Newspapers love stories like mine: kidnappings, people coming back from the dead. Several of the papers have rung up offering money for my exclusive story. Dad told them to leave me alone, but in private he says that if I ever feel like telling my side of things and earning some cash for my future then we can talk about it, choose the right newspaper or even find a publishing deal. ‘But not yet,’ he says. ‘Give yourself time to adjust. To be at home.’ He’s treating me like an adult at last. It feels good. But I still have to ask him what happened when I was a baby. How they became my parents. There’s so much to deal with, too many tangled feelings.

  The newspapers are full of Billy. My ‘evil kidnapper’. There are photos of him in his uniform staring out of front pages. One article says that Billy had an impeccable career up until the moment of the shooting. Popular with his fellow soldiers, he’d acted ‘out of character’ during the tragic mistaken shooting of civilians at a check-point. He was found not guilty by a military court and had been deemed fit to return to duty in Northern Ireland. After that Billy had absconded from a local barracks and disappeared into thin air. Depending on the paper, he’s ‘deranged’, ‘a survival expert’, ‘a danger to society’ or ‘mentally scarred’. I stare at his photograph and see an ordinary young man, clean-shaven and smart in his uniform. He looks into the camera with a serious expression. Puzzled, I search for the Billy that I know inside the grainy print eyes staring back.

  It’s raining again. I lie in the comfort of my bed and listen to the sound of water drumming on glass. I imagine the creeks and mud pools in the marshes seeping full, and how the ground in the dark garden will be softened and turned to mud in the downpour. The sea is crashing against the shingle beaches of the island. I know that the walls of the pagoda are damp and chilled, shadows moving as birds settle inside the opening under the roof, looking for shelter.

  Where is Billy? The island has been searched. The whole area is crawling with police. Sometimes I wonder if he attempted to cross the Channel in his boat and drowned. I tell myself it’s more likely that he’s disappeared into the woods or the marshes, sleeping rough, scavenging scraps, hunkering down in a new hiding place. Or perhaps he’s got away from Suffolk and is heading north to where he came from. Maybe there’ll be a friend or relative there that will offer him shelter. I twist the sheet in my fingers, unable to sleep.

  There is a noise outside. It sounds like the clatter of a dustbin lid. I freeze under the blankets, ears straining to hear it again. I think I hear soft, stealthy movement. Feet on sodden ground. I get up and make my way across the moonlit floor to the window. I pull back the curtain and stare down into the pitchy depths of the garden. I can’t see anything. My first thought is that it might be Billy and my heart leaps. But then I put my hand over my mouth because a certainty fills me: Robert Smith is down there. The thought makes me sick. I drop the curtain, stepping back from the window. I don’t know what to do because even if he isn’t in my garden knocking over dustbin lids, sooner or later I will see him, stepping out from under the bus shelter, stopping beside me on his moped. He’ll always be there, with his knowing eyes and his leer. And I don’t think I can bear it.

  51

  They said that it wasn’t the Wild Man that had taken Eva. It was someone called Billy. But I recognised him as soon as I saw him on the island: the face from the river, from my dreams, hundreds of years old. They’ll never find him. He’s not from this world. He’s disappeared into the river again, dark and invisible as a seal.

  The police asked Eva lots of questions about him, but they had to do it in hospital because she was ill. We all visited her there, bringing little treats for her to eat and sitting by her bedside. She seemed different: quieter, sadder. Her eyes watched everything, wary and alert. She reminded me of a deer in a forest clearing. Mum cried on the way home after the hospital visits, sobbing in the front seat, and Dad leaned across and put his hand on her knee. She and Dad had discussions behind closed doors at home.

  I had some time off school. Then it was back to normal. I went through the gates into the playground on the first day with my satchel on my hip, keeping my head down like always. But straight away a crowd gathered around me. They wanted to know what had happened, all the details. I felt like a hero. People were nice to me. Teachers as well. I was treated as if I was important. Kids in my class wanted to sit next to me and talk to me, even the ones who usually ignored me. At lunch I was invited onto three different tables at the same time.

