The Lost Child

by Emily Gunnis

Genres: Historical Fiction; Historical Mysteries

Synopsis

Perfect for fans of Kate Morton and Kathryn Hughes, this twisting novel of murder, tragedy and betrayal will haunt you.

A shocking murder. A child witness. A diary of secrets.

1952. Rebecca Waterhouse is just 13 when her father, suffering from PTSD following the war, kills her mother then himself. As Rebecca runs from the house, she is sure she sees someone standing at the window watching her. But no one believes her.

2018. Iris Waterhouse, a journalist, hears that police are trying to find a woman on the run with her newborn baby. The mother is depressed and the baby, who has strep B, urgently needs medication. Iris begins to investigate.

Meanwhile a woman in her 90s is found wandering on Whittering Beach. She is very distressed about a baby she says she abandoned in 1940.

As Iris gets closer to the missing mother, she starts to read the diary of her grandmother Harriet Waterhouse, who was murdered by her husband decades before. She realises there is a connection between the two families. And in doing so unveils a shocking secret buried years ago.

Release date: August 16, 2019

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 352

Sample

Dear Reader,

Buildings speak to us. They have heart and history and whispered secrets within their creaking floorboards. They have a feel about them as soon as you walk in the door that you cannot explain.

When I was looking for a backdrop for my new novel, The Lost Child, an old black-and-white map of Chichester that I saw by chance at the Goodwood Hotel in Sussex and the faint image of a building labelled ‘County Lunatic Asylum’ gave me goosebumps.

As soon as I got home, I called my mother-in-law, a former police detective. She kindly agreed to drive us to Chichester and take a look at the building which was once Graylingwell Psychiatric Hospital and is now luxury flats. She had taken a few ‘lost souls’ to be admitted to Graylingwell in her days on the beat in the seventies and knew her way around.

It was a beautiful sunny winter’s day as we drove around the grounds, drinking in the atmosphere and taking pictures of the untouched derelict outbuildings. In spite of the smart new veneer of the flats, you could still feel the history of the place. I could picture patients walking around and visiting the chapel – that was still intact.

However, despite drinking in the atmosphere, I still didn’t have my story. But as we drove away from the imposing Victorian building my mother-in-law said, ‘Did you know that until about the fifties, if a wealthy man was bored with his wife, he could have her put in there so he could marry his mistress?’

I nearly crashed the car. A sane woman could be locked up for life at her husband’s discretion? It turned out to be true. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1937 extended the grounds for divorce, which, until that date, had been only for adultery, to now include unlawful desertion for two years or more, cruelty, incurable insanity, incest or sodomy. As divorce was very hard to come by, many husbands resorted to fake pictures of infidelity or, indeed, ‘arranged’ for their wives to be declared insane and locked away as a means to escape any scandal or repercussions.

I was shocked, horrified . . . and inspired. I had my plot and my building. Now I just needed my characters and, as soon as I started my research on that incredible, and hidden, part of our recent history, these came magically to life.

I hope you enjoy reading The Lost Child as much as I have loved writing it.



Saturday, 19 November 1960

‘Please let me out, sir. I don’t feel well.’

Rebecca looked over the table at the policeman with wire-framed glasses who hadn’t let her leave the interview room since they had arrived two hours before.

Detective Inspector Gibbs took a deep inhale of his Woodbine then blew the thick grey smoke into the airless room.

Rebecca stared down at her hands: tiny specks of her mother’s blood were spattered on the back of her right wrist and she began scratching at them with her nails. She was still wearing the white nightie she had slept in. Trails of blood dragged along the hemline. She wanted to tear it off, get in a bath, sink underneath the water and never come up again.

‘We’re nearly done. I just need to get a few more details straight in my mind before we have your statement typed up.’ DI Gibbs reached forward, his black eyes glaring into hers, and crushed the Woodbine under his nicotine-stained forefinger. ‘I’ll get you some water.’

As he stood, his chair scraped across the tiled floor, letting out a high-pitched screeching noise which startled her. She pulled the scratchy woollen blanket round her. She was shaking, and cold. So cold.

DI Gibbs let the door slam behind him. Rebecca’s eyes stung as she looked up at the clock: 4 a.m. She had never stayed up this late before. She and Harvey sometimes hid in the bomb shelter together late into the night, to escape her father’s fury, but his desire for whisky-fuelled oblivion usually took over his rage by midnight.

