Forgive Me (34 page)

She knew with utter certainty that
wasn’t going to happen. But at the same time she was wary of jumping into living
with him too soon. She needed to get a new job, and they had to look at the
practicalities of their separate homes and make decisions that weren’t based
purely on wanting to sleep in the same bed together every night.

Gregor and Grace both wore slightly bemused
expressions when the young couple arrived at their house looking ‘loved up’,
no doubt remembering Eva’s claim before Phil arrived in Scotland that he was just
a friend.

Grace teased them a little as they all
shared a pot of tea, asking about the places they’d stayed at and if it was the
Highland air that had given them a certain glow. Eva and Phil hadn’t dared look at
each other at that point for fear of laughing, because they’d pulled off the road
earlier in the day and made love in a wood. They had only just got back on their feet
when a man walking his dog had appeared close by, which had sent them into spasms of
helpless laughter.

‘You’re welcome to stay here for
a couple of days,’ Gregor said. ‘Grace and I would love that.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’
Eva said. ‘But we’re running out of days and there’s still so much
more we want to see before we go home.’

‘You just make sure you keep in
touch,’ Gregor said as they got up to leave. ‘We want to be the first to
hear if you find a body in Carlisle. And there will always be room for you here, if you
fancy coming up here again.’

Eva bent over his wheelchair to hug him.
‘It’s been such a
pleasure meeting you. Shame you
didn’t turn out to be my dad, but a girl can’t have everything.’

Grace laughed. ‘Well, you’ve got
your ox now, and I think you’ll find that is a great deal more exciting than
gaining a dad.’

She took Eva to one side.
‘Phil’s a keeper,’ she whispered, ‘a lovely man. You hold on to
him, and live happily ever after. Take Dena’s advice and don’t try to wake
the sleeping serpent. Let the past go.’

Eva grinned. ‘You know, I think you
really believe she has “powers”.’

Grace frowned. ‘Sort of. It might just
be coincidence, but she’s told me and several friends some rather uncanny things.
A year before Gregor’s accident she warned him about it. Some would say that there
was a fair chance any man who took such risks would eventually come a cropper, but there
are many people in this town who pay her a visit whenever they have a
problem.’

‘Maybe we can go back to Pitlochry
next summer?’ Phil said as they drove south. ‘I’d like to see Gregor
and Grace again. You just don’t meet people like that in London.’

Eva agreed with that. It wasn’t that
there was anything wrong with Londoners, but a big city made people harder, more wary
and materialistic. Gregor was very open, he was in touch with nature, the elements and
the seasons. Grace was more sophisticated than her elder brother, but she too was warm
and generous. They both cared about people and valued friendship.

‘Whatever Mum got up to in the past,
or however devious she was, I’m really glad I’ve met Gregor and
Patrick,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘They feel almost like family.’

As they’d decided they wanted to spend
the rest of their
holiday exploring the Lake District, their plan was
to reach Carlisle by mid-afternoon, stay overnight, then push on the next day.

They found a guest house within walking
distance of the town centre, left the car there and set off to have a look around. Phil
picked up a city map at a Tourist Information kiosk, and after they’d had a look
at the castle, they got an outside table in the market square and ordered coffee and
cake. Phil got out the map which also listed places of interest.

‘We should visit Hadrian’s Wall
tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’ve always wanted to see that. There’s
also a covered market close to here.’

‘Oh, goody,’ she replied.
‘Markets in strange towns are always more exciting than the ones back home. Is the
street in Mum’s picture on that map?’

‘Yes, it’s here,’ he said,
pointing to it. ‘Botchergate. It’s a horrible name. I wonder what it means?
Do you think all the city botchers lived there at one time?’

Eva giggled. ‘Plumbers who leave
leaks, bricklayers whose walls fall down!’

‘I didn’t imagine it being a
main road, but it seems to be,’ Phil said. ‘We can go down that way on our
way back to the guest house, take a look and then cut across through the backstreets to
where we are staying. I don’t think it’s very far.’

‘Is there really any point?’ she
said doubtfully. ‘After all, it’s not as if we’re likely to find out
what that place meant to Mum.’

