Peter Robinson - Aftermath

“Laura, isn’t it?” she said when they’d settled.

The young woman raised her eyebrows. “Why, yes. How did you know?”

“It wasn’t difficult,” Jenny said. “You resemble your sister, and you’re with your cousin.”

Laura blushed. “I’m only visiting him. It’s not… I mean, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.”

“Don’t worry,” said Jenny. “I don’t jump to conclusions.” Well, not many , she said to herself.

“Let’s get back to my original question,” Keith Murray cut in. He was more hard-edged than Laura and not one for small talk. “That’s who are you and why you’re here. You might as well tell me what you were doing at Alderthorpe, too, while you’re at it.”

Laura looked surprised. “She was in Alderthorpe?”

“On Saturday. I followed her to Easington and then to Spurn Head. I turned back when she got to the M62.” He looked at Jenny again. “Well?”

He was a good-looking young man, brown hair a little over his ears and collar, but professionally layered, slightly better-dressed than most of the students she taught, in a light sports jacket and gray chinos, highly polished shoes. Clean-shaven. Clearly a young lad who took some pride in his rather conservative appearance. Laura, in contrast, wore a shapeless sort of shift that hung around her in a haze of material and hid any claims she might have had to the kind of figure men like. There was a reticence and tentativeness about her that made Jenny want to reach out and tell her everything was fine, not to worry, she didn’t bite. Keith also seemed very protective of her, and Jenny wondered how their relationship had developed since Alderthorpe.

She told them who she was and what she was doing, about her forays into Lucy Payne’s past, looking for answers to her present, and both Laura and Keith listened intently. When she had finished, they looked at each other, and she could tell they were communicating in some way that was beyond her. She couldn’t tell what they were saying, and she didn’t believe it was some sort of telepathic trick, just that whatever they had been through all those years ago had created a bond so strong and deep that it went beyond words.

“What makes you think you’ll find any answers there?” Keith asked.

“I’m a psychologist,” Jenny said, “not a psychiatrist, certainly not a Freudian, but I do believe that our past shapes us, makes us what we are.”

“And what is Linda, or Lucy, as she calls herself now?”

Jenny spread her hands. “That’s just it. I don’t know. I was hoping you might be able to help.”

“Why should we help you?”

“I don’t know,” said Jenny. “Maybe there are some issues back there you still have to deal with yourselves.”

Keith laughed. “If we lived to be a hundred, we’d still have issues to deal with from back then ,” he said. “But what’s that got to do with Linda?”

“She was with you, wasn’t she? One of you.”

Keith and Laura looked at each other again and Jenny wished she knew what they were thinking. Finally, as if they had come to a decision, Laura said, “Yes, she was with us, but in a way she was apart.”

“What do you mean, Laura?”

“Linda was the eldest, so she took care of us.”

Keith snorted.

“She did , Keith.”

“All right.”

Laura’s lower lip trembled, and for a moment Jenny thought she was going to cry. “Go on, Laura,” she said. “Please.”

“I know Linda was my sister,” Laura said, rubbing one hand against the top of her thigh, “but there’s three years between us, and that’s an awful lot when you’re younger.”

“Tell me about it. My brother’s three years older than me.”

“Well, you’ll know what I mean, then. So I didn’t really know Linda. In some ways, she was as distant as an adult to me, and just as incomprehensible. We played together when we were little, but the older we got, the more we drifted apart, especially with… you know… the way things were.”

“What was she like, though?”

“Linda? She was strange. Very distant. Very self-absorbed, even then. She liked to play games, and she could be cruel.”

“In what way?”

“If she didn’t get her own way, or if you didn’t do what she wanted, she could lie and get you in trouble with the adults. Get you put in the cage.”

“She did that?”

“Oh, yes,” said Keith. “All of us got on her bad side at one time or another.”

“Sometimes we just didn’t know if she was with us or them,” said Laura. “But she could be kind. I remember her treating a cut I had once, putting some TCP on so it didn’t get infected. She was very gentle. And sometimes she even stuck up for us against them.”

“In what ways?”

“Little ways. If we were, you know, too weak to… or just… sometimes they listened to her. And she saved the kittens.”

“What kittens?”

“Our cat had kittens and D-d-dad wanted to drown them but Linda took them and found them all homes.”

“She liked animals, then?”

“She adored them. She wanted to be a vet when she grew up.”

“Why didn’t she?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she wasn’t clever enough. Or maybe she changed her mind.”

“But she was also their victim, too? The adults.”

“Oh, yes,” said Keith. “We all were.”

“She was their favorite for a long time,” Laura added. “That is, until she…”

“She what, Laura? Take your time.”

Laura blushed and looked away. “Until she became a woman. When she was twelve. Then they weren’t interested in her anymore. Kathleen became their favorite then. She was only nine, like me, but they liked her better.”

“What was Kathleen like?”

Laura’s eyes shone. “She was… like a saint. She bore it all without complaining, everything those… those people did to us. Kathleen had some sort of inner light, some, I don’t know, some spiritual quality that just shone out, but she was very f-f-fragile, very weak, and she was always ill. She couldn’t take the kind of punishments and beatings they dished out.”

“Like what?”

“The cage. And no food for days. She was too weak and frail to begin with.”

“Tell me,” said Jenny, “why did none of you tell the authorities what was going on?”

Keith and Laura looked at each other in that intense way again. “We didn’t dare,” Keith said. “They said they’d kill us if we ever told a soul.”

“And they were… they were family,” Laura added. “I mean, you wanted your mummy and daddy to love you, didn’t you, so you had to do, you know, what they wanted, you had to do what the grown-ups said or your d-d-daddy wouldn’t love you anymore.”

Jenny sipped some tea to cover her face for a moment. She wasn’t sure whether anger or pity had brought the tears to her eyes but she didn’t want Laura to see them.

“Besides,” Keith went on, “we didn’t know any different. How could we know life was different for other kids?”

“What about at school? You must have kept yourselves apart, been aware that you were different ?”

“We kept apart, yes. We were told not to talk about what happened. It was family , and nobody else’s business.”

“What were you doing in Alderthorpe?”

“I’m writing a book,” Keith said. “A book about what happened. It’s partly therapeutic and partly because I think people should know what goes on, so maybe it can be prevented from happening again.”

“Why did you follow me?”

“I thought you might be a reporter or something, poking about the place like that.”

“You’d better get used to that idea, Keith. It won’t take them long to find out about Alderthorpe. I’m surprised they’re not swarming around already.”