CHAPTER 1

i

Kelly

The house was dark. It jolted Kelly Sheldon the moment she pushed the door open. Darkness like a hand raised in her face, halting her in her tracks. The house should be alight by now, a warm glow after the gloom of the early spring evening.

And her mother should be in the kitchen, cooking or brewing or bottling. But the cluttered kitchen was silent. A saucepan stood cold on the cooker, empty jars waited forgotten on the table. Kelly pushed aside pots of herbs on the windowsill, to peer out into the field. Sheep and lambs were milling about, disgruntled, by the gate. They hadn’t had their usual feed.

What had happened to her mother? It wasn’t in Kelly’s nature to worry but a chill clenched her stomach now.

‘Mum?’ She tried to speak normally, keep her voice level.

No response. She tiptoed upstairs, wanting to shout, but afraid there would be no reply.

‘Mum?’ For a moment she thought that Roz’s bedroom was also empty. No light. Silence. A jumble of bedding. That wasn’t right. Messy bedding was normal for Kelly’s room, but Roz always kept calm order in hers. Tantric harmony.

Kelly laid a hand on the quilt and felt her mother’s arm beneath. She turned back the covers.

Roz was half undressed, one shoe still on, huddled in the tangle of cloth, shivering. She mewed as Kelly pulled the quilt, her eyes clenched shut.

‘Mum? What’s wrong? How long have you been like this? Christ, Mum.’

Roz’s fingers closed round her wrist, as if Kelly could give her a transfusion of strength. She swallowed hard, opened her eyes with a wince. ‘I’m all right.’

‘How can you say that? Mum! I knew you weren’t well. I shouldn’t have gone out. Look, I’m going to get a doctor.’

‘No!’

‘But Mum, you’re really ill. I’ve got to.’

‘No. I’ll be all right. You can get me some water. Some tea. Dandelion root. There’s some in the kitchen. Make a—’

‘No, Mum, this is serious. Look at you. You can’t solve this with herb tea.’

‘I don’t want a doctor. I’m not taking their poisons.’ Roz was struggling up, ready to fight, and Kelly saw her with new eyes. Not just slim and supple, as Kelly had always thought, but gaunt. Still in her thirties, she was looking nearer sixty. The effort of rising was too much; the nausea was clearly taking hold. Roz was waving her arm for support, so Kelly helped her, half carried her through to the bathroom, where Roz dropped over the pan and heaved. ‘Just some water,’ she said hoarsely.

Kelly hesitated for a second. ‘All right.’

She raced down to the kitchen for a glass, because doing something, anything, gave her time to confront her panic. Think. She groped in her pocket for her mobile, and checked for a signal. Why was she bothering? She knew there was never any signal here, in the shadow of the hill. She would have to climb…

Joe. Her boyfriend. Of course, he was still in the yard. He had brought her back from The Mill and Tuppence on the pillion of his spluttering bike, and he always took time to see if the potholes on their mountain track had done any damage.

She flung the door wide, calling him.

Joe ambled over.

‘Mum’s ill.’ She didn’t like to shout, so she forced herself to wait until he was close enough. ‘I think she’s really bad. She needs a doctor. Call one.’

Joe was flummoxed. ‘Doctor? I didn’t think she had one. I thought she didn’t believe—’

‘She doesn’t. But tough. She’s really ill, Joe. Here, take my phone. Find a signal. Please.’

‘Okay.’ He took the mobile, confirming that, yes, there was no signal.

‘Please hurry. I’ve got to get back to her.’

‘Yeah, yeah, okay.’ He wandered off and Kelly dashed upstairs with the water.

Roz was back in bed, shivering. ‘No doctor,’ she said.

Kelly held the glass to her lips. ‘You’ve got to have a doctor. I don’t care what you say. You’re ill, and I’m scared and I don’t want to lose you. Please, Mum.’

Roz’s face, already creased with pain, frowned more. Then her resistance softened into tears. ‘Kelly.’ She squeezed her hand, then lay back and allowed her daughter to straighten her bedding and wipe away the sweat.

‘I couldn’t do without you, Mum,’ said Kelly, unable to stop her voice quivering. ‘So please, be good when the doctor gets here. Because I am going to do whatever he tells me to do.’

Again, Roz opened her lips to argue. Then stopped, smiled and sank back. ‘You’re the boss.’

‘That’s right!’ She was going to play the boss and take a machete to one of Roz’s strongest convictions; no doctors. Herbs and acupuncture and the correct balancing of Yin and Yang were all very well for sniffles, aching feet or sore eyes. But this was different. This, Kelly knew in her twisting gut, was bad. For the first time she imagined a world without Roz.

Kelly lit a couple of scented candles and sat on an embroidered cushion, holding her mother’s hand while they waited for the doctor.

A siren. She heard it, muffled by distance and a bank of trees, the brief blast of an ambulance edging a car out of the way up on the narrow road. Of course, Joe wouldn’t have had the sense to find a GP’s number, he’d have gone straight for 999. Kelly gave her mother’s hand another squeeze and went to the window. Blue pulsing light. Then she glimpsed the white van bumping its way along their track.

It was too drastic, an ambulance. Not what she’d wanted. But her instinct told her it was what her mother needed. She went down and out to the yard to greet the paramedics.

‘All right, love? Where’s the patient?’

Midnight. She had never known the house so silent. Which was absurd, because, if she chose to listen, there were all the usual noises of the night, the faintest creaks and rattles, the wind outside, an occasional bleat. Just like any other night. But there was an emptiness, something missing, so fundamental, the house seemed dead without it.

Kelly switched on the light, leant back against the door, out of energy. ‘Go home,’ they’d insisted. ‘There’s nothing you can do here. We’ve got her stabilised, just waiting for the test results, so you go home and get a good night’s sleep.’

Joe had brought her back, thought he’d stay the night, but she’d waved him away. Joe wasn’t the right companion for dealing with this – this thing. This was a lesson in being alone. As she would be, if Roz died.

It wasn’t loneliness that Kelly feared. Happy and easy-going, she would always have friends, companions, lovers. But the loss of Roz would be the loss of a part of herself. She would have this place, but what sense would it make without Roz?

Carregwen, the cottage, battered and patched, tasselled cushions, wooden bowls and sandalwood and patchouli disguising the smell of damp, was Roz’s home. Home in its deepest meaning. Kelly loved it as a comfortably unconventional retreat, a place to do her own thing, the good night’s rest after adventure. But for Roz it was far more, totemic, something that had made her whole. Carregwen meant she was a home provider. She had filled it, obsessively, with little things, but most of all with the one prize that mattered – a family. Her daughter.

