The Last Witness

FOUR

‘Is there nothing else we can do?’ Elena pressed.

‘Not at this stage, I’m afraid.’ Nadine Moore let out a tired breath at the other end of the phone. ‘I’ve been in touch with Lorena’s school and GP, told them to let me know if anything appears untoward with Lorena. Physical indications obviously from her doctor, but from the school all they can look out for are mood swings or problems with her work.’

‘And they didn’t tell you of anything they’d noticed already?’

‘No. I’d have phoned you straightaway if there was any news. I know how anxious you are.’ With the silence from the other end, Nadine added. ‘As you said, it was just a momentary look. You could well be wrong — it could be nothing shy; shy;.’

‘No.’ Elena shook her head. ‘I know Lorena too well. There’s something wrong.’

‘Maybe it was just concern about the fuss caused by our visit. She started to think about what might be said to her after we left.’

‘I don’t know.’ Elena felt herself swaying, but only for a second. She reminded herself that she’d only seen that look on Lorena’s face twice before: once recalling some nights in the sewer waking up with rats crawling over her, then the threat of the second orphanage closing and her dread of possibly having to go back to the streets again. Elena knew the difference between fear and concern with Lorena. She was aware of a presence behind her, and glanced back. Gordon hovered by the door to his study. With a taut half smile he turned back in, and she pulled her attention back to Nadine. More emphatically: ‘No. It’s more than that, I know.’

Nadine exhaled heavily. Practically a replay of their conversation after leaving the Ryalls yesterday, and now painfully evident that she wasn’t easily going to dispel Elena’s worries, imagined or otherwise. But there was little else she could do. As it was, she’d stretched as far as she dare go: telling Ryall that he should avoid visits to Lorena’s room late at night had been like tip-toeing through broken glass. Cushioning the reproach — ‘ It’s just one of those things with girls at her age. They become very secretive and self-conscious. You weren’t to know’ — had done little to ease Ryall’s pained, incredulous expression.

‘With Ryall not visiting her room any more, hopefully that should put pay to any problems. If there were problems.’

‘Yes, hopefully.’ Elena didn’t sound convinced. Doubt still nagged heavily at her. But she sensed that Nadine’s position was starting to become entrenched; little would be gained by pressing. She elicited a promise from Nadine to let her know the moment anything knew came up, and signed off.

Yet it wasn’t just Nadine that was doubtful. When she’d recounted everything to Gordon the night before, he’d questioned whether she might be reading too much into it all. Now that tight smile when he’d heard her pressing Nadine.

She pondered whether to broach the issue — she’d hoped at least for support from Gordon, if nothing else so as to not feel so isolated with her concerns — but from his voice trailing through from his office, she could tell that he was on the phone.

She went back to her upstairs studio to do more painting. Time to allow her mood to settle, her thoughts to focus. Her painting helped with that. Brushstroke therapy.

She’d spent much of the last month painting version three of the chine — the steep wooded ravine leading to the sea — which their house overlooked. Version one had been a standard landscape view which she wasn’t happy with. Gordon had prompted her: What is it that you most like about the chine, that you find magical? She’d admitted that it was the feeling of secrecy and being protected once deep inside it, with the open sea at its end representing freedom. Yet as she would move closer to the sea and hear its rushing surge, that also came to represent all the volatility and madness out there; what she was perhaps hiding away from. ‘In the chine I feel safe, as if it’s a haven.’ ‘Then paint that,’ Gordon had suggested.

Good, solid, dependable Gordon, sometimes infuriatingly laid-back with his slow, pedantic deliberations — but always intuitive. The voice of reason in a storm. Probably why now his support was so important to her.

Her second attempt had too much contrast between the darkness of the chine and the harsh light of the sea horizon beyond — this time she was trying to capture some warmth and texture; some detail and depth to the trees and foliage, the faint chinks of light reflecting off the brook trickling through. She’d taken three photos in the summer as a guide, but she knew the chine so well she could practically paint it blindfold.