  The only people who didn’t come over were Joanna and Ellie. They stayed away, sulking in corners, shooting dark looks in my direction. At the end of the day I found them whispering together in the hallway. It looked as though Joanna had been crying. I stopped to ask her what was wrong.

  ‘None of your business,’ Joanna said, her eyes pink-rimmed.

  ‘It’s her cousin,’ Ellie said, her arm around Joanna’s shoulder. ‘Her cousin has gone missing.’

  ‘Who’s her cousin?’

  ‘You know,’ Ellie whispered, ‘Robert. Robert Smith. Nobody knows where he is.’

  I frown. ‘Maybe he went off with my au pair. She’s gone too. And they were… going out together I think.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Joanna said. ‘He’d never go off with her. He hates foreign food and that. And anyway, he disappeared last night when he was on his way to see a mate. They found his moped and helmet just abandoned on the side of the road. He loves that bike. He’d never leave it with the keys in it.’

  ‘He’ll come back,’ Ellie said soothingly to Joanna. She turned to me and raised her eyebrows, gave a wink.

  I remembered Robert standing over me on the wet garden path. Most of all I remembered his naked bottom, hair at the base of his spine like a tail.

  After school I find Mum, Dad and Eva waiting for me in the kitchen. Dad has made a cake. I can smell cherries and the buttery scent of warm sponge. Mum is pacing around the table, fiddling with her ring and her watch, clasping and unclasping her hands. Silver is in his basket; he twitches his tail when he sees me, thumping it against the flagstones.

  Dad clears his throat loudly and motions for us to sit down. ‘Mum and I have something to tell you. It’s something we should have told both of you, a long time ago.’

  Eva and I pull out chairs at one side of the table and Mum and Dad settle on the other. It’s the four of us again, all together, just like I’d wanted it to be; but it feels wrong, stiff and formal like an old-fashioned painting. I’m frightened. I look up at Eva for support, but she doesn’t take her eyes off a scratch on the table. Dad clears his throat.

  ‘After we got married,’ he says, ‘Mum and I wanted to start a family. We wanted a baby very much. But it didn’t happen. There were pregnancies. But…’ he glances across at Mum, ‘we lost the babies.’

  Mum blinks, looks at Eva and away. For a second I imagine Mum and Dad absent-mindedly leaving babies behind, in supermarkets, by the river, on a train. But then I know they mean that the babies are dead and I can’t understand how that happened and I want to ask if they died in Mum’s womb and why. Only Dad is already saying something else. ‘Then I met a young woman called Suky who was unmarried and pregnant.’ Dad rubs his nose. ‘She wanted us to have her baby. That baby was Eva.’

  ‘And she died?’ Eva asks in a small voice. ‘My mother?’

  Dad nods, ‘I’m sorry.’

  Eva has balled her hands up on the table and she’s digging her nails into her skin. ‘So that girl, Suky. She was definitely my mother?’ Eva frowns. ‘My real mother?’

  Dad coughs, as if he’s choking on a cake crumb, except he isn’t eating any. He leans across the table. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘Suky was your mother.’ He reaches out to touch Eva’s hands. ‘She died soon after you were born.’

  ‘It’s my fault that we didn’t tell you that you were adopted.’ Mum is talking very fast. ‘Dad wanted to tell you. But I felt you were my own.’ Her voice jerks and wobbles. ‘I didn’t want you or anyone else to ever think you didn’t belong to us, to our family.’ Her nose is red and she struggles to get more words out, ‘That… that we didn’t love you exactly as we love your sister.’

  Dad looks at me and Eva, his eyebrows pulling together. ‘You can ask us anything you like.’

  ‘Why didn’t my mother want me?’ Eva’s voice seems to come from a long way off.

  ‘Oh, darling.’ Mum’s eyes brim and spill over. ‘She didn’t want to give you away! I know she loved you.’

  I shift on my chair, push my thumbs against the edge of the table.

  Mum folds her hands under her chin, as if she’s praying. ‘But she was only a little older than you are now.’ She’s hunched over, looking straight at Eva. She doesn’t seem to notice tears sliding down her cheeks. ‘With no support, no family to look after her, she didn’t have a choice.’

