The Picture On The Wall

PART TWO: Helen’s search for answers was going nowhere, so she decided to take matters into her own hands…

Further chapters of our intriguing new serial

Idon’t know, Helen. I’m not just saying it. I don’t know.” Mum’s hands were entwined tightly in her lap, and I knew it was to stop them shaking. But I couldn’t afford to be merciful if I wanted the truth that had been hidden from me for so long.

Ever since the first nightmare triggered by the painting I’d seen on the wall of the hypnotist’s waiting-room, I’d known there was a mystery in my past. Now my mother was confirming it.

“How can you not know?” I countered. “For goodness sake! Dad said he was going to adopt me and you agreed without knowing who I was or where I came from?”

“Your fath…” She stumbled on the word. “Patrick wouldn’t tell me. He said the less I knew, the better. All that should concern me was that here was a little girl who’d been abandoned and who needed a new mum and dad.”

“And you meekly accepted that?” I didn’t believe her.

She raised her eyes to mine with a flash of her usual spirit.

“No. I refused, at first. I argued. Of course I did.” Tears threatened to spill over. “But he loved you. Anyone could see that. And you adored him. So what else could I do?”

“But – ” I clutched my head. “Why had I been abandoned? How did Dad know about it? And who are my real parents? Didn’t you even ask?”

I’d been so sure that I was going to get all the answers to the questions that had tormented me since Auntie Gill had

blurted out that I was adopted, but it felt like trying to grasp mist between my finger and thumb. There seemed to be more questions than ever.

She sighed. “It was something to do with Alan.”

“So something did happen at his farm, then?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that Pat brought you back with him one day after he’d been there, and it was Alan who turned up with a forged birth certificate for you several weeks later. He said everything had been arranged.” Her face flared into anger for an instant and her voice was bitter. “Patrick was as straight as a die, but Alan… he was always sailing close to the wind, always knew the people to go to for anything shady.”

I looked at her, my dismay showing. Could it be that I was connected to something criminal?

Mum wiped a tear from her cheek. I’d never seen her cry before. I wanted to put my arms around her, but it was as if some invisible barrier prevented me.

“I always hoped we’d have a baby of our own,” she said. “I thought Patrick would see sense, then. That he’d stop loving you so much, see that he should let the authorities know what had happened and let you go.” Her smile was watery. “But he never would have, even if I’d been able to give him a football team of children. So then I hoped you’d never find out.”

“How old was I when…?” I couldn’t finish. I didn’t know what to say. “Three or four. I don’t know exactly.” My birth certificate said I was born in 1987. But then I reminded myself that it was a forgery.

“Give me Alan’s address,” I commanded.

She looked scared. “Don’t go near him, Helen. He’s dangerous.”

“Well, if you can’t – or won’t – tell me, he’ll have to.”

“If there was anything more I could tell you, I would.”

I suppose she saw I wasn’t to be put off, for she said suddenly, “Perhaps Mary could tell you.”

“Mary? Who’s she?” I couldn’t remember ever hearing anyone speak of a Mary.

“She was Alan’s wife. She left him, around about the time all this

I felt my safe and STABLE world suddenly SHIFTING under my feet

happened.” Mum’s eyes filled with pain. “I thought… what if Pat had been having an affair with her and Alan found out?”

No wonder Mum occasionally took refuge in wine. My safe and stable world was shifting under my feet as if I was standing on a kaleidoscope but I knew, whatever else had taken place, that was not possible. I reached over and laid my hand on hers as they twisted in her lap.

“No,” I said. “No, he would never have done that. And it wouldn’t explain how I come into it, would it? I’m not her daughter. You’d have known.”

Her fingers gripped mine tightly for a moment, then she rose and went over to the cupboard.

“I’ll give you the only other address I had for her. It was where she was living before she married Alan – her family home, I think. It’s a long shot, but she could have gone back there. But promise me you won’t go to him, or anywhere near that farm.”

I didn’t want to go there either, or see the man whose hard blue gaze I’d found disturbing at Dad’s funeral, but I couldn’t make that promise.

“I can’t, Mum. I have to know. But I won’t unless I absolutely have to.”

Isat in front of the computer, staring at the Google page. The cursor flashed, waiting for me to type something into

the search engine but my fingers seemed to have frozen.

“If we want to find this Mary, the first place to try is the 1991 or 2001 census,” my ex-boyfriend Mark had said when he phoned to find out what I’d learned. Just seeing his name come up on my mobile made me feel warmer. Less alone.

“Right,” I said. “I’ll give it a bash. I’ve got nothing else to go on. The number Mum had for her was discontinued so I’ve sent a letter snail-mail, but I’m not holding my breath. Mum said she hasn’t heard from her in twenty-odd years, ever since she left the farm. She could be anywhere from Orkney to the Scilly Isles, and that’s if she’s even still in this country. She could be in Timbuktu, she could have gone back to her maiden name, she could have remarried. She could even be dead.”

