The Picture On The Wall

Concluding chapters of our intriguing serial

Uncle Alan, it’s me,” I said nervously. “I’m Helen… Patrick’s daughter.” “Is that right?” He sounded darkly amused and I could have kicked myself. Of all the people on the planet, this man knew who my parents were. But to my relief, the twin barrels of the shotgun shifted ever so slightly downward. “Well? What do you want?”

I wanted to know what had happened here twenty years ago. I wanted to know who my real parents were and why they’d abandoned me. Most of all, I wanted to know who was the woman whose blood had bloomed like a flower on her breast.

My guts twisted uncomfortably at the thought that no one knew where I was. The waitress at the hotel might remember I’d asked the way, but I hadn’t told Mum or Mark I was coming here because I knew they wouldn’t have wanted me to.

Of course he wouldn’t use the gun, I assured myself, but I couldn’t help wondering if he’d used it before.

Was it Mary, his wife, who’d lain only yards from where I stood now? And had he shot her because she’d been having an affair with the man I’d thought of as my dad?

He followed my gaze to the spot where the body had been lying.

“Ah…” It was almost a sigh. “You’ve remembered. I didn’t really think you would. You weren’t quite four.”

“Who was she?” I demanded. “What happened to her?”

He seemed to go very still for a moment. Then he abruptly broke the gun, exposing the gold gleam of the cartridge bases, hooked the rifle over his arm and turned to walk back through the barn.

“You’d better come into the house,” he said over his shoulder.

We went across the yard, passing a small walled garden which must once have been the vegetable plot. Now, only a few onions poked through the weeds, runner beans were climbing some ancient, rickety poles, and an Impressionist red wash of straggly geraniums was splashed against the far wall

It was obvious when we went through the back door into a large kitchen that no woman lived here. There were no flowers, no pictures, no tablecloth on the bare wooden table. The units and appliances had probably been top-ofthe-range twenty years back. Mostly they looked unused, but the kettle and microwave were finger-marked and grubby with use.

Alan laid the gun on the table, reached up for another mug and switched on the kettle. He tipped two teaspoonfuls of cheap instant coffee into each mug, poured the water, barely boiling, and banged them down on the table.

“Sit down. If you’re waiting for biscuits, you’ll be unlucky,” he said, with a twist of the lips.

“I’m waiting for you to tell me who that woman was.” I perched on the hard wooden chair and took a deep breath. “Was it Mary?”

He gave a bark of laughter and I saw his hand curl into a fist. “I wish it had been.” I stared at him, shocked. “It was all her fault. If she hadn’t dobbed us in…” He stopped suddenly, his lips forming a grim line.

“I don’t understand,” I said quietly. “What did she do?”

He slapped his hand on the boards, making me jump, and leaned forward.

“She called in the Immigration people. They took away all my pickers. How was I supposed to run the place without people to cut cabbages? She wanted a new kitchen, a good car. How did she think she could have that if I

My WORLD was SPINNING and it was suddenly difficult to BREATHE

didn’t use cheap labour to get my harvest in?”

“So why did she call them?” I recalled the brief article Mark had found in the local paper, about the anonymous tip-off that had brought the Customs officials to Kirkfen Farm.

“Because of Kotrina. Oh, I’d had flings with some of the girls before. Mary knew about them, but she was happy enough

to put up with it so long as she got what she wanted.” His voice melted and his blue eyes grew suspiciously misty. “Kotrina was different. Her husband had worked here before, but this was the first time she’d come with him. She was the most beautiful thing I ever saw…” I felt a surge of anger. Why couldn’t I remember her like that? Why was my only legacy a hatred of a painting and red flowers in a buttonhole?

“I wanted to marry her. Get rid of Mary and marry Kotrina.”

It was easy to understand why Mary had done what she did, then. It must have been bad enough knowing her husband was sleeping with other women. But knowing he was in love with Kotrina, passionately and obsessively, must have been unbearable. It was suddenly difficult to breathe.

Mamyte. Mummy. I looked at the man who sat opposite me. The thought revolted me, but I had to know.

“Kotrina was my mother, wasn’t she? Are you my father?”

The softened look vanished. “Your father was a worthless piece of nothing called Adomas Kalvelis. Lithuanian equivalent of Adam Smith, so don’t go thinking he was anyone special.”

Tetukas. Daddy. I felt as though the world was spinning. I had to hold onto my chair with both hands or I’d be flung off into a black hole. “Lithuanian? I’m Lithuanian?” “Not officially,” he said, with a laugh that lacked any mirth. “Haven’t you seen your birth certificate?”

“Mum told me it was a forgery and it was you who arranged it.” I leaned forward too, and stared straight into his eyes. “If it wasn’t Mary that I remember laying in that field, then who was it?”

