The Lake House (16 page)

E
leven

Cornwall 2003

Sadie went home by way of the library. The dogs knew the drill by now, kicking about a bit before settling at the corner of the building near the stainless-steel water bowl Alastair had started leaving for them.

It was dim inside, but after some scouting Sadie spotted the librarian crouched behind a stack of books in the large-print section.

He smiled when he saw her. “I've got something for you.”

He fetched an A4-sized envelope from beneath the desk.

“Is it what I think it is?”

“
Polperro Post
,” he said. “The day after the disappearance.”

Sadie let out a small, satisfied breath.

“That's not all.” He handed her a thick stack of bound pages with her name attached to the front with a rubberband. “Fictional Escap(e)ades: Mothers, Monsters and Metaphysics in Children's Fiction, a doctoral dissertation featuring a chapter on Daffyd Llewellyn and
Eleanor's Magic Doorway
.”

Sadie's eyebrows arched.

“And last but not least . . .”

“There's more?”

“We aim to please. Another map of the property, including plans for the house. Rather special, this one. Quite a stroke of luck. It came from a set of documents that were only discovered a few years ago. They were stored in an old trunk—God only knows who put them there—and found when renovations were being undertaken for the millennium. The originals were badly water-damaged but were sent off for restoration. They only came back to the County Archives last month.”

Sadie was nodding keenly in the hope it would hurry him along. It took every ounce of patience she had not to tear open the newspaper archive envelope and devour its contents in a single gulp, but listening to Alastair's enthusiastic research-related narrations was part of the deal. Never mind that she already had a perfectly adequate plan of the house and property. Alastair chattered, Sadie nodded, until finally he drew breath and she was able to squeeze in a thank you and something about the dogs needing to get home.

Her mood was strangely light as she emerged back into the brilliance of the sunlit day, packages in hand. Sadie would never have guessed in a million years that a person could gain this sort of satisfaction from a visit to the library, certainly not a person like her.

There was a small white-rendered hotel just down the road, with giddy sprays of flowers in hanging baskets, views to the harbour and a convenient wooden bench seat out front. Sadie sat against a neat sign reading
hotel guests only!
, tore open the envelope and scoured the article inside.

Her heart sank as she realised the information wasn't new. Clearly this was where Pickering had done his research. There were, at least, two photographs she hadn't seen before: one of an elegant, smiling woman sitting beneath a tree with three little girls in summer white dresses gathered around her and a copy of
Eleanor's Magic Doorway
on her lap; and another featuring the same woman, only this time her face was serious and drawn and a tall, handsome man had his arm around her, his hand resting on her waist by way of support. Sadie could identify the room as the Loeanneth library. It was unchanged, right down to the framed picture on the table by the French doors.
distraught parents
! the headline clamoured, before continuing:
Mr And Mrs Anthony Edevane urge anyone with information on the whereabouts of their young son, Theodore, to come forward
.

There was a depth of sorrow in the woman's face that Sadie recognised. This was a woman who'd lost a part of herself. Although the letter on the ivy-rimmed paper had been written during an earlier pregnancy, the longing and love expressed for her unborn child made it clear that Eleanor was the sort of woman for whom motherhood was a blessing, her children a joy. The intervening decades had given the photograph an additional layer of resonance. It had been captured when the horror of the disappearance was hot and new, when Eleanor Edevane still believed her son would be returned and that the raw, empty hole torn by his absence was temporary. Sadie, observing the frozen moment from the future, knew better. The loss was one Eleanor would always carry, and beyond the loss itself, the agony of uncertainty. Not knowing whether her baby was dead or alive, loved or suffering, whether he cried for her through the long nights.

She set the paper aside and looked down the cobbled lane towards the shimmer of water. Maggie Bailey's daughter had cried for her. When Sadie and Donald discovered Caitlyn alone in the flat in Holborn, the little girl's face had been stained with old tears. The two of them had pushed their way through the stack of junk mail piled behind the door and been met with a smell so foul even steel-gutted Donald had retched; the rubbish bin in the kitchen had been buzzing with flies.