As the yelling began, she would signal to Harvey from her bedroom window with a torch he had given her and he would sprint across the cornfield to her, open the hatch to the bomb shelter under Seaview Cottage. By then she would be waiting for him, having accessed the shelter via the trap door in the under-stairs cupboard. A small underground cave, which her father had filled with tinned food and books and candles in case the German enemy returned to slaughter his family. Father’s never-ending paranoia, which made her and her mother’s life hell, unwittingly provided her with an escape.

Rebecca sat and watched the seconds ticking on the clock, the passing of time taking her further and further from the last time she had seen her mother. The last time she would ever see her mother. She could still picture her: her mouth gasping for air, her beautiful lips, which had kissed her so many times, her skin losing colour, then taking her last breath, the life leaving her.

The silence of the smoke-filled room throbbed in her ears. Her body was exhausted yet her brain played over and over in her mind the scene that had greeted her when, hearing her mother’s wall-piercing screams, she had run from her bedroom into the sitting room at Seaview: her mother, lying on the pale rug Rebecca had watched her beat clean of dust so many times on the sun-dappled steps of the cottage.

A rug now dyed red with the blood that had poured from her ears and her nose. Her eyes so swollen shut from her father kicking her with his heavy black boot she couldn’t see her daughter in the doorway.

‘So, Miss Waterhouse.’ DI Gibbs made her jump as he walked in through the door. ‘Let’s go over this one more time.’

It already felt like another lifetime, lying in her bed only hours before with the storm blowing in from Wittering Bay hissing at her window. Despite the extra quilt she had pulled from the cupboard, her extremities had throbbed with the cold.

She had pictured Father groaning as he tended the fire, muttering to himself as the dust made him cough. Mother would be looking over at him, her straight, mousey hair swept up in a bun, her tired legs stretched out on the stool in front of her, silently waiting for his temper to light along with the kindling. The fire lit, Father would take his key from the desk drawer, walk over to the locked cabinet and remove his Luger pistol, as he did every Monday, meticulously taking it apart and cleaning the grips with linseed oil while Mother watched anxiously. ‘We can’t all afford to be as naive as you, Harriet,’ he would say. ‘A man needs to be able to protect his family.’

Rebecca had felt the tension through the floor. It was deathly quiet, as it always was when her father was brooding. It had been a fraught day, since her parents had been called in to see the headmaster about her. Her father hadn’t spoken to her since, except to say that they were leaving Seaview first thing in the morning and that she would never be seeing Harvey Roberts again.

The thought of Harvey slammed her back into the present. ‘Please let me see Harvey,’ she pleaded now.

‘All in good time. Harvey Roberts was making rather a nuisance of himself so we’ve had to put him in the cells.’

The nausea was coming again, Gibbs’s presence overwhelming her. He reminded her of one of the rats scuttling about the lambing pens at Seaview Farm. His teeth were yellowing and sharp; the ends of his thick black moustache twitched as he spoke, like whiskers.

Rebecca gulped down the rush of tears. Soon after she had been taken to the interview room, she heard Harvey crying out for her in the corridor outside. She had heard several policemen talking over one another, shouting for him to calm down, threatening to lock him up for the night. He had pounded at the door between them, his voice fading as they dragged him away.

‘What about Harvey’s dad? I’m only thirteen. Shouldn’t I have an adult with me?’ Rebecca’s voice trembled, and DI Gibbs glared at her.

‘Ted Roberts is inebriated – he doesn’t even know his own name at the moment, so he’s not much use to you, I’m afraid. We’ll call social services once their office opens, and you’ll be made the subject of a care order.’

‘What does that mean?’ she said, her heart flooding with panic.

Gibbs glared at her. ‘It means you’ll be placed in the care of the local authority and you’ll have a social worker attached to you who is responsible for you.’

‘But I want to live with Ted and Harvey.’ Rebecca couldn’t help the tears coming now. ‘Please let me use the bathroom, I really don’t feel well.’

‘Well, the sooner you can be a little clearer about what happened, the sooner we’ll be done here.’

‘But I have been clear, I’ve told you everything. Please don’t make me go over it again.’

