To The Grave (29 page)

Jonathan was still taking it all in, eyes fixed out of the front window as they drew closer.  “It’s hard to believe that Mena was so close to home all these years and no one knew,” he said.  He sighed.  “And while I was growing up, enjoying a normal, happy childhood.”

Tayte didn’t know what to say about that so he said nothing.  Out of the car windows to either side of him he saw line after line of galvanised wire fencing surrounding the buildings to keep people out.  It was clear that the developers who had bought the property - whose banners he could see flapping in the light breeze - were well under way with their plans.  Further on he saw a sign inviting him to view one of the recently converted show homes and he began to question what he expected to find here, more than a decade after the hospital had closed.  He could hear the hum of builders’ machinery somewhere nearby and he wondered where all the health service staff were.  The only people he could see were two men in grey suits and white hard-hats.  He pulled over just ahead of them and got out of the car.

“Excuse me!” he called, stepping around the car to meet them.  “I was under the impression that the hospital kept a staff on after it closed.”  He looked around at the obvious lack of any activity other than building works.  “Doesn’t seem to be the case.”

The shorter of the two men - surveyors, Tayte assumed - stepped closer.  “You’ve come to the wrong block,” he said with a strong east-midlands accent.  “The NHS reoccupied some of the newer buildings further down.”  He pointed over Tayte’s shoulder.  “If you go back out onto the main road and -”

“Reoccupied?” Tayte cut in.  “So they can’t have kept any existing patients on,” he added, more to himself than to the surveyor.

“I shouldn’t think so,” the man said.  “I believe it’s all admin now and they won’t be there much longer.”

Tayte paused, staring at the car while he tried to figure out his next move.  It seemed clear to him that if the buildings had been empty and only later reoccupied, he wasn’t going to find anything out from the staff that were there now.  In all likelihood they hadn’t been there more than a few years.  He turned back to the surveyor.

“Thanks,” he said.  “I’ll find it.”

With that he got back into the car and drove out the way he’d come.

“We’ll go and ask a few questions while we’re here,” he said to Jonathan, but I’m not confident that we’re going to get any answers about a girl who was admitted more than sixty years ago.”

Sitting in a dark green Land Rover Defender, set back in a siding off the main road opposite the former asylum complex, the man at the wheel sat up when he saw Jefferson Tayte’s hire car pull back out onto Gipsy Lane.  He turned his key in the ignition and slowly left the cover of trees that lined the roadside, watching intently as the silver Vauxhall completed its right turn.  Approximately one hundred metres further along the road, it indicated right again and turned out of sight.

The man in the Defender sped up, turning as the Vauxhall had turned, entering through galvanised steel gates by a blue and white sign that read, ‘Leicester Partnership NHS Trust - George Hine House.’  There was a small car park beyond the gatehouse buildings and the man held back when he saw his quarry stop and get out of the Vauxhall.  He watched them march towards the buildings until they disappeared behind a fringe of trees and shrubbery, and when he could no longer see them he selected an appropriate parking space from which to monitor their return.

And there he waited.

Fifteen minutes later he heard a familiar American voice and saw Jefferson Tayte and his companion walking back across the car park, engaged in conversation that he couldn’t make out, but from the body language and the dour expression on the American’s face, he could see that their visit had not proven fruitful.  He watched them go to their car and get in, and he was ready to start the Defender up again, but the Vauxhall did not move.

Tayte stared out of the windscreen with his hand paused on the ignition key.  “I should have known that would be a waste of time,” he said.

“It was worth a try,” Jonathan offered.

“Yeah, I guess.  It’s just so frustrating being referred back to records you know you’re not allowed to look at.

He started the engine.  Then he stopped it again, wondering how long Mena had been at the hospital and what treatment she might have undergone.  He imagined her condition had begun at Trinity House as a form of nervous or mental breakdown, brought on by everything that had happened in 1944 and soon after: being raped, falling in love and being denied that love, and the great injustice of being incarcerated on the brink of womanhood through no fault of her own.  He thought it was more than enough to drive anyone to a place like the former Borough Lunatic asylum. 