He looked back at me with such loathing that fear swept over me again – and I knew who it was.

“It was Kotrina!” I whispered. “She didn’t love you, she loved my father. Did you kill her because of that?”

Alan rose, slamming his chair back so that it tipped over and fell with a crash. “No. You did.” Before I could move, before I could even take in what he’d just said, he scooped the gun over his arm again, came round the table and took my wrist in an ungentle grip. Yanking me to my feet, he propelled me out of the house and across the yard.

Back through the barn we went, out of the great doors and into the familiar field. He spun me round and released my wrist.

“Stay there,” he barked.

He strode back to the barn door and pulled it almost shut. The cartridges from the gun were ejected with two loud clicks and he slipped them into his pocket. I watched, stunned into stillness, while he leant the gun against the door.

“She was there.” He pointed at me. “Mary had left me by then, and the pickers had all been arrested, including Kalvelis. You can bet I made sure of that, but I saved Kotrina. And you. I’d managed to hide the pair of you when the Customs guys turned up. I was pleading with her, trying to persuade her to stay with me. I would have managed it, too, but then you came…”

He slid through the partly open door into the barn, without disturbing the gun propped against the door. For a moment, I waited, unmoving. Then the door was slammed fully open and Alan stood in the doorway.

The gun fell to the ground, its barrels pointing accusingly in my direction as the roar echoed only in my mind.

‘“Mamyte, Mamyte,”’ he mimicked savagely. “Bang!” Then he kicked the weapon aside. “You killed your mother.” I felt as if my legs had gone to jelly.

I don’t know what I needed most at that moment. To sit down. To try and make sense of what I was being told. To be away from here. But I had to know the rest of it. I couldn’t leave it unfinished, not now. I sensed that it was a relief to tell someone the truth he’d lived with for years, but once he stopped, he’d clam up for good and I’d never get another chance to know.

“Patrick was here. He heard the shot and came running. He took you away while I did… what had to be done.” The look he gave me carried a kind of sour puzzlement. “He’d always adored you, from the moment he set eyes on you.

“And you loved him back. You wouldn’t speak two words to me, but he had you jabbering away in a mixture of Lithuanian and English whenever you saw him. Judith couldn’t give him children. You were the daughter he’d always longed for. I told him I’d arrange it all, but he had to get you away from here and never speak of what happened or come near the place again.”

“But what happened to Adomas?” Saying the name somehow comforted me, as if he and Dad had become one. “He was deported.” “But he would have been frantic to know where we were!” I wouldn’t believe he had been anything else.

Alan shrugged. “Oh, he turned up on the doorstep about six months later. Worked his passage over on some cargo vessel and jumped ship when they docked. I told him some story, that Kotrina had taken you and gone off with one of the Polish workers and I hadn’t a clue where she was.” I breathed in deeply. Uncle Alan still blamed me for her death, but it wasn’t me who’d left a loaded weapon carelessly against a door. No court in the land would convict me for manslaughter but he would have at least one charge to face. I knew that it was an offence to dispose of a body, and I was sure my mother was somewhere on this farm. His next words confirmed it. “But she never left me.” He walked over to where the gun had come to rest, picked it up and brushed soil from it. The cartridges were still in his pocket. It would take only seconds to re-load. He could shoot me and bury me with her, dispose of my car and no one would ever be able to prove I’d set foot on the farm. No one would hear of Kotrina Kalvelis again.

I leapt for the door, hearing him shout something intelligible, and sped through the barn into the yard beyond, fumbling in my pocket for my car keys as I ran.

The welcome lights flashed. I tugged the door open, scrambled in and started the engine, crunching the gears into reverse. The engine howled as I shot out of the gate and skidded round in a tight turn, banging the rear hard against the trunk of a stunted bush. In the rear view mirror, I could see him standing in the lane, looking at me with the gun still crooked across his arm, but I floored the accelerator and bounced madly along the rough track until I reached the road.

I was shaking so much. I almost pulled into a layby, but I was afraid that if he came after me he’d recognise my car. I fled back to the hotel and ran up to my room, my thumb already hovering over the 9 on my mobile. But I stopped after the first tap, switched it off and dropped the phone on the bed.

I couldn’t ring the police. Not yet. I couldn’t ring Mum. She would always be my mother, even though Kotrina Kelvelis was lying under the Lincolnshire soil. I wasn’t Elena Kalvelis any more. I was Helen Gardiner, Judith’s daughter, and I loved her. But this wasn’t the sort of thing I could tell her over the phone.

I scrolled back to Mark’s name. I had no right to call him. He wasn’t mine any more. I’d driven him away.

He answered before I could chicken out and end the call. “Helen?” “Oh Mark!” I said. “What’s up? Where are you?” My explanation was so garbled, it was no wonder that he interrupted me. “You’re at the farm now?” “No, I’m at the hotel.” “Stay there. I’m on my way.” He must have broken all the speed limits, but by the time he knocked on my door, I’d reached my decision.

