Page 2

TWENTY-THREE YEARS LATER

NEW YEAR’S EVE

‘And you found this, where?’ Cristy asked, looking up from the pages she’d just spent the past few minutes reading, pages that had taken her briefly to another world where clearly something wasn’t right. She already wanted to know more.

‘It was amongst my aunt’s papers,’ Sadie Winters replied. She was sitting up tall, a little stiffly – nerves, Cristy suspected – and her voice wavered slightly as she spoke. Her beauty was something Cristy hadn’t especially noticed when she’d come into the room; now it seemed almost mesmerizing in its subtle form of radiance. In fact, it was as if the beauty itself was undecided on how far to go, how much it wanted to be recognized. Her hair was golden blonde and fell in soft, luxuriant waves to her shoulders; her forehead was high, her almond-shaped eyes brown and intelligent, hesitant, as well, Cristy thought. Right now they conveyed a sense of hope along with a quiet determination to stay focused on why they were there.

Sitting beside Sadie at the conference table in this spacious office in St Peter Port, with its vast picture windows framing the harbour and all manner of nautical-themed fixtures on the walls, was Sadie’s best friend, Anna Gaudion.

‘It could make a brilliant podcast,’ Anna declared eagerly, clearly thinking Cristy needed more persuasion. Perhaps Cristy did, although she had to admit she was already more than half on board. Whatever the mystery, presuming it was based in fact – two sisters, a child on a beach, an enigmatic note … would it be right for Hindsight , the true-crime podcast series that she and her partner produced? ‘That’s why we’ve come to you,’ Anna ran on.

Cristy had to smile. This girl, young woman – she and Sadie were both mid-twenties – was as outspoken and excitable as she was rash and lovely.

Anna was still speaking. ‘It blew my mind when I read it the first time,’ she said. ‘It’s totally surreal, don’t you think? Like something out of a movie, only it really happened.’ She turned uncertainly to Sadie. ‘Well, we think it did,’ she added. ‘I mean, it must have, because it explains everything.’

Sadie’s voice was gentle, her smile still hesitant as she said, ‘Actually it doesn’t explain anything, which is why we’re here.’

‘Of course,’ Anna agreed. ‘But all the names are real,’ she continued, turning back to Cristy. ‘Mia and Lottie are Sadie’s aunts, and we think, well we know, that Lottie, who died just before the lockdowns, so four years ago, wrote what you’ve just read. It was her thing, you see, short stories. She had lots published, back in the day, but then she stopped. Well, we thought she did, but since Sadie started going through all her stuff she’s found dozens of them, all printed out, and not necessarily complete.’

‘And then I found that,’ Sadie added, nodding towards the pages in front of Cristy.

Cristy sat back in her chair barely noticing the torrents of rain streaking the windows behind the girls while gale-force gusts chopped up the sea and tossed fishing boats about like toys. She was about to speak when Anna said, ‘It’s a brilliant story, what we know of it so far. We just need someone to help us find out the rest. So if you’re interested, I know you do cold cases …’

From the doorway David said, ‘Anna, why don’t you let someone else speak?’

Cristy had to laugh even as her heart warmed to find him standing there, his dark-blond hair and handsome face wet with rain, his expression wry as he took in the scene and came to a quick conclusion about his daughter’s part in it. ‘Sorry if I’m interrupting,’ he said, his eyes on Cristy’s, ‘but I felt someone should.’

Anna said, indignantly, ‘I’m just trying to get things going here, Dad. You know how shy Sades is …’

‘She’s just not loud,’ he corrected, ‘otherwise she’s perfectly capable of speaking up for herself.’

Anna’s eyes shot darts at him. ‘You shouldn’t even be here,’ she told him. ‘I thought you had a meeting in town.’

‘It got cancelled, so I thought I’d call in and see how you’re getting along.’ As he came to stand behind Cristy she lifted her face and smiled as he kissed her.

‘They keep doing that,’ Anna grumbled to Sadie. ‘And it’s not like they don’t have a room.’ To her father, she said, ‘You have to go now or you’ll just end up taking over the way you always do.’