Her style of painting was conventional landscape with a hint of impressionist, but became unconventional through its use of layering — the habit of building the oils in layers employed by the Old Masters. It had derived originally due to the expense of canvass, so therefore the need to re-paint over old paintings or the false starts of works in progress. For Elena, she enjoyed the luxury of being able to paint over her errors until she reached perfection. She considered herself not that good an artist — despite now two local exhibitions and one at a small Notting Hill gallery when they were in London — and so for her the layering became in part a device behind which she could shield her lack of ability. Nobody would ever know.

The one thing she shared with the Old Masters was the rich texture and depth gained through the many layers. But as now she carefully dabbed and stroked, she found herself becoming increasingly agitated rather than relaxed. Her hand started to shake on the brush. The therapy this time wasn’t working.

Elena could only catch a glimpse of sea beyond the far ridge of the chine, a heavy grey-blue almost merging with the mist and cloud. Far different to the Ryall’s broad sea panorama seven miles up the coast — but Elena couldn’t help contemplating if Lorena was looking from her bedroom window at the same dull, brooding sea, wondering if anything was happening or whether she’d been left alone and forgotten.

‘You don’t think I should pursue it, do you?’ Elena looked at Gordon directly as she toyed with the last of her dessert.

She’d tried to broach the subject twice earlier: the first time Shelley McGurran, her boss at the agency, had phoned; the second time her daughter, Katine, walked into the kitchen halfway through them talking while preparing dinner.

They’d let the children leave the table early to watch TV with their desserts; they were now out of earshot in the adjoining lounge.

‘It’s not that I think you’re wrong. Your suspicions may very well be right — something is happening.’ Gordon gave a small shrug. ‘After all, you know Lorena better than most. It’s just that from your position there’s little you can do — you’re out of the loop now. And if, as you say, Social Services can’t do anything, you’re just going to get frustrated trying to pursue it.’

Elena held Gordon’s gaze for a second. Obviously her two false starts earlier had given him time to prepare: he’d chosen the route of lesser confrontation, not wanting a heated debate over whether or not her suspicions might be right.

‘But if Social Services can’t or won’t help her — who else is there to help her? Who else does she know in this town?’

‘I know, I know.’ Gordon held one hand up, sighing, as if exasperated that despite his efforts he’d still hit a confrontational wall. ‘I think you’re right to try. But unless you budge Social Services to your way of thinking, how far are you going to get? Even if you convince them something is happening — regardless that it’s based only on a hunch over a worried look from Lorena — they’ll still need something concrete to be able to pursue it.’

As always, the voice of reason. But as much as she knew that, annoyingly, Gordon was probably right — what hit her strongest, like the many times he’d been right before, was his smug, know-it-all overtone, which would usually draw out her instinctive rebelliousness. Though through twelve years of marriage she’d learnt to curb her worst traits, so all that resulted now was her lightly chewing her bottom lip as she looked back down at her dessert.

Sudden awkwardness with the silence; when she lifted her head she glanced through the open archway to the lounge. Christos, twelve, their eldest by four years, was pointing to something on the TV and making a comment to Katine, who was just out of view.

Elena shook her head. ‘I mean, my God, she’s only eighteen months older than our Katine. If anything is happening, she must feel so… so helpless. And vulnerable.’

Gordon reached across the table and clasped her hand. ‘Maybe they’ll hit on something through her school or GP.’

Elena smiled back tightly. Gordon had aimed to re-assure, but it had back-fired as a sharp reminder that those were their only hopes. If nothing came to light, Lorena would be quickly forgotten, consigned to some Social Services ‘dead-file’ cabinet — no doubt larger than any others.

After a second, Gordon asked, ‘What was it with Shelley?’

Elena faltered slightly with the shift in topic before re-focusing. ‘Oh… it was about the next supply consignment. It’s almost ready — five or six days. I’ll ride with it to Bucharest, stay maybe a week between the two orphanages, then catch a flight to Sarajevo.’

