The Half Sister, page 15
She nods and swallows the bad taste in her mouth. ‘My sister,’ she says without even thinking. ‘It’s a surprise.’
The woman smiles kindly. ‘Oh, I’m sure she’ll be thrilled.’
I wouldn’t bet on it, thinks Kate.
24
Kate
There’s not a cloud in the sky when Kate gets off the train at Bournemouth. She stands on the platform for a moment, breathing in that unmistakeable sea air and listening to the seagulls squawking overhead.
Despite what she’s here for, there’s almost a feeling of serenity about the place, a peacefulness that you can’t find in London, no matter how hard you try.
‘Where to?’ asks the driver as she reaches the top of the taxi rank.
‘The university please, Talbot campus.’
‘I assume it’s not to study,’ he says, laughing.
He must see the perplexed look on her face as he quickly follows it up with, ‘No disrespect, love.’
Kate pulls herself up at the slight, knowing that he’s only speaking the truth, but it sometimes takes a comment like that, from someone who can only see your exterior, for reality to hit home. The campus is almost deserted, the summer vacation well underway. She spots a few students milling around, their smiles carefree, their optimism for the future almost tangible, and she realizes that she is old. She may not look a day over thirty-four – though if the truth be told, she’d rather hope that she could pass for closer to thirty – but her mind feels a hundred, scarred by the minutiae of everyday life, cynical of everyone’s motive, no longer assured that everything will work out for the best. As she looks at the nondescript building she’s about to walk into, she has a sinking feeling that the latter will never be truer.
‘Oh hi,’ she says to the first person who looks at her from across the chest-high counter. ‘My name’s Kate Walker and I’m from the Gazette. I called earlier about verifying one of your students for a job offer.’
‘Oh yes,’ says the woman, with a frown. ‘Well, I’m very sorry to have to tell you that we have no record of a Jessica Linley having studied here.’
Kate doesn’t know what she was expecting, but it isn’t this. Still, there is a frisson of anticipation working its way through her as she acknowledges what it means. It will give her no pleasure to inform Lauren that Jess isn’t who she says she is, or tell Matt that his star reporter is a liar and a fraud, but she’ll do it if it means putting an end to this ridiculous charade that’s been plaguing her family for the past month.
‘Are you absolutely sure?’ asks Kate earnestly. ‘There’s no way you could have got this wrong?’
The woman shakes her head regretfully. ‘I’ve double-checked. The only possibility would be if she attended under a different name. Is that likely?’
Kate considers it for a moment. Anything is possible, especially where Jess is concerned, it seems.
‘I don’t have another name,’ she says, rummaging in her bag. ‘But I do have a photograph. She has only just graduated . . .’
The woman looks at her with a forlorn expression, almost as if she’s taking responsibility for Jess’s duplicity herself.
‘Well, so she says,’ adds Kate. ‘You might recognize her.’
The woman looks at the photo and back at Kate. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t . . .’
‘Don’t worry, it was just a thought,’ says Kate, about to take it back.
‘I’m sorry I can’t be of more help.’
‘I recognize her,’ says the woman standing next to her, making Kate’s heart feel as if it has frozen in time. The woman takes an inordinate amount of time to lift her glasses, hanging on a beaded chain around her neck, and sit them on the end of her nose, before moving in for a closer look at the photo. ‘I couldn’t tell you her name,’ she says. ‘But I’ve definitely seen her before.’
‘Are you . . . are you sure?’ stammers Kate, feeling as if the small office is closing in on her. She catches the woman shooting a look at her colleague behind the desk, as if in anticipation of a problem.
‘You’re absolutely sure?’ questions Kate.
‘Mmm,’ mumbles the woman non-committally, as if she’s suddenly conscious of breaking some human rights clause in the bureaucracy handbook.
‘Maybe it’s not who you think it is?’ presses Kate.
‘I’m usually pretty good,’ she says. ‘I know that face, but can’t place her for the life of me.’
‘Might it have been here, at the university?’ presses Kate. ‘Or somewhere in town perhaps?’
‘Gosh, I really don’t know,’ says the woman, oblivious to Kate’s growing frustration. ‘I just know I’ve seen her somewhere before.’
‘Well, to be honest, if her name’s different to the one she used here, it tells me all I need to know anyway,’ says Kate, slipping the picture back into her bag. ‘But if you remember anything more, perhaps you’d give me a call?’ She hands over her business card.
‘Of course,’ says the woman, a puzzled expression still clouding her features.
Kate thanks the ladies for their help and walks out into the sunshine, wondering where to go next. She’d hoped to at least be able to start tracking Jess’s past, but the only lead she has is the university, and with that going cold she has nothing to follow up on.
‘Shit!’ she says aloud, as soon as she gets around the corner, ignoring the bemused looks of passers-by.
‘Hey, excuse me,’ comes a voice from behind her. ‘Excuse me . . . Miss!’
Kate turns around, praying that it’s the same woman, having had an epiphany. She struggles to contain her buoyed enthusiasm when she sees that it is.
‘I don’t know if it’s going to help you any,’ pants the woman. ‘But I’ve just remembered where I know her from.’
It’s what Kate had wanted and feared in equal measure.
‘Oh,’ she says, trying to sound nonchalant.
‘As odd as this may sound, I think she was working in the cafeteria.’ The woman looks at her quizzically over the top of her glasses. ‘What that means, I don’t know, but you might want to ask down there.’
Kate’s brows knit together in confusion. ‘Working?’ she asks.
The woman nods confidently. ‘She wasn’t a student here; she was an employee.’
Kate’s brain feels as if it’s about to explode. ‘But then why . . .?’ she starts, to which the woman shrugs her shoulders.
