Chapter 17
17
Hudson hadn’t had a chance to ask what had happened with Archie yesterday and Nadia had left for the day without another word about it. She’d wanted to get away and he understood. She’d been through a lot both in her earlier life and lately with Archie showing up and now with her sister missing. If it was him, he wasn’t sure he’d still be standing after all that. But she was. She was strong, one of the qualities he admired in her. And now he understood her desire to move on. He still wished she’d told him about her family, but he got what it was like to feel the need to keep some things to yourself.
And today, as much as he wanted to talk to Nadia after she’d opened up to him, and especially now the official confirmation had come through that the young woman who’d died was Lena’s mother, he had pressing issues of his own to deal with.
Yesterday, he’d called Lucinda to discuss what had happened with Beau. The call hadn’t lasted long; she’d had another meeting. She’d told him they’d talk more later.
And now here she was pulling into one of the spaces at the airbase when Hudson was working and Beau, having finished school for the day, was here again as agreed. Beau had worked on his written apology as soon as he arrived and Hudson would go through it later. In the meantime, Beau was vacuuming the inside of the rapid response vehicle.
‘You could’ve just called me,’ he said, opening her car door for her. He’d gone outside to bring in the bag of rubbish Beau had cleared from the vehicle and which was in danger of blowing away: a fact his son hadn’t noticed.
She sighed. ‘We’d only argue.’
‘Why would we argue?’
‘You know I’m taking Beau and Carys to see a movie this afternoon and then for dinner. And I knew if I called rather than coming here, you’d insist Beau couldn’t go, because he was doing this instead.’
‘It’s important he learns a lesson.’
‘I know that; don’t you think I realise this was a close call? It’s a good job Conrad heard and not another figure of authority.’ She paused, presumably waiting for him to say something about her new boyfriend, but he was keeping his mouth firmly shut. He didn’t have the energy, especially when he was at work.
‘So, can I take Beau to the movies and for dinner?’
It was on the calendar, prearranged, and he hated it when she forgot a schedule, but things had changed. ‘What’s that teaching him? That he gets rewarded for doing something wrong?’
‘He’s been going to school when he should, he’s working hard in lessons and he has been working hard here, Hudson. Give him a bit of a break.’
He hated to admit that she had a point. Beau had improved a lot compared to how he’d been behaving since their separation.
She leaned on the top of her car door and watched him retrieve the bag with the rubbish. ‘You can’t keep him doing this indefinitely.’
‘It’s better than a hefty fine or a prison sentence.’
She laughed. ‘Bit dramatic.’
‘So Conrad didn’t tell you what the punishment could be for a hoax call to the emergency services?’
‘Of course he did; he was very nice about Beau actually. You should be thanking him. Like I said, it was lucky nobody else?—’
‘Overheard,’ he finished for her. ‘So you said.’ He went over to the big bin outside the airbase and deposited the bag of rubbish in there. ‘I don’t want to argue with you.’
She crossed her arms in front of her. ‘I’ve arranged time off to do this, Hudson. I didn’t think you’d appreciate me changing the schedule even though Beau is being punished.’ Her lips formed that hard line that said they were at an impasse.
‘Okay, you’re right. He has been working hard. Could you please just make sure they’re home by Carys’s bedtime?’
‘Wouldn’t dream of doing anything else,’ she said but she was already walking over to Beau.
‘I’ll get his bag from the locker room,’ Hudson mumbled.
He hoped he’d get a chance to talk to Nadia tomorrow but tonight, all he had to look forward to was going home to an empty house and a lonely dinner for one.
The next day, Hudson waited in reception for Nadia to finish up in her early-morning meeting with the fundraising committee. He’d arranged for them to visit the Wallace family – Marissa’s parents, Lena’s grandparents. The police had already told Mr and Mrs Wallace the basics of what had happened but the family unsurprisingly had questions; they needed to hear about the medical side and it was part of Hudson’s job to be that bridge. Hudson and Nadia had all the information they needed. They’d gathered the facts from Kate and Brad’s accounts of what happened; Hudson had interviewed the road paramedics who’d been first on the scene.
‘Ready?’ she asked when she appeared, bag and raincoat in hand in preparation for the dark clouds outside.
‘Ready.’
They were soon on their way to the family’s home.
‘How did it go with Archie?’ He’d been desperate to ask her but hadn’t wanted to do it until they were alone.
‘The police have found Monica.’
He wished he could take his eyes off the road, give her some sort of comfort. ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘I wanted to but I can see you’ve got a lot to deal with, with Beau, Lucinda.’
