‘But that information must be available somewhere? Through the adoption agency?’
‘You’d have thought so, but Marina had a rather unusual early life.’
‘In what way?’
‘She was found drifting in a rubber dinghy in the sea off Brighton. Only about two at the time, so very little language to give a clue to where she came from. The view was that the dinghy had belonged to a larger boat that had been smuggling in illegal immigrants. Whether that’s true or not is impossible to know. As is whether the larger boat sank, taking down her parents with it. Some people reckoned from her looks — pale blue eyes, high cheekbones — that she came from somewhere that used to be part of the Soviet bloc. No idea if that was true. All conjecture.
‘The facts, on the other hand, are that Marina was taken into care. Her name, incidentally, was given to her because the dinghy was found floating near Brighton Marina. The press at the time came up with the nickname, and it stuck.
‘Anyway, I was married back then, and it was becoming clear that we weren’t going to be able to have children, and I was keen to get on with adopting before the authorities thought we were too old. So Marina became our daughter.’
‘And your husband? Is he still on the scene?’
Susan Holland let out a derisive ‘Huh’, then added, ‘He went the way of all men. Or at least all the ones I get involved with.’
‘So how old was Marina when you adopted her?’
‘Five. And those years in care hadn’t done her much good, which, added to God knows what traumas she’d suffered before that, meant. . Well, Marina was never the easiest child. Her father walking out didn’t help either.’
‘But going back to the DNA, surely there must have been things of hers in the house that the police could have got a match from? A toothbrush or. .?’
‘I’m sure there were. Still are. But persuading the police that they should be channelling valuable resources into doing those kinds of tests was never going to happen. As I said, they’d written me off as the hysterical mother of a grumpy teenager.’
‘Susan, what makes you think that the remains found in Fedborough Lake might be those of Marina?’
‘Timing as much as anything. That dry summer was the year after Marina disappeared.’
The two women looked at each other. Both knew how flimsy Susan Holland’s reasoning was. And both knew the level of neediness that made her clutch at so fragile a straw.
But Carole Seddon didn’t comment. Instead she asked, ‘Could you tell me the circumstances of Marina’s disappearance?’
Apparently relieved at the direction of the questioning, Susan Holland was more than ready to reply. ‘All right. We’re talking seven years ago, more than that now, nearly eight. Marina was sixteen going on twenty-six. A seething vat of hormones and confusion. Every teenager reaches a point where they question their own identity. They don’t know where they’re going, they want someone to define them. They’re full of questions about who they are, what their place in life is. Well, given her complex background, Marina had more of those questions than most kids of the same age.
‘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.