And now that daughter slid down the kitchen door, slumped on the floor and contemplated how meaningless the place would be without Roz.

‘Of course your mother seems to have a comparatively healthy life style.’

Dr Choudry pulled up a chair for Kelly. She had spoken to three hurried doctors since her mother’s admittance and received a dismissive grunt from a fourth. Dr Choudry had been the most convincingly human one, so Kelly decided to corner him for explanations. He was ready to oblige; Roz’s medical notes needed some urgent padding.

‘I gather she’s a vegetarian.’

‘Yes, these days.’ There had been a burger and chip interlude in Milford Haven, but mother and daughter had returned to the diet they’d enjoyed in the commune. ‘But she’s not a vegan,’ she added. Roz would have been, but Kelly had insisted that it made no sense to keep chickens and goats if they didn’t eat eggs and milk.

Dr Choudry nodded. ‘She’s certainly not overweight.’ Tactfully put. Roz was skeletal. ‘She gets plenty of exercise?’

‘Oh yes, in the garden, you know, and she walks everywhere, and she teaches yoga. What’s this got to do with her being sick?’

‘It may have helped conceal her condition for a long time. Of course if she had been signed up with a GP, gone for regular check-ups, it would have been caught long ago. This sort of diabetes can often be dealt with by simple—’

‘Diabetes? I thought it was a problem with her kidneys.’

‘That is one of the long-term problems that can arise with diabetes. Your mother agrees she has been getting increasingly tired over the last few years. There are other signs. A lot of trips to the toilet in the night?’

‘Those were symptoms? I should have done something earlier.’

The doctor smiled. ‘I’m guessing your mother would not have been very amenable. She’s not a great fan of doctors. As far as I can see, the last time she had any dealings with the orthodox medical profession was at your birth. Am I right?’

Kelly tried a smile that she hoped wasn’t too apologetic. ‘She likes to do things naturally. I didn’t think it would matter if someone wasn’t really ill.’

Dr Choudry raised his eyebrows in response. Enough said. Roz had been ill, but they had never known.

‘It’s called Maturity Onset Diabetes of the Young,’ he explained. ‘It usually develops in the late teens or in early adulthood – at about the time your mother disappeared off the NHS radar in fact. No rapid rush of symptoms, so she probably never appreciated them. Until now, unfortunately, when things have progressed to a relatively serious level. A very simple medication might have prevented this. No need even for insulin to start with. But now her kidneys are damaged. Eye problems too, but the kidneys are the real problem.’

‘Will she need dialysis?’

‘It may come to that. Dialysis or a transplant.’

‘A kidney transplant? She can have one of mine.’

He smiled at Kelly’s instant eagerness. ‘Let’s not jump the gun. She’s a long way off being in urgent need of one. For now, we’ll manage her condition by other means. She will need to stick to a careful diet, but I don’t suppose that will be a problem.’

‘No, no problem.’ Kelly was sounding calm. Could he tell, she wondered, that her insides were dissolving in panic? She needed the toilet.

Dr Choudry’s hand was on her arm as she started to rise. ‘That’s your mother. We also need to think about you.’

‘I’m fine. Really. Never a day’s illness. I can cope with one kidney. Wouldn’t that solve everything? Wouldn’t that make her better? Having one of my kidneys?’

He was calming her, a hand on her shoulder. ‘Even if that were the best solution for your mother, it’s not an automatic option. You might not be a suitable donor. We would have to see if your blood and tissue are a match, but first we would need to consider whether your own health would allow it.’

‘I told you, I’m fine.’

‘This type of diabetes is hereditary. Any child of a parent with MODY has a fifty per cent chance of inheriting the condition. You are, what, twenty now?’

‘Twenty-two.’

‘You should sign up with a GP, Kelly. A doctor to help you deal with any symptoms, or with any other medical complications in your life. Yes, conventional medical help, but I’m sure you can see the sense of having the option of both worlds.’

‘Yes. Maybe. I’ll think about it.’

‘Think seriously. Meanwhile, there is a simple predictive test that we can do, to establish whether you have inherited the gene from your mother. That has to be the first step.’

The first step, so innocent. A simple blood sample, almost forgotten by the time the results came back. Roz was home, being nursed and bullied by her daughter, having good days, sometimes almost back to her old self, tramping the fields and counting lambs, talking to her herbs, serenely meditating. But having bad days too. While Roz had still been too weak and vulnerable to object, she and Kelly had signed on with the local surgery. As Kelly had explained, it didn’t mean they ever had to see a doctor unless they chose to.

Free will. It was enough for Roz to allow Dr Matthews to call once or twice to check on her.

The surgery notified Kelly that the results of her test were back.

‘I’m clear,’ she said, bursting in on her mother who was pottering gently in the kitchen. ‘No trace of your naughty genes.’

Roz sat down heavily on the farmhouse chair, dislodging the disgruntled cat. ‘You mean – what did they say? That you and I—’

‘It means I haven’t got this MODY mutation. It was fifty-fifty, and I got the right fifty. Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ve passed on plenty of other nasties to me.’

‘I have?’

‘Who knows? Do you have any more nasties you haven’t told me about? Sudden baldness at forty? We’ll find out soon, won’t we.’ Kelly filled the kettle, feeling light as a feather herself, and baffled that her mother wasn’t similarly elated. ‘Anyway, this test was just for the one gene, so I may never know about the others.’

‘Oh.’ Roz was smiling at last. ‘And you’re clear. Oh, Kelly.’ She was up and hugging her, with a small wince of pain.

‘Come on, sit down again. What sort of tea do you want?’

‘The nettle and parsley? Kelly, I am so pleased. But I knew that you would be all right.’

Kelly smiled. Back to normal – her mother sublimely confident again that things would sort themselves out. ‘The best thing is that maybe I can help you.’

‘You do help me, sweetheart. All day and every day. You help me too much.’ There were tears in Roz’s eyes as she reached out for her daughter’s hand. ‘You shouldn’t be here, stuck with me. You should be away, at college, getting that degree, making a life for yourself.’

‘I am making a life for myself. The life I want.’

‘But you don’t want to be nursing me for the rest of my life.’

‘Yes, but maybe I won’t need to. That’s the point. Now that I know I’m not going to get this moddy noddy thing, there’s nothing to stop me giving you one of my kidneys.’

‘No!’ Roz looked appalled. ‘No! I won’t hear of it.’

