John Matthews - The Last Witness

‘My God… don’t tell me your father was molesting you?’

Elena threw he head back and laughed out loud at the suggestion. She subdued it quickly. ‘No, no. My father might have been a monster in every other way… but he wasn’t molesting me.’

Gordon raised his glass and smiled. ‘Now you’ve got me at it. Seeing demons where they don’t exist.’

Elena was glad of the light relief to suddenly dead-end their conversation. But her half smile as she raised her glass to clink with Gordon’s also conveniently shielded the bitter irony: what in fact had happened with her father was in many ways far, far worse.

Elena became increasingly agitated as the days counted down to her going away.

Clinging to the hope that Nadine would call with fresh news from Lorena’s school or GP, or that Lorena herself would phone again. But as Gordon had pointed out when he’d picked up on her agitation, ‘Surely best if she doesn’t call. At least one sign that Ryall is doing what he’s been told and is keeping away from her room. Or that her first call was a false alarm.’

But the comment only made her focus more on why she remained uneasy: the abject fear she’d read in Lorena’s face in that brief moment. She was concerned that even if the problem with Ryall re-surfaced, Lorena might be too frightened to raise the alarm again. Also, she was Lorena’s only possible ally, yet now she was heading off. Deserting her.

The last day was particularly tense. She thought of putting in a last minute call to Nadine, then wavered against the idea before finally going ahead, only to discover that Nadine was out on calls and unavailable. Then work and final arrangements took over — checking rosters and schedules, last second calls to synchronise their travel over — and she was headed for a midnight shuttle in a van loaded to the brim leading the way for the main 2-ton supply truck behind.

The long drive over gave her some moments to think again about Lorena, probably too many, and at one point her diver, Nick — twenty-eight, square-jawed, who looked like he’d stepped from a jeans advert despite his years of wild debauchery as a roadie — asked her what was wrong.

‘One of the kids I placed with an English family a couple of years back. I’m worried about her.’

‘Is she ill, or just a bad family?’

Elena smiled tautly at the ‘just’, as if it was a far lesser worry than illness. She didn’t want to go into detail with Nick. ‘That’s what we don’t know yet. We’re hoping she’s mistaken.’

Nick half-shrugged, sensing Elena’s reluctance to elaborate. ‘Hope it works out.’

‘Thanks. Me too’ She looked to one side, losing herself momentarily in the darkness of the endless line of fir trees bordering the autobahn.

One of Nick’s favourite Ry Cooder tracks was playing on the CD, and he turned it up a notch. Elena found herself slipping into cat-naps with the repetitive scenery, and their small talk didn’t return for a while, with Nick by then alternating with some of Elena’s favourites: Santana and Peter Green era Fleetwood Mac.

When they arrived in Bucharest, the hectic turn of events pushed all thoughts of Lorena into the background. A seven year old boy at the Cerneit orphanage with a prolonged headache and eye strain was finally diagnosed as having meningitis. Two more suspected cases were discovered over the next few hours, and Elena was caught up in a maelstrom of activity: treatment for the three cases and organizing vaccines for the remaining children, with frantic calls back to London for wired funds to cover it all.

The boy’s condition worsened on the third night, and she kept up a bedside vigil for five hours holding his hand and praying that they didn’t lose him. It struck her then: Gordon was right. These children needed her, this is where her main focus had to be. She didn’t have time, nor the mental or emotional space, to be divided on two fronts.

The boy rallied well the next morning, and Elena headed off with Nick, a day behind schedule, to the orphanage in Brasov. Approaching the Carpathian mountains, dusk was falling. They looked dark and foreboding at the best of times, often shrouded with mist, ideal fodder for the shadowy myths and legends surrounding them.

But staring into the rising wall of darkness with the last dusk light as a pale trim, Elena was suddenly gripped by recall of the chine — the one and only time she’d taken Lorena there on a day out to introduce her to the area before she settled in with the Ryalls.

She’d taken Lorena to see her home, then they’d gone down the steep wooded bank into the chine. As they’d reached the bottom of the chine and the darkness of the steep wooded ravine and the dense foliage above enshrouded them, she’d gripped Lorena’s arm tight and asked her to listen, ‘Listen?’

It was eerily silent and cool, and after a moment of them standing stock still, they could pick out the sound of the brook running gently through the bottom of the chine towards the sea.

‘You hear that?’ she prompted. ‘It’s magical down here, isn’t it? Like some secret hideaway from the rest of the world.’

Lorena hadn’t answered, and at first Elena thought the trembling where she gripped Lorena’s arm was because of the coolness of the chine. But the shaking became rapidly worse, and Lorena muttered tremulously, ‘I don’t like it down here… please let’s go. The darkness, the water, it…’

Lorena lurched forward, practically dragging Elena, and within a few paces they’d hit a run. They followed the bottom of the chine close to the running brook, bursting through the branches and foliage as they ran frantically, breathlessly, towards the light of the sea horizon ahead. Lorena’s increasingly laboured breath started lapsing into strangled sobs. Their legs pumped hard and their lungs ached with their rasping breath — but the light never seemed to get closer. The dark, dense foliage remained all-enveloping, suffocating, the light at the end still distant, out of reach, except for a single shaft which seemed to burn through, intensify, as if trying to…

‘ What…?’ Elena sat up, startled.

‘Are you okay?’ Nick repeated.

Elena shielded her eyes from the searing headlamps of an oncoming truck. She’d fallen asleep; it was now pitch dark. Catching up after her vigil with the boy last night.

It took her a second to adjust back to her surroundings. They’d in fact burst through to the light of the open beach quite quickly, their breathlessness lost on the fresh sea breeze, and Elena had hugged Lorena tight and kissed the tears from her cheek, muttering, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ She hadn’t realized that the chine might remind Lorena of her sewer days.

Suddenly the image was back of Lorena standing alone at her bedroom window, deserted. Despite Gordon’s wise words and her own rationalising of the past forty-eight hours, she couldn’t help wondering if that was what Lorena wanted from her now: to once again help her out of the darkness towards the light.

But when eleven days later Gordon called to tell her that Lorena had phoned again, it threw her into turmoil. Whether through once again becoming absorbed in the plight of the orphaned children, or clinging to rationalisation that nothing was happening or, even if it was, it was no longer her problem — Elena wasn’t sure. But part of her wasn’t surprised at the call, and she wondered why she hadn’t stayed with trusting her instincts. Why she’d allowed herself to so easily get pulled with the flow.

‘She said that Ryall stayed away from her room for a while, but now he’d started coming back. And that she needed help. No doubt your help.’

Slightly numbed, Elena said simply, ‘I suppose I’d better call Nadine Moore again.’