‘Doesn’t mean I can’t fit you in too.’ He indicated to take the next turning on the right. Something was wrong; she didn’t seem overly happy despite the news her sister had been found. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’
‘The police found Monica, but she told them she was fine and she’d take it from there. Archie has heard nothing from her since.’
‘She hasn’t been in touch?’
‘No. And the police wouldn’t tell Archie where she is either. They’ve done their bit, she’s an adult, she’s okay and still pregnant. They shared that much. Archie told me she went overdue with Giles so maybe this pregnancy has gone the same way. I think Archie is hoping she’ll contact him soon. He’s terrified of her going into labour when her head is still in a bad place.’
‘He must be in pieces.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you?’
‘I’m okay.’
‘Do you want to see her?’ he asked. ‘I know you two have a complicated history, but you were a mess when you thought it was your sister in the accident. That tells me no matter that you turned your back, you’d at least like to face her now.’
‘I don’t know. Yes. No. Maybe. I’m not sure how I feel. All I know is that I’m scared she’ll do something awful.’
‘But she’ll know you’re both looking for her. Surely she won’t do anything drastic when she knows people care so much.’
‘I’ve no idea. I don’t know her any more. But if she does something awful, it’ll all be my fault. She came here for me, she left her husband and child to find me, because I was so stubborn that I cut all ties.’
‘You did it with reason. I understand why.’
She didn’t say anything else on the drive to the house and soon they pulled in at the kerb.
They sat in the car for a moment. ‘This is going to be horrible.’ Nadia tipped her head back against the headrest, looked up and out of the sunroof at the vast expanse of sky beyond. ‘I can’t imagine what these parents are going through. And here we are to make it even more real.’
‘They’ll be going through hell, but in my experience, they’ll want to know more about the medical side of what happened, what help their daughter had, whether she suffered. It’s part of the closure they’ll need and sometimes, it can be a comfort even when it’s unbelievably painful.’
He took the keys from the ignition but Nadia stopped him before he opened up his door.
‘Just another minute here. Before we go in.’
They sat side by side, quietly.
‘There’s more, you know,’ she said, looking across at him.
‘More what?’
‘More to my story, more to what I told you yesterday.’ She turned in her seat so she was facing him. Her eyes had lost their dancing sparkle; her face didn’t have the usual glow.
‘I not only left Switzerland; I made it so that nobody could find me.’
He smiled kindly. ‘I worked that out for myself.’
‘Part of me wonders whether that’s why I got married to Jock so quickly: so I could become Nadia Sutton rather than Nadia Fischer. My mum had gone, it was just me and Monica, but I couldn’t bear to be around her. My own sister. I was grieving and we couldn’t even comfort each other. She tried to talk to me, so did Archie, but I walked away. I shut them both down.
‘Mum didn’t have a lot to leave us and the formalities were sorted out via a solicitor. I couldn’t bear any contact with Monica because I was so angry, about the way she was when she was growing up, how she demanded all of Mum’s care and attention, the way she’d taken my best friend from me.’
Nadia took a deep breath, blew out her cheeks. With all the revelations, it was easy to forget they were working, here to talk to parents about an event so devastating, those people sitting inside the unassuming house on a beautiful tree-lined street, on what was otherwise a very ordinary overcast June day, would never get over it.
‘I never told Monica I’d got married, I still had bank accounts in my maiden name having not changed them over, I did all my contact via a solicitor so it was easy enough. I’d walked away once and I knew I was going to do it again and this time, for good.
‘Hudson, I walked away from everything. I never looked back. I didn’t think she had either but now I know that she did, once before and again now.’ She looked up and out of the sunroof as droplets of rain tapped on the glass and bounced right off again.
‘How did you leave it with Archie when he came to the airbase yesterday?’
‘I told him I didn’t know what else I could do. Monica doesn’t want to be found. I told him I had a life to live, a job to do.’
‘There’s a but in there somewhere.’
‘But it’s not that simple. When I thought the patient at the scene we attended might be Monica, it was as if my past came at me at full throttle – every moment replayed in front of me, every choice that took me in a different direction. I couldn’t bear the thought that the victim could very well be my sister and when I realised it wasn’t, the relief almost overwhelmed me. And yet, when I saw Archie at the airbase, all the pain they both caused me was all I could think about.’
‘It sounds like you need to let him in a bit, talk to him. It might help you and if it doesn’t, then you can move forwards in a different way.’
They sat there a couple of minutes more before Hudson put a hand on Nadia’s. ‘We should go in. Are you ready?’
‘Ready as I’ll ever be.’