Not that I was capable of telling him for quite some time. As soon as I opened the door, he grabbed me and hugged me so close I could scarcely breathe. And it’s even harder to breathe when someone’s mouth is pressed tightly to yours and you want to kiss him back and never stop. At last I pushed him away. “Mark, don’t…”

I was SHAKING so much, AFRAID that he would come AFTER me

“Why not?” He tenderly swept a stray curl of hair out of my eyes.

“What about your girlfriend?” He’d never even told me her name.

A deep flush spread up his cheeks. “I haven’t got one.”

“But at Fiona’s wedding…” I began, but his sheepish smile dried the words.

“She’s not my girlfriend. She’s a friend’s sister and I persuaded her to go with me because I didn’t want to go on my own. I knew you’d be there and I thought you’d be with someone. And I didn’t want to let you think I couldn’t find someone else after we split. But I couldn’t…”

“Me neither,” I replied in a small voice.

“I should have told you at Luigi’s. I was trying to work out how to put it when that damned waiter turned up. Then you evaded me every time I tried and I thought you were warning me off. But I love you, Helen. I can’t just stand by when you’re in trouble.”

It was so good to feel his arms around me and know there would be no more parting, but there was something far more serious I had to say than to tell him I loved him too. The gladness died out of his face as he listened.

“You do realise you’ve no proof?” he asked when I’d finished. “If you go to the police, all he’s got to do is say you turned up at his house with some wild story about seeing a dead woman in a dream. He’ll give them the same line he gave Kelvelis, that she left with some foreign guy and that he doesn’t know where she went.”

“Auntie Gill knows I’m adopted. Mum told her.”

“But don’t you see, love? Your dad said you’d been abandoned, didn’t he? It all fits too well.”

“If they found her body, that would be proof,” I said. His eyes showed his concern. “She could be anywhere on that farm. They wouldn’t be able to dig it all up, even if they believed you.”

They wouldn’t have to – because I knew exactly where she was. It was the only place of beauty, where the geraniums shone against the wall. She neverleftme, he’d said. And he’d made it as pretty for her as he could.

“And have you thought he could be lying? That he killed her? It’s only his word, after all. Can we trust him?”

The thought had been in my mind, too, ever since I left the farm, but I was as sure as I could be that Alan had been telling me the truth. He’d loved Kotrina – still did, even after all this time. But he’d lied to my birth father, sent him away and left him thinking that we’d abandoned him. I had to put that right.

There would be consequences. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t scared… of Alan, once he found out I was taking her away from him again… of how my life would change if I let it get crunched up in the legal machine… and whether Mark would still be a part of it.

“If I go to the police, it’ll open up a real can of worms,” I said. “I don’t know how it’ll affect me, for instance. Will I still be a British citizen, or will I be Lithuanian? And I don’t want to get Mum in trouble for going along with it all those years ago. But Adomas deserves to know what happened. I have to do it, Mark.” He rose and put his arms around me. “None of this was your fault, Helen. It’ll get sorted out, don’t worry. And however long it takes, I’ll be here for you – you know that.”

He reached down and picked up the mobile from where it lay on the bed. “How about you make that call?” T he restaurant was several degrees classier than the caff on Alston Street. The meal had been wonderful, the wine and the soft music gently relaxing. How I needed this after the past few months!

“If I’d realised how complicated it was all going to be, I’d have left well alone,” I said with a sigh. “I couldn’t have done it without you and Mum.”

Mark had been rather quiet all evening. My heart gave an anxious flutter. What if he told me he couldn’t take any more of this? And there was something else I had to tell him…

“You know they’ve traced the village my parents came from? Once I’ve got my passport back, I have to go there. I have to try and find my father.”

“Of course you do.” Like a magician producing a rabbit, a red, rectangular object appeared in his hand. “I’m coming with you. Public Enemy No 1, don’t you agree?”

He opened the page with a flourish and I saw his face staring back at me with the faintly pugnacious air of all passport photos. “Mark! But you’re afraid of flying!” “And you don’t like buttonholes. We can always say that anyone wearing a red carnation at our wedding will be out on their ear,” he suggested hopefully.

My heart, from being somewhere in the region of my toes, now seemed to be dancing above my head! “Our wedding?” “Just thought I’d ask… while I was at it,” he said.

“We’ll make wearing one a condition of attendance,” I said, reaching out to take his hand.

I’d always remember Kotrina whenever I saw a flower in someone’s lapel, but with a gentle sadness now, not stomach-twisting dread.

And if Mark loved me enough to get on a plane, then I could cope with anything.

I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t SCARED – there would be CONSEQUENCES