‘So you think she’s dead?’ she asked in a raised voice.
‘I don’t know, Lena, I DON’T KNOW!’
‘Don’t shout at me, Marcus. I don’t care what she might have done, or what she is doing; if she is sick I want to find her and I will never give up hope of bringing her home. If you can’t help me then I will do it on my own, because I won’t stop, I want to take care of her, and I’ll do anything I have to do.’
He hit his flat hand on the arm of the chair. ‘All right… I’ll look through the albums.’
He banged one open in front of him and began thumbing through the photographs; everything she had said about trying to be a good mother was evident there, one photograph after another showed them together, always smiling, many of him with Amy, from riding ponies to playing tennis and skiing. He was yet again about to say it was a pointless exercise when she pushed back her chair and gave a strange half-moan.
‘What, what is it?’
She pointed to the open pages of the album in front of her; they were not photographs of Amy. In gathering up the albums, she had mistakenly brought one of own from when she was a child.
‘What, what’s the matter?’
She got up from the table and walked towards the glass-panelled doors that led into the garden. She stood still and then pressed her head against the cold glass.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked, concerned.
Still facing away from him, she said in a small quiet voice that she had never wanted to ever open that album. She had kept it in the drawer, hidden away, because it was too painful.
Marcus somehow knew to encourage her to continue, and he got up and put his arms around her, drawing her away from the glass. She leaned against him, and instead of returning to the table he walked with her into the TV room and then sat beside her on the big wide-cushioned sofa. He was trying to think of what he should say, hoping that she might have found some detail that would help them to understand their daughter.
His silence and the comfort of his arms made her want to talk about something she had never told him before, something she had only touched on with her therapist. It was coming out, unstoppable, and she had to take deep breaths as she described what it had been like to be told her mother was dying, the cancer affecting and consuming her fragile body as she slowly lost her mind to the disease. The terrible screams that permeated her mother’s semi-consciousness as the morphine eased the pain. She had felt helpless and repelled by the odours at her mother’s bedside, but still she helped wash her and clean the bed linen.
Marcus felt Lena’s body shudder and he held her tighter, as she described lying awake night after night waiting for the end, and then waiting for her father to come and comfort her. She was eight years old when the comfort became physically abusive and the grief-stricken man professed his love, and then the secret that she must never tell to anyone went on and on even after the funeral.
‘I never told a soul, and his drinking spiralled out of control so he would often be so drunk he’d just lie beside me. I was too frightened to move away from him in case he would force me to pleasure him.’
Marcus rocked her in his arms, unable to find a word of comfort, and appalled that she had never trusted him enough to tell him this until now. He was also trying to think about the possibility of her father, Amy’s grandfather, ever being left alone with the little girl. He had met him when they married, and he had stayed with them for short periods, but he was a wretched alcoholic and as far as he could recall he died when Amy was two or three years old.
‘Are you disgusted with me?’ she asked softly.
‘What, how can you even ask me that? Dear God, I am disgusted with myself, ashamed that you never had enough faith in me to tell me any of this.’
‘Shame is what I have felt nearly all my life, but he made me promise not to tell, and constantly told me it was because he loved me, and if I was to ever tell anyone he would be arrested and taken to prison.’
‘So you kept his filthy secret – was there no one you could have turned to?’
‘No, when I reached sixteen I had a lock fitted to my bedroom door and he stopped. He was so pitiful I used to feel sorry for him.’
‘My God, if only I had known, I’d have beaten the shit out of him, and you let him stay with us, he gave you away at our wedding.’
She was curled up beside him, her head resting against his body. He gently stroked her hair and she pressed her face into his chest.
‘It wasn’t him, was it? I mean, you don’t think he would have touched Amy?’
She gave a long sigh and eased away from him. ‘No, I never left him alone with her ever; by the time she was three he was dying, and I was very protective of her. I said to him once that if I saw him so much as touching her, even holding her hand, I would kill him. He was sort of afraid of me, because he knew I meant it.’
Marcus was stunned that she had kept all this from him, and he had never felt so protective of her before. He looked down into her beautiful perfect face, and he kissed her.
‘I won’t leave you, Lena, we’ll go through whatever we have to together. I’ve been pretty useless of late, but I promise I am going to change.’
‘I love you,’ she whispered and he lifted her up in his arms, carrying her up the stairs and into her bedroom. He was gentle and caring, and she responded with such adoration, he would have made love to her, but she seemed only to want him to hold her and eventually she fell asleep. He got up and drew the duvet around her and slipped out of the bedroom.
Marcus rarely if ever went into Lena’s office, but now he did and stood staring around the usually neat room. Stacks of unopened mail were left on her desk and some had been tossed onto the floor. Every surface was covered with documents and papers and over the carpet were littered torn-up letters and envelopes. The answer machine on her desk was blinking to indicate the memory was full; the house answer phone was also blinking with unanswered calls.
He sighed and glanced over the mound of receipts, some with ‘Urgent’ stamped across them, payments due for deliveries and orders. He would have liked to open her computer but had no idea what the password could be, and so instead he sat in her desk chair and began to sift through some of the unopened mail, growing increasingly concerned when he found a recent mortgage company letter claiming payments had been late for six months. He couldn’t understand why, as he knew she had the finances, particularly after their meeting with the divorce lawyers. Checking more recent demands for payment, he realized that Lena had been ignoring all the household bills since before Amy had been missing. He wondered if she had become so consumed by her Kiddy Winks business that she had neglected her everyday bills or whether she was ploughing the house money into the new venture. He gave a deep sigh, knowing they would have to discuss the situation.
Marcus returned to the bedroom to check on Lena, who was still sleeping, and so he decided to go and find something to cook for them both. As he was going downstairs the doorbell rang then rang again, and when he opened the door there were two journalists asking to talk to him and Mrs Fulford. Marcus curtly told them they were on private property and they should leave. The big wrought-iron gates at the foot of the drive were rarely closed and were not electronically operated. Marcus went out to the garage to fetch a padlock and chain and, returning to the front of the house, again demanded that the journalists leave. As he drew the gates closed, two more journalists drew up, beginning to make him feel threatened, as their cars were parked outside in the road by the entrance. He hurriedly secured the gates with the chain and locked the big heavy padlock.
The journalists called out his name and there was a flash of a camera. Marcus’s first reaction after anger was that they must have information about Amy and he dreaded that maybe her body had been discovered. He was just wondering whether he needed to contact the police when suddenly his mobile phone rang.