Gordon nodded. Europe’s child-neglect hot-spots that had been Elena’s roster the past four years: Romania, Bosnia, Chechenya — where they’d adopted Katine eighteen months before Elena joined the agency. In fact, the main driving force behind her joining: ‘We were able to help Katine. But she’s just one child out of thousands in the same position. If I can, I’d like to be able to help more children like Katine.’ Anything from two to four weeks away on each round-trip tour, then two or three weeks back in the UK helping Shelley McGurran organize the next aid consignment.

‘How are things now at the Cerneit?’ Gordon asked. He knew from Elena’s recent conversations that the Cerneit was one of their most troubled orphanages.

‘We’ve managed to cut down on the two or three to a bed sharing — but now every inch of floor space is littered with mattresses. You can hardly get a foot between. And just when we got the hepatitis under control, there was an outbreak of scurvy.’

‘What from?’

‘We sent over a large consignment of oats porridge last time. But they went mad with it, gave it to the children for breakfast, lunch and dinner — weren’t sensible enough to balance it out with fresh fruit and veg.’ She shook her head, half smiling in disbelief. ‘The said they didn’t realize and, besides, they claimed to be short the last couple of months on cash for food: a problem with the heating boiler had forced them to spend more on building maintenance and take it out of the food budget.’

Gordon looked down for a second — the point he’d been circling towards was now within grasp — before looking back up meaningfully. ‘That’s the other thing with this now. If there is a problem with Lorena — what do you do? Just turn your back on all those hundreds of other children who need your help?’

‘That’s unfair, and you know it,’ Elena protested. ‘This is just a one-off. It’s not as if it’s the sort of thing that happens every day.’

‘The point I’m trying to make, Elena, is where do you draw the line? You’ve become a surrogate mother to a lot of these children, and it’s great that you’ve become so close to so many of them. But you can’t be a mother to the world. At some stage you’ve got to let go, let someone else take the responsibility. You can only stretch yourself so far.’

‘This is different. And, as I said, unlikely to happen again.’ Elena flickered her eyes to one side, towards the children in the next room. Gordon was right, but she didn’t want him to see he’d hit a painful raw nerve. Feeling his eyes still on her, she added, ‘This isn’t just about my past closeness to Lorena, or perhaps me reading too much into the worried look in her eyes. It’s also the atmosphere in the house and with the Ryalls that tells me something is wrong.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well…’ She grappled for the right words. ‘Tense to say the least — which perhaps you’d expect given the nature of our visit. But I couldn’t help feeling that something was being hidden. And Cameron Ryall came across as a complete control guru.’

‘Isn’t that also what you’d expect from someone in his position.’ Cameron Ryall’s status warranted only sidebars in the financial pages of the national press, but locally he was big news: Chelborne’s Bill Gates.

Elena shook her head. ‘No, it went beyond that. Nicola Ryall had obviously been primed, but I got the strong feeling that she was actually afraid of him. As she sat there, hardly daring to answer or interject, all I got was a picture of my mother sat there in a similar position.’

‘Oh, right.’ Gordon exhaled, a slightly defeated sigh. So now finally they were getting to the root of the problem: her father.

Gordon looked down awkwardly, toying with the rim of his wine glass. Just when he thought that finally her father’s shadow had gone from her life, inevitably it would rise again, like a phantom. The all-controlling figurehead who had guided — or would a better word be destroyed — so much of her life. Whose hand could be seen in practically every major step or decision she’d ever made: forcing her to have an abortion when she became pregnant at sixteen, and then the growing gap between them finally leading to years of rebellion — leaving home early, the bed-sits and hippie communes, the protest marches and ‘discovery’ trips to India and Marrakech, where she’d ended up living for two years: days where the edges became increasingly blurred in a euphoric haze of dope and dabbling with LSD — before she woke up to the fact that she wasn’t just rebelling against everything her father stood for, she was also punishing herself.

