A Little Death (33 page)

When Dodie Blackstock, only child of multi-millionaire Wolf Blackstock, was eight, her mother was kidnapped. The family’s attempts to get her back ended in disaster, and her body was never found.

Now Dodie is twenty-nine, and her mother’s body has just been discovered. She has been dead only forty-eight hours.

1

My name is Dodie Blackstock. Well, it’s supposed to be Dorothy, but I hate it. And yes, it’s
those
Blackstocks. Wolf Blackstock was my father. I’m the one who inherited all the money. My mother was his third wife. The one who was kidnapped.

I hate telling people. Sometimes—no, often—I lie. Because when they ask if I’m related, they expect me to say something like, ‘No, but I wish I had his money,’ and then we can talk about the kidnap and how weird that they never found her body, and that leads us onto the summer of 1976 and how hot it was. If you’re about my age—I’m twenty-nine—I already know it was your best school holiday ever and that you went to the open-air pool every day and came back in the evening feeling as if the sun was inside you.

If I do tell the truth, I usually regret it. Because if you tell someone that your father was Wolf Blackstock and your mother was murdered by her kidnappers, you might just as well add, ‘And by the way, I’m seriously screwed up,’ because that’ll be what they’re thinking. I’ve had every sort of reaction, from total disbelief to a level of sympathy where they’re almost ready to commit suicide on my behalf, and they’ve only known me five minutes. But the worst thing is the nice people, the ones who just say, ‘God, that must have been terrible.’ I just say, ‘Yeah, well…’ and talk about something else.

But it’s always uncomfortable. It’s as if people feel guilty because they asked or they’d made a joke about it or something. And because they’re fascinated by the money, of course.

People used to ask all the time. I used to think about handing out flyers with my life story printed on them to save time. Father rich; mother kidnapped, body never found; university; the reason I actually work for a living instead of designing my own range of swimwear or prancing about in art galleries or whatever rich girls are supposed to do that passes for a job. Anyway, the life-story thing dropped off a bit because people were getting younger—well, they weren’t, but you know what I mean. But last year, when my father died, it was all raked up in the obituaries and magazine articles and one of those TV programmes, so now everyone knows about it all over again.

I was eight when Mum was kidnapped. January 1976. The kidnappers wanted ten million pounds, but my father wouldn’t pay. They dropped it to nine million, and then to eight million three months later, then seven, then two months after that they dropped it to six, before he agreed to part with a penny. You know the Pathe News videos they sell, one tape for each year? Well, if you get the one for 1976 you can see what happened. You’ll find it in June, after the bit about the end of the Cod War. There’s a man with fuzzy sideburns and a drip-dry shirt with a long pointy collar, crouching in some grass in front of a bush. The camera’s a bit wobbly, and sometimes you catch sight of a bit of thatched roof poking up behind him.

Then a voice-over will tell you that police arrested the third member of the gang at a house in Cricklewood, where items of women’s clothing were discovered, but that despite a nationwide search, my mother’s body was never found. Then it goes on to talk about record traffic jams to British coastal resorts and Dennis Howell being the Minister for Drought.

After that, half the journalists in the country must have descended on that village in Suffolk. One of the locals said it was like
Gunfight at the OK Corral
and a woman said she’d rung the police station when she heard the gunfire, and the sergeant said not to worry because the police were the ones doing the shooting. The other half of the journalists were doorstepping us, or that’s what it felt like. We were down at Camoys Hall. That was my father’s country house, which was where he lived most of the time and where I lived when I wasn’t at school. It’s got a great circle of gravel in front of it, made when the house was built so that carriages
could turn round. I remember looking down at it from a top-floor window and not being able to see one speck of gravel, only the tops of journalists’ heads. I spat, but nobody looked up.