  ‘Things were very different in the sixties,’ Dad says. ‘The place she was in, the home for unmarried mothers…’ He breaks off, frowning. ‘It wasn’t a kind place. Your mother and I have always felt lucky, but at the same time… I don’t know, guilty I suppose, to have been given you.’

  ‘Guilty?’ Eva sits up straight. ‘You did steal me then?’

  Mum lets out a sound like air punched from a stomach. ‘No! No, it was an adoption. Suky. Your mother. She agreed. And your uncle.’

  ‘Things were not well-documented I’m afraid.’ Dad hangs his head, his voice low. ‘It’s always been a fear, that someone from your mother’s family could try and claim you.’

  Eva stares at her hands again. ‘Not now though,’ she says slowly. ‘I can live with who I want now, can’t I?’

  Dad nods. I notice that he has taken Mum’s fingers in his. I stare at all three of them, examining the details of their faces. I can see things that I always knew but had never properly considered: Eva is everything I’m not–dark and beautiful and strong. We couldn’t possibly be related by blood. She bends over the table, gazing at the little red marks she’s dug into her hands. I’m afraid that she’s going to get up and leave, go and find her other family. Even if her mother is dead, she’ll have relations, uncles, cousins, grannies and grandpas maybe, people that don’t have anything to do with me or Mum and Dad. I feel panicky at the thought. It makes Eva seem far away again. I want to say something to make her stay. My mind is blank and I can feel myself getting hotter and hotter.

  ‘What did my mother look like?’

  I sigh, air rushing out of my lungs. Eva hasn’t jumped up and run away; she stays in her chair, elbows on the table, asking more questions that Mum and Dad don’t seem to know how to answer. Dad says that Eva has an uncle in Berkshire, and that they can contact him, that he should be able to answer more questions about Suky. He nods at Eva. ‘You’ve met him already, haven’t you? Wasn’t he the person who told you about the adoption?’

  Eva swallows, and I feel her stiffen. ‘No,’ she says, ‘no I never met him.’

  ‘But then,’ Dad frowns, ‘who told you?’

  ‘Someone in the village.’ Eva shifts on her chair. ‘That man, my uncle, I think he said something to the barman at the pub the day he came to see me. When I was a baby.’

  ‘Village gossip.’ Mum looks pale. ‘Does everyone know?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Dad says. ‘We have nothing to be ashamed of. None of us do.’

  Nobody is eating any of the cake. I sniff the sweetened air, my mouth watering. It’s just a story, I realise. A story about Eva’s beginnings, like something you’d find in a guidebook. A history. It isn’t about today; it isn’t about her real life with us, all those years we’ve been a family, growing up and arguing and doing things together, making memories.

  ‘She’s still my sister, isn’t she?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ Mum says, wiping her eyes. ‘Yes, of course she is.’

  Eva turns. ‘Do you want me to be?’

  I nod, spitting on my hand and holding it out to her. She does the same. We clasp fingers, pressing wet palm against wet palm.

  ‘One more thing,’ Dad says. ‘We have to decide if we sell the house or not.’

  ‘Can we pull out now?’ Mum looks surprised.

  ‘Of course,’ Dad says. ‘It’s our home. We can pay for the wretched surveyor. Reimburse their losses.’

  We have a show of hands and all of us want to stay in Holt House. I can’t imagine living somewhere else. I can’t imagine not being able to hear the sea from my bedroom, see it from my window.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Mum asks Eva.

  ‘This is home,’ Eva says.

  Dad cuts a huge slice of cake and puts it straight into his mouth, crumbs spilling across his chin, moist chunks of cherry falling onto the plate.

  52

  The ache inside is over. Clara sleeps soundly at night. She and Max roll into the same warm dip in the middle of the bed instead of clinging to the outer edges. They sleep pressed against each other, limbs entangled. There are no more dreams filled with the rustle of nun’s habits, their thieving whispers and Eva’s anguished cries.

  Suky has gone. Clara is restored to herself; the boundaries of skin and self are intact and separate. Sometimes she thinks she sees the flutter of blonde hair at the edges of her vision, brightness in dark corners and shadows. When she is alone there is perhaps a faint echo remaining of a mother murmuring to her baby, half-songs and promises of love and protection.

