Riley felt her breathing beginning to tighten as an awful prospect began to take hold in her mind. Yet her instincts kicked against it. ‘Did they argue a lot?’
‘A fair bit. Sniping, mostly, from Katie, once she knew how to get under his skin. He couldn’t stand up to her when she began shouting.’ She paused and stared into the distance. ‘But inside he would have been dying. He loved her so much. You have no idea what this… this kind of thing can do to a family. One minute things were fine. Next our world seemed to be tearing itself apart.’
‘But you bore it.’ Alone, she almost said, trying to imagine the woman’s torture.
‘Not so well, as it turned out. I don’t like saying it and may the Good Lord forgive me, but there were moments when… well, I actually hated Katie. Hated what she did to her father… what she did to us. And there was no reason for it. That’s what I find so hard to understand. If it was simply the pregnancy, I would have helped her. I might even have found a way of convincing John. But once she’d gone, it was too late.’
‘Was there anything else it could have been — that made her leave, I mean?’ Riley squeezed the question out, dreading the reply.
‘I honestly don’t know. I don’t think so, but…’
‘But what?’
‘Not long before she left, Katie became… secretive. As if she knew something the rest of us didn’t. Something huge that we weren’t in on and never would be. She used to get all starry-eyed and say odd things, about how much we didn’t know or how we were unaware of things — especially her father. Yet she never told us what those things were. It was like she was laughing at us for being ignorant, when all the time she was the only one who knew what she was talking about. It was as if she had an invisible friend, urging her on.’
Was that something they had all ignored back then, Riley wondered. The possibility of someone waiting in the background? But would that have been enough to pull Katie away, even given the atmosphere Susan had described?
Riley recalled Donald mentioning that the body by the Thames was wearing a crucifix. After what Susan had just told her, she was surprised Katie would have tolerated ever wearing a symbol of her father’s faith. But people change. Maybe Katie had, too, over the years. ‘Well, she evidently believed in something,’ she said gently, rubbing Susan’s hand. ‘Maybe in the end that’s all she needed. Did the police say when they would send you her things?’
Susan’s head rolled on the pillow, her eyes closing. ‘Things? Oh, there wasn’t much. They said they had identified her by a bracelet. I’d like to have that… something to remind me.’
‘And the crucifix. You’ll want that, too.’
Susan’s eyes flickered open, confused. ‘Crucifix? No, dear, that can’t be right. Katie wouldn’t have worn a crucifix. They must have made a mistake.’ She stared hard at Riley, shaking her head with insistence.
Riley leaned closer, feeling the older woman’s breath on her face, sour and with a trace of mint. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t follow. What do you mean?’
Susan gave Riley a dry smile, as if she was talking to a child. ‘Katie didn’t believe in Christianity. Her father put her right off it. It’s what most of their rows were about.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely. You see, Katie found another path. It upset John dreadfully, of course, but he couldn’t do anything about it.’
‘Another path?’
‘Yes. For the last year we knew her, Katie rejected Christianity completely. She became a devout Buddhist.’
Chapter 22
‘But that doesn’t make sense. I mean… ‘ Riley clamped her lips shut. Whatever Susan Pyle believed her daughter had been part of, now was not the time to shake those beliefs. ‘How devout was she?’
‘Very. She had posters in her room and a small prayer wheel, and she used to meditate a great deal. It was no passing fad — I could tell. Some girls her age go through that kind of thing, but not Katie. She was very serious about it. There was the incense, which stank the house out all the time. John hated it, but he could never have forbidden her to use it. Anyway,’ she smiled faintly with the memory, ‘I quite liked the smell — it certainly made a difference to John’s awful pipe tobacco.’
‘I remember it now,’ said Riley, casting her mind back. It confirmed what the new owner of the Pyle’s house had said. But she didn’t recall the posters and prayer wheel. Maybe by then they had already been removed.
Susan Pyle seemed to read her mind. ‘We moved them after she… she left. A friend said if the police thought she had joined one of those religious sects or got involved with some outlandish group, they wouldn’t want to get involved. I said they weren’t a sect — it was nothing like that. Well, Buddhism is an established religion, isn’t it? Katie seemed to be so gentle whenever she talked about it… as if she were a different person. In the end, though, it seemed better to simply put the stuff away. But we never disposed of it completely.’
Riley wondered if a belief in Buddhism would have contributed to Katie’s leaving home. Certainly nothing she had heard about it suggested anyone would have persuaded her to go. On the other hand, maybe having to tell her new Buddhist friends that she was pregnant had been an obstacle too far. It might be worth talking to those friends. She decided to broach the subject of Susan’s recent visitor. ‘Mrs Francis said a man came to see you a few weeks ago. What did he want?’
A shudder went through Susan and she shook her head. When she spoke, her voice was as flat as iron. ‘I don’t want to talk about him. It was nothing. Just some nonsense.’
Riley said nothing, but waited, watching the older woman intently. Something in her manner told Riley she would talk, given time.
The tactic worked. Susan glanced across at Riley, and decided that keeping secrets was no longer an option.
‘He wanted to know if we’d heard from her,’ she said finally, her voice paper dry. ‘I couldn’t believe he was asking me such a thing. Not after all these years. I mean… we assumed she was dead. Of course this was before the police called the other day… and told me what they had found.’
‘So this man knew Katie was still alive.’ Riley wondered how anyone could be so callous. The effect on the old lady must have been unbearable. But why was he looking for her now? Did it mean Katie knew something that somehow made her a threat?
‘He wouldn’t say any more. He just kept demanding to know where she was… as if I was hiding her. When I asked him who he was and how he knew about Katie and where I lived, all he would say was that they knew everything about me.’
‘Did he say who ‘they’ were?’
‘No. When I told him that I hadn’t heard from Katie since she first left, and that she was probably dead, he seemed surprised, as if the idea hadn’t occurred to him. I thought that was the end of it. But then he became very unpleasant — almost desperate. He started shouting and making threats, saying he had to find her, and if she spoke to anyone, she’d regret it. We all would.’ She looked up with sad, moist eyes, her expression one of hopelessness. Her breathing had become faster, causing her thin chest to rise and fall unevenly. She swallowed and continued sadly. ‘I had no idea what he meant. All I could think of was that my Katie was alive.’
Riley touched the old lady’s arm. ‘What happened then?’
‘He said he knew why Katie had run away and how it was all going to come out. I told him to leave. I was very frightened by then and suddenly he was churning everything around. You have to understand, I had managed to shut out most of the past… about what could have made Katie leave… and what might have happened to her. Or I thought I had.’ She swallowed and wiped a tear from her cheek. ‘I still can’t truly understand, even now. Then he said he would make sure everybody knew and it would cause such a scandal.’ She stared up at Riley, her look suddenly vulnerable, like a small child. ‘Can he do that, Miss Gavin?’
‘No,’ Riley said firmly. ‘No, he can’t.’ She took the mystery man’s threats to be a last desperate effort to frighten an old lady. Who was there to harm? John Pyle was dead, and Susan was undoubtedly beyond being affected by long-forgotten secrets. There was no leverage in a purported scandal if the main participants or victims were no longer around to suffer. And who would be shocked these days by a teenager running away?