2014
She didn’t recognise her mother when she came in.
Somehow DI Fleming had managed to arrange a prison visit out of hours. The visitors’ room, with its vending machines and children’s toys in one corner, seemed vast and as she sat waiting at a scarred table Marnie had time to consider jumping up, saying it had all been a mistake and leaving.
Then a door at the further end opened and a prison officer ushered in an old woman, very thin, with slumped shoulders and untidy, rusty-white hair. She looked across and without any sign of animation or interest came over to Marnie’s table and sat down. She had bright-blue eyes.
Like her own, Marnie realised. It was a shock. She remembered her mother with black hair and eyes that were an indeterminate grey; she couldn’t be much more than fifty now but this woman looked twenty years older than that.
‘Mum?’ she said uncertainly.
The woman gave a thin smile. ‘I suppose so. They said my daughter wanted to see me.’
‘Did you want to see me?’ It was all she could think of to say.
Kirstie shrugged. ‘I don’t want anything, really, any more. I’ve had enough.’ She leant forward across the table. ‘They watch me, you know. They won’t let me do it.’
Marnie had imagined her mother cruel, harsh, mocking. In hopeful dreams she’d imagined her at last responding to the ties between them. She’d never thought of this. Struggling with a sense of unreality, she said, ‘I wanted to ask you a couple of things.’
‘If you like.’
‘When you left me at the cottage, when I was struck over the head, was it Drax who hit me?’
A little animation came to her face at the name. ‘Drax?’ She lingered on it lovingly. ‘No. He wasn’t there. He was waiting for me, of course.’
Sick bile rose in Marnie’s throat. ‘You hit your own child? You hit me, then you left me? I could have died.’
‘I told you,’ Kirstie said, as if she was explaining to a child. ‘Drax was waiting for me at the station. It had all gone wrong, the business. We had to go. He wanted you out of the way – you just came back at the wrong time.’
She was disposable, worthless. When she was tense, the scar from her bullet wound hurt; it was hurting now. With her throat stinging from suppressing the tears, Marnie said, ‘Was he my father?’
‘No!’ It was a cry of pain. ‘He should have been. But he would never give me a child. You were just a mistake. He’d left me then, you see.’
Marnie heard the words but if she didn’t block their meaning she couldn’t go on. Just one more question, then she could leave.
‘Who was he, then?’
‘One of the screws at the prison. Peter Redford. Never said anything but I knew he fancied me.’ She smirked. ‘I was pretty then, you know, prettier than you are. When I was discharged I’d nowhere to go so I went to him and he took me in. Didn’t care what I did – Drax was gone.
‘I said I’d marry him. Then Drax came back, so of course I left.’
‘Did he – did he know about me – my father?’
‘Never saw you.’
‘Did he – did he look for me?’
‘I don’t know. We’d gone.’
‘You didn’t want me. Why didn’t you leave me with him?’ Marnie burst out.
Kirstie gave her an impatient look. ‘I was only six months gone. I couldn’t have.’
‘You could have waited—’
‘Drax would have vanished by then. Don’t you understand?’ Her voice was impatient.
And somehow, all of a sudden, Marnie did. His name had been short for Dracula and he had sucked out the essence of her mother’s humanity and left her less than human too.
She had only one more question. ‘What was my father like?’
‘Oh kind, soft – a fool!’ There was nothing but contempt in her voice.
Now she could go. Without farewell, without a backward glance, Marnie walked to the exit door and said to the prison officer, ‘I want to leave now.’
Outside the prison, the air was very fresh and cool. It had stopped raining for the moment and Marnie walked fast, as if to put distance between herself and the woman she had known as mother.
It would be easier now. It wasn’t that Marnie was worthless, it was simply that long before she was born Kirstie Burnside had no love left, as Peter Redford had found.
Peter Redford. It wouldn’t be hard to trace him, the ‘kind, soft fool’ who was the better part of her heredity. By now, the heartbreak he had felt would be long forgotten, though, and he would have his own life.
She wouldn’t try to find him. The price she, and others, had paid already in her search for answers was too high. She was simply Marnie Bruce, a name without connections, a name that was hers alone. Tonight she would be back in North London in the tiny flat Anita Loudon’s legacy had bought her, beginning on the task of quelling the memories, clearing the ruins of the past and trying to build her new life.