CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Cristy was so angry with herself that she’d only narrowly avoided an accident while driving.
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t considered the possibility of Robert Brinkley knowing Lottie Winters through their overseas work because she had.
It had occurred to her more than once, so why in God’s name had she never asked the question?
The answer was because she’d assumed – and who wouldn’t – that if he did know her he’d have said so, but he hadn’t.
She wanted to know why.
More than that, she wanted a full explanation of what the hell was going on.
By now she was seated at a corner table of the White Lion pub, part of the Avon Gorge Hotel in Bristol’s upscale area of Clifton.
It was unusually quiet for a Saturday evening, most of the long bench tables were empty and only one server at the bar, but it was only just past six-thirty so it would probably start filling up quite soon.
She wasn’t interested in who was coming or going, only in Robert Brinkley who was seated opposite her, scrolling through the photos on her phone.
As she watched him she felt so much anger, and on so many levels, that she was finding it hard to keep it to herself.
As his head was down she had no way of telling how he was reacting to the shock of her finding out about his relationship with Lottie, apart from the tightness gathering around his mouth.
No matter that things had ended between them a long time ago – if Lottie’s letters were anything to go by and actually they were everything – what Cristy needed to know was what the heck he was doing here, now, messing with Sadie, and with her?
When he eventually looked up she was momentarily thrown by his expression. He seemed both stunned and confused, as if she were playing some unfathomable trick on him. There was none of the guilt or embarrassment or defensiveness she’d expected.
His voice was hoarse as he said, ‘Where …? How did you get these?’
‘Sadie found them,’ she replied coolly, ‘in her aunt Lottie’s safe along with your letters, the cards you sent, the journals she wrote about you …’
‘I don’t understand,’ he interrupted. ‘They’re … This is … Lottie?’
‘You must know …’
‘Oh God,’ he groaned, clasping a hand to his head as though sinking into an unimaginable horror. ‘If this is Lottie … Oh Christ, what can I tell you? How the hell is this even possible?’
‘I’m waiting for you to answer that very question,’ she told him tightly.
He regarded her helplessly, clearly not sure what to say, and looked at the photos again almost as if they weren’t real, or they were of someone he didn’t know, which couldn’t be the case because he was in them.
Warily, she said, ‘Have you never looked at our website?’
He shook his head. ‘No, I haven’t, but it seems if I had …’
‘You’d have known right away that Lottie – Sadie’s aunt Lottie – was the woman you had an intimate relationship with for … God knows how many years?’ Her tone was every bit as sarcastic as she intended.
He scrolled through the photos again. ‘Seeing these …’ He paused, took a breath and she noticed his hand shake slightly as he said, quietly, ‘So she’s dead?’
Cristy became very still. Did he really not know that? Was this truly how he was finding out that the woman he’d written so many beautiful letters to, who he’d apparently loved with a near blinding passion, was no longer alive?
She watched him inhale deeply, softly, and take a while to let the breath go.
‘We haven’t been in touch for years,’ he said quietly. His eyes were captured by a photo of Lottie laughing and looking as beautiful as Cristy had ever seen her. Had he taken it? He was in the next one, and the next, in fact most of the others Sadie had found in a small wallet inside the safe.
‘I was never sure why she …’ He took a moment and started again.
‘The last time I saw her … We were in Nairobi. We’d stolen some time to be together …
We often did that. She’d meet me a few days before I joined the medical team I’d been assigned to, or when I was on my way out …
Sometimes we were at the same camp, or conference, or we were invited … ’
‘Please just tell me this,’ Cristy interrupted. ‘When you met Sadie, did you already know who she was?’
He looked up at her, clearly aghast. ‘Of course I didn’t,’ he replied. ‘You can’t seriously think … Jesus Christ, what do you think? That I’m somehow involved in all this …?’
‘Persuade me you aren’t.’
He threw out his hands. ‘How am I supposed to do that when I apparently know even less about Lottie Winters than you do? She was Carla to me, Carla Andrews. She lived in London, was the daughter of some wealthy banker, a free spirit, had no children of her own, was devoted to those she helped.’
Was this the truth, or did Cristy just want it to be because she didn’t want to be wrong about him? ‘If you were that close,’ she said, ‘and your correspondence shows that you were … Did she never talk about her sister and her niece?’