With a laugh, he said to Sadie, ‘Should I take her with me so you can get a word in?’

Apparently enjoying his tease, Sadie said, ‘She’s OK.’

With a smile, he dropped another kiss on Cristy’s forehead and was already answering a call as he left the room.

Taking a moment to refocus – why wasn’t Cristy over these teenage flutterings yet, it had been almost a month since they’d first ‘become official’ great euphemism, introduced by her nineteen-year-old daughter, Hayley. ‘Sadie,’ she said, firmly, ‘why don’t you tell me about yourself and your life today. I’d like to have a fuller picture of who you are, what you do, where you live, although I take it it’s here on the island.’

As Anna took a breath to answer, Sadie put a slender hand over hers and said, ‘There’s not all that much to me, really …’

‘Not true!’ Anna protested.

‘Maybe we need to call your father back,’ Cristy suggested.

Anna scowled as Sadie laughed and said, ‘I’m soon to be twenty-six – at least I think I am – and I’ve lived in Guernsey for most of my life. Anna and I went to school together, that’s how we know one another. I left for a few years when I went to uni in London and I worked there for a while after. I came back when one of my aunts fell ill. She recovered, thankfully, but by then I’d already decided I was going to stay on. Jasper – my fiancé – works here in St Peter Port, he’s an investment analyst, and I’m trying to set myself up as a freelance editor of fiction. No clients yet, but it’s still early days.’

‘She’s going to be brilliant,’ Anna insisted.

Sadie’s eyes sparkled as she said, ‘We all need an Anna when it comes to confidence boosting. Anyway, that’s what I do when I work, which actually isn’t all that often. Jasper and I have a small house on my aunt’s estate just a couple of miles along the coast from here. She’s on her own now, since my other aunt passed away, so I’m glad to be nearby, although J and I spend a few days a month near Bath with his parents. He’s not from the island, you see, so he feels the need to escape now and then, and I guess I do too, but I don’t like leaving Mia for long.’

‘The two of you are close,’ Cristy concluded.

Sadie nodded. ‘We have been for as long as I can remember. Her name’s Emilia, Mia. I grew up with her and my other aunt, Carlotta – Lottie. They were the best parents anyone could ever wish for. Real characters, in their different ways, often unpredictable, generous to a fault, sometimes bossy especially with each other, far too forgiving, but not gullible, never a great idea to get on the wrong side of them, but on the whole they were just … kind .’ She thought for a moment and added, ‘Controlling as well, but there again, aren’t all parents? Anyway, since Lottie died, just before Covid, it’s like Mia has … This is going to sound strange, I know, but she seems to get confused about who she is. She often talks to Lottie out loud, asking what she thinks about something, or what she, Mia, should do in a certain situation. Then she answers herself and laughs at how “dotty” she must sound.’

‘She’s not demented or anything,’ Anna put in, ‘well, maybe she is, a bit, but what matters for our purposes today is that she just won’t answer questions about Sadie’s parents.’

Cristy’s gaze returned to Sadie. ‘What exactly have you asked her?’ she prompted.

‘Lately, not very much,’ Sadie admitted, ‘but a while ago, I mean a few years back, I started looking into my roots and that’s when I discovered that I’m not their dead brother’s daughter, the way they’ve always claimed. In fact, I can’t find any record of them having a brother at all.’

Understanding how alarming that must have been, not to mention disorientating, Cristy said, ‘So are you thinking now that the child on the beach is probably you?’

Sadie swallowed dryly. ‘I think it’s possible, yes. And my aunts either kept me because whoever wrote the note didn’t come back, or …’

‘Or they stole her,’ Anna finished, clearly having reached her own conclusion. Then not quite so certain she added, ‘There’s also the chance they might have bought her and what we’ve read is a kind of cover story?’

Intrigued by both possibilities, random as they were, Cristy said, ‘Just to be clear … these pages here are written like fiction, but it’s your belief they are, in fact, or could be, a record of how you came to your aunts’… What shall we call it? Care?’

Colour seeped into Sadie’s cheeks as she said, ‘It’s the way she’s used our names,’ she explained, clearly worried that Cristy had already concluded she was reading too much into a few random pages.