Frankly, it would have been child’s play to kidnap Mum from Camoys Hall, but she was taken from her car in London. My father wouldn’t have dogs or guards or anything because he said he wouldn’t be made a prisoner in his own house, so there were ordinary farm gates at the end of the driveway instead of electric ones. There was a notice saying
PRIVATE PROPERTY
, but the gates were usually open and anyone could have driven through them. Those journalists must have thought they’d died and gone to heaven, except that my father refused to talk to them, and they waited in front of the house every single day for almost three weeks while the search for Mum’s body was going on. The reporters had vans, lighting, everything. By the end, there were blankets and even deckchairs. Most of the men had sunhats, and some of the women were lying on the brown grass of the front lawn with their tops rolled up, sunbathing. One of the newspapers ran a picture of them sitting around a picnic, playing cards. When they finally went, Joan our housekeeper—actually she was a bit more than that, but I don’t want to go into it now—and I tiptoed out of the front door to have a look and by the state of the grounds you’d have thought there’d been a garden party. Not a Buckingham Palace one, though. The following spring, our cook cut open one of the cabbages from the kitchen garden and found a used condom inside it.

I’ve got a photograph of the press conference that my father eventually gave. We’re all standing on the porch at Camoys Hall. My father’s in the front with Angela, his mistress—she had been sort of pensioned off when
he married Mum, but she still lived at Camoys Hall— Des, Irene des Voeux, Joan and me. Irene des Voeux was the woman Mum was on her way to spend the weekend with when she was kidnapped. Des is Desmond Haigh-Wood. He’s retired now, but he was my father’s finance director and probably the closest thing he had to a friend. He had his own suite at Camoys Hall because he stayed with us so often. Des was always nice to me: I used to practise writing
Dodie Haigh-Wood
, and wish that he was my father instead of my real one.

I think the photo I’ve got must have been done just after the official picture was taken. Everyone’s turning sideways to talk to each other and I’m obviously not meant to be there at all; they’re in suits and I’m wearing shorts and a T-shirt and Joan’s holding the top of my arm as if she’s trying to hoick me back into the house. You can just about see my squint through my glasses, which are completely lopsided, and my hair is a mess—
plus ca change.
It looks as though Joan’s been at my fringe with her nail scissors.

At that time, the police were still searching for my mother. I couldn’t believe she was dead. I was sure they’d find her. I thought she’d manage to escape from the kidnappers, and that she was going to come and get me and take me away with her to somewhere lovely where we could live together. I couldn’t believe she was just going to leave me with my father. I went on believing that for about three years, and then on and off until I was about fifteen. I couldn’t talk about it to anyone. I knew they’d be sympathetic but pitying, because they didn’t believe she was going to come back themselves. I never spoke to Angela anyway if I could help it, and the thought of talking to Joan about it was even worse because I liked her. I suppose I could have talked to Des, but I was frightened he’d say the same as the others and
then I wouldn’t be able to love him anymore. And I didn’t really talk to my father at all. I mean, I couldn’t have gone to his study unless I was summoned. Nobody did that, not even Des.

Mum had to be officially declared dead in the end. They never found her body. Until last night, that is. June 14, 1996. They found it on an estate in Hackney, where they’ve been pulling down the tower blocks.

She’s been dead for less than forty-eight hours.

2

Des once told me this story about soldiers in the Second World War. They’re in Malaya or somewhere, fighting, and their commander—a man not known for his tact and sensitivity—gets a telegram to say that one of the men’s mothers has died. He orders a parade and says, ‘All those men with mothers still alive, take one pace forward. And where d’you think you’re going, Private Smith?’

The policeman who told me about Mum was a bit like that. I told him my mother was already dead, and he said, ‘Look, you
are
Dorothy Jane Blackstock, aren’t you?’ When I said yes, he said, ‘Well, you’re absolutely right, because she died, because she died yesterday. We’ve just found her body.’ Then he asked me if I’d like to ‘take a look at her’, meaning would I come to the mortuary and identify her.

There was another policeman in the car with him. Neither of them looked old enough to shave, so they can’t have remembered the kidnap and it was obvious no one had told them, or maybe they thought it didn’t
matter. At the mortuary, they had this person they said was my mother, on a trolley covered over with a sheet. I looked around to see if there was someone older, someone who’d remember what happened, a doctor or somebody I could talk to.

