crossed out and Porter scribbled in next to it. But it couldn’t be. That was the name of her mother, and her mother was dead.
This couldn’t be right.
The truth didn’t dawn – it hit her full pelt like a punch, leaving her reeling from the impact. She felt sick.
She threw the bracelet across the hall as if it was a toxic, physical lie. Staring at it she half hoped it would dematerialize and take itself away from her like it had never existed. But it remained on the bottom stair – tauntingly real.
The address had said Bayswater. She shook her head and went back into the lounge. She would prove this wrong. At most, this would be a coincidence. Her family couldn’t have lied to her about this. It wasn’t possible; they weren’t that cruel.
She had discovered that the internet was a wonderful thing a long time ago. You could find out pretty much anything if you knew where to look, and 192.com was a good place to start. All you needed was a name, and a vague idea of location, then you could find out someone’s phone number, address, and even whether they were registered to vote. Rachel Porter had no phone, but she was on the electoral roll. She did exist.
Amy still wasn’t quite convinced that this Rachel Porter was the same Rachel who had married her father and died in childbirth like the tragic heroine of her fantasies. There would have to be a death certificate, a record of her mother’s demise, and she knew exactly where to look. Her dad had a trunk at the end of his bed where he kept his personal things. If the evidence she needed was anywhere it would be in there. Dispassionately she headed for the stairs, fully prepared to break into his privacy without a second thought.
Most of what she found consisted of old business accounts, copies of VAT Returns and the like. There were drawings and Father’s Day cards that she had made for him over the years, all wrapped in the shawl she had used as a baby. Before this she would have thought how sweet he was to cling onto such things, but at that moment in time she was so angry with him she wanted to tear everything to shreds.
At the bottom of the trunk was a tin box, its hasp sealed with a small padlock. She had never picked a lock, wouldn’t have had a clue how to do it and didn’t fancy spending hours pissing about with a hairgrip and getting nowhere. Neither was she prepared to waste time looking for the key. Her father was a security-conscious man, had spent too long in the company of felons not to be, so wherever the key might be, she would be unlikely to find it easily. Instead she ran down to the garage, taking the box with her, and broke it open with a pickaxe, the contents exploding all over the concrete floor on the third blow.
The box was ruined and she couldn’t have cared less; she was only interested in the contents.
Sure enough, she found her own birth certificate, and his and Rachel’s marriage certificate. No death certificate. Just a pile of letters addressed to HM Prison, Dartmoor.
She opened one and realised that they were the letters her mother had sent to him in prison. She opened more, scanning the handwriting and seeing that some were from her gran too. Only one envelope stood out from the others – it was stiff and large, addressed to their house, so more recent than the rest. It was from a London solicitor, from Rachel’s solicitor, warning Charlie not to contact or visit or they would have no alternative but to apply for an injunction against him. ‘My client has no wish for further contact with you,’ she read.
The letter was dated fifteen years ago when Amy had been five. Rachel had been alive and hadn’t wanted to see them. Hadn’t wanted to know her own daughter. The woman had gone so far as to threaten legal action if Charlie even tried.
If Amy’s mood had been angry before, this discovery only served to fuel the flames. Now she was incandescent! Her mother was alive and it looked like she was a complete bitch. What kind of woman walked away from her own child? Anger gave way to a swathe of hurt that scythed through her and nearly took her off her feet. Mind reeling, she tried to absorb what it all meant, what it said about her – Amy – the child her mother didn’t want. The sensation of abject sorrow was too much to bear and she had to shut the feeling away and cling onto the anger.
Not that she knew who it was for yet: the mother she’d believed was dead, her father for the lie, or her gran. But you didn’t get angry with Gran. Life wasn’t worth living if you got on her wrong side. As much as she was loving and kind, she could turn, and when she turned, she turned nasty. No, Gran wasn’t the one she could run to, not about this. Not about anything that challenged her cosy world. Now that she had locked the emotions down, she could be rational and work out what she needed to do. Because she had to do something.
Rachel’s address was etched into her mind. It was simple. She would go there and confront the woman who had faked her own death to abandon her family. Amy wanted to know why, and she wanted to know now.
Back in the house it took only moments to look up train times and find that if she was quick she could be on a train in forty-five minutes and in London an hour and a half after that. She took the letters and stuffed them in her backpack. She also took her father’s secret stash of cash. Five hundred pounds, rolled up and secured with an elastic band and kept hidden in a piece of spare waste pipe in the back of the sink unit cupboard. He thought she didn’t know about it, but she had watched him many a time unscrew the dummy pipe and store his money. He owed her for all this, so she wasn’t going to feel bad about taking it.
As she headed across the sitting room towards the door, she looked towards the mantelpiece and saw the photograph of her father holding her. She had been about four and was sitting on his shoulders and they were both grinning at the camera. It was a mutual favourite picture and she couldn’t remember a time when it hadn’t been on display somewhere in the house. The sight of it stirred the feelings she was trying so hard to suppress.
She picked up the picture and hurled it against the wall, wincing as the image shattered, littering the floor with tiny shards of glass. She was sick of it! It wasn’t real. None of it had been real. Not this house, not her dad, not this life. For good measure, she followed the picture with the plate of cold pizza, watching in satisfaction as it slid slowly down the wall, leaving a trail of cold congealed gunk in its wake.
Satisfied, she stalked from the house, slamming the front door so hard that the glass pane at the top cracked from the impact.
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