Page 252 of The Missing Sister
‘Not completely, but enough to know that you, Mrs McDougal, did not welcome the sisters’ pursuit of you.’
‘Please, call me Merry, and no I did not, but you still haven’t answered the question: why are you here tonight?’
‘Because... forgive me, Merry, if I sound as though I’m talking in riddles. To be honest with you, I never expected this moment to arrive. I have worked for the girls’ father—’
‘Whom they call Pa Salt,’ I butted in.
‘Yes. He’s been like a father to me ever since I have known him. I have worked for him for the whole of my career as a lawyer, and he has always talked of the fact that there was a missing sister, one he could never find, however hard he searched. I joined him in that search when I was old enough to do so. Occasionally, he would call me with a promising lead as to her whereabouts and I would employ a trusted team of private investigators to follow that lead up. Every time, they led to nothing. And then, this time last year, finally, my employer discovered new information, which he assured me was almost certainly accurate. I had very little to work on, but work on it I did.’
I watched the man pause for a moment, then lean forward to pick up the glass of whiskey on the table in front of him. He drained the glass, put it down and looked at me.
‘Merry, I could sit here and tell you the pains that I and the private investigators went to in order to discover who you had become, but...’
I watched him as he shook his head and put his hand to his brow, obviously embarrassed to be showing deep emotion.
‘Excuse me one moment...’
He fumbled in the file on his knee. Accepting and rejecting various pages, he finally drew one out and turned it round to face me.
‘If only I had known how simple the puzzle of identifying you would eventually be, then I could have spared you all you’ve suffered during these past weeks. After all this, we didn’t even need that emerald ring.’ Mr Hoffman pointed to it sitting on my finger, then handed me the sheet of paper. ‘Look,’ he said.
I did look, and once my brain had made sense of the image, I performed the cliché known as a double-take, because I looked again in disbelief.
On the page in front of me was a charcoal portrait ofme.
I looked closer, and discovered that yes, maybe the shape of my jaw was heavier and my eyebrows were a little lighter than the drawing in front of me, but there was no doubt.
‘It’s me, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ Mr Hoffman whispered, ‘it isn’t you, Merry. It is your mother.’
In the following twenty minutes, I couldn’t remember much about what I’d said or what I’d done. That face, which was mine yet wasn’t, stirred in me some primeval reaction I’d been unprepared for. I wanted to stroke the drawing, then I wanted to tear it into shreds. I accepted a whiskey that I didn’t want but drained the glass, and then I cried. Torrents of tears for the mess my life seemed to have become. Whatever I thought I had solved, each time a new puzzle had appeared in its place, along with a gamut of emotions that ended with me in Ambrose’s arms on the sofa, and the lawyer watching from the leather chair.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ I kept saying as I dripped tears all over the charcoal drawing of the me that was my mother.
Eventually, I stopped crying and with Ambrose’s handkerchief, dried my eyes, my cheeks and then patted the photocopy of the face that had apparently borne me into the world. Which was now smudged and ugly.
‘Please, do not worry about that. It is a facsimile of the original,’ said Georg.
As my senses began to return to normal, I moved out of Ambrose’s embrace and sat upright.
‘Merry, if you please, could you give me a little tug upwards?’ Ambrose asked. ‘I think some tea is in order for all. I shall go and make some.’
‘Ambrose, really—’
‘My dear, I’m perfectly capable of making a pot of tea.’
Georg and I sat together in silence. There were so many questions I wanted answers to, but I struggled to know where to start.
‘Georg,’ I managed as I blew my nose for the umpteenth time on Ambrose’s sodden handkerchief. ‘Could you please explain why, if you knew which year I was born, you pursued or the sisters pursued – my daughter, who is only twenty-two?’
‘Because I had no clue that your daughter would be called Mary too. And that you would have passed the ring on to her on her twenty-first. During the past two weeks when the search for you was continuing, having established that they had found Mary McDougal, I was then... unavoidably detained elsewhere. Out of contact with them.’
‘I’m very sorry, Georg, but there are so many things I don’t understand. You say that this charcoal drawing is of my mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you know this?’