I broke off abruptly and my heart missed a beat. Was she the woman of my long-submerged memory? Was it Mary I’d seen lying there, in a field of bloodred flowers?

Mark’s voice was calming and reassuring. “Give it a go, Helen. It’s a start. And tell me again where that farm is. I’ve got another idea.”

“You’re not going there, are you? I promised Mum I wouldn’t.” It wasn’t precisely the truth, but I didn’t want him to go there. Not without me, at any rate.

“No, but there’s something I’d like to try,” he replied.

He wouldn’t say what it was, but rang off as soon as I’d given him the information. The flat seemed empty without the sound of his voice in my ear.

At the end of a frustrating weekend, spent gazing at a screen or on the phone, I closed the lid of the laptop.

Without more information, I couldn’t get past the first page of the census website, and the fatherly man who answered when I rang the Red

Cross Family Member tracing service was only a little more hopeful.

“Do you know her maiden name?” he asked. I could hear the keyboard clacking under his fingers.

It had been the one snippet that Mum could give me. His sigh echoed down the line. “Mary Gardiner, nee Williams. You wouldn’t like a nice Martita Cholmondely-Marjoribanks instead, I suppose?”

“I’m afraid not.” I took his point. There must be millions of Marys and thousands upon thousands of Gardiners and Williamses.

“Well,” he said cheerfully, “we’ve found people with less. But not much less, I have to say. We’ll give it our best shot, but with so little to go on, it’ll take some considerable time unless we’re incredibly lucky. Still, stranger things, etcetera etcetera. Aren’t there some family members you could speak to? Even a few more answers would make it easier, not to mention quicker.”

Dad’s family was neither big nor close. The only ones I could think of were a couple of distant cousins. One didn’t even know that his cousin Alan’s marriage had broken down and was no help at all, and the other

Could my real MOTHER have been one of those DEPORTED workers?

only added to my confusion…

“I heard somewhere that she left him because of an affair.” She must have sensed something of my stricken breath, for she added hurriedly, “I don’t know for sure whether it was him or her who had it, but Alan’s always been one for women. Maybe Mary had had enough. But I never heard a peep from her afterwards. It’s as though she just dropped off the planet.” Or under its soil. It had all been a complete waste of time and I hadn’t heard from Mark. I knew I shouldn’t feel as if he had let me down. Maybe his new girlfriend had objected to him helping me, maybe he’d just decided it was a hopeless task.

So when he appeared at my door a couple of days later, I felt a totally unwarranted joy.

“Read this,” he said, spreading a sheet of photocopied newspaper on the table. He’d circled a small item about halfway down, sandwiched between reports of vandalised hedges and stolen agricultural implements. “What is it?” “It’s the local newspaper for that area. I’ve been trolling through their archives, looking for evidence of a ruckus of any sort at the farm.”

“You went up to Lincolnshire?” Guilt poked me in the chest for doubting him.

“Yes, but only to the newspaper offices – I didn’t go anywhere near Kirkfen Farm,” he assured me. “Go on, then – read it.” I turned back to the paper. AnonymousTip-OffNetsIllegal Workers, the headline said.

Following an anonymous tip-off, Police and Customs officials raided Kirk fen Farm and detained a number of foreign pickers, mainly from East European and Baltic countries, suspected of working illegally. The owner of Kirk fen, Alan Gardiner (42) claimed that all his workforce was supplied by an Agency and that anyone within valid documentation was down to them. So far, the Agency representative, thought to be Estonian, hasnotbeentraced.

“For Agency, read gangmaster,” Mark said. “I couldn’t find anything more. It obviously wasn’t interesting enough to justify being chased up.”

I read through the article again. “It says they were arrested and held in custody pending deportation unless their papers checked out. But how would this have anything to do with me?” “Look at the date.” “August 1991.” My heart tripped over its own feet. “I’d have been four.”

“About the time when you were abandoned, according to your dad. There has to be a connection, Helen.”

I stared up at him. “You mean my real mother might have been one of those deported workers? I might be Estonian or…?” I tried to think of an East European country but my mind had gone completely blank.

“It’s possible, but if she was deported, why weren’t you sent back with her?” Mark said.

“And you couldn’t find anything about a death or an accident that would explain this memory I keep having?” “Nothing, I’m afraid.” “Well, you certainly tried. Maybe it is just a dream. Maybe I’m making a big fuss about nothing.” I tried to laugh unconcernedly. “But thanks for going all that way, Mark.” “Call it going the extra mile,” he said, but I could tell from his smile that he’d sensed my withdrawal.

“More like the extra hundred. Your girlfriend will be after my blood.” I aimed for the light, ironical touch. His nearness was sending my system into a spin again. I had to get him to go before I did something I’d regret.

He made a business of folding up the photocopy, smoothing it out and placing it carefully back on the table. “Look, Helen…” “How long do you think it’ll take that Red Cross guy to get back in touch?” I couldn’t bear him to explain how he felt about his girlfriend.

