I raised one shoulder in a shrug. “There’s not much a good hacker can’t find out these days. How did you find out?”
He ran his thumb along the sharp line of his jaw in a curious stropping gesture. “A mixture of luck and hard work,” he said. “The first time I got into a serious relationship, when I was in my twenties, I decided I wanted to know where I’d come from. It hadn’t seemed important before, but the idea of being with someone long term, maybe even having kids with them, made me curious. I searched the records, and found out my father was already dead. Killed by a heart attack.” He gave a bitter cough of laughter. “Not bad for a heartless bastard. I carried on looking and I discovered my mother was Dorothea Thompson, née Dawson. But the trail went cold.” His eyes were alert, never leaving my face. I suspected he was watching for any signs that he was breaking new ground, revealing things I didn’t already know.
“I know about the breakdown,” I said. “Was that where the trail petered out?”
He nodded. “She was released from the hospital still using her married name, and she disappeared without trace. I found a cousin, the only other member of the family still alive, but he had no idea what had happened to her. The only useful thing I got from him was a copy of her wedding picture. I even hired one of your lot, but he never found her. Then one day I was sitting in the staff canteen at NPTV and Edna Mercer walked in with her latest fad. It was like someone took my stomach in their fist and squeezed it tight. I didn’t need to hear her name to know who she was. That was just confirmation of what I knew the minute I saw her face. All those years later, she was still the spitting image of her wedding picture.”
“But you didn’t rush across the room and reveal you were her long-lost son.”
He gave a twisted smile. “When I started out looking for my
I couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t offensively trite. My childhood was breathtaking in its comforting and confident normality. When I’d fallen over, there had been someone there to pick me up and stick a plaster on my knee. I’d fallen asleep with stories, not nightmares. There had always been arms to hold me and faces to reflect pride in my achievement. I could barely imagine the yawning gap of such an absence, never mind the agony of having it filled with such poisonous viciousness. “You must have come to hate her,” I said, surprised by the huskiness of my voice.
He shifted in his chair so his face was obscured by shadow, his spiky hair emphasized in a dark fragmented halo. With his black polo neck and black trousers, he looked like a satanic ghost. “I wanted to make her life a misery too,” he said. “I wanted her to understand something about the pain and misery she’d given me.”
“I don’t think she had a lot of choice in the matter.”
“More choice than I did,” he blazed back at me. “She could have come looking for me. It couldn’t have been that hard to find a child in care. But she made the decision to leave me in whatever hell I happened to be in.”
In the silence that swallowed his outburst, I thought of how it must have been for Dorothea. Tainted with the stigma of mental illness, abandoned by her husband, wrenched from her child, without resources. She couldn’t go home for she had no home to go to. The village where she’d grown up was the one place she’d
“She tried to get me to fall for that line,” he said scornfully. “No way. She never came after me. She left me to it. And my problem is that I’m not stupid. I know I’m fucked up. And I know exactly how and why. I’m fucked up because she left me to rot, to be abused, to be fucked over. And that’s why I didn’t murder her. I hated her far too much to give her the easy way out. I wanted her to go on suffering a whole lot longer. She still had years to pay for.”
Strangely, I believed him. The vitriol in his voice was the real thing, so strong it made the air tremble. “So you didn’t let on when you realized Edna Mercer’s latest discovery was your mother?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t say a word. I just watched her, every chance I got. I listened to the actors talking about her when I made them up. At first, I was confused. It was like part of me desperately wanted to love her and be loved back. And another part of me wanted revenge. I just sat it out, waited to see which side would win.” Freddie shifted in his chair, folding his arms across his stomach and bending forward. Lit from above, his eyes were impenetrable pools in shadowy sockets. “It was no contest, not really. The more they went on about how lovely she was, the more I resented what she’d deprived me of. I wanted revenge.”
“But you ended up in business with her. Earning money together,” I said, trying not to show how baffled I was by that. I suspected that he still harbored a determination not to tell me any more than I already knew.
He looked up then and stared into my face. He gave a strange barking cough of laughter. “Don’t you get it? That was my revenge. One night, I waited till her last client had gone and I walked into the van. I told her my date, time and place of birth and watched the color drain out of her face. I didn’t have to tell her who I was.
“You see, if she revealed that I was her son, it wouldn’t just be another happy tabloid reunion story. She’d have to explain how she came to give me up in the first place. She’d have to tell the world she was a nutter. Most people find mental illness frightening. She was convinced that she’d lose her contracts, lose her clients at Northerners and end up back where she was all those years ago when she came out of the mental hospital. I think she was wrong, but it suited me that she believed it. That way, I had leverage. I made her tell me people’s secrets and then I sold them. She had this phony reverence thing about her psychic gift. She was always going on about being like a priest or a doctor, the repository of people’s confidences.” His contemptuous impersonation was frighteningly accurate; if I’d been the superstitious type, I’d have sworn I could see Dorothea’s ghost rising up before me.
“In that case, why did she tell you?”
“I was her son,” he said simply. “She wanted to please me. It helped that she was desperate to keep our relationship secret, so she needed to keep me sweet.”
“So you put together what she winkled out from her clients with what people let slip in the make-up chair, and with the overlap between two sources you were able to expose all those people who probably think of you as a friend?” I said.
“Don’t make me laugh,” he said bitterly. “I’m not a friend to them. I’m a servant, a convenience. Oh sure, they treat me like I’m their best buddy, but if I died tonight I doubt if more than three of them would make it to the funeral, and then only if they knew the photographers were going to be there. The program’s last publicist, he made the mistake of thinking they were his friends. He had a breakdown — too much stress. One cast member sent him a get-well card. One sent him a bunch of flowers. And that was it. He’d been working his socks off to cover their backs for the best part of five years, and the day he went sick, it was as if he’d never
“Wasn’t it a bit of a risk, revealing secrets people knew they’d told Dorothea? Didn’t anybody put two and two together?”
He shook his head, a smirk on his narrow mouth. “I always waited a few months. I used the time to do a bit more digging, see if I could come up with extra information, stuff my mother hadn’t been told about. Once you know where to look, it’s amazing what you can find out.”
Tell me about it, I thought, feeling a strange pity for this damaged man who’d subverted the tricks of my trade and used them to generate misery. “I suppose leaking the storylines as well helped to cover your tracks.”
He frowned. “Storylines? That wasn’t me. I never really know the storylines in advance. Just bits and pieces I pick up from what people say. I’d heard it’s supposed to be somebody in the location catering company doing that. Turpin’s giving them the heave, and they’re getting their own back. That’s what I’d heard.”