The Wallaces were welcoming under the circumstances, their grief was hard to judge when they spoke to Hudson and Nadia, who avoided any look of surprise. They’d both had practice at this, with patients and families, where your opinions and your own emotions had to take a back seat.
‘We hadn’t seen her for almost a year,’ said Mrs Wallace, who’d asked them to call her Jane.
‘She hung around with a bad crowd.’ Bobby, Marissa’s father, wasn’t good at making eye contact. Whether it was caused by his sorrow or reluctance to talk to outsiders about his only child, Hudson wasn’t sure.
Marissa’s bag had been found by the police in the hedge at the side of the road; it must have been thrown there on impact. Inside the bag had been the purse with the photograph of Lena wrapped in the blanket Hudson and Nadia had seen the night the baby was left at the airbase.
‘We’re happy to answer any questions you may have.’ Nadia spoke gently and mainly to Jane because Bobby’s face and body language was so closed off. He might well still be in shock; sometimes it took a lot longer than hours or days to process something so monumental.
Hudson addressed both parents, a folder of information on his lap even though he didn’t want to bombard them with too much detail. Some families wanted all of it; others wanted very little at all. ‘We have the full reports from our crew of the emergency pre-hospital care your daughter received, if you’d like us to go through it.’
Jane’s fingers traced the edges of the silver crucifix around her neck. ‘Did she suffer?’
‘From what we know, it was very quick.’ Nadia put a hand on the one that wasn’t preoccupied with the crucifix and kept it there while Hudson went through the various steps that the road ambulance paramedics and then the critical care paramedics had performed.
‘The police say there was a lot of alcohol in her system.’ Jane was by now gripping Nadia’s hand. ‘Was that true?’
Bobby turned away, looked out of the window.
‘Yes, that’s correct.’
‘And that she walked out in front of a car.’ Jane gasped, closed her eyes, gathered herself.
‘That’s right,’ said Nadia.
Bobby still had his back to them when he spoke again. ‘Marissa was trouble, big trouble, for years. We didn’t know what to do with her. In the end, we fought so much about the way she was living her life – the clubbing, the drinking, the drugs on occasion – that one day, she walked out and never came back.’
‘We thought she’d have her time away from us and then come home,’ said Jane. ‘But a few days went by, a week, a month. It was almost a year since she left and we heard from her twice, when she needed money. We paid it into her account; she sounded in a state both times she called. I begged her to come home… I said that we could fix this. And now we’ll never get the chance to make things right.’
Nadia wrapped Jane in a hug, rocked her while she cried.
‘I’ll never forgive myself,’ said Bobby. ‘If I hadn’t been so stubborn, so angry with her…’
‘She had a baby without her mum,’ Jane wailed, ‘a baby, our grandbaby.’
When things calmed a little, Hudson and Nadia talked about Lena, how well she’d been cared for prior to being left at the airbase, they discussed next steps with the social worker, let the couple know that Hudson would liaise with both parties on that.
By the time Hudson and Nadia left the Wallaces, they were spent. The couple had so much grief, so much blame and regret, and none of it was going to change the fact that their daughter was gone.
‘What happens next?’ Nadia asked as they did up their seat belts ready to leave. ‘You probably said when we were in there, but…’
‘It wasn’t an easy meeting.’ He reached across and gave her hand a squeeze. ‘I get that.’ He started up the car. ‘The social worker will be in touch. Grandparents don’t always want custody if they feel they’re too old, but Jane and Bobby are only in their very early forties so if they’re willing, it makes sense that they want to bring Lena up. Did you see the light in their eyes when they talked about their grandchild?’
Nadia smiled and wiped away a tear. ‘Actually, I did; it was a little glimmer of hope in a situation that’s so…’ She didn’t finish; there was no word to sum up what this was, not for anyone concerned.
‘They’ll be able to let Lena know as much as possible about her mother when the time is right; they’ll be able to share the happy times and maybe eventually the struggles.’
They were well on their way when Nadia asked, ‘Can we go and visit Lena?’
‘Sure. Give the social worker a call, check first, but I’ll head in that direction.’
Sybil said that of course it was fine to pop over. They didn’t stay long but it was enough for Nadia to have a cuddle with Lena, tell her that they’d met her grandparents and that they were kind, they would look after her if that was what was agreed.
As they drove back to the airbase, Hudson barely got another word out of Nadia.
When they parked up outside, he shared with her his own fears. ‘If anything happened to one of my kids… well, it would break me. I’m not sure how you move forwards with something like that.’
‘It makes me think about Monica.’
‘How so?’