She didn’t want to recall the sound of her father’s raised voice piercing the storm howling at the house. The bellow that had come through the floorboards, and the sound of her mother’s voice, trying to calm him. She could picture her mother trembling in her chair now, her fear of what was to come evident. Something in the room below had smashed. Rebecca’s heart had thudded painfully as the wind and rain pelted against her window and she had pulled the covers over her head.

‘So I’m going to write it down this time and then the secretary can type it up when she comes in at the start of her shift.’ He sighed, exhaling smoke. ‘Tell me again, what was it your mother did to anger your father this evening?’

Rebecca angrily wiped away a tear. Her head was shattering: she had no way of making this man understand what it meant to live with a man like her father. ‘She didn’t do anything. We didn’t need to do anything. I could leave a pencil out, maybe my mother didn’t fold a towel the right way. My father suffers with chronic battle neurosis. He was treated at Greenways Psychiatric Hospital but he’s never fully recovered. He’s got a violent temper and the smallest noise or upset can trigger a flashback.’

‘But today something did happen to make him angry? You said you played truant from school.’ The policeman stared at her, his pen poised.

Rebecca closed her eyes and thought back to the day before, when she was a different person, still a little girl with a family, sitting in the corridor outside her headmaster’s office staring at the orange, swirly carpet as voices resonated inside.

‘It’s that Roberts boy, he’s a bad influence.’ The headmaster spoke loudly and Rebecca had pictured him pacing, his hands clasped behind his back as her parents sat inside.

‘They live on the farm bordering Seaview Farm and Ted Roberts employed my wife while I was being treated at Greenways.’ Father’s voice had been quiet, as it always was outside their secluded home. ‘As a result, Rebecca and Harvey grew up together and, unfortunately, I wasn’t around to stop the unhealthy amount of time they spent together.’

‘Well, I would trust your instincts, Mr Waterhouse. While I thought Rebecca had her sights set a little higher than being a farmer’s wife, I fear her relationship with the Roberts boy is having a detrimental effect as her grades have started to slip.’

‘Her grades?’ her mother had said, anxious. ‘Her studies are very important to her – she wants to be a doctor.’ She stopped, as if suddenly embarrassed by her outburst.

‘It’s a bit late to be fussing now. I warned you about those people, Harriet.’

‘Well, the ambitions of most ladies fall by the wayside when they fall in love, I find,’ the headmaster had said matter-of-factly.

‘Love?’ Despite himself, her father’s voice had become louder. ‘She’s thirteen, for God’s sake.’

‘Can I ask, have there been any issues at home?’ the headmaster said, treading carefully.

‘No, nothing I can think of. Can you, Harriet?’ Rebecca had held her breath. Both knew full well why she had played truant that day, why she had been desperate to see Harvey. Her father was taking her away, from Seaview and Harvey, the only things that made it possible for her to survive.

Her grades were not slipping because of Harvey, they were slipping because she was exhausted from living in fear. Because her nightmares ended only when the day of treading eggshells began. Because she lived in a house where she was scared to walk into a room in case her father was in it; where she had wet the bed until she was eleven because she was too afraid to get up in the night in case she bumped into him. Because watching her father beat her mother had become almost a relief from the endless tension of waiting for it to start. And, every time, her mother would apologize for him, make excuses, dab at her bleeding mouth, try to mop up the blood on her face over the ceramic sink in their tiny kitchen.

‘Why did you feel the need to leave school today without permission?’ asked DI Gibbs, jolting her back into the present.

‘I went to say goodbye to Harvey,’ Rebecca said quietly. She was shaking now, her whole body starting to go into shock.

‘Because you were moving away?’ Gibbs waited for her to nod before scratching her words out on the paper.

‘He was baling at Greenways Psychiatric Hospital. They have a farm the patients work on. Harvey and his father stay at the local pub in the week so I knew I wouldn’t see him before we left.’ Rebecca closed her eyes and let out a slow breath, trying to ease the nausea.

‘We are smitten, aren’t we?’

‘Ted and Harvey are like family to me. They took my mother in when I was a baby and my father was sent to Greenways. We would have been on the streets without them.’

DI Gibbs nodded slowly. ‘And how did you get to Greenways after sneaking out of school?’

‘I got the bus.’