‘I’ve got two, you know, both as healthy as the rest of me. I’ll be just as good with one and if you have the other, you’ll be back to normal. See?’

But Kelly knew that look on her mother’s face. She didn’t want Kelly to have a needless operation. The mere mention of it was filling her with an undefined fear. Kelly could feel it. She could read every fleeting nuance of her mother’s feelings; the telepathy of their lifelong closeness. ‘Surgery doesn’t kill, Mum. It’s all safe these days. You won’t lose me on the operating table.’

‘You can’t be sure of that.’

‘I am sure.’ It was important to be firm and confident when Roz’s anxieties took hold. ‘Look, nothing’s going to happen any time soon. I’m not rushing off to hospital tomorrow. But we can be prepared. They can at least do tests, to see how well our blood and tissue match. Then—’

‘Don’t, Kelly.’ Roz stood abruptly. She leaned on the sink, staring out of the window. ‘Don’t let them do any more tests, please.’

‘It would just be a simple test, Mum.’

‘Don’t do it, please. I don’t want to lose you.’

‘A test isn’t going to kill me. An operation won’t kill me. Nothing will kill me.’

Roz turned, tears streaming down her face.

Kelly hugged her. ‘I promise; it’s just a test to see if there’s a match.’

Roz’s breast was rising and falling like a stormy sea. ‘What if there is no match?’

‘Then they can’t use my kidney, that’s all. But I’m hoping there will be a really good match.’

‘And if there isn’t?’

‘I told you.’

Roz pulled back, covering her face with her hands. ‘I don’t want tests. I don’t want to know.’

‘Mum?’ Kelly took her hands, lowering them from her face. This terror wasn’t about kidneys or operations. It was something else. ‘What’s the matter? What don’t you want to know?’

‘I don’t want you to give me a kidney.’ Roz’s blurred eyes were wandering, looking at anything but Kelly.

‘No, that’s not what you meant. What don’t you want to know?’

For a second, she could feel the great wall of resistance in her mother, straining for survival, before it crumbled like a collapsing dam.

‘I don’t want to know if you’re not my daughter!’

Kelly stared at her, aghast at the terror engulfing her mother. Then she absorbed the words. ‘What do you mean? Of course I’m your daughter. Why on earth—?’

‘Because.’

Roz returned to the chair. She sat, looking at her hands.

‘When I was in hospital, in the maternity ward with you… They put labels on all the babies. I woke up one night. There was some row going on outside the room. I went out, stopped a nurse, asked her, what was the fuss about. She told me that someone had muddled up some of the labels. On the babies. She said it was all right, I wasn’t to worry. I tried not to worry, Kelly. I tried. But I always kept wondering, what if they’d mixed up your label and given me another baby? I kept looking at you, looking into your eyes and I was so sure I knew you. But I couldn’t stop worrying. I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter. As long as I didn’t know for sure, they couldn’t take you away. I didn’t want to know. But now… If you have these tests, I’ll have to know. Don’t you see?’

Kelly took this in, automatically tending the kettle and the tisanes and the mugs, mopping up spilt water. It explained so much – her mother’s neurotic fears for Kelly, her perpetual anxiety. A seed of terror planted in a young girl, in hospital, in a state of hormonal riot. A girl not capable of understanding that it didn’t matter.

That was Kelly’s sole thought, without a moment of doubt; it didn’t matter. But then she was already much older than her mother had been then. More mature, less mentally chaotic.

She waited for Roz’s eyes to focus on her. Eyes full of desperation, awaiting the executioner. Then Kelly smiled, as only she could smile. A broad beaming smile. ‘Mum. Of course you are my mother. You’ve been my mother all my life. In every way that really counts. So maybe, supposing there really had been a mix-up, someone else had a claim on me for a few hours. But you’ve been my mother for twenty-two years. Nothing can change that. It’s all that matters. Did you think, if I found out, that I’d stop loving you?’

Roz was looking at her like a child, waiting for reassurance. Wanting to believe.

Then the first worm of doubt in Kelly… ‘If there was a swap, would you stop thinking of me as your daughter? Is that it? You’d want to find the other girl and claim her instead?’

Roz shook her head. ‘No! You could never stop being my daughter. When I looked at you, when you were just a wrinkled red bawling baby, you were mine, all I wanted. But I’ve always been so scared that if you found out, you’d want to go and find her. Your real mother.’

‘You are my real mother. Whatever. I promise you, whatever the tests show, I am your daughter and you are, always were, always will be, my mother.’

ii

Vicky

‘I like it when they’re unconscious. So much more co-operative.’ Zoe Tyler’s laugh distintegrated for a second on the laptop screen, as the Skype connection threw a hissy fit. ‘I don’t mind getting really hands on. Not nearly as squeamish as I thought I’d be. It’s when they start talking I go to pieces.’

Vicky Wendle smiled. ‘Maybe you should go for forensic pathology. They’ll never answer back on the autopsy slab.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that! Brill. Except I really wanted obstetrics.’

‘Perfect. Babies can’t talk at you.’

‘No, but their mothers can.’ Zoe shuddered. ‘I don’t know how you coped in oncology. Doesn’t matter what we’ve been taught, I just sound like I’m talking by rote. Mitchelson said you were a natural.’

‘Did he?’ Vicky knew she was far more communicative with the patients than with her lecturers and fellow students, but she hadn’t expected anyone to notice. She felt quietly flattered.

‘But then you’re his star, you and James “Actually My Uncle” Danvers. Drew says – oh yes, Drew’s party, Saturday, are you going? I thought, if you were—’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Vicky, slowing the words so her haste wouldn’t be too obvious. She was four years into her course, and her classmates still hadn’t cottoned on that she didn’t do parties. ‘Think Mum’s got something planned here. Look, she’s coming. Better go. Talk to you about that Harper lecture this evening?’

The door of her tiny bedroom opened, and Vicky switched off. In every sense.

‘Thought you’d like a cup of tea.’ Her mother, Gillian, bustled in with a tray.

Vicky moved her books and files from one side of her miniscule desk to make way for it. ‘Thanks.’

‘Not studying too hard, I hope. We want to see something of you. But I suppose there’s such a lot of work for your course.’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh.’ Gillian frowned at the tray. ‘I brought you biscuits. I suppose I shouldn’t have done. Shall I take them away again?’

‘Might as well.’

‘All right. Well then…’ Gillian hesitated, picked up the biscuit plate and an empty mug from the windowsill and added in a library whisper, ‘I’ll let you get on.’