“Where might Mena have gone when she left here?” he said, thinking aloud.

“Are you sure she survived the place?”

Tayte gave a slow nod.  “I’ve thought about that a lot and I’m certain of it.  A hospital like this would have registered her death and no death has been registered for Mena Lasseter or Fitch in this county.”

“So she could have left any time between 1957 and 2005?” Jonathan said.  “That’s forty-eight years.  It doesn’t help to narrow things down much, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t,” Tayte agreed.

“Do you think she could still have been here when the hospital closed?” Jonathan asked.

“If she was, and presuming that she still needed care, she would have been transferred to another hospital that could take care of her.  But it’s a long time.  I can’t see her being here for forty-eight years.”

“No,” Jonathan agreed.  “Although we can’t rule it out, can we?”

“No, we can’t,” Tayte conceded.  He just didn’t want it to be true; for Mena’s sake and because if she had been transferred to another psychiatric hospital as recently as 2005 he knew that he would never find her.  He unclipped his seat belt and slouched a little in his seat.  He wasn’t going anywhere yet, not least because he didn’t know where else to go.  “Let’s look at what I believe is the only other possible scenario,” he said.

“Which is?”

“Which is that somewhere between 1957 and 2005 Mena had recovered sufficiently to be discharged into the community.  In which case, where would she go?  What would she do?”

“Well she didn’t come home,” Jonathan said.  “That much is certain.”

Tayte scoffed.  “And who could blame her?  I shouldn’t think she’d want anything more to do with her old life after all she’d been put through.  How could she go back to a family that had abandoned her like that?”

“Yes, I suppose she must have seen it that way.”

They both fell quiet with their thoughts and Tayte went over all the checks he’d already made back home.  All he’d found for Mena was a birth certificate.  If she had been released into the community he thought there would be some other trace of her, but he recalled that when he’d checked online before leaving Washington there wasn’t even an entry for her in the recent electoral roll registers - not one match.  He thought she couldn’t have vanished more thoroughly than if she’d entered into a Federal witness protection programme. 

And changed her identity...

Tayte sat up and turned to Jonathan, wide-eyed.  “What if she took another name?  One she chose for herself this time.  Maybe her mother gave her the idea when she sent her to Trinity House under the name of Fitch.”

“But didn’t you already check?”

“I did.  But when you change your name by deed poll in the UK, it isn’t automatically logged in any central register.  I find that a little scary myself, but it’s true.  If the person changing their name elects to enrol the details then it gets recorded in the Enrolment Books of the Supreme Court of Judicature and subsequently gets printed in the London or Belfast Gazette where the details are easy to find.  But most people who change their name do so with good reason - they don’t want to go public.”

“So just because you can’t find a change of name, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen?”

“Exactly.”

Tayte thought it would explain why he’d found so little information when he’d looked before, and what better way to put such a traumatic past behind you than to disown that past completely and become someone else?  Given everything he’d heard since arriving in England, from talking to the family and friends and those who had come to know Mena at one time or another, he didn’t have to think twice about the name she would have chosen.  It seemed entirely obvious to him now.

“Danielson,” he said.  “She would have become Mena Danielson.” 

“Of course,” Jonathan agreed.

Tayte twisted around and grabbed his briefcase from the back seat.  “According to Audrey Marsh, who was at Trinity House while Mena was there, Mena was telling everyone she was married - that she was waiting for her husband to come and fetch her once the war was over - but it was sheer delusion.”

“Perhaps that’s how she managed to deal with her situation.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Tayte said.  “And she began to believe in the dream.  And later on she took his name.  It makes perfect sense.”

He slid his laptop out from his briefcase and booted it up, wondering if it was possible, even now, that Danny had managed to find her and that she had taken his name without officially marrying him, which would have made them both easier to find if anyone came looking. 
Were they together now?
  Tayte hoped so and he thought he might soon find out.

