about your mother, we can.’
Since Ray had come back from the airport, there had been no proper explanation of what had happened all those years ago. Ray said only that they’d had no choice and Ingrid had to get away. Elise could glean more information from the media about her mother than she could from her father. Various articles repeated the same story, that Ingrid had possibly been a patient of Ray’s before they’d started a relationship, and she had suffered from mental health issues. Others suggested a personality disorder, that she was a threat to her child. But as Nathaniel told her, they were just journalistic speculation. The only people who could tell her the truth were her mother and father.
‘What else are you hiding, Dad? What did the police want to talk to you about?’
‘Nothing, sweetheart. Nothing at all. You must understand how things were in those days. Your mother was suicidal most of the time. I had to do something to protect you. She would have succeeded eventually – you must remember what a mess she was?’
‘The psychiatrist who couldn’t fix my mother. Or me. Or himself, it would seem. Why can’t you just tell me the truth? The thing I now have to live with, Dad, is the fact that when you took Ingrid away from me, she survived. So I must have been the problem. You allowed me to believe she was dead – and worse, a victim of the Suicide Watcher. How could you do that?’
‘Elise, listen to me. Your mother was suffering from postnatal depression, and it was unheard of when you were a baby. Unfortunately, other mental health issues complicated everything and she just didn’t get better. You can understand that, with all the issues you’ve had to deal with. I did what I thought was best at the time. I had to protect you,’ Ray said, grabbing her arm to show her he meant it.
Elise pulled away from him. ‘You better hurry up. You’re due at the police station again in an hour.’ She left the summer house, emptying her cup on to the grass, and began walking back to the house.
She didn’t want to hear his nonchalant explanations, or about how familiar he was with the parenting of her children, reminding her how she’d failed at various times during their childhoods. And here they were with Buddy, a baby who had come abou
t as a last attempt at repairing her and Nathaniel’s marriage. She knew her emotions towards Buddy weren’t normal. To her, he was just a little stranger, an imposter in their family unit. She’d caught herself feeling angry towards him, as if he were somehow to blame for what had happened to Ida. But, if she was honest, Ray’s explanation about her mother had touched a nerve, and made her shockingly aware of her own frailty.
The children were always told about everything that was going on, although Ida had been at an age where she asked too many questions and didn’t like a lot of the answers. Elise had never lied to them or protected them from other people’s actions; Ray had always taught her they wouldn’t thank her for it when they were older. She wondered if this was why they had always felt so free to explore the macabre. Though they didn’t see it like that; to them, it was just a normal part of life. Bad people did bad things to others, something Elise had also been told when she was growing up.
When she was only eleven years old, Elise had to come to terms with the death of her mother, who had allegedly blasted herself into oblivion on the other side of the bathroom door. The bathroom door in their 1970s house, where Elise’s mind was forever trapped. Whatever she was doing, her mind was always outside that room, where one of the marbles she’d been playing with had parted from its group and rolled across the carpet runner, on to the hard wood before clonking its way down the steps, exactly at the point she imagined the gunshot had sounded, causing her narrow frame to flinch and settle. At 16.43. Elise had often returned to the house afterwards and sat outside the bathroom door where she believed Ingrid had taken her own life. All she remembered afterwards was Ray arranging for her Uncle Mac and Aunt Estelle to pick her up so she could stay there while Ray went away. Mac was a relaxed version of her father and Estelle a clipped Frenchwoman who only seemed to ever smile at Elise. She’d stayed with them for almost two years until she was able to live with Ray again. Elise had never got to the bottom of why Ray was estranged from his brother and sister-in-law.
After Ingrid’s death there was no ‘it’ll be okay’, no words of comfort at all from Ray, or anyone for that matter, and no one explained what had happened. All she knew was her mother was being taken to Norway, so her family could give her a burial. A fake one, an utter farce, so it would now seem.
This was the tragedy she’d grown up with. It was whispered about, apparent in the eyes of people who knew them; they were the victims behind the glass. But Elise didn’t want to hide it in the cupboard, so if anyone asked about her family, she openly told them her mother committed suicide, as if she were telling someone Ingrid was a doctor or a scientist. Now they had a different tragedy to deal with, a real scenario, and Elise wished that Ida’s death were fake instead of Ingrid’s. She wanted it so badly she thought her heart would explode. Their children were intrigued by sinister news and stories that neither she nor Nathaniel had discouraged them from reading. Now they had become the stories people would read about, as their lives were splattered like roadkill all over the media. There had been articles written suggesting Nathaniel had been having an affair, and others that accused them both of attacking their own child. The stories about Ray were even worse – fictitious claims he was involved in some weird cult, or saying he’d conspired with a patient to get rid of his granddaughter, or another that suggested he was involved in illegal surrogacy deals. Now Elise was wondering how much of it was the truth.
Miles was awake when Elise looked into his room. He was staring at the bed opposite, where Ida usually slept. Elise climbed in behind him and pulled his warm little body into her arms and kissed the back of his head.
‘Ida told me she was going to die on leap year.’
‘Don’t be silly, Miles.’ Elise squeezed him tighter, but he wrenched himself from her grip and turned to face the wall.
‘I don’t want to live with you and Dad anymore. I want to stay here with Granddad Ray.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
NOW
Mark Paton stood at Elise’s front door holding his son, Louis, in his arms. Louis had obviously been crying quite a lot, because he was gulping air in staggered breaths.