The door softly closed. Vicky sat back with a sigh and picked up her fresh tea. Zoe was right, she could sit and listen to dying cancer patients with compassionate interest and discuss their most intimate issues with calm professional concern, but she couldn’t speak to her mother about anything. Not properly. Not anymore.

It didn’t matter. She had work to do.

And she should collect her medication. She could do that now, walk down to the chemist’s. She needed some exercise, some air, even if it was only the air of Marley Farm.

Downstairs in the kitchen of her former council house on the Marley Farm estate, Gillian’s mother Joan was topping up the teapot and coughing over her cigarette. Gillian watched the dangling ash about to drop off into the box of tea bags. There was absolutely no point in saying anything, but she did. ‘I wish you wouldn’t smoke in the kitchen.’

Joan coughed again and flicked the ash, just in time, in the direction of the bin. It missed. ‘My bloody kitchen, remember? No one’s going to stop me smoking in my own home. Bloody Nazis, telling us what to do. We fought a war against that. Look at your father! And now they’re bloody telling us where we can and can’t fucking smoke.’

Gillian wanted to argue that smoking bans and the Final Solution weren’t in the same league, but she held back, biting her tongue. ‘I just want to keep the kitchen clean.’ She wanted the house smoke-free too, but no chance with Joan there. Gillian had smoked, too, once. Long ago, before cigarettes became one of the many resolutely embraced sacrifices of her life.

Joan watched her slip Vicky’s empty mug into the washing-up bowl and return the biscuits to the tin. ‘I suppose you’re going to be waiting on that girl hand and foot for the next month. Spoilt bloody princess, if you ask me.’

Gillian turned on the hot tap and washed plates with concentrated vigour. Concentration on something else always helped her keep her temper. ‘I want her to be able to get on with her studies.’

‘A bit of proper work wouldn’t do her any harm for a change. Instead of all that messing about with books. Not what I’d call work.’

Gillian took a deep breath. ‘Most of Vicky’s course is done in hospitals, not with books. None of it is messing about, and she works a bloody sight harder than you ever did!’

‘Ha! You don’t know what hard work is. Slave labour in that factory. Keeping a house, and you brats, and a crippled husband on next to nothing. And what thanks do I get? This lot today—’

‘Don’t know they were born,’ Gillian completed the sentence for her. Did Joan really believe a word of what she’d just said? She had spent her factory years happily slagging off the management, flirting with the overseers, skiving off down the Blocker’s Arms with her mates. A slave to housework? Gillian would come home from school to find a ten bob note thrust into her hand to buy fish and chips, while her mother, without bothering to look at her, filled in the Pools coupon. A husband crippled enough for a scant pension, disappearing each night down the dog track.

Gillian thought of her daughter, diligently, obsessively working eighteen hours a day for her medical qualifications, and though it was pointless she had to say it. ‘Vicky is a clever dedicated girl, who is going to make something of her life, and you should be bloody proud of her.’

Joan stubbed out her cigarette before it burned her fingers. ‘Don’t see why she’s extra special just because she’s got a few snotty exams. I’ve got seven grandchildren, and five greats. Proper ones, my own flesh and blood, not like her. Thinks she’s so smart, but when’s she going to get herself a man, eh? Not so clever in some departments, is she? I don’t suppose you give a toss about grandchildren. Wouldn’t be the same for you.’

Gillian stared at her, a chill in her stomach, realising, as Joan spoke, that they were not alone.

She turned her head to the kitchen door, where Vicky was standing.

‘Vicky, darling, I thought you were working.’

What had she heard?

‘I’m going out. To the chemist.’ The girl’s voice was as emotionless as her face. Showing nothing, even when her grandmother glanced challengingly at her. ‘I’ll see you later.’

‘Yes. I’ll have lunch ready.’ Gillian smiled, that bright, determined false smile that she had mastered over the years. ‘Take care.’

Vicky left. Gillian stood still, tea towel clasped to her until she heard the front door click shut. Then she turned on Joan. ‘Why can’t you shut up? Why can’t you ever bloody well shut up?’

Joan shrugged. ‘Don’t know what all the fuss is about. Well, I can’t stand here gossiping all day. Meeting Bill at ten. You want this tea?’

Vicky walked. The one good thing about the Marley Farm estate was that if you wanted a walk, you could walk for miles, without getting anywhere. Only five hundred yards to the chemist on the Parade, but she took the long way round. And round. Walking fast. It was good exercise. She made a point of exercising every day. It was something that she could control. Drown out the past.

Drown out Joan. Surely she had learned to do that by now? She’d thought she’d reached the stage where the old witch was invisible to her, her snide comments nothing but the faint drone of distant traffic.

But Joan could still sting like a viper’s fangs. ‘Seven grandchildren…proper ones…my own flesh and blood, not like her.’

Gillian always called her ‘Gran’, as if endless repetition would make it true, but Joan would never be ‘Gran’ to Vicky. She had never behaved like other people’s grans. This explained why not. Joan wasn’t really Vicky’s grandmother.

Vicky walked. Past the half-hearted multi-storey block at the end of the Ring, through the equally half-hearted industrial estate that clustered round the link road.

Joan had never said it outright before, but there’d been ample hints about ‘gratitude’ and ‘burden’. Snide remarks about Gillian and Terry’s inadequacies in the baby-making department. In her teens, Vicky had thought she understood. Gillian and Terry must have had trouble conceiving. They’d spent – wasted, according to Joan – all their money on fertility treatment. Vicky had assumed sperm donation, meaning Terry wasn’t her biological father. That made sort of sense. Terry had never rejected her in any way, but he never seemed to know what to do or say, to be hoping for someone to tell him. Once, when she’d asked him something, he’d reached forward and ruffled her hair. Like an experiment, to see what would happen. Then he smiled and shuffled away. It hadn’t shocked her to think that he wasn’t genetically connected to her.

But now she realised she must have it wrong. The egg must have been donated, not the sperm. Why was that so much more disturbing? Distressing. How could it hurt her to know that Gillian wasn’t related to her? She had stopped relating to Gillian so it shouldn’t matter.

It shouldn’t matter.

Of course it didn’t. Vicky was an adult now; she could cope. She wasn’t a thumb-sucking infant needing maternal hugs.

She half-marched, half-ran across the link road, through a gap between the thundering lorries, to the bridleway onto the downs. Gillian used to hold her hand when she crossed roads. A loving mother, she’d thought. She didn’t think it any more – but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t be hurt. Not by them. Not by anyone. She could look after herself.

So why was this upsetting her? Because Gillian, who had failed her so unforgivably, was all she had, and it was so hard, so cold, to be alone.