Sadie would never forget her first glimpse of the Bailey child—she'd been halfway down the corridor when the small, wide-eyed girl materialised like a ghost in her Dora the Explorer nightie—but then they hadn't been expecting a kid. The neighbour who'd made the complaint had reported a bad smell; when questioned about the occupant of the apartment she'd described a woman who kept to herself, occasional loud music, a mother who came to visit sometimes. She hadn't mentioned a child. Afterwards, when Sadie asked her why not, she'd shrugged before offering the familiar refrain, “You didn't ask.”

All hell had broken loose when they found her. Jesus Christ, a child, alone for a week in a locked apartment? Donald had called it in while Sadie sat on the floor with the girl, with Caitlyn—they'd learned her name by then—playing with a toy bus, struggling to remember the lyrics to a single nursery rhyme, and trying to get her head around how this turn of events changed things. It changed them a lot. Little girls left all alone tended to bring the services out in force, and more police, forensics and child protection all seemed to come at once, milling about in the tiny apartment, measuring and searching and dusting. At some point, as the day turned into night, the little girl had been taken away.

Sadie didn't cry over her work, not ever, despite the sad and awful things she saw, but she'd run hard that night, thudding along the pavements of Islington, through Highgate, across the darkened heath, shuffling pieces of the puzzle until they blurred into a furious fug. Sadie had trained herself not to get hung up on the emotive, human parts of crime-solving. Her job was to unravel puzzles; the people involved were important only insofar as their characters could be usefully applied to that end, determining matters of motive and confirming or collapsing alibis. But that little girl with her rumpled nightie, her bird's-nest hair, and those frightened eyes as she called for her mother, kept getting in the way.

Hell, she was still getting in the way. Sadie blinked the image out of her mind, angry with herself for having let her thoughts drift again to that bloody flat. The case was closed. She focused on the harbour instead, the fishing boats coming back to roost, the gulls circling above them, swooping and soaring.

It was the parallels between the cases, of course: mothers and their children, the removal of one from the other. The photograph of Eleanor Edevane, her face hollowed by loss, by fear when faced with separation from her son, poked at Sadie's soft spot. It exposed the same weakness that had allowed the Bailey case to weasel its way beneath her skin, that had kept her awake at night, convinced that Maggie Bailey couldn't have done it, walked out like that, left a child of two alone in a locked flat with no guarantee she'd be found in time.

“Don't mean to disappoint you, Sparrow,” Donald had said, “but it happens more than you'd like to think. Not everyone's cut out to be a mother.”

Sadie hadn't disagreed. She knew he was right, she knew it better than anyone. It was the manner in which Maggie appeared to have left her daughter, the carelessness, that didn't compute. “Not like that,” she'd insisted. “Maggie might not have been able to stick it out as the child's mother, but she wouldn't have risked her daughter suffering. She'd have called someone, made some sort of arrangement.”

And Sadie had been right, in a way. It turned out Maggie
had
made arrangements. She'd walked out of Caitlyn's life on a Thursday, the same day the little girl's father always called to collect her for his weekend custody visit. Only that week he'd been out of town on a fishing trip in Lyme Regis. “I told her,” he'd said, cradling his cheap takeaway cup in the interview room at the Met. “I made her write it down on a piece of paper so she wouldn't forget. I hardly ever go away, but my brother gave me a charter trip for my birthday. I wrote it down for her.” The man had been beside himself, worrying away small pieces of polystyrene as he spoke. “If I'd only known, if she'd only said. When I think what might have happened . . .”

He'd given them information that painted a very different picture of Maggie to the one her mother, Nancy Bailey, had supplied. Not a surprise. It was maternal instinct, Sadie supposed, to paint the best possible portrait of one's child. Still, in this case it had been particularly unhelpful. It was a pity Sadie hadn't met the father, Steve, first, before she bought Nancy's story, lock, stock and barrel. “You know the problem?” Donald had said helpfully when all was done and dusted. “You and the grandmother, the pair of you got too chummy. Rookie mistake.” Of all the comments he'd made, that one had stung the most. Loss of objectivity, the intrusion of emotion into the realm of the rational—they were among the worst criticisms you could level at a detective.