“It might be ages, if at all. It’s such a common name.” He scowled in frustration. “How can you lose an aunt?”

“Easily, it seems. Especially as she’s not, strictly speaking, any relation.” I looked down at my fingers and then back at his face. “What if we can’t find her because she’s the one I keep seeing? What if she’s dead?”

He moved and I thought he was going to put his arms around me. I stepped casually backwards to pick up the piece of paper and scan it as if it held all the answers. How could I think of letting Mark back into my life on a sort of part-time basis? He was in a relationship. And I hadn’t told him I wasn’t.

It had been me who pushed him away in the first place. That time three

years ago, when my father had got up from his chair to shake hands with a client and collapsed with a cerebral aneurysm, was fuzzed with grief. I couldn’t recall what I’d said and done with any clarity, but by the time the fog had cleared, I knew I’d been totally bitchy and unreasonable, and Mark and I were no longer together.

And now he belonged to someone else. I had to keep him at arm’s length for my own sanity.

“Oh, well, I suppose I can always get Spooky Reg to regress me,” I said with an airy laugh.

I’d said it purely to prevent myself from saying something nearer to my heart. I had no confidence in Reg Humphries or his psychic powers but I had to admit that my dieting chum, Jan, still wasn’t eating lemon drizzle, or any other cake for that matter.

So, when she went into the Inner Sanctum, I said casually to his receptionist, Maureen, “Could I make an appointment with Mr Humphries? For myself, that is.”

She beamed and reached for the

appointments book. “Certainly. What did you want to consult him about?”

“I want him to regress me, to see if I can discover the meaning of what might be a childhood memory.”

Her smile vanished and she shut the book. “Oh no, I’m afraid not,” she said, regretfully.

“Why not?”Wasn’t that what he did? It would be a change from helping people to lose weight or stop smoking.

“It wouldn’t be ethical. Mr Humphries is very careful about things like that. He’d have to assess you over a number of weeks, to see if you were able to cope with the sort of memories that might surface. I can book you in for that, if you like, but he would have the final say. If he thought you weren’t suitable, he wouldn’t do it.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said. I didn’t want to wait weeks, either for Reginald Humphries to decide I’d be too spooked at my memories for him to bother, or for the people trying to trace Mary Gardiner with the flimsiest information.

A sudden, overwhelming impatience swept over me. I could have walked out then and there, got in my car and driven up to Lincolnshire to confront my uncle. Only he wasn’t my uncle, any more than his brother was my father. Tetukas. The word formed in my mouth without warning. I wasn’t aware I’d spoken it aloud until Maureen said icily, “I beg your pardon?”

I think she must have thought I was swearing at her in some foreign language, but I didn’t know what it meant any more than she did.

“Sorry. I was thinking of something else.” I went back to my seat and stared defiantly at the picture until Jan finally emerged.

How long would it take me to get to Lincolnshire? Three hours? Four? If I set off now, I could make it easily.

Murmuring something about not feeling too good, I dropped Jan at the office and drove home to throw a toothbrush and a change of knickers in an overnight bag. I decided against phoning Mum or Mark to let them know what I was doing in case they tried to talk me out of it.

Igot a room in a small hotel near Bolton. There was still just enough light in the wide Lincolnshire sky to find the farm but, perversely, now I was here, I didn’t want to. I was tired and hungry and I told myself it wouldn’t be good manners to appear on my uncle’s

doorstep at night and without warning. A good sleep was what I needed, to set me up for tomorrow, when I should at last get to the bottom of this.

I couldn’t say I was feeling particularly rested when I woke from a doze filled with dreams that dispersed into nothingness as soon as I opened my eyes, but at last I was getting near to Kirkfen Farm.

The fields were as wide and open as the sky, totally different to the landscape I was used to. In some of them, huge machines crawled forward inch by inch, small stooping figures bowing before them. It felt intimidating and slightly alien.

The signpost for Kirkfen was so small I almost missed it.

As I drove carefully up the rutted track, the farm buildings seemed to grow out of the ground until I turned into a yard hemmed on three sides by a house and barns.

No one answered my knock at the farmhouse door, nor appeared from any of the other buildings when I called. I stood in the middle of the yard, wondering what to do next. The doors to the large barn to my left stood open, so I ventured inside. “Hello?” No one replied, but I thought I saw a shadow pass the doors on the other side, which were ajar. I walked through and pushed them open.

There it was. The field I’d seen so often. It was filled with soft green growing things, but the likeness to the painting was enough to strangle my call in my throat.

A sound to my right made me look round. Alan Gardiner stood there, a shot-gun crooked over his arm.

I know no more about guns than what I’ve seen in television dramas, but I knew when he straightened the gun with a firm click that it was threateningly ready to shoot.

“Hello, Elena,” he said pleasantly. “So you’ve come back.”

A sudden sense of OVERWHELMING impatience SWEPT over me