She toyed with her handbag on her lap. ‘If I’d had my way, my mum would have been harder on my sister, she would have told her to pull herself together, do better. And Monica might have ended up like Marissa, pregnant and alone, thinking she couldn’t stay where she was, that she’d been abandoned by those who were supposed to protect her.’
‘Nadia, don’t beat yourself up about this.’
‘But I left Monica; I abandoned her by running away.’
‘No, you didn’t. She was your sibling, not your child. Your mum made her choices – and I imagine part of you wanting your mum to tell Monica to pull herself together was because you were trying to protect your mum, not because you wanted harm to come to Monica.’
‘I would never wish for that.’
‘I don’t know your sister and I never knew your mother but it sounds as though Monica played a very big part in making things so terrible that her own sibling left. You can’t blame yourself for wanting to live your own life away from all the stress and the drama.’
‘Mum never once turned her back on her – there were so many times I wanted her to, but she couldn’t see my sister’s faults; she couldn’t see that Monica was taking advantage. Monica got in trouble at school and I lost count of the times Mum went up there to sort things out, the stress she felt and the tears she thought I couldn’t hear behind closed doors. Monica would stay out all night sometimes, then she’d waltz in and hug Mum, say a quick “I’m sorry” and it would all be forgotten. But I saw it wearing my mum down. When I said that to Mum, she denied it, said she was parenting; people did it the world over.
‘I wondered sometimes whether I was imagining it, whether I was jealous of my younger sister, but then one day, she got picked up by the police for shoplifting and was brought home in a police car. She was let off, the owner of the shop didn’t want to press charges, but she was given a stern warning and not just by the police. My mum got angry that day, it was the most furious I’ve ever seen her, and she told Monica that something had to change.’
‘And did it?’ Hudson asked.
‘For a while, yes. I thought that finally, we would go back to being a normal family but Monica couldn’t help herself; she ran wild, she didn’t play by the rules at all but she stayed just on the right side of the law. The potential arrest for the shoplifting had obviously worried her but she went back to blaming all her problems on her struggles at school, her inability to do as well as everyone else.
‘I always knew I was loved, I never felt that I wasn’t, but any time I spent with Mum was marred with her sadness and her stress over my sister. On my eighteenth, Monica got completely wasted – I’ve no idea how she even got alcohol when she was so young and she never told my mum either, but my eighteenth, with friends and a posh afternoon tea Mum had organised, along with Pimm’s in the garden in the sunshine, was tainted once I saw Monica come in. She almost knocked over the tiered plates full of sandwiches and Mum ushered her away and into the bathroom. She kept her away from me and my friends but the damage was done. It went on for years – different things and yet the same: Monica not caring about other people, only looking out for herself. I had to leave before all the anger and resentment made me into a person I probably wouldn’t have liked very much. Monica was never going to stop taking Mum’s time, her energy, her focus, and her money, given she didn’t pay anything in the way of rent or living costs. Monica stole from me; that’s how I saw it. She stole my relationship with Mum because she was always there, always in the background, always causing chaos. I tried to talk to her over the years before I left but…’
‘But then Archie was the final straw. Can’t say I blame you for that.’
It had Hudson wondering about Beau. Had his son done all these things since Lucinda left to get their attention? Hudson had his kids living with him, which meant he had work, childcare, everything to do around the house, and sometimes the emotional side of parenting was the thing that got cast aside. He barely had enough energy on some days to get through everything else.
‘We’d better get inside.’ Nadia waved out of her window at one of the Whistlestop River Freewheelers who pulled in alongside them.
Nadia seemed fine as they made their way into the airbase but Hudson knew that deep down, she wasn’t. He only hoped she’d be able to resolve things one way or another with her family.
When Lucinda dropped the kids home that evening, the first thing Hudson did was get Carys organised for bed but then he went into the kitchen and without asking his son, made him a mug of hot cocoa which he took up to his room along with a stack of four chocolate Hobnobs – his favourite.
Beau had said he’d be studying and he was and even managed a thank you rather than a grunt when Hudson went into his room with the drink and snack. For once, he didn’t have his headphones fixed in place over his ears.
‘I’ve read through your apology letter,’ Hudson told him. ‘It reads well. I’ll send it in the morning.’
‘Then the shit will really hit the fan.’
Instead of reprimanding him for the language, Hudson smiled at his son, who had done something stupid but was going some way to making up for it with the letter and all the hard work he’d done at the airbase. ‘Let’s hope The Skylarks are feeling in a forgiving mood tomorrow. You’ll stop by after school?’
‘Will it be safe?’ A Hobnob hovered uncertainly in his fingers.
‘Only time will tell.’
He would keep everything crossed that it would be and that perhaps now might be the start of getting Beau back on the right track.