Rebecca’s stomach throbbed. The sanitary pad in her knickers was irritating her skin and she was sure it needed changing, but she had nothing with her other than the nightie on her back. She hated what her body was doing to her – the mess, the pain of it, not just in her tummy but in her back, her legs. She hated the hairs between her legs, her growing breasts, sore and ever present. She didn’t want her body to change and had no use for any of it. She knew that, unlike the other girls in her class who were already giggling over the prospect of marriage and children, the idea of it filled her with horror.

‘Don’t get married, Rebecca, it’s a mug’s game,’ Mother had whispered one evening as they peeled potatoes for dinner. ‘I’ve put some money in an account for you for medical school.’ She had looked out of the kitchen door to where Jacob was reading the newspaper, then back at her. ‘There’s no need to tell anyone about it. Promise me, whatever happens, you’ll finish your studies.’

She had startled as her mother pulled a post-office booklet from the back of the kitchen drawer and pressed it into her hand. She felt herself beginning to cry, all the tension that forever filled the house pressing down on her.

‘Promise me.’

‘I promise.’

It had started the day he came home from Greenways and she had looked over at her father, his dark, brooding eyes glaring at her, a forced smile etched onto his scarred face.

‘Why, Mummy? Why does he shout at you and hurt you?’ The knot in her stomach this stranger had inflicted was already having an effect on her sunny fearlessness. A black cloud now followed her everywhere she went. She loathed being alone with him and cowered behind her mother’s legs whenever he emerged from his bedroom, bleary eyed and foul tempered.

‘Things are going to have to be different at home from now on, little one, because Daddy’s a bit sad and frightened from fighting in the war. And you have to be there for the people you love, even when they’re not being as kind and nice to you as you’d like them to be. He’ll be better soon.’

At the age of five, life as she had known it had ended. Their carefree, fun-loving home became a prison overnight. The sounds of laughter, the smells of the sea breeze through the open windows, the sand pockets over the kitchen floor, the music on the wireless. As he came in through the door, her mother’s heart went out.

‘And what happened when you got to Greenways?’ asked DI Gibbs, leaning forward to picking up a now-cold cup of coffee.

Rebecca thought back to the previous afternoon. The biting cold had snapped at her when she stepped off the bus, as if warning her to turn back. With butterflies in her stomach, she had walked towards the three-storey Gothic building at the edge of Chichester. The high wrought-iron gates a threatening reminder that once you were in, it was near-impossible to get out.

Soon after the gates had slammed shut behind her, a clean-shaven man had walked up to her, blocking her path, his eyes averted.

‘What is your date of birth?’ he asked rocking gently from one leg to the other.

‘Don’t be shy. Tell George your date of birth and he’ll tell you the day of the week you were born.’ With relief she had turned to see Harvey smiling at her in his mud-soaked dungarees, his blond hair flopping in front of his blue eyes.

‘Okay. I was born on 8th January 1947.’

To her amazement, George, without a moment’s hesitation, blurted out, ‘Wednesday.’ Staring at her, he added, ‘You’re the girl in the painting.’

‘That’s incredible. How does he do that?’ said Rebecca. ‘What painting is he talking about?’ she added, frowning.

Harvey shrugged. ‘George has a brilliant mind, but he’s totally institutionalized. He would never survive outside these walls now.’

‘It isn’t how I imagined it would be – I thought everyone would be locked away.’ She had tried not to stare too much, but her curiosity got the better of her. The biting cold was making her shiver.

‘Well, the ones wandering around are the ones the doctors think should be kept occupied with physical activity, but the ones who are psychotic, who are a danger to themselves or others, they’re locked up in Ward B, up there,’ said Harvey, pointing to the dozens of arched windows staring down at them from the façade of the main building.

‘Anyway, what are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at school?’ Harvey led her out of the bitter wind through the door and stood at the end of a seemingly never-ending corridor which looked like the stuff of nightmares. There was a tension in the air, and she could hear what sounded like a woman screaming for her life.

‘I found Harvey and told him we were leaving,’ Rebecca said quietly now to DI Gibbs.

‘And what did he say?’ He looked up from his notes and glared.

Rebecca paused. ‘He said he would come to Seaview tonight and we would run away together.’

She could see him now, staring at her with his baby-blue eyes. ‘But Seaview Farm is your home. Your dad would be lost without you.’

‘He can cope. He knows how much I . . . I care about you.’ Harvey kicked the soil at his feet.