“There’s a way we should be able to prove this theory,” he said, tapping keys.  “If she did change her name to Mena Danielson it should appear on the electoral roll registers.  Normally it’s no good unless you have an address or at least a street name to search by because that’s how the original documents are sorted.  But the electoral rolls from 2002 are available online and you can search them by name.”

There were several websites providing this service: some gave free teaser information, but all charged a fee for the full details.  Tayte brought up his preferred website for electoral roll searches - one of many subscription websites he used - and entered the name, ‘Mena Danielson’ into the search field.  His shoulders slumped when the search returned no matches and he crumpled over the keyboard like the wind had just been knocked out of him.

“Come on,” he said to the screen.  “She has to be there.”  He needed her to be there.

“Try Philomena Danielson,” Jonathan said.

Tayte sat up again.  He punched the name in and started the search again.  When the result came back this time he just stared at the screen and shook his head.  “Nothing?”  He turned to Jonathan, his head still shaking.  “This can’t be right.”

“Maybe she chose a different first name, too,” Jonathan offered.

Tayte liked the idea.  If Mena wanted to leave her past behind, she couldn’t very well have kept such an unusual name as Mena or Philomena.  He’d come across a few mentions of those names in his earlier searches, but they were few and those that he’d found, other than for her birth certificate, hadn’t offered any connection to the Mena he was looking for.  The big question now was what name she would have chosen.

“Any thoughts?” he asked.  “Any names you’ve heard from the time she would have been at the house?”

“There were two Great Danes,” Jonathan said, “But they were called Xavier and Manfred.”

“There was a teddy bear in the suitcase that was sent to my client,” Tayte said.  “Any idea what she called it?”

Jonathan shook his head.

“I’ll do a broad search for Danielson,” Tayte said.  “See if any of the names ring any bells.”

He typed ‘Danielson’ into the surname field and this time he left the first name field blank.  There were 184 matches: male names, female names and some entries with just an initial.  He slid the laptop around so Jonathan could better see it and slowly began to scroll through the list.

“Shout out if anything jumps at you,” he said.  Then as he started to scan the list himself, something did.

“Emma!” he said.  He turned to Jonathan with a wide smile on his face.  “Emma as in Bovary - from the book.  Maybe Mena escaped her past through the character in her book.”

Tayte hoped he was right.  The age guide seemed to fit well enough, indicating that the subject was between seventy-five and seventy-nine years old at the time the details were recorded.  He clicked the name and was presented with another screen that gave details from the 2002 electoral roll, being the first year that it was possible to opt out of the public register.  That there wasn’t a more recent entry told him that this person had chosen to opt out of all subsequent registers.  There was an address in Leicestershire, which was also encouraging.

“It’s to the southeast,” Jonathan said.  “On the border with Northamptonshire.”

It was the name of the residence Tayte was interested in.  As he took his notebook out and wrote it down, his confidence that he had at last found Mena peaked.  “It’s a care home,” he said.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

L
ogan House Care Home was on the outskirts of Market Harborough, a rural market town divided from the county of Northamptonshire by the river Welland.  The near twenty-mile drive took Tayte no more than half an hour and it was almost midday when the voice from the satnav told him he’d reached his destination.  The building was a modern structure, painted white with walls of glass and a slate roof that was fitted with solar panels.  It was set in open countryside between weeping willows that had long since shed their leaves, their branches draping like veils over the brook that ran close to the property.  

Tayte glanced at Jonathan, smiling pensively as he pulled onto the forecourt and parked the car, knowing there was every chance that he was about to meet the girl - the now elderly woman - whose suitcase had brought him all the way from America.  And yet he was nervous about what he might find now that he was there.

They got out of the car together and Tayte collected his briefcase from the back seat.  He paused as he looked more closely at the place - only the sound of birdsong in his ears.