Especially a detective for whom the accusation rang true.
Don't even think about making contact with the grandmother.
Donald was right. Sadie
had
liked Nancy, all the more because she'd said the things Sadie wanted to hear. That Maggie was a responsible, caring mother who'd have sooner died than left her child unattended, that the police were wrong, that they ought to be looking for evidence of foul play. “Why would she lie?” Sadie had demanded of Donald. “What's in it for her?” He'd only shaken his head and smiled with fond sympathy. “It's her daughter, you goose. What else is she going to say?”

Sadie had been cautioned against making any further attempts to visit Caitlyn after Steve filed his complaint, but she'd seen the little girl once again, just after the case was officially closed. Caitlyn had been walking between her father and his wife, Gemma, holding their hands as they left the Met, a kind-looking couple with neat haircuts and nice clothes. Someone had brushed out the tangles and put plaits in Caitlyn's hair, and as Sadie watched, Gemma stopped to listen to something the little girl said before swinging her up onto her hip, making her laugh in the process.

It was only a brief glimpse, from a distance, but it was enough to know that things had turned out all right. The other woman in her silk wrap dress, with her kind face and tender gestures, was just what Caitlyn needed. Sadie could tell just by looking at her that Gemma was the sort of person who'd always know just what to say and do, who'd know exactly who Dora the Explorer was, and have the lyrics to any number of soothing lullabies at the ready. Evidently Donald had thought so too. “Best thing the mother could've done for her,” he'd said later in the Fox and Hounds. “Blind Freddy can see the kid's better off with her dad and that wife of his.” And children deserved that, didn't they, the best possible chance to thrive? God knew there were enough pitfalls out there waiting to trip them up.

Sadie's thoughts went to the letter she'd dropped in the postbox. It would have reached the girl by now. Good thing she'd printed her return address nice and clearly on the back of the envelope. No doubt they taught that sort of thing in the fancy school she went to. Charlotte Sutherland. It was a good name, Sadie had decided; not the name Sadie had given her, but a lovely name all the same. It was rich-sounding, educated and successful. The name of someone who enjoyed hockey and horses and never bit her tongue for fear of sounding stupid. All the things Sadie had wanted and wished for when she handed the tiny girl over to the nurse and watched through glazed eyes as she was carried away to a better future.

A jolting noise behind her and Sadie jumped. A stiff sash window was being jiggled and lifted in spurts. The lace curtain was drawn aside and a woman with a green plastic watering can appeared in its place, a distinctly proprietorial tilt to her nose as she glared down at the seat (
hotel guests only!
), and more specifically at Sadie on it.

The dogs had finished their exploring and were sitting, ears cocked, watching Sadie earnestly for a sign that it was time to go. As the hotelier began pouring water into the hanging basket directly above her, Sadie gave them a nod. Ash and Ramsay paced ahead towards Bertie's place, while Sadie followed, trying to ignore the backlit shadow child who'd fallen into step behind her.

* * *

“Solved it yet?” Bertie called as Sadie and the dogs clattered through the front door.

She found him in the courtyard beyond the kitchen, pruning shears in hand, a small pile of weeds and trimmings on the bricks beside him. “Almost,” she said, dropping her backpack onto the slatted garden table. “Just the small matters of who, how and why.”

“Small matters indeed.”

Sadie leaned against the rock border wall that stopped the garden from sliding down the steep hill into the sea. She took in a deep breath and released it steadily; it was the sort of thing you had to do when confronted with a view like that. The spill of wind-silvered grass, white sand tucked into a cove between two headlands, the vast silken sea unfurling from azure to ink. Picture perfect. Just the kind of view sunburned holiday-makers posted back home to make their friends and family jealous. She wondered if she ought to buy a postcard for Donald.