Someone in a white coat then came and pulled the sheet down a bit, and one of the policemen said, ‘Do you recognise her?’

I said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t.’

‘So you’re saying that this isn’t your mother?’

‘I don’t know. I’m sorry.’ I mean, how was I meant to know? I suppose she did look vaguely familiar, but even if I’d seen the same face, alive, in a crowd of people— because she wasn’t—battered or anything—I wouldn’t have shouted out, ‘That’s my mother!’ My idea of Mum—the beautiful young woman whose voice I’d heard so clearly in my mind two days before—and this woman… I just couldn’t bring them together. The woman’s face just looked so… so nothing. So
dead
, I suppose.

I said, ‘I haven’t seen her for twenty years. I can’t tell if it’s her or not.’ One of the policemen gave me a funny look, but they covered her up again. When we left the room, I asked, ‘Why do you think she’s my mother?’ and they said she’d had a diary with her name in it: Susan Carrington. Then I asked them how they’d found me and they said my name was in the diary as well. In the section where you put personal details, where it says who to contact if there’s an emergency, she’d written my name. She’d put ‘daughter’ beside it. That was why they kept calling me
Mrs.
Blackstock all the time—they thought I was married, and Blackstock was my husband’s name.

They took me into a little office with filing cabinets and a scuzzy grey carpet. I looked to see if there was a
name on the door, just to get my bearings, but I couldn’t see one. ‘Did you leave home when you were very young?’ one of them asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t like that.’ I suppose I should have explained, but I couldn’t be bothered. I was angry because they didn’t know, and they should have. I mean, they must have a computer or records or something where they look people up. Why should I do their work for them? And if it
was
Mum, why didn’t they do their job in 1976 and find her while she was still alive? I couldn’t stand having to go through it all again while they asked stupid prurient questions and just… I don’t know, trampled over everything. I wanted to go home.

I was about to ask if I could when an older man in ordinary clothes poked his head round the door and motioned one of the uniforms outside. I heard them talking—not the words, though—and then the older one looked in again and told the other uniform to fetch me a cup of tea.

‘Get younger all the time, don’t they?’ He came in and sat down. He said his name was Inspector Halstead. I don’t think the others told me their names, or if they did I don’t remember them. ‘That must have been a terrible shock,’ he continued. ‘Miss Draycott obviously wasn’t able to talk to you.’

I was about to ask him who Miss Draycott was, but then I realised he meant Joan. She still lives at Camoys Hall. ‘You’ve spoken to her?’

‘Your name was in Miss Carrington’s diary with a Cambridgeshire address. I spoke to Miss Draycott, and she told me where to reach you.’

‘When was this?’

‘This morning. She said she’d phone you straight away. She wanted to tell you herself.’

‘Well she didn’t. I was at home all the time, until your men came.’

He was sitting across from me, with his legs properly under the table. The uniform who’d asked me if I’d run away from home had parked his bum on the corner of the desk as if he was just making do with me until someone more interesting came along.

‘Do you know about it?’ I asked.

‘You mean, about the kidnap? Yes.’

‘Those others didn’t. They didn’t know anything. Anyway, why are you so sure it’s her? It couldn’t be some sort of hoax, could it?’ I’m not sure what I was thinking, really—I suppose that someone might claim to be my mother, like that woman in America who claimed to be the Tsar’s daughter. The woman in the mortuary had red hair, but it was darker than Mum’s, and anyone can dye their hair. I didn’t know if I wanted the woman to be Mum, but I didn’t want her to be Minnie Bloggs who’d just been decanted from the mental home and was going round telling everybody that she was Susan Carrington, either.

‘Well, we’re not certain. Having said that, we think that she might have been homeless. A couple of the local shelters recognised the name and description, though they didn’t know much about her. Both said she was quiet—not a talker. They didn’t think she was anyone in particular. They didn’t say that she’d gone round claiming to be kidnapped or anything. Mind you, a lot of them do in those places, so another one would hardly stand out.’