‘True. But if you don’t bother
to go, you’ll always wonder about it,’ he said.

‘You are an amazingly reasonable
man,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you sick of me banging on about all this stuff
with Mum?’

‘No, I’m intrigued.’ He
grinned. ‘Especially as there don’t seem to be any secrets to uncover in my
family.’

‘It could be they are just better at
hiding them.’

They had fish and chips in a cafe later,
wandered around a little more, then made their way back down Botchergate, intending to
find a pub near the guest house afterwards.

Botchergate was a bit rough and dreary; the
streets running off it were all terraces of run-down little houses without a tree or
plant in sight.

‘So that’s it,’ Eva said
as they stood outside The Crane-makers Arms and looked from the pub across the street at
the row of shops. It didn’t look all that different to the old photograph – except
the shops had changed hands since then. There was a fireplace shop on the corner, a
newsagent’s, a charity shop and what appeared to be a printer’s. A man they
had spoken to by the new Lanes Shopping Centre in the middle of town had said this area
of Carlisle was due for redevelopment too. It badly needed it, especially the
houses.

‘The fireplace shop is where Huggetts
was, and that charity place is the old betting shop,’ Phil said. He got out his
camera and took a picture. ‘Just something for you to tuck away for the next
generation to puzzle over,’ he added.

‘Let’s go and have a drink in
here?’ Eva suggested, looking at the big pub behind them. ‘You never know,
some old codger might be sitting at the bar ready to tell us about the racy red-haired
artist who once called in.’

It was a traditional workingman’s pub
which had probably changed very little over the years, still with a separate saloon and
public bar. They went into the public bar, as there was more likelihood of being able to
get into conversation with someone who had lived here twenty-odd years ago. A group of
six men wearing navy-blue overalls sat at a table in the corner, a few old men nursing a
pint were dotted around, and up at the bar there were two middle-aged men on stools
talking to the landlord. He was short but burly, with an impressive moustache.

Phil ordered the drinks and then asked the
landlord how many years he’d had the pub.

‘Only five as landlord,’ he said
in a rich Cumbrian accent. ‘It was me da’s place afore that. It took a lot
of effort to lick it back into shape. I was away in the army and he let things slide
after me mam died.’

‘So you grew up here then?’ Eva
said eagerly.

The man smiled. ‘I certainly did. Got
my training in the licensing trade as young as six when I used to fill up crates with
empty bottles.’

‘You must have seen a lot of changes
in Carlisle then over the years?’ Phil said. ‘Show him the picture,
Eva.’

‘My mother took this photo, we think
in 1970,’ Eva said as she took it out of her bag. ‘She also did an oil
painting of it.’

The landlord took the picture and showed it
to the other two men. All three spoke about it eagerly – about who owned the shops at
the time of the picture, and before.

‘I wonder if you’d remember my
mother? She was red-haired, small, slender, called Flora Foyle.’ She took one of
the pictures of Flora that Gregor had given her out of her bag. ‘I think she
must’ve stayed here for a while.’

The landlord looked at the picture and shook
his head. ‘I’d remember a good-looking lassie like that if I’d seen
her, but I was in the army then and only came back occasionally to see the
folks.’

The other two men didn’t recognize her
either. ‘Sorry, pet,’ one said, ‘never seen her. But she looks classy.
It were rough around here twenty-odd years ago, can’t imagine she’d have
lived here.’

‘Well, she was an artist, so she might
have,’ Eva said. ‘I can’t see why she would want to photograph that
row of shops unless she had some connection with it.’

‘Back in 1970 there were a lot of
people coming around
here taking pictures.’ The older of the two
customers spoke up. ‘Remember! That was when Sue Carling’s baby was
snatched.’

The three men had a little argument between
themselves, the older man insisting it was June 1970 because his own bairn was born
around the same time. The younger man said it was 1971, but the landlord said it
couldn’t have been, as his mother had written to him at Aldershot about it and
he’d left there by the summer of 1970. He thought it happened earlier in 1970.

‘Did they find the baby?’ Eva
asked. She felt a tiny pin prick of anxiety at this news.