‘Where will we go? What about school? If I go with you, I’ll never finish my studies and I’ll end up just like Mother.’ Tears of panic stung her eyes.

‘And what did you say to that idea?’ Gibbs leaned forward, glaring at her intently, his cigarette breath sucking at the oxygen in the room.

‘I said I couldn’t leave my mother,’ said Rebecca as another tear escaped. She was afraid to cry; if she started, she would never stop.

‘So you left?’ asked DI Gibbs.

Rebecca nodded.

‘But when we arrived at the house tonight, you said you heard someone at the door, before you came downstairs and found your mother and father. And that this person you heard started the argument that led to your parents’ deaths. Do you think that person was Harvey?’

‘No.’ She could still hear her bedroom windows, shaking in the relentless gale as if they might smash, the rat-tat sound of the door knocker which must have been the howling wind.

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Because when I went downstairs there was no one in the house. I must have imagined it. He and Mother argued all the time. There was a storm, battering at the windows, I couldn’t hear properly.’

‘But you said you heard your father speaking to someone, and that an argument broke out. Wouldn’t it make sense that this person was Harvey, if he said he was coming for you?’ Gibbs leaned in further and Rebecca felt her body tense and her stomach spasm again.

‘No.’ Rebecca shook her head. She had to get out of this room. She couldn’t breathe. She could smell the burning fumes from the Luger pistol when it went off.

‘Why?’

‘Because Harvey would never have left my mother dying on the floor like that. He loved her.’

‘Could he have shot your father to save your mother?’

‘No.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I know. He couldn’t do something like that. Please, sir, I really am going to be sick.’

‘Well, luckily for him, his father is an alcoholic, so there are witnesses to say they were both at the King’s Head tonight.’

‘So why are you asking me this? Why won’t you let me go? Please, I feel very unwell.’

Rebecca felt vomit rushing up from her stomach.

‘Because I’m not sure you’re being entirely honest with me, young lady. I think you’re holding something back. And that you have an idea of who was at the door.’

The tears started now. She began to panic that she was going to choke on the vomit burning at the bottom of her throat. ‘Please sir, there was no one there when I went downstairs. No one else was in the house.’

‘And your father kept a pistol?’

Rebecca nodded, putting her hand over her mouth as the sounds of the night screamed in her ears.

She had put her head under the covers, as the storm picked up its pace, echoing what was happening downstairs. The sound of yelling, smashing glass, her father’s fury thudding through her veins, feeling it as if it were her own. She had lain in her bed, paralysed with indecision, until her mother’s screams came through the floor, forcing her to act, to go to her. ‘Mother!’ She had shouted to her, opening her bedroom door and launching herself down the stairs towards the horrific scene unfolding in the room below.

Her mouth was filling with vomit now and, as it began to pour through the fingers covering her mouth, the acid in her stomach burning, she gagged and bent double.

DI Gibbs shot up, but it was too late: it was all over his notes, the table, the floor. As bits of the last meal she had eaten with her mother – their final supper, at which no one had said a word – covered the detective’s black shiny shoes, and the last of the air in the room became wretched, their interview finally came to an abrupt end.

9 a.m. Wednesday, 19 November 2014

Harvey Roberts walked over to the window of his farmhouse kitchen and looked out beyond the ice-covered courtyard to the South Downs. He had only been up for a couple of hours but he could still barely walk from exhaustion after spending the past two days holding his daughter’s hand through her labour. When he had finally got home to his bed he’d barely slept, spending most of the night worrying about her. He took a glug of coffee and resolved to gather his strength for another long shift at St Dunstan’s Hospital.

It had been a harrowing couple of days. His daughter had gone into labour three weeks before her due date and, as Jessie’s boyfriend, Adam, was in Nigeria on a photoshoot, it was Harvey’s phone that had rung at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning. He had dressed quickly and driven into Chichester, where the last of the Saturday-night revellers were still making their way home. When Jessie opened the door to her and Adam’s two-bedroom period flat, she was already out of her pyjamas and dressed.

‘I think it’s started, Dad,’ she said, looking less like the thirty-nine-year-old features writer she had become and more like the little girl he used to comfort after a bad dream. Her shoulder-length highlighted hair, normally blow-dried into a sleek bob, was scraped back into a ponytail, her porcelain skin free of make-up and her green eyes framed with tortoiseshell glasses.

They had stood by . . .