The Lost Child Read online

  Copyright © 2019 Emily Gunnis Ltd

  The right of Emily Gunnis to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This Ebook edition first published in 2019

  by HEADLINE REVIEW

  An imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the

  Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  Cover images: garden © Tuan Tran/Getty Images and girl © Rekha Garton/Trevillion Images; gate © kzww, shadows © milano1968 and leaves © Mongkol Rujitham, all at Shutterstock.

  Author photo © Laurie Fletcher

  eISBN 978 1 4722 5503 7

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Praise for Emily Gunnis

  By Emily Gunnis

  About the Book

  Dedication

  Dear Reader

  Prologue

  Chapter One: Harvey

  Chapter Two: Harriet

  Chapter Three: Iris

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five: Rebecca

  Chapter Six: Harvey

  Chapter Seven: Harriet

  Chapter Eight: Iris

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten: Rebecca

  Chapter Eleven: Harvey

  Chapter Twelve: Harriet

  Chapter Thirteen: Iris

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen: Rebecca

  Chapter Sixteen: Iris

  Chapter Seventeen: Harvey

  Chapter Eighteen: Harriet

  Chapter Nineteen: Rebecca

  Chapter Twenty: Iris

  Chapter Twenty-One: Harvey

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Harriet

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Rebecca

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Iris

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Harvey

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Harriet

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Harvey

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Harriet

  Chapter Thirty: Iris

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Harvey

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Harriet

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Rebecca

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Harvey

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Harriet

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Iris

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Rebecca

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  An extract from The Girl in the Letter

  About the Author

  Emily Gunnis previously worked in TV drama and lives in Brighton with her young family. She is one of the four daughters of Sunday Times bestselling author Penny Vincenzi. Her first novel, The Girl in the Letter, was an international bestseller and has been translated into twelve languages.

  For more about Emily, visit her on Twitter @EmilyGunnis and on Instagram @emilygunnis.

  Praise for The Girl in the Letter:

  ‘I was gripped by The Girl in the Letter. The story is compelling, twisty, heart-wrenching and thought-provoking. A novel that stays with you’ Sophie Kinsella

  ‘A great book, truly hard to put down. Fast paced, brilliantly plotted and desperately sad at times – all hallmarks of a bestseller’ Lesley Pearse

  ‘What a heartfelt emotional story, made even more so because it’s based on a shocking truth. I raced through it, involved, moved and gripped’ Fanny Blake

  ‘As moving as it is disturbing. A real triumph’ Woman & Home

  ‘A pacy, heartrending read’ S magazine, Sunday Express

  ‘A gripping story that will take you on an emotional rollercoaster’ My Weekly

  ‘Complex, thought-provoking and heart-wrenching’ Heat

  ‘Rich with period detail and believable characters’ Woman

  ‘Poignant. . . A powerful family drama’ Woman’s Weekly

  ‘You won’t be able to put this book down. We guarantee it’ Take a Break

  ‘Gripping’ Bella

  ‘Immersive and heart-wrenching’ Candis

  ‘Not to be missed. A must-read this season’ Reader’s Digest

  By Emily Gunnis

  The Girl in the Letter

  The Lost Child

  About the Book

  A tragic death.

  A missing baby.

  A long-kept secret.

  1960. Thirteen-year-old Rebecca and her mother live in fear of Rebecca’s father’s violent temper. As a storm batters Seaview Cottage one night, Rebecca hears a visitor at the door and an argument ensues. By the time the police arrive, the visitor has fled and both Rebecca’s parents are dead. No one believes Rebecca’s story that she heard a stranger downstairs . . .

  2014. Iris, a journalist, is sent to cover the story of a new mother on the run with her desperately ill baby, as the police race against time to find them. When the trail leads back to Seaview Cottage, the childhood home of Iris’s own mother, Rebecca, Iris must unravel the events of the night Rebecca is desperate to forget for Seaview Cottage to give up its secrets.

  For my husband Steven,

  my love, my life, my reacher of high things;

  I didn’t know I was lost until I found you.

  Ever has it been that love knows not

  its own depth until the hour of separation.

  Kahlil Gibran

  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.

  Prologue

  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.