As hard and cold as the wind on Brewer’s Down.

Gillian, alone in the house, busied herself with housework. Time to vacuum, do the stairs, get the cigarette ash out of the carpet. Try to keep the dread at bay.

What had Vicky heard?

Of course she should have told her years ago. Why hadn’t she done as everyone had advised and been honest from day one?

She had been put off by her mother, that was the truth of it. By Joan’s comments, her constant belittling. Whatever Gillian had said to Vicky, Joan would have spoiled it. With the cat officially out of the bag, there would have been no stopping her. As if her heavy-handed hints all these years hadn’t been enough. It was a miracle this hadn’t happened sooner.

Landing done, Gillian reverently pushed open the door of Vicky’s room. Nothing to do. Everything neat and tidy, in its place. It had to be; the room was so small. Years ago, when Vicky was doing so well at school, accumulating so many textbooks, needing quiet space to do her homework, Gillian had suggested that Joan, who had the big room at the front, should swap rooms with her. Joan was having none of it. The house was hers, wasn’t it? Damned if she was going to be turfed out of her own bedroom for a brat who should be outside playing with the other kids, not burying her head in books. No matter that widowed Joan spent five nights out of seven away from home, with her succession of ‘fancy men’. Even now she was eighty and her latest, Bill Bowyer, was seventy-seven, she wasn’t a woman for a cosy cup of cocoa before bed.

Night after night the big front room stood empty, while Gillian and Terry shared the smaller back room and Vicky made do with the little one over the hall. A narrow bed, a tiny dressing table that passed for a desk, a chair tucked under it so that there was room to move. Shelves on the walls, bending under the weight of books. She needed more. She deserved more. But there was no point letting her use the big bedroom in her grandmother’s absence. Joan’s room stank of tobacco smoke, scent and used underwear. Vicky refused point blank even to enter it.

Gillian laid a hand on the books by the closed laptop on the desk, as if to draw strength from them. Medical books. Utterly incomprehensible to her. With all her might, she had catapulted her daughter into a future beyond her own. Only now she realised that she would be left standing, watching Vicky disappear from view.

Not yet. Please God, not yet.

She put the vacuum cleaner away, wiped down the bathroom, put her apron on to start on lunch. Something healthy. Ham rolls with salad. Would that be all right? She always managed to get something wrong.

She heard the front door open; she was listening for it. Footsteps on the stairs. Gillian peeled back the wrapper from a fresh block of butter, her chest so tight she was barely breathing. If she heard Vicky’s bedroom door close, what should she do? Go up to her? Or leave her to get on with her work?

She didn’t have to decide. She could hear her daughter coming back downstairs. The kitchen door opened.

‘Ah, there you are.’ Gillian buttered furiously. ‘Did you get your medicine? I’m making some rolls for lunch. Is that all right?’ The knife hovered. ‘Should I be using low fat spread?’

‘Is Joan out?’

‘Gran? Yes, gone to Bill’s. Don’t suppose she’ll be back today. Salad cream? I never know…’ She felt compelled at last to face her daughter.

Vicky stood in the doorway. A blank mask. ‘Can we talk, please?’

Gillian felt her insides shrivel. ‘Yes, of course.’ The floor was buckling under her feet as she followed her daughter into the living room.

She sank onto the brown velour sofa, looking up at her daughter. Tall and angular. Beautiful to her mother, even if other people didn’t think so. Standing there, arms folded tightly. Gillian felt a twinge of pain merely looking at her. For all her academic success, there was something about Vicky that screamed distress. Some deep anger boiling within. Was it Gillian’s fault? Was it all because of this, because she had been too cowardly to tell the truth?

‘Could you explain, please? I would like to know. I know you had fertility treatment. I thought it was the sperm, but it must have been the egg, if Joan thinks I’m not her real granddaughter. Is that right?’ The girl’s careful politeness acidified. ‘I’m not her granddaughter? Thank God for that at least!’

‘Oh Vicky, don’t be like that. Your gran means well.’ What was she doing? Defending her mother, for God’s sake, just so that she could postpone talking about anything else. She met Vicky’s eyes, blank behind her glasses.

‘Actually…’ Gillian stood up, walked to the glass cabinet, opened a drawer. Why? Was she expecting to find the Answer within, tied up with a bow? She pulled out a tissue and wiped her sweating hands.

She turned, bracing herself against the cabinet. ‘None of the fertility treatment worked. Terry and I couldn’t have children. We adopted you, Vicky. Please, darling, don’t think—’

‘Adopted?’ Vicky’s voice was sharp with surprise.

‘You mustn’t think for one moment that you’ve ever meant any less to us. You’re every bit as precious to us as if—’

‘Precious.’ She repeated the word as if it were too bizarre to have any meaning. ‘You adopted me. Some other woman didn’t want me, so you took me in.’

‘Yes. You see—’

‘To this family. I didn’t belong, but you brought me here.’

Vicky’s voice was so even that Gillian mistook her words at first for understanding. Then she saw the tremors in Vicky’s hand, the tick under her left eye, and she realised that some seething molten emotion was about to erupt.

‘We wanted to give you a loving home, darling.’

‘A loving home. You spent every last penny trying to conceive, and when that was exhausted, you selected me, something another woman had discarded, and put me in this loving home.’ Vicky’s voice was rising, her fists clenching.

‘No, Vicky, it wasn’t like that! I didn’t think of adoption at first because the doctors talked about other things, about trying this, and then that. If I’d known I would get you, I would have gone straight for adoption from the start. You’re my daughter, Vicky, my darling, all I ever wanted.’

‘I’m what you wanted?’ Vicky opened her arms and looked down at herself, her face twisted with challenge.

She’d taken to doing this, selling herself as an unattractive, ungainly shrew. Why? Vicky might not have a face from the cover of Vogue, but she would look wonderful if she made the right effort. If she bought herself some nice clothes, had her hair done, put on a bit of make-up. It wouldn’t take much. It was almost as if she took satisfaction from the snide comments Joan slipped in every day. ‘Never going to get yourself a man, looking like that. What’s this, you off to the frump’s ball? What do you want to be wearing those specs for? Men don’t need women to see. You’ve had your hair cut. Look like a boy. But you might as well. That long straggly stuff wasn’t doing you no favours. Not that long or short is going to turn you into a fairy princess.’

Gillian had spent twenty-two years trying to shield Vicky from comments like that. All Joan’s granddaughters had received the same, her daughters too. The others knew how to respond. But despite Gillian’s attempts to protect her, Vicky had reacted with hurt and later with contempt.