‘We reckon this could be a fictionalized version of fact,’ Anna said, spelling it out helpfully.

Cristy nodded, still not entirely sure what she thought, although she was ready to accept that there might well be something more … sinister? manipulative? at play. ‘How old is your aunt?’ she asked Sadie. ‘The one that’s still living.’

‘She’s seventy,’ Sadie replied.

‘And still quite glam,’ Anna added, ‘in a bit of a funky way. I mean, she likes the Sixties look, flicked-up hair, mini-dresses, fake leather trousers and all that sort of stuff, but it kind of suits her.’

‘Lottie, on the other hand,’ Sadie continued, ‘preferred a more masculine sort of style, although her features and her mannerisms were entirely feminine. She loved baggy trousers and men’s shirts. She’d even go to balls dressed in a tuxedo at times.’

‘She wasn’t gay,’ Anna insisted. ‘She really liked men, didn’t she? I mean, it says so in these pages, and she was always messing with the blokes around the yacht club here on the island.’

With a wry sort of smile, Sadie said, ‘Mia used to accuse her of liking men a bit too much, and Lottie would accuse her of being jealous, or frigid, or tell her to loosen up and get a dildo.’ She laughed and Cristy did too, as much at the unexpectedness of it as the comedy. ‘Not that Mia didn’t have her share of “admirers”,’ Sadie continued. ‘I mean, she was married once. I never knew him, and they never really talked about him, or about anyone Lottie was involved with. She used to keep her affairs, or flings, or whatever we want to call them, to when she travelled.’

‘So are your aunts from the island?’ Cristy asked.

‘No. They’re from London originally.’

Anna said, ‘We think the house mentioned in those pages is somewhere their grandparents took them a few times when they were young.’

Cristy frowned curiously. ‘Why do you think that?’

‘Because my aunts used to talk about it. They told me about going to Somerset as children when their parents were in more exotic places. They described it as an adventure, somewhere different, more rustic with no rules and lots of freedom. Lottie told me once, years later, that on a whim they got someone to find it for them, and they rented it for a while. She joked that they weren’t as much into the rusticity or bad weather then, so they didn’t stay as long as they’d intended.’

Seeing how the girl’s mind was working, Cristy said, ‘So what exactly did they tell you about your parents, and how you came to live with them?’

Sadie took a breath and clutched her hands together as she said, ‘They told me that my father, their brother, and my mother, were killed in a car crash when I was two years old, and that’s when they became my legal guardians.’

‘And are they? Your legal guardians?’

‘I haven’t found any documents to support it, but I guess it’s academic now, considering my age.’

Conceding the point, Cristy said, ‘But you know that they never had a brother?’

‘Not that I can find any record of.’

‘Do you have a birth certificate?’

Sadie swallowed as she nodded. ‘It says I was born on the fourteenth of May 1998 and that my father’s name was Martin Winters.’

She will be two years old on May 14th .

‘What about your mother?’ Cristy asked.

‘She is down as Vanessa Winters, née Jameson. I’ve tried, but I can’t find any trace of them – at least not as a couple with a daughter who’d be my age.’

‘And when you discovered your aunts didn’t have a brother, what did you do?’

‘Nothing – then. I didn’t know how to bring it up without it seeming as though I was being mistrustful, and spying on them.’

‘But you must have asked about your parents before that, while you were growing up?’

‘Yes, of course, and they’d tell me lovely stories of how much they’d adored me and how proud they’d be of me if they could see how well I was doing. They even had photographs of me as a baby, and of them, but I’m not sure now how real any of it was.’

Cristy sat with that for a moment until Anna said, ‘We’re actually pretty certain her aunts stole her. You’ll understand what we mean when you see what else Sadie found in Lottie’s desk.’

Cristy looked at Sadie, a prompt for her to explain.

‘It was during the pandemic that I first started to go through Lottie’s things,’ Sadie began. ‘There’s so much, honestly, I knew it was going to take forever, and Mia kept telling me it could wait … I realized she didn’t want to help in any way, and I didn’t mind, I understood it would be a lot more painful for her than it might be for me.’

