The Child (Kate Waters #2)(102)

“Alice,” she says as if she can read my thoughts. “I’ve never stopped thinking about you. Never.”

“She hasn’t,” Nick says. My dad. He keeps looking away as if I’m too much to take in. But Angela doesn’t.

“I thought we’d be safe in a hospital,” she says. “But we weren’t.

“When I got back from the shower, I knew as soon as I came in the room that I was alone. There was a silence so unnatural I felt faint and had to grab the doorjamb. Everything was wrong, but I couldn’t see how. I went over to your cot and there was just a slight dent in the white cotton sheet to show that you’d been there. I put my hand in your cot—I couldn’t believe you’d gone—I searched every corner in case you were hidden somehow, and I felt your warmth for the last time.”

My mother weeps.

“I couldn’t remember if I’d looked at you again before I went out. I shouldn’t have left you.”

I reach out and take her hand. It is the first time we’ve touched. Her hand is soft and warm and I squeeze it.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I say.





EIGHTY-FOUR


    Emma


WEDNESDAY, MAY 16, 2012

Two weeks later, I’m sitting in the waiting room of a magistrate’s court with Mick and Kate. Mick has put on a terrible stained tie as a nod to the occasion and brought an Egg McMuffin in his pocket. “Bit late up this morning,” he’d explained.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be ready,” he said to Kate when he finally swallowed the last mouthful. “I’ll go outside for the arrival. Can’t wait to see his face.”

Kate’s in a severe black suit and white shirt. She looks like an undertaker’s receptionist. She’s up and down all the time, talking to DI Sinclair in the corner.

Her story about Angela and me had caused a huge fuss when it came out. She’d had to write it carefully, she said, leaving out anything that might identify Will as the rapist and hedging round Jude’s role. There was a line saying: “Police have arrested a seventy-three-year-old woman as part of their investigation.”

“I don’t want to be responsible for their trials collapsing,” she told me. “There’ll be plenty of time to tell that part of the story later.”

The day after Angela and I met for the first time, the Post put our reunion on the front page and on three pages inside. There were pictures of me and Angela with our arms around each other. It was the first time we’d held each other and we’d needed Mick to give us permission, almost.

“Come on,” he’d said when we hovered nervously near each other, neither ready to make the first move. “You’ve waited forty-two years for this. Give her a hug, Angela.”

Mick clicked away for ages but when he stopped, we couldn’t let go.

Joe had cried and Kate put her arm round him. Everyone seemed to be hugging.

? ? ?

But there’s no happiness here. This is where my misery started. And where it will end. It’ll be the first time I’ve seen Will since that day at his house. I wasn’t going to come, but DI Sinclair said Will was going to fight it all the way. I suppose I knew he would. His arrogance wouldn’t let him do anything else. Kate said she’d heard he was putting all the blame on Soames. Soames’s face was identifiable in the photographs. He was the one with the record of sex offenses.

I couldn’t let him think I would back off. So I’ve come. To show him I’m still here. Like Banquo’s ghost.

He arrives with a swagger.

“I have come to protest my innocence,” Will says on the steps of the court, turning his best side to Mick’s camera.

I can feel every inch of my skin, as if I’m on fire, as I stand up from my seat and face my attacker. He looks startled and his public face disappears. He is just a frightened old man.

Jude isn’t here. She’s retreated from me, from everyone, since she was arrested. She seems to have shrunk in the days that have followed her confession and she’s refusing to eat.

Barbara is staying with her, while she is on bail. To look after her—picking up where she left off all those years ago. I’ve told Jude I don’t hate her. But I think I do. I’ve tried to understand why she took me from the hospital, what drove her. I’ve tried to put myself in her desperate shoes. But all I can think of is Angela’s face when she found me gone. And her years of agony.

When I asked Jude how she could have lived with herself, knowing what they were going through, she said she forced herself not to think about them.

“They had other children,” she said, as if that made it right. I wanted to scream at her but there was no point. She is shielded by her self-obsession. Her sense of entitlement. Whenever she’d wanted something, she took it whatever the consequences because she felt she deserved it.

I now saw why it was she threw me out without a backwards glance. She had to have Will so I had to go. I was collateral damage.

Angela won’t talk about her. Won’t speak her name. She says she wants to concentrate on the future, not the past.

We speak on the phone every day with a growing familiarity and I wonder if I’ll ever call her Mum. Not yet. She still calls me Alice and then corrects herself. I feel like I am two people now. Emma and Alice. I’m going to see my brother and sister next week. I think I’m ready now and Angela wants us to meet, but I’m not sure how they feel about it. About me. The shock of my reappearance must be taking its toll on them as well. I’m the missing child who caused so much unhappiness to their family. Angela says they are thrilled I have been found, but she wants everyone to be happy. I need to take it a step at a time.