Now that same contempt was being turned full force on Gillian. Perhaps it had always been there. Contempt for a mother who allowed Joan to victimise her. A hopeless and inadequate mother, despite all her efforts.

‘Vicky, you are exactly what I wanted. You are the daughter I love. I will always love. I just want you to do well and be happy.’

‘Happy! You brought me here to be happy? That’s a new one. I remember you wanting me to do well. Nose to the grindstone. Someone for you to push into doing all the things you weren’t allowed to do. Someone to live your life for you.’

‘No, that’s not what I wanted!’ There was a flicker of anger in Gillian too now. It helped to quell the nausea of distress. ‘I wanted you to live your life.’

‘But you decided what that life was to be.’

‘You mean you don’t want to be a doctor?’

‘A bit late to ask me that now, isn’t it? You were the one desperate for the top grades, the posh career. “My daughter is not going to be a hairdresser.” That’s what you said to Amy’s mum. You never asked me if I wanted to be a hairdresser.’

‘Did you?’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘Yes it is! You had the brains, you could do anything and I didn’t want you to throw it all away, like everyone else round here. I pushed because I loved you, and I’m sorry if that wasn’t enough for you! I love you because you’re my daughter, whether I gave birth to you or not.’

Her heated response took a little of the wind out of Vicky’s sails. They stood for a moment staring at each other.

‘Are you going to tell me who my real mother is, then?’ Words deliberately calculated to hurt. Lashing out.

Gillian took a deep breath. ‘Your biological mother? I don’t know.’

‘You mean you won’t tell me. Stupid of me to ask. For twenty-two years you haven’t even bothered telling me she existed. That I was just bought over the counter.’

‘You weren’t bought! You were found. Aban—’ Gillian stopped, biting on the word.

‘Abandoned? Oh great! Chucked away!’

Vicky put her knuckles to her mouth. Gillian reached out but she flinched.

‘No! Don’t – I need to think. Just – leave me alone.’

She ran, blundering up the stairs blindly, slamming the door of her room.

Gillian slumped onto the sofa, acid in her stomach, an iron band tightening round her head. For years she had shied away from this moment, dreading how badly it might go. Now she knew. This badly. Worse than her worst nightmares.

Her palms were sticky with sweat. She forced herself up, back to the kitchen, and held her hands under the taps, numb, not even sure if the water was freezing cold or scalding hot.

Instinctively, hopelessly, she finished making up the rolls.

Vicky’s room was a prison, the walls edging in to crush her. But when, on the point of exploding, she rushed out, gulping the damp air, heading wildly down the road, she realised that there was nothing to do but keep walking. She had nowhere to go.

The Downs had offered her no answers in the morning, so she walked the other way, into town. It really didn’t matter.

She found herself, briefly, at the gates of her old school, gripping the bars. Why had she come here? Because it had been a place where she used to learn, to feel in control. But it had no answers to offer this time.

She finished up in the town centre, marching through the shopping centre, up the High Street, round the town hall, down the High Street, through the shopping centre. She couldn’t keep this up for ever. It wasn’t helping, any more than the school gates had done. She emerged from the centre, into daylight, looking across the square with its patches of worn grass and its concrete tubs of bulbs, into the glass wall of the library. Her natural home, the place where she always sought answers.

The library.

It stared her in the face, the newspaper for the year of her birth, a great volume like the book of judgement, opened up to pronounce her fate. She’d hoped she might find some small snippet, some tiny clue, but there was nothing tiny about it. The big story of 1990, it seemed. So obvious. The woman who claimed her baby was snatched.

She read, devouring every word, absorbed and yet detached, because it was too unreal.

The story unfolded. The woman claimed… The police suspected… The public thought…

It was true. Behind all the claims and suspicions, Vicky held the truth within her, like a hard, sharp jewel. She was the missing child. Snatched. That’s what Gillian had done. Snatched her. Taken her home to Joan.

The library swam around her. Vicky shut her eyes, forcing her breathing to steady. The woman, her real mother – where was she now? In the hefty volume of the collected Lyford Herald, the story ran for a few weeks, then petered out. Was that all there was?

She enquired about the story and was directed to the clippings section of the local history library, with folders on every possible subject – factory closures, royal visits, council rebellions, accidents at sewage works. Pamphlets, articles, postcards even, collected, collated, indexed and cross-referenced. It was easy to find her story: it had a folder of its own. The same articles she’d just found in the Herald and other papers, with updates from later years. The latest clipping was less than a month old.

Vicky stood staring at it. It gave a name, a place. It was enough.

iii

Mrs Parish

‘Mrs Parish.’ The tone was hostile, struggling to be polite, as if the speaker would much rather have spat.

She stopped at the foot of the stairs and turned. Mrs Bone was peering round her front door, lips pursed. ‘Mrs Parish. The graffiti. It’s there again.’

‘I didn’t put it there.’

‘No, well, I never said you did, but we all know why it’s there, don’t we. And it’s not nice! None of it’s nice.’

‘It’s not nice for me either.’

‘Whose fault’s that?’ Mrs Bone slammed her door shut.

Mrs Parish continued up the stairs. Fifth floor flat. She could have taken the lift, but she’d made that mistake a month ago. She’d found herself trapped with a burly resident who felt obliged to make his feeling clear with his fists. When she escaped, someone called the police. Not an ambulance, just the police.

The latest incident in the park had set off the usual ritual – the tip-off to the local papers, the carefully legal tabloid sniping, then the abusive letters, the graffiti, the vigilante rage. Every few years it flared up, usually ending in an assault, a trip to the hospital. She knew by now how to handle it: wait for things to die down, then she’d quietly move on, find a new flat where her neighbours didn’t know her.

The solution was simple. She knew it. Everyone knew it. She should move out of the area. But she wouldn’t. Not till she had her answer.

She was out of breath when she reached her own front door. A red spray can had been used. Lots of it, randomly, like blood splatter. The words ‘Baby Killer’ were scrawled across the door and onto the adjoining wall. Probably a dog turd shoved through the letterbox too. There usually was.

Then she noticed the figure.

Hunched, at the end of the corridor, hood up, rising from the ground now like an evil imp.

Her fingers fumbled with her key. She could feel the month-old bruises on her cheek flare up in anticipation, as the figure strode forward.

Then the hood went back. Not a hoodie but a cagoule, not a boy but a girl. A young woman, lank hair, long face white and desperate. No evident hatred, but the girl was strangely rigid.

‘You’re the one, aren’t you?’ the girl demanded. ‘The woman everyone said killed her baby.’