‘But she was OK with you doing it?’ Cristy prompted.

Sadie nodded. ‘I guess so. I mean, she never tried to stop me, so I just got on with it. Not every day, you understand, not even every week, but then, quite recently, I opened one of the hundreds of box files prepared to find more bank statements, or postcards of places Lottie had been, brochures, various knick-knacks, she kept everything … But in this particular box there were two large brown envelopes. The first turned out to contain photographs that I recognized right away. They were the ones I mentioned just now that used to be dotted around the house when I was growing up. Me – or a child who was supposed to be me – as a baby either with my “parents”, or alone. A couple of my “parents” on their wedding day, my christening, that sort of thing. What I never noticed when I was younger, but I did when I studied them more closely recently, was that there are no early photos of me with my aunts, or of them with my parents.’

‘Have you asked your aunt Mia about that?’

‘Not yet. I guess I’ll have to at some point, but the last time I brought up the subject of my parents … Actually, it was before Lottie died, and I’m afraid it didn’t go well. I’d eventually plucked up the courage to ask about their brother and Mia got angry, saying I should leave things alone and stop bothering them with memories they’d rather not revisit. Lottie was pretty angry too. She asked if I was unhappy, and if so I didn’t have a right to be. She said, “Haven’t we given you everything?” and they had, of course, I could never deny that.’

Thinking how spiteful that sounded, Cristy said, ‘You mentioned two envelopes just now.’

Sadie nodded. ‘The other one contained the pages you’ve just read. You can see they’re a printout, but I can’t search Lottie’s computers to see if there’s more because, after Lottie died, Mia had them returned to factory settings and shipped off to various schools in Africa. She said it’s what Lottie would have wanted.’

‘Didn’t she make back-ups of Lottie’s files?’ Cristy asked.

‘I don’t think so, or not that I’ve found so far. They could be in Mia’s office, of course, but I don’t have any reason to go poking around in there.’

‘And what about these pages? Have you shown them to your aunt?’

‘Not yet. I wanted to find out first if I’m just being fanciful or paranoid …’

‘We want to know what you think,’ Anna said for her.

Regarding them both, Cristy said carefully, ‘You understand, Sadie, I’m sure, that if this does turn out to be fact rather than fiction your aunt could be in a lot of trouble.’

Sadie looked horribly pained. ‘I do, but honestly, if you knew what it was like to have no idea who you really are, to have no real sense of belonging … I’m sorry if that sounds selfish, but I don’t know if I can carry on not knowing any more. And as for my aunt, I promise you, it won’t be anything she can’t handle. She’ll just throw money at it, the way she does with everything.’

Thinking that no amount of money could buy off a case of child abduction, Cristy’s eyes moved to Anna as she said, hotly, ‘What matters is that Sadie should know who she really is.’

Cristy looked at Sadie again. ‘Have you done a DNA test to find out if you’re related to your aunts in any way?’ she asked.

Sadie swallowed. ‘Yes, I have, and no, I’m not.’

In spite of having expected the answer, Cristy couldn’t help feeling the girl’s bewilderment and sadness. How on earth must it feel to find out that the space you should be filling in the world is empty?

Anna said, ‘You never know, Sadie’s real parents could be out there somewhere, desperate to find her …’

‘If they’re still alive,’ Sadie put in quietly, ‘and I like to think they are.’

As Cristy’s eyes swept her face, she was wondering about the people who’d made this stunningly lovely young woman and what could have happened to tear them all apart. As privileged a life as Sadie had led, there was clearly a whole other story folded into her genes, running untold through her veins. She wasn’t the person sitting here today, or she shouldn’t be. There was someone else inside her who needed to be heard, to be recognized for who she really was.

In the end, she said, ‘What about your aunt? How’s she likely to take it if you do find your real family?’

Sadie shook her head helplessly. ‘I guess a lot depends on who they are and what they say happened to separate us,’ she said.

Silent echoes of the mysterious story seemed to fill the room before Anna said, ‘Please say you’ll help.’