‘I have no idea, but your best bet is to go down there and ask around. I can safely say I’ve seen her there in the last six months.’
‘Erm, okay, thanks,’ says Kate, hurrying off.
‘It’s that way,’ says the woman, nodding in the opposite direction to the one in which Kate’s heading.
‘Thanks,’ says Kate hurriedly, her feet taking her faster than her brain can think.
It looks more like a cafeteria in an upmarket department store than a university. No wonder it costs nine thousand pounds a year to come here.
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.
‘I don’t think so,’ she says. ‘Let’s go up to the next turning.’
The red slate roofs of the houses in the road before are replaced with black tiles, giving the street a more ominous feel.
‘This is it,’ she exclaims, knowing instantly that her memory hadn’t lied to her.
Jess stops stock still and looks at her. ‘Are you sure?’ she says.
Lauren nods. ‘So now what?’
‘I’m going to knock on a few doors,’ says Jess. ‘See if anyone remembers anything.’
Lauren had had a horrible inkling she was going to say that, and tiny pinpricks of sweat spring to the skin of her palms.
‘Are you coming?’
Lauren nods half-heartedly, though when they reach the gate of the first house, she holds back. ‘I’ll stay here with the children,’ she says. ‘You go.’
Jess smiles tightly before walking down the path and as Lauren watches her, she doesn’t know what she wants her to find.
‘Oh hello,’ says Jess cheerily to the woman who answers the door. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you but I’m looking to speak to someone who lived on this street twenty or so years ago.’
The woman shakes her head and says, ‘I’m sorry,’ before Jess has even finished the sentence.
‘I’m not looking to sell you anything,’ presses Jess, but the door is already closing. This is going to be crueller than Lauren thought, and she berates herself for ever mentioning it to Jess. No good can come of this.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ says Lauren with forced joviality. ‘We can have a walk around town, and I’ll treat you to scones and a cuppa at Betty’s Tea Rooms.’
‘We can’t give up after just one setback,’ says Jess. ‘We need to keep going.’
It’s not what Lauren wants to hear, but she can’t decide whether it’s because she doesn’t want Jess to get hurt or is scared for herself. Either way, there’s a sense of impending doom as Jess presses on.
The next house is shrouded in shadow, guarded by an imposing oak tree on the pavement. Brightly coloured flower boxes line the deep ledges of the ground-floor windows and the front garden is pruned to within an inch of its life. It looks like a home owned by an elderly, but active, house-proud couple. Lauren applauds her observation skills when she sees one of the brilliant-white net curtains twitch. Bingo!
Almost before Jess even navigates the bell pull, an older woman, who reminds Lauren of her late grandma, opens the door and looks at her inquisitively. The sound of the doorbell is still chiming around the house.
‘Hello dear,’ she says.
‘I’m really sorry to bother you . . .’ says Jess. ‘It’s just that I’m looking for someone who may have lived here around twenty years ago.’
‘Well that would be me,’ says the woman, with a half laugh. ‘How can I help you?’
Jess turns to look at Lauren hopefully, but a sudden apprehension weighs Lauren down. How could she ever have thought this would be a good idea?
‘I haven’t got much information to go on, but I’m trying to track down a family that may have lived along this street.’
The woman looks at her expectantly.
‘A couple and their daughter. He was . . . he was . . .’
‘Tall,’ says Lauren from the kerb. ‘With blonde hair and pale blue eyes.’ As she pictures her father, she unexpectedly feels a pull at the back of her throat.
‘You’re not referring to the Woods family, are you?’ asks the woman, her features darkening.
‘I . . . I don’t know,’ says Jess. ‘Maybe.’
‘Perhaps you should come in,’ says the woman, opening the door wider and stepping aside.
Jess looks wide-eyed at Lauren, who shakes her head. ‘I’ll wait with the children out here.’
‘It’s too hot to stand out there,’ says the woman. ‘The tree keeps this place lovely and cool – please, come in.’
Lauren looks at the pristine hallway, with its pale blue carpet and ornate dado rail, and fast forwards in her head to what it might look like in ten minutes time, once her little horrors have inflicted their worst, with their sticky fingers and dusty shoes. ‘This is really very kind of you,’ she says, as if it will offset the apology she’ll have to make on the way out.
‘You don’t look like reporters,’ says the woman.
‘Reporters?’ exclaims Lauren. ‘Why would we be reporters?’
‘They come by here from time to time, every few years, trying to dig it all up again.’
The woman was right, the house was lovely and cool, but now there’s a ferocious heat coursing through Lauren. Dig all what up again?
‘I’m Jess, and this is Lauren, my . . .’ There’s a split-second pause that only Lauren would notice. ‘Sister,’ she goes on, before smiling to herself.
‘I’m Carol,’ says the woman. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
Lauren wants to say no, but Jess has already said, ‘That would be lovely, thank you.’
They follow Carol down the long hallway, into the kitchen at the very back of the house. Lauren imagines that when the blue and orange cupboards were put in, they were the height of fashion, but although it still looks shiny and new, she can’t see this particular trend coming around again anytime soon.
‘So, the Woods?’ asks Jess.
‘Oh, it was a terrible business,’ says Carol as she fills a cream kettle with a woodland scene depicted on the side. ‘They were a young couple, Frank and Julia were their names, and they lived next door but one.’
‘With a baby?’ asks Jess.
Carol nods. ‘I didn’t know them to speak to – I tend to keep myself to myself, even more so since I lost my Roy a few years back.’
Lauren smiles sympathetically, but wishes she’d get to the point.
‘So, anyways, they’d have these almighty rows – that we could hear from here – and every few weeks the police would show up, have a word with him, and things would quieten down for a bit. We’d not heard a peep out of them for a good few months before it happened.’
