‘Iain – that’s my ex-husband – had walked out about a year before and, though she’d never admit it, Marina had been very hurt by that.’
‘Were they close?’
Susan Holland screwed her face up as she tried to find the right words. ‘They were, in a way. Iain had been very fond of her when she was small. She was a pretty little thing and I think he saw her as a kind of accessory. He’d show her off, at the same time demonstrating to everyone what a great dad he was. But as she grew older, the relationship changed.’
‘You don’t mean . . .?’
‘Oh God, nothing like that. He never touched her or anything. There are a lot of harsh, uncharitable things I could say – and have said – about my ex-husband, but I’d never accuse him of that. No, I think he turned against Marina just when she became less biddable. You know, suddenly she wasn’t the adorable little moppet who thought everything her daddy did was wonderful. She started to develop a mind of her own and gave us both a hard time. Pretty soon she only had two default settings – asleep and stroppy. Well, I took most of the flak. Iain just – am I allowed these days to say “in a very masculine way”? – avoided confrontation with Marina and lost interest in her. By coincidence perhaps it was also around the same time that he lost interest in me.’ She spoke these words with grim resignation. ‘Are you married?’
In some circumstances Carole might have resisted giving personal information to a stranger, but she was keen to bond with Susan Holland so readily replied, ‘Divorced.’
‘So you know where I’m coming from.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Anyway, Iain was off, developing his career, finding a new wife, getting a new set of kids – kids of whom he was the birth father – which didn’t do much for my confidence, as you might imagine. He was generally starting over – and beginning to make a lot of money.’
‘Oh? Doing what?’
‘He’s in the stationery business. Started very small, just bought this one ailing store and we worked very hard to turn that around.’
‘You were in the business with him?’
‘Yes. But don’t worry, I’m not about to get into that routine of “I worked my fingers to the bone for that man, but when the business started to take off, I got dumped and . . .” True though it happens to be. But I’m not bitter about it – well, not more bitter than I am about other aspects of his behaviour. And the fact that Iain’s now got a chain of stationery stores across the south coast and his kids are in private school and he’s even got time to dabble in local politics and . . . Don’t get me started.’
To Carole it seemed that she already had got Susan Holland started, so she quickly asked, ‘Did your ex-husband keep in touch with Marina?’
‘Not as far as I know. I don’t think he wanted any links with the past. He wanted to start with a new squeaky clean sheet.’
‘So you don’t think he might know what had happened to her?’
‘No. He might have been sufficient of a bastard to keep that kind of information from me, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, but he wouldn’t have lied to the police – and they interviewed him quite a lot around that time. No, I’m sure he didn’t know anything.’
‘But he didn’t take much positive action to find out what had happened to his daughter?’
‘I think her disappearance probably suited him quite well. Reducing the number of skeletons in his closet to one – namely me.’
‘Hm.’ Carole nodded thoughtfully. ‘Let’s go back to the time when your husband walked out, and the effect it had on Marina.’
‘Well, she’d never have admitted it, but she was very upset. Which, of course, affected her behaviour. She was getting well out of hand. I was doing the job at the nursing home back then, like I am now, and that involves quite a few evening shifts, so I wasn’t able to keep as close an eye on her as I should have done. So I think Marina was getting in with the wrong crowd . . . and there are quite a lot of wrong crowds in Brighton.’
‘Are you talking about drugs?’ asked Carole.
Susan Holland grimaced. ‘Probably. They’re certainly easily available round here. I don’t know. Marina was very defiant towards me. She wanted to hurt me. She seemed to blame me for her confusion. If Iain and I hadn’t adopted her, she said, her life would have been more straightforward. She could have, as she kept putting it, “gone back to her roots”. Though, poor kid, neither she nor anyone else had any idea what her roots were. But I’ve heard adopted children can often entertain the fantasy that they were born to better things. And there were a lot of things better than being brought by a harassed, hard-up single mother in one of the less salubrious areas of Brighton.
‘Marina was quite attracted by the idea that she was Russian by birth. An exotic Russian . . . I suppose in the nineteenth century she might have thought she was a princess. Now what? The daughter of a Russian oligarch? Who was going to appear one day in a Rolls-Royce, claim her as his rightful child and whisk her away from the squalor of Brighton and of me. Poor kid.
‘Oh, I understood a lot of what she was feeling. But there’s only so much understanding a busy working mother can give. And I didn’t want to let my own life and needs become completely subservient to hers. Of course there were lots of arguments.’
‘I did ask you about drugs.’
‘Yes, I was getting there, sorry. Marina told me she was taking drugs. She told me she was having sex too. Both things may have been true, but the way she said them to me, it was more a kind of defiance. As if she was challenging me, seeing how far she could push me before I snapped and said something unforgivable to her.’
‘Something unforgivable?’
‘Yes. Like that I didn’t love her. That’s what she wanted to hear from me. She kept telling me she hated me and she wanted me to hit back in the same way. She said I couldn’t love her – not properly – because I wasn’t her real mother. According to Marina, the only reason I’d taken her on was because I wanted a baby, any baby. It wasn’t her specifically. And the love I gave her was the love I would have lavished on whatever baby I happened to end up with.’
‘It sounds exhausting even just to hear it described.’
‘Believe me, Carole, it was. The same arguments time after time, sawing away like a serrated knife through broken flesh. I was dead on my feet by the time she finally disappeared.’
‘And what caused that? Why did she finally go? Did you have some even more enormous row?’
Susan Holland was silent. She’d been swept along by the momentum of her narrative, but now her grief and bewilderment caught up with her. ‘No. I wish there had been something. I wish there had been one enormous flare-up, a bigger one than all the others, something I could have looked back to and said, “That was it. That’s where I went wrong. That’s what did it.”
‘But I don’t have that satisfaction. Oh God, I’ve asked myself that so many times. What did I do? What was the trigger? In what Marina would have regarded as the long catalogue of my offences what was the one thing that pushed her too far, the one thing that made her go?’
‘And you’re sure she did go of her own accord?’
‘As opposed to what?’
‘As opposed to being abducted. If you are thinking of Marina being the Lady in the Lake, then you’re thinking of a murder victim.’
‘I see what you mean. No, she left home of her own accord.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘There was a note.’
‘Had she ever done anything like that before?’