She stood, equally rigid. ‘I did not.’

‘1990. It was you? The papers—’

‘The papers got it wrong.’

‘I know!’

It wasn’t what she was expecting. Mostly, when she was recognised, her accosters said, ‘Liar! You murdered her. We know the truth.’

She waited, her fingers twisting the key back and forth, something to concentrate on.

The girl lifted her arms, not to strike, but to reach out. ‘I’m her! I’m your daughter. I was the stolen baby.’

Such insane eagerness. Of course, now it made sense. It was another of those deranged fantasists, or the heartless con artists. Every so often they popped up. She had given up trying to fathom why. Mad fixation, or some idea of wringing money out of her, or maybe just a hope of notoriety. Once, years ago, she’d have felt a wild lurch of hope, a racing pulse and a catch in her throat as she stupidly dared to believe. Now she knew better.

‘No.’ She spoke coldly, tired of the situation already. ‘You are not my daughter.’

‘But I am!’

The girl came forward, crowding in on her, as she fumbled and finally succeeded in opening the door. ‘Get away from me. I know you’re not my daughter, you understand? I know. I don’t know what sort of freak you are and I don’t care. Just go away.’

Mrs Parish shut the door in the girl’s face. Through the panels, she could hear her, voice raised almost to a scream.

‘Why? How can you know? Because you lied? Was that it? I wasn’t snatched, you really tried to kill me.’ She was thumping on the door. Would the lock hold? ‘It didn’t work! I didn’t die!’

The hammering slowed, like a failing heartbeat. ‘I didn’t die.’

Mrs Parish waited for the silence to settle. It would pass, this episode of insane misery. She opened the cupboard under the sink, took out cleaner and a scrubbing brush, then put the kettle on. When she was sure the mad girl had gone, she’d deal with the graffiti.

iv

Kelly

‘Just leave that for a moment,’ said Kelly.

Roz laid the knife on the chopping board.

‘Doc wants us to try this,’ said Kelly, holding the cotton bud ready. ‘A new way of testing blood sugar levels they want to check out. Might as well give it a go.’

‘If you think so,’ said Roz with comfortable unconcern, opening her mouth to let Kelly swab the inside of her cheek. ‘It’s all voodoo if you ask me.’

‘Quack experiments,’ Kelly agreed, with a shrug. ‘But what the hell, if it keeps them happy.’

Keep everyone happy. Especially Roz, who trusted her implicitly. It was fine with her that her daughter was in charge. Control was something Roz had never been comfortable with.

Prompted by guilt, perhaps, Kelly’s mind pictured her mother’s face, thirteen years ago. A face so rigid with purpose that it had seemed to belong to a different person. Eight-year-old Kelly had been more disturbed by that look on her mother’s face than by the cause of it. She could recall her mother treating the bruises on her cheek, but she could only vaguely recollect being hit.

She’d known that the shadow of violence lurked in the small terraced house in Milford Haven, although she had never witnessed it. She’d only seen her mother weeping occasionally, or dabbing make-up on a bruise. Until that day, Kelly had never been the recipient of Luke’s drunken fists.

Luke Sheldon was a well-meaning man on good days. Even affectionate. Catch him in the right mood and there was nothing he liked better than to take Kelly to the swings, buy her ice creams, promise treats, everything a father was supposed to do. But when he drank there was no holding him. Everything irritated him and then the violence would begin.

Kelly, looking back, could understand her mother. Each time, afterwards, Luke would apologise, and each time Roz, incapable of contemplating a life alone, would accept his promise that it wouldn’t happen again. But when he hit Kelly, then the tigress inside Roz woke. While Luke went raging back to the pub, she packed a few things, bundled Kelly into her coat and walked out for good.

It had only been a brief moment of decisiveness, but it had been enough to wash mother and daughter onto a new track, first to a battered wives’ refuge, where someone had helped Roz find a job at a supermarket. A proper job, with regular hours, fixed pay days and National Insurance stamps. Something so normal that Roz had always believed it utterly beyond her.

Kelly knew that her mother, after walking out on her husband, had desperately longed to return to the safety of their commune days, before Luke; those gilded days when they had lived first in tepees on the hills, then in an old farmhouse, with Roger and Mandy and Bo and Tig and Pete and Ieuan and Gish and all the others. It had been a glorious time for Kelly, thriving in the messy crèche, and it had given Roz all the reassurance and support she’d needed.

Roz’s yearning to recreate the magic of the commune had been their eventual salvation. The commune had kept animals; Roz would do the same. To begin with there were three chickens in the backyard of their new council house. Kelly took charge of them, selling the eggs. Roz had helped with the commune’s herbal remedies, so she started brewing them again, and thanks to her daughter’s brazen salesmanship, found herself supplying some of the more quirky local shops. She had practised yoga with Mandy; Kelly urged her to take a proper course. When the instructor retired, Kelly prompted her mother to volunteer as teacher. Kelly set her up as an aromatherapy consultant.

It all worked perfectly. The adolescent daughter advertised, booked halls, paid the bills and took the money, and Roz serenely held her classes and consultations. Finally, Kelly guided her, step by step, through all the complications of getting the lease on Carregwen. Roz Sheldon might never be able to own property, but she longed for a home, not just accommodation provided by the council. A patch of Planet Earth to make her complete.

Leaving Luke had paid off. And it had been for Kelly.

Kelly understood her mother better now. That fantastic suspicion planted by the nurses talking of mixed-up labels, explained Roz’s anxieties. Roz had always nursed a paralysing fear of the ‘Authorities’, the men in suits, the women with thin lips and sharp eyes who were waiting to take away the only thing that really mattered to her. Only when they were finally installed in Carregwen, with their herbs and hay, and their sheep, two goats, three ducks and a dozen hens, had Roz at last begun to believe that the State might not snatch Kelly away.

By then Kelly had been old enough to resist any snatching. A girl who knew her own mind, who could organise without being bossy, who could keep the peace without rolling over.

Roz had even offered to let go, urging Kelly to try for university as her teachers had wanted. Urging with most of her heart and soul, and the little part of her that had hung back had rejoiced in a very shamefaced way when Kelly refused.

Kelly wasn’t ambitious. She wanted what she already had – liberty, food to eat, enough money for today, time for tomorrow, friends and lovers, and a home so lost in the hills that no one was ever going to bang on the wall and tell her to turn the music down. To appease her mother and teachers, she had gone to the local college and taken a course in marine biology, on the strength of which she now worked part-time with the National Park. Reasonable money by local standards, supplemented by work as a barmaid at the Mill and Tuppence, occasional demonstrations of willowcraft and help with a few boat trips in the summer. Why would she want more?