  Clara would like to be able to tell Eva about Suky. But she has no information, no facts, only the secret knowledge of her dreams. Max has suggested to Eva that they contact Charles. As her brother, he will have photograph albums, stories, perhaps a family-tree to offer. But Eva seems reluctant to speak to Charles. ‘Let her have time to think it through,’ Max said. ‘It’s a lot to take on all at once. She’s been through so much. And she’s grown up, don’t you think? She can make her own decisions.’

  Clara watches Eva closely, looking for signs of trauma, the after-effects of her experience showing as damage. Eva is different. She is more considered, slower to anger, more self-reliant than she used to be. She doesn’t seem frightened. She only gets angry when people say negative things about Billy. She is strangely protective of him. ‘Must be Stockholm syndrome,’ Max whispers, ‘like Patty Hearst.’ Clara thinks that this outcome has to be preferable to the alternatives. She refuses to think of what might have happened to Eva in that deserted concrete bunker. When she considers the young man who took Eva, Clara feels an odd sense of gratitude to him. He kept Eva safe. And in the end, he saved both her children’s lives.

  Eva’s experience has given her a gravity, a weightedness. Her physical appearance is the opposite though and Clara is trying to put meat on her bones. She offers Eva regular meals, vitamins, hot drinks laced with fortifying powders. As she sits across a table from her girls, watching Eva and Faith together, being a family again, eating meals and talking, weaving moments out of simple everyday gestures, this seems to Clara to be what happiness is.

  Max woke up with a memory of Eva clinging to the mast of the boat, wild water everywhere and her glaring down at him, spitting, ‘I hate you.’ The lifejacket orange and wet, tightly zipped, the belt knotted at her waist. He’d known it all along, his brain hiding that same memory from himself. The whole day is clear to him now, up until the moment that the boat turned and something hit him on the back of the head. He recalls Eva’s puffy eyes and sullen face. He should have asked her what was wrong, made her tell him. He’d wanted to get onto the water too much, was itching to have a sail, the first that year, and he hadn’t heeded the warning signs: the darkening sky and restless waves. Worst of all he’d ignored Eva’s strange expression, her silence.

  Eva explained that Billy found her washed up on the beach. ‘He saved my life,’ she’d said. The man could have been a hero, Max thought; instead he’d thrown her lifejacket into the sea, holding her against her will in a damp, primitive place. Leaving her family to presume that she was dead. Billy was deliberately cruel. Wicked. Evil. Max repeats those words to himself.

  Max’s anger feels like a relief to him. After all these months of passive uncertainty, living with the corrupt, insinuating effects of guilt, the weight of his grief, he wants to take action–he wants to find Billy and punish him. He is a criminal. The police have let him slip through their fingers. Max reads every newspaper, frustrated when the articles about the kidnapping begin to dry up, replaced by more recent news. He keeps a box file full of clippings about Billy. He phones the local station daily, demanding to know what new information has come to light. He wanted to borrow a boat to go to the island, to see if he could find traces of the kidnapping himself, clues that will tell him where Billy is, but the island is out of bounds and Clara begged him not to go. ‘It will be upsetting. Disturbing. And you won’t find anything the police haven’t already uncovered.’

  Eva comes into the study as he is re-reading an article about Billy’s life before the army, the box file open on the table, a notepad full of his scribbles next to him. He hears her make a noise in her throat and looks up from the file, his hands curling into fists either side of the article.

  ‘Stop it.’ Eva bends forwards, snatching at the paper. His fingers grasp the edges automatically and there is a tearing; Eva stands flushed, holding a ripped section in her hand. ‘What are you doing?’ She screws the paper into a crumpled ball. ‘Let it go. It’s over. I’m home now–isn’t that what matters?’

  He rubs his forehead hard. ‘Of course. Of course that’s what matters.’

  ‘So stop obsessing about Billy.’

  Max flinches.

  ‘You can’t even hear his name, can you?’

  Max runs his tongue over his teeth. ‘I can’t help it. It’s how I feel–as a father. I want to kill him. When I think of you there…’

  ‘No.’ Eva slides into the chair next to him, flips his notepad closed, her hand spread across it.