Elle
PAST
“You did what?” Jaz asked, incredulous.
“I followed him to his house in St. John’s Wood,” I repeated.
He shook his head as if to clear it. “Let me get this straight. When we were in the pub earlier, you saw the man who kidnapped and murdered that American girl and decided to follow him back to his house?”
“That’s right.”
The look on his face told me he was dithering between anger and relief. Relief won. He pulled me into his arms.
“Thank God you’re safe. It was a bloody stupid thing to do, going on your own like that. You should have come back to get me, I would have gone with you.”
“I tried to call DC Moss but she didn’t pick up,” I explained, my voice muffled in his chest. “If I hadn’t followed him, I would have lost him. Anyway, she’s got his address now so with a bit of luck, he’ll be arrested soon.”
He moved his arms to my shoulders and held me away from him.
“Look, I know you think you’re worldly-wise because of having to stand on your own two feet from an early age.
But you can’t just go running off after a murderer.
What if he’d spotted you? He knows what you look like, you said he saw you at the window when you shouted down to him. ”
“I made sure he didn’t see me.” I reached up and ran my fingers through his long dark curls, loving the way he looked out for me.
I’d been brought up in the care system after the death of my teenage mum when I was just a baby, and had spent large chunks of my childhood in a variety of foster families, some good and some not so good.
When I moved in with Jaz, it was the first time in my nineteen years that I’d felt secure.
I was thirteen years old when I was told by the couple fostering me that I was to have a visitor.
A woman had come to the house and had introduced herself as my great-aunt Rose.
She was tiny in height but large in body and had a gentle voice and demeanor that immediately drew me to her.
It was my great-aunt who told me I’d been taken into care at an early age because the man who’d fathered me had disappeared before I was born and my seventeen-year-old mother, abandoned by hyper-Catholic parents for being pregnant and unmarried, had drowned herself while in the care of social services, not long after my birth.
My great-aunt explained that she had wanted to adopt me but had been forbidden to do so by her stern and unyielding older sister and brother-in-law, with whom she lived and that, dependent on them for the roof over her head, she hadn’t had the strength of character to stand up to them.
I learned that my grandparents had been in their forties when they’d been blessed with my mum, the child they’d always wanted.
But my mum had been a free spirit and strong-willed and when she’d reached her teens, she’d rejected the religious upbringing her parents had tried to impose on her and the relationship between the three of them had broken to the point where it couldn’t be fixed.
“What was her name?” I’d asked. “My mum?”
“Elizabeth, after your grandmother. But she hadn’t liked it and asked everyone to call her Elle, which her parents hated. It was why she called you Elle. She hoped you’d be like her and not like your grandmother.”
Am I? I’d wanted to ask. Am I like my mum? “What was she like?” I asked instead.
My great-aunt had smiled. “A handful. Headstrong. But also kind and beautiful. She truly loved your father and the pain of him abandoning her was too much for her.”
I didn’t think I was beautiful but I hoped that I was kind. I knew that I was headstrong because I’d been told it, many times. “Is my father still alive?”
“I don’t know. He took himself off to Canada when your mother told him she was pregnant.”
My great-aunt explained that the only reason she’d been able to make contact with me was because her sister and brother-in-law, by then in their seventies, had recently died within months of each other.
Over the next three years my great-aunt continued to visit me, turning up at whichever foster family I’d been placed in, or at the care home, to take me out for afternoon tea and to visit London, where she encouraged me to have an inquiring mind and to use both a knife and a fork when I ate.
She also taught me how to read the tube map, telling me that I needed to know how to get around because one day, I would live in London.
“How do you know that I’ll live in London?” I’d asked, mystified that she could know something about my future self.
My great-aunt had smiled. “Because one day, when I’m no longer here, my house will be yours.
When my sister and brother-in-law died, I sold their house and bought myself a little mews house in Paddington.
I’d always wanted to live in London and their passing meant I finally got to live the life that I wanted. ”
I hadn’t wanted to think about my great-aunt dying. I’d grown to love her but when I begged to be allowed to live with her, my great-aunt calmly told me about the debilitating illness she’d been struck with and how her health would deteriorate rapidly, meaning she would be unable to look after me.
“But I can look after you,” I’d pleaded. I was nearly sixteen by then and desperate to get away from my current foster family, who were loud and rowdy with an older son I didn’t like.
My great-aunt had only smiled and afterward I wished I’d never mentioned it, as I never saw her again.
When I inquired, I was told she was too ill to come and see me.
When I asked if I could visit her, I was told that no one knew where she lived.
It was only when I was older that I realized the authorities must have known my great-aunt’s address, as she would have been vetted before being allowed to contact me three years earlier.
It was my great-aunt who hadn’t wanted me to know where she lived.
Despite this blow, remembering the promise my great-aunt had extracted from me on what had been her final visit, I had buckled down and worked hard at school.
With the help of grants and part-time jobs, I’d gotten myself through university and I now worked in PR, a job which, if I was honest, bored me.
I’d met Jaz, the older brother of a friend, at a house party at the beginning of my second year at university.
He was small and wiry with black hair and startling blue eyes, which spoke of his Irish ancestry.
At five years older than me, he had his own flat and a good job and I couldn’t believe he’d be interested in someone like me.
But the three years we’d been together had been the happiest of my life.
“The car was in his driveway,” I said to Jaz. “The one that he used to abduct Bryony. Right down to the silver rims around the windows.”
Jaz shook his head. “There are probably thousands of black cars in London with silver rims around the windows.”
I moved from his arms. “It was the same car, I know it was. You’ll soon see that I’m right. In the next few days, he’ll be arrested and charged with Bryony’s murder.”
“I hope you’re right, babe. I really hope you’re right.”