The problem was, she didn’t want less either. She didn’t want to lose her mother. Which was why she was determined to go to any lengths to sort this thing out. Solve once and for all this riddle of the switched labels.

Leaving her mother chopping parsley, she carried the precious swab up to her bedroom and slipped it into a plastic bag, pushing it, with the forms, under her bed. One down.

It was odd, considering how open and honest and forthright she was, that Kelly found it remarkably easy to lie.

v

Vicky

Nearly dinner time. Vicky had been out all day. Gillian breathed an explosive sigh of relief when she heard the door open. She’d been nursing the worry all afternoon that Vicky wouldn’t come home at all. Now she had, and one good thing had come of her absence: it had given Gillian time to prepare. She was going to explain everything, put it right.

‘Vicky!’ she called up, as her daughter was on the point of disappearing into her room.

Vicky looked down at her over the banister, her face a mask of loss and misery, and, worse than either, hatred. Gillian’s stomach tightened.

‘Yes?’ That cutting politeness.

‘Can you come down, please. I want to talk.’

Vicky paced down, slowly, till she was eye to eye with her mother. ‘You want to talk.’

‘I want to explain. About the adoption.’

‘Do you?’

‘Yes, I know I’ve left it far too late. I was wrong. I should have told you, years ago, from the start. I wasn’t trying to deceive you. I was just waiting for the right time, and it was always, always the wrong time.’

‘I’m sure it must have been very difficult for you.’

‘I didn’t want Gran to upset you.’ The bitterness Gillian felt for her own mother burst out. ‘I didn’t want her poisoning things, if I tried to explain!’

‘Joan has been poisoning things all my life. I don’t recall you ever stopping her.’

‘I tried! I did try. I know things haven’t been ideal.’

‘Ideal.’

‘If we could have afforded a place of our own, we’d have kept you right away from her. But we couldn’t, and we had to make the best of things.’

‘Joan isn’t the best, she’s the worst. She’s evil! And you. Everyone. You’re all evil!’

All civility was forgotten now. Vicky was shaking as Gillian had never seen her shake. What had happened? The mention of adoption seemed to have triggered a tidal wave of resentment.

Vicky breathed deeply, each breath a shudder. Then she ran back up the stairs.

‘Vicky?’

The bedroom door slammed.

Gillian returned to the living room, sat down on the couch and rocked, her head in her hands. She wanted a cigarette. Never, in the last twenty-five years of abstinence, had she wanted a cigarette quite so much.

She should phone Terry at the garage. This was a family crisis, he should be here. But what was the point? Terry wouldn’t know what to do. He had never understood any of it.

Tea. She needed tea and a Disprin. Put the kettle on, make a pot. Vicky must need one and it would be an excuse to speak to her.

She stirred the pot slowly, pushing tea bags round and round, when she heard Vicky’s bedroom door open again. Gillian nerved herself and went to the hall.

Vicky was standing there, jacket on, suitcases at her feet, mobile phone in her hand, thumbing the keys.

‘Vicky? What are you doing?’

‘I’m going back to my digs in London.’

‘But you’ve only just got here. I thought you’d be here for a month.’

‘I can’t stay here. Not with that evil bitch Joan. Not with any of you.’

‘I’ll speak to Gran, I promise. I’ll make her—’

‘You won’t make her do anything. You’ll curtsy round her like you always do. But she’s not my Gran, just as you’re not my mother, and I don’t have to stay here anymore!’

Gillian floundered. This wasn’t about adoption, this must be something more. She had to understand. ‘Please, Vicky, don’t go. You can’t go like this. Let’s talk, please. Tell me. Whatever it is, we can talk it through.’ She followed her out.

‘We had twenty-two years to talk it through. But you never talked. Just like you never listened and you never saw. Excuse me. I’ve got work to do. I need to concentrate. Goodbye.’

‘No, wait!’ Gillian followed as Vicky dragged her suitcases along the street. ‘You don’t want to go by bus. Your father will be home soon. If you really want to go back, Dad can give you a lift.’ If she could keep her here, please God, another hour, two, surely she’d change her mind.

‘I’m fine with the bus.’ Vicky was almost at the bus stop and already a bus was heaving into view over the brow of the hill, ready to sweep down Drover’s Way and scoop her up.

‘Please, Vicky!’

‘Just go home, Mum.’

‘Come back with me, please.’

‘No. I need to get away, okay? Go home.’ Vicky sounded so bitter.

The bus drew up and the doors hissed open.

‘I saw her.’ She looked at Gillian just once, her face blank. ‘My real mother. I saw her.’

Hiss. Doors closed. Gillian was left standing.

Vicky found a seat. She sat, back rigid, hands gripping the handles of her bags as if she would snap them off.

All that she’d kept bottled up for the last five years was roaring around inside her, ripping her apart. ‘Get over it.’ That was a phrase she’d adopted as her motto, cruel but intelligent. But it was a joke: she hadn’t got over it at all. It had been waiting all this time to eat her up. Quiescent before, because there was nothing she could do, but now…

This new truth hung before her, blocking her vision. Everything she’d been through hadn’t been inescapable fate. It should never have happened. She should never have been there, with Gillian and Joan. She should have been with another mother. Her first thought, that Gillian had been an evil child-snatcher, had made it easy. But no. She hadn’t been lying about adoption. The lie had been in the tale of baby-snatching. A lie told by a woman who had wanted Vicky dead twenty-two years ago and who now slammed the door in her face.

She was just a piece of flotsam for them to discard and pick up at will, a toy for their evil games. How could she just get over it? She was hurt, she wanted to hurt back, to give voice to this sharp bright hatred that almost smothered the pain.

Almost.

The bus moved off.

Gillian stood there, remembering her daughter’s face twisting in loathing: ‘That evil bitch Joan.’

She turned, barely aware of what she was doing until she was almost back at the gate. Then she marched into the house. Upstairs, to the big room that should have been Vicky’s. The room that needed fumigating and cleansing. Scent bottles. A porcelain figurine holding rings. Photos of Joan in younger days, with grinning men lost in the fog of time. The lewd glass clown Bill had given her. Silk scarves and fake fur. Apricot wig on its stand. Clutter that had no right to be here.

One by one, Gillian picked them up and threw them. She picked up a brass pot and thrashed at the glass, china, mirrors. Anything that wouldn’t smash she ripped.

Then she sank down in the mayhem and sobbed.