‘Yes, often. Emilia and Sophie. I assumed they were mother and daughter … She was very close to them, but there were times when she needed to get away … She said they were … that sometimes she felt she couldn’t breathe when she was with them … If you’ve read the letters you’ll know all this.’
‘We don’t have the ones she wrote to you,’ Cristy pointed out. ‘When exactly did you meet her?’
Robert inhaled again, and took some time to roll back through the years, unlocking memories he seemed not to have visited for a very long time.
‘It was 1998 in Tierkidi, one of the Sudanese refugee camps. She was brought to me as an emergency. She’d suffered a major cardiac event while helping to process new arrivals and …
It was severe, we almost lost her …’ He broke off, drew an unsteady hand across his mouth, the memory of it seeming to have the power to affect him even now.
‘She always liked to say that I gave her a reason to go on living …’ He tried to laugh as if to lighten the weight of it, but it came out as more of a groan.
‘That was how it started between us. She was a patient; I was the surgeon who … wanted, more than anything, to save her.’
A touching picture that Cristy was finding it very easy to believe in … perhaps too easy? ‘I’m guessing you were married at the time?’ she said, seeing little choice but to go with his story, at least for now.
He nodded. ‘And not in the habit of cheating. It was just with her … Christ, Cristy, you have to believe I’d have told you right away if I’d realized Sadie was in any way connected to her. It never even entered my head …’
Still angry with herself for not having explored the possibility when she’d known they moved in the same world, she said, ‘You have to see that this … revelation … calls everything into question about you, and seriously jeopardizes our credibility for not having known something so important about you sooner. It seems pretty obvious now, having read your letters, that you were the reason Lottie was so keen to break free of her sister. She got her a husband, and then a child … And the fact that you just happened to stumble across that child’s mother on a hillside close to the house where Lottie and her sister were staying, and then you turn up all these years later just as the same child goes public with her suspicions …
Everyone’s going to be asking who the hell you really are. I am asking who the hell are you?’
His eyes were solemn and dark with sincerity as he said, ‘I am exactly who you think I am, Cristy, and the main reason I took an interest in helping Sadie is because it matters to my mother.’
‘But the sisters were in Somerset at the same time you were back in 2000,’ she cried. ‘By your own admission you knew Lottie – Carla – then. Janina even talked to you about her … That’s what you said.’
‘She did, but I had no reason to think that one of the women she was referring to was Carla. There are hundreds, thousands, of women from all over the world who get involved in the camps. And as far as I can remember Carla was in Malawi around the time I was in Somerset, or I thought she was … For God’s sake, Cristy, coincidences can be real even if they seem unlikely, or convenient, or flat out unbelievable. You must know that.’
Though she did, she remained very uncomfortable with this one. Opening up the Hindsight website on her phone she found the shots of George Symmonds-Browne with Lottie and Janina, and thrust the phone at him. ‘Do you know who he is?’ she asked.
Looking at it Robert frowned and shook his head. ‘I’ve never seen him before.’
‘But you do recognize Lottie?’
He nodded.
‘So can you explain what’s happening there, where this is …?’
‘I have no idea, I’m sorry.’ He put the phone down on the table. ‘I know you won’t want to hear this, why would you, but finding out that Carla is dead …’
‘Lottie. Her name was Lottie, and I think we’ve already established that she really wasn’t the woman you thought she was.’
His eyes hardened slightly as he said, ‘Maybe not, but we’re all capable of being different people at different times, and if, as you say, you’ve read my letters you’ll know how much she meant to me. I saw nothing bad in her, only good …’
‘If you loved her so much, why didn’t you leave your wife to be with her? You told her in one letter it was too soon, your children were still too young …’
‘They were, and they’re the only reason I wouldn’t end my marriage.
When you’ve seen the kind of suffering I have, that Carla saw too, children, babies, orphaned and maimed …
Losing parents to a divorce doesn’t equate, of course it doesn’t, mine would still have had a mother and father who loved them, a proper home to live in …
Even so, I didn’t want to hurt them, to see that same look of bewilderment and fear in their eyes as I was seeing in the field and know I had caused it. ’
‘Did your wife know about Lottie?’