Pick up the frame. Illuminate it with my torch.
It’s exactly what I thought I’d seen. A framed document that shows Danny was a trustee of a company called Pretty Lanes. That’s why the words ‘Pretty Lanes’ were so familiar because I saw them on Danny’s wall the first time I came here. I don’t have time to sift through what all this means yet, but it’s another red mark against my blood father. I want to take this away as evidence but I know I can’t because Danny will probably miss it. So I snap it on my phone. Anyway, what’s it evidence of? That he was a trustee of a company back in 1994. There’s no crime in that.
Carefully, I place the frame back down and cover it over with the papers again. I sweep my torch around the room. And stop. The section of the wall that was empty when Danny showed me this room now has a corkboard. The board is covered with photographs from my life. Me as a teenager, at college with friends, long-range shots of me taken at work with a telephoto lens. My adoption papers, original birth certificate, children’s home records, the lot. What I see next shakes me to the core. Facing me is the spectre of seven-year-old Little Eva. My heart slams against my chest. My palm moulds skin-tight round my mouth to muffle my noise of distress. Little Eva is almost bald. Tiny tufts of clustered curls cling on like heroes refusing to be taken. Her eyes are the earth-brown of the dead, not the laughing-brown of an innocent child. This is crushing me. Killing me. Causing me so much pain. My hands clutch my hair. Wrenching. I’m broken. Broken. So bloody broken.
No! My mind vigorously protests. I won’t allow this to happen to me time and time again. I’ve survived everything before and I will survive it again.
I. Am. Strong.
Frantically, I spin away from the past. Think. Danny’s known about me for years. How? Why did he never come forward to acknowledge me as his daughter? Why did he leave me in that children’s home to almost wither away and die? It’s another red mark against him.
My head shoots up with the force of another damning question. If he knew I was his child all this time why did Danny decide to get in touch with me via his DNA trick, now of all times? Is he involved in the women going missing twenty-eight years ago? My blood father couldn’t have been responsible for my mother’s death? The unspeakable horror of that leaves me cold.
A noise outside disturbs me.
‘Eva?’
Danny’s call is unexpected. I clench up, body filling with alarming tension. Does he know what I did? I pull the duvet away from my face and look towards the door where Danny stands. After hearing the noise downstairs, I re-locked his devil’s lair and flew as quickly as possible upstairs, including having to figure out how to climb the banister to the floor above.
The backlight from the landing settles a shade over him like that of an angel’s halo. An angel? Danny has played me like the strings of a violin playing the dirge at a funeral.
I answer. ‘I’m OK, Danny. Thanks for letting me stay.’
He hesitates in the doorway. Please don’t come in. Don’t. Danny slips away as quietly as he came. And I lie there in the night, shivering, tormented by the darkest question: was my father involved in the murder of my mother?
In the morning, it’s the call from my manager, Janice Baker, that allows me to make an early escape after coffee and toast by the river.
CHAPTER 41
‘Patrick Walsh has dropped his complaint,’ Janice Baker informs me with considerable relish and a satisfied grin.
I didn’t want to come here, instead I wanted to go straight to Sugar with the information I found at Danny’s. But not responding to Janice’s summons means I might lose my job. Danny’s a trustee of Pretty Lanes. Danny’s known about you since you were a child. They keep knocking and banging the walls inside my brain until my head is a throbbing mess. But neither implicates him in the murder of my mother and the other women. I still don’t have any idea what or who Pretty Lanes are. This is all linked to what went on in the old medical block, I suspect, but suspicions aren’t evidence of wrongdoing.
What Janice is saying penetrates my brain. ‘Your lawyer made mincemeat of him.’
The lawyer that Danny engaged without asking me. The dutiful father helping his daughter? Or another one of his manipulations? The last time I was here, I was shattered, beaten down, crippled by the tragic aftermath of Mummy Cherry’s death. Now I feel emotionally dead. Barely there. Ever since she died some of my humanity has been switched off.
My job in the asthma clinic and respiratory ward was once my obsession, my flag-waving signal that Eva Harris has made it. Eva Harris is a success. The problem is it’s not the same Eva who’s sitting here today. Hope, little Amina, Veronica-Ronnie and Sheryl have pushed me to question everything I stand for.