‘Can I come in?’ Mark’s T-shirt was stained but Elise didn’t think about what had caused it, so shocked was she to see him there. Her heart lifted at the sight of Louis, her Buddy, who looked so familiar to her. If Elise hadn’t been so distracted, she’d have noticed Mark had also been crying, but she mistook his red-rimmed eyes for tiredness.
‘Sure, come in. Everything okay?’
Mark didn’t reply; he simply walked past her and abruptly turned around. ‘I think I need a coffee, or a drink?’ Mark lifted his free arm up to wipe his nose on the sleeve of his hoody, his fingers wrapped around a handgun. Elise’s eyes widened, and she turned towards the front door, stopping just as she reached it, an instinct to protect the little boy suddenly overwhelming her.
‘Don’t do that.’
Elise slowly turned around to see Mark holding the gun to Louis’s head. ‘No!’ she shouted, causing Louis to flinch, and a new bout of crying ensued. ‘Please, Mark, don’t do that.’
‘Come away from the door and get me a drink.’ Mark’s face crumpled. ‘You’ve got to help me, Elise.’
‘Okay, Mark. I’ll get you a drink if you put the gun down and let me take Louis?’
Mark’s foot was tapping the floor; he was agitated and jumpy. ‘You can have Louis, but I’m not putting the gun down.’
Elise was stunned, and began to shake as she took a now-screaming Louis into her arms, frantically thinking how she was going to get them out of this situation.
As she headed towards the kitchen, she wondered if she could text Nathaniel – her phone was on the worktop – and then she felt what she assumed was the muzzle of the gun in the middle of her back.
‘If you try anything or call anyone, I’ll shoot both of you.’
‘It’s okay, it’s okay.’ Elise was saying this more to herself than anyone else. With a shaky free hand, she found a glass in one of the cupboards, her brain racing, thinking who might call round. She found some whiskey and poured it into the glass, passing it to Mark as Louis returned to his staggered breathing.
‘Do you have a sitting room in this shithole?’
Elise led Mark into the lounge and chose to sit in the chair by the fireplace. Mark briefly glanced at the black, charred wall in the opposite alcove and sat by the door.
‘Mark, what’s happened? What’s this about?’ Elise put her hand on Louis’s forehead and kissed his hair. That smell – the smell she remembered from the hospital – was faint, but she still recognised it.
‘Daddy?’ Louis held his arms out to Mark.
‘Just sit with me for a minute, sweetheart.’
‘Touching.’ Mark swigged his drink. ‘You know, I thought you were such a mad bitch. I was convinced you were cuckoo when you started harassing us, telling us we had your son. Completely crazy. I didn’t think for one second that you might be right. That was until yesterday, when I found out what a fucking liar my wife is.’
‘Mark, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Do you know what she said to me?’ Mark started waving the gun around, making Elise even more nervous. ‘“He’s not yours, anyway.”’
‘This isn’t making any sense. Who’s not whose?’
‘That isn’t Louis sat there. That’s your son.’
Elise was quiet for a moment, stunned at what she was hearing. ‘How do you know?’
‘I found a contract between Jane and your father, paying her a lot of money to take your son and swap him with ours.’
‘You’re lying. My father wouldn’t do that.’
‘Well, he has.’ Mark was talking animatedly, in a sarcastic tone.
‘Mark, whatever is going on between you and Jane is none of my business. You shouldn’t be here; you’re going to get me into so much trouble.’
‘You’re the lunatic who made our lives a misery and now you don�
�t believe me when I tell you that’s your son?’ Mark stood up and walked to the window, reaching up and touching the livid scratch on the back of his neck. ‘Do you want me to tell you why she did it? This’ll make you laugh. Jane said she’d been having therapy with your father because a work colleague raped her. What she really means is, she was shagging someone she worked with. I know how you women work – you make a mistake, feel guilty and then lie to cover it up. In a nutshell, she was spouting all this to your father and, for whatever reason, he offered her a lot of money to swap your baby with hers, so she wouldn’t be reminded of the bloke she’d been shagging.’
‘But why would my father do that to us?’
‘I don’t fucking know – some experiment, knowing the good old doctor. Your old man has previous for all that kind of thing – I mean, he’s been nicked before.’
Elise didn’t answer him.
‘That’s not the best of it. Apparently, it’s all my fault.’ Mark said, a sarcastic smile appearing on his face. ‘We don’t have any money – we’re in debt because I have an addiction. That’s why she took that money from your father.’
‘There’s clearly been some sort of misunderstanding. I’d love to believe that he’s my son, I was so convinced of it.’ Elise remembered all the times she’d doubted herself, had pushed her head through the bubble and realised how wrong she sounded. ‘But I think someone is playing games with you. Mark, put the gun down and go home. I’ll follow along with Louis and we’ll say no more about it.’
Of course, that wasn’t what Elise was going to do, if he agreed to it. She was going to call the police immediately and tell social services what had happened, so they could protect Louis and possibly Jane.
‘I might be drunk, off my head, whatever, but I’m not stupid. Stay there.’ Mark suddenly decided to leave the room. Elise looked out into the hall at the back door, but knew it was locked and it was too risky to try to get out.