Eleven years she’d spent pursuing ‘alternative’ lifestyles; they’d met three years after her return from Marrakech when she was working in her Uncle Christos’s import business, and they’d married ten months later. Their adopted boy they’d named after her Uncle, who — though Elena would be reluctant to admit it — everyone else saw as partly filling her need for a father figure; but one that understood her, loved her. Christos was also what she would have named her aborted child had it been a boy. Then later her desire for another adopted child, a girl, and the resultant urge for her to do more for other orphaned children.

But hers wasn’t the only life she’d felt had been scarred by her father’s over-dominance. She blamed him also for the suicide of her younger brother, Andreos, who had knuckled under her father’s influence, yet in the end felt he’d not only betrayed what he truly wanted to do but, regardless, would never have been able to live up to his father’s demanding expectations. Andreos opted out in the most dramatic way possible.

Her father had died five years ago, but the scars still ran so deep that she’d refused to attend the funeral. But more than anyone else in her family, Gordon felt that she’d kept her father’s memory alive with her every action through the years, and now his ghost was back again in the shape of Cameron Ryall’s dominance over Nicola Ryall and Lorena.

Certainly, on the surface at least, there were similarities with Ryall: her father had parlayed a 1950s Cypriot-Greek trading company into Britain’s ninth largest merchant bank. But any link between them, real or imagined, only returned Gordon full circle to one of his first concerns.

‘Has it struck you that the reminder of your father might be making you read too much into it all, seeing demons where they don’t exist? You see the surface signs with Ryall, then fill in the gaps to suit.’

Elena shook her head vigorously. ‘No, no. It’s more than that with Ryall.’

‘Like what?’

Elena stared back levelly. As much as she’d carefully skirted around the issue, it was back squarely in her lap. But she could never tell Gordon what had really happened with her father: too many years now she’d spent not only telling the lie, but living it. She reached across and touched Gordon’s hand.

‘There were a lot of things I never talked about with my father. Nothing significant, just small things, which is probably why they hardly seemed worth mentioning. You know, it’s like you when know someone’s unbalanced way before they start wildly swinging an axe.’ She looked down briefly at the table for inspiration. ‘You see it first in the tense way they grip a coffee cup, or their reaction to someone saying something out of place or wearing something they don’t like. Small things. And it’s things like that I see now between Ryall and his wife. It’s… it’s hard to put my finger on. Maybe no more than a hunch. And maybe you’re right — that hunch could well be wrong.’

Gordon held her gaze for a moment before she glanced away. He could tell that she was deeply troubled, and while the analogy made sense, her finishing on the note of so casually casting off her previous concerns made him suspicious. He took a fresh sip of wine, and suddenly the uneasy thought hit him like a thunderbolt.

‘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.’

A few seconds’ silence with only the faint static line hiss, then Gordon asked. ‘When are you heading back?’

‘I’m not sure yet. I’ll call you later today when I know.’ She’d decide after she’d spoken to Nadine Moore whether to fly back straightaway or wait out the five days left of her trip. ‘And Gordon, I…’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s okay.’ She bit lightly at her bottom lip. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll see you soon, anyway.’ It just didn’t feel right pouring out her heart over this faint, static charged line; even though the distance, not having to face him, might have made it easier. And perhaps when she got home, having harboured the secret now for so many years, it still wouldn’t feel right.

Signing off, Elena found that she was trembling. She knew now why she’d so readily clung to rationalisation, and it had little to do with refusing to accept the worst after everything Lorena had already been through in her troubled past. It had to do with her own past — the wall of lies she’d so carefully constructed throughout her life, to Gordon and everyone else, but most importantly to herself. What lay at the core of their adopting Christos and Katine and her decision to work with strife-torn, orphaned children. She’d feared from the outset the gap in her psyche that this incident with Lorena threatened to open up, and part of her, despite her raw instincts, had tried to push it away. Now, having to face it square on, meant admitting that the founding principals of half her life had been wrong. There was nothing left to stop the wall crumbling.