‘No, never,’ the landlord said.
‘Most think the mother did away with it. Whether she murdered it and buried the
body out on the fells, or sold it to someone rich, we’ll never know for sure. The
police could never prove anything. All we really know is that she left the bairn outside
the bookies in its pram. What decent mother leaves a newborn bairn out in the rain while
she puts a bet on?’

‘Did she have any other
children?’ Phil asked.

‘She had two or three, all taken off
her afore that. She ought to have been sterilized years ago, instead of letting her
breed like a rabbit with every drunken bum in town. I heard she had another one a few
years later, and I think they left that one with her. God knows why, poor kid. She lived
in Flower Street then, but she’s long gone now. I haven’t seen or heard owt
else about her for years.’

The sudden arrival of a group of men ended
the landlord’s diatribe, and he went to serve them.

Phil picked up their drinks and took them
over to a table. ‘Whew!’ he said. ‘Well, I suppose we wanted a bit of
local colour.’

When Eva didn’t respond, he patted her
knee. ‘What’s up? Did that upset you?’

‘It was like a goose ran over my
grave,’ she admitted. ‘That snatched baby couldn’t have been me, could
it?’

Phil laughed. ‘Come on, Eva, of course
not. You’re letting your imagination run away with you. I bet your mum was told
that story while she was here, and being pregnant it played on her mind and that’s
why she took the picture. Mystery solved!’

In the early hours of the morning Eva lay
beside Phil, unable to sleep for the thoughts running around in her head. They had gone
on to another pub and drunk far too much. Once back at the guest house they had made
love, but Phil fell asleep quickly afterwards.

Phil’s explanation of why Flora took
the picture was completely logical. Eva could almost see Flora walking along that
street, perhaps stopping to ask why the press were there, and being told the sad story.
Or she could have read about it in the newspaper, and curiosity made her look for the
place where it had happened.

Yet however logical that explanation was,
she couldn’t help but weigh other facts against it. No one in Pitlochry had known
Flora was pregnant, and in the early summer of 1969, when she must have conceived, there
appeared to have been no man in her life. It was odd enough that she didn’t
confide in anyone about her pregnancy, but even more puzzling was the fact that she
didn’t mention it in her diary. She’d made comments about far more trivial
things.

The diary stopped in Carlisle too. If she
had been affected so badly by the story of a baby being snatched that she had to
photograph the scene and later paint it too, surely she would have written about it?

Eva couldn’t believe Flora was capable
of stealing a baby, but she had lost her own baby and she was depressed – and
it wasn’t unheard of for a woman to take a child under those
circumstances.

But over and above everything that may or
may not add up to a case against Flora, Dena’s warning words about sleeping
serpents kept ringing in Eva’s mind.

What should she do?

Just walk away from Carlisle and try to
forget that row of shops and the story behind it?

Or should she dig further and try to find
something that would exonerate her mother, for her own peace of mind?

The next morning Phil began talking about
going to see Hadrian’s Wall almost as soon as he woke.

‘It’s a beautiful
morning,’ he said, pulling open the curtains. ‘If we go early, we can be in
The Lakes by late afternoon with plenty of time to find somewhere nice to
stay.’

Eva didn’t want to disappoint him, but
she’d already made up her mind what she must do.

‘I’m sorry, Phil, but I’ve
got to go to the library first and look in their archives to get details of the
baby-snatching,’ she said.

His face fell. ‘No, Eva! That baby
can’t be you. We don’t even know if it was a little girl.’

‘I know,’ she sighed.
‘I’m hoping it will turn out to be a boy. But if it was a girl, then
I’m hoping she’ll be much older than me, and that Flora arrived here long
after she had been taken. But I need certainty. I can’t go off trekking around the
countryside and dwelling on this.’

Phil went to the window and looked out. He
didn’t say anything for what seemed ages. Eva was afraid he was cross with her.
But then he turned back to her with a resigned expression on his face.

‘OK. We’ll go to the library and
look it up, just to give you
peace of mind. Then we’re going to
Hadrian’s Wall, because I know you are going to be laughing again by then and
feeling daft that it even crossed your mind that your mother stole you.’