The Half Sister(50)
Kate heads straight towards the girl on the till, with the photo of Jess in her hand.
‘Hello,’ she says, offering a friendly smile. ‘I wonder if you can help me. I’m looking for this girl.’
She shows Jess’s picture and watches the young woman’s expression carefully.
‘Has something happened to her?’ she immediately asks, making Kate’s stomach turn over. ‘Are you the police?’
‘No,’ says Kate softly. ‘She’s my friend and I’ve lost track of her. The last time we spoke, she was working here.’
The girl’s face relaxes and she nods. ‘Yes, Harriet was working here until a couple of months ago.’
‘Harriet?’ Kate repeats, unable to stop herself. She senses the girl tensing up again, so quickly adds, ‘I’ve not heard anyone call her that in a long time. I know her as Jess, which is her middle name.’
‘Oh,’ says the girl. ‘Well Harriet, or Jess, left just before the summer. She said she was going up to London. She wanted to make a name for herself.’
Well she’s certainly doing that, thinks Kate.
‘I’ve been round to her place in Lancaster Road,’ says Kate, hoping to give the impression that she knows more than she does. ‘But they’ve not seen her for quite a while.’ She crosses her fingers in the hope that the girl doesn’t call her bluff.
‘Well, the only place I’ve known her to live is at Elm House on the Clifford Estate.’
‘Ah, that must be where she went to after Lancaster Road,’ says Kate, making a note in her head.
The girl looks taken aback. ‘How long did you say it had been since you’d seen her?’ There’s an accusatory tone to her voice and Kate feels hemmed in.
‘It’s been a while,’ she says. ‘But thanks for your help.’
The girl nods. ‘Well, say hello when you find her.’
‘Oh, I will,’ Kate replies with a smile.
25
Lauren
As Lauren walks out of Harrogate station, she feels like she’s stepped back in time. Everything’s exactly as she remembers it from when she was last here as a teenager, just before her family suddenly upped and moved to London.
The bench where she spent hours smoking and kissing Justin still sits opposite the station, surrounded by a well-stocked bed of flowers. The council had long since cottoned on that the spa town could be a popular tourist destination and had presented it as such, ploughing funds into quaint hanging baskets and attractions such as Valley Gardens and the Royal Pump Room Museum.
It feels odd being back here with her three children in tow, having left this place declaring that she’d remain childless.
‘Which way do you think we should head?’ asks Jess, interrupting her thoughts.
Lauren shields her eyes from the midday sun as she takes a moment to get her bearings, looking left and right up Station Parade.
‘We need to go up the hill,’ says Lauren, feeling like a reluctant tour guide. ‘It was one of the roads off on the right, up by the Majestic hotel.’
Jess leads the way, pushing the double buggy with Noah and Emmy in, whilst Lauren follows with Jude in a front-wearing sling. This trip would have been an impossibility on her own, but with an extra pair of hands it just about works.
‘Do you think you’ll recognize the street if you see it?’ asks Jess, reminding Lauren exactly who she’s doing this for.
‘I don’t know,’ she says honestly.
She can feel Jess throw her a sideways glance as they get to the hotel on the brow of the hill, as if hoping that she’ll immediately declare that it was right on this spot that she saw her father push her in a pram almost a quarter of a century ago.
A bus passes by and Lauren is hit by a sudden flashback to when she was coming home from a geography exam. It had gone terribly, like everything else in her life at that time, and she was sitting on the bus, looking out of the window, wondering where it had all gone wrong. Just as she was thinking that it couldn’t possibly get any worse, she had seen her dad walking down a side street with one arm draped around the shoulder of a woman and the other pushing a pram. The vision was gone in a flash and she had instinctively jumped up out of her seat and hit the bell, pressing it incessantly until the driver called out, ‘Okay love, don’t get your knickers in a twist.’ A flippant comment that would cause him all sorts of trouble in today’s world.
She’d got off at the earliest opportunity and ran back up the hill as fast as she could, not knowing whether she wanted to be proved right or wrong. The image was already fuzzy in her head and she couldn’t be sure if it was the first right turn or the second that she’d seen him. It might even have been the third, but all three were clear by the time she’d got there.
Over the intervening years, her memory had embellished what she’d seen, to give her even more of an excuse to hate the man she’d once loved. She convinced herself she’d seen him kiss the woman and was adamant that he’d scooped the tiny baby up into the air, smiling at it from below. But now, as she stands at the viewpoint from the bus, she wonders whether she ever saw him at all.
‘Was it here?’ asks Jess.
Lauren looks around pensively, forcing herself to concentrate, whilst wondering what it’s going to achieve even if she does recognize something.