‘I never told Monica I’d got married, I still had bank accounts in my maiden name having not changed them over, I did all my contact via a solicitor so it was easy enough. I’d walked away once and I knew I was going to do it again and this time, for good.
‘Hudson, I walked away from everything. I never looked back. I didn’t think she had either but now I know that she did, once before and again now.’ She looked up and out of the sunroof as droplets of rain tapped on the glass and bounced right off again.
‘How did you leave it with Archie when he came to the airbase yesterday?’
‘I told him I didn’t know what else I could do. Monica doesn’t want to be found. I told him I had a life to live, a job to do.’
‘There’s a but in there somewhere.’
‘But it’s not that simple. When I thought the patient at the scene we attended might be Monica, it was as if my past came at me at full throttle – every moment replayed in front of me, every choice that took me in a different direction. I couldn’t bear the thought that the victim could very well be my sister and when I realised it wasn’t, the relief almost overwhelmed me. And yet, when I saw Archie at the airbase, all the pain they both caused me was all I could think about.’
‘It sounds like you need to let him in a bit, talk to him. It might help you and if it doesn’t, then you can move forwards in a different way.’
They sat there a couple of minutes more before Hudson put a hand on Nadia’s. ‘We should go in. Are you ready?’
‘Ready as I’ll ever be.’
The Wallaces were welcoming under the circumstances, their grief was hard to judge when they spoke to Hudson and Nadia, who avoided any look of surprise. They’d both had practice at this, with patients and families, where your opinions and your own emotions had to take a back seat.
‘We hadn’t seen her for almost a year,’ said Mrs Wallace, who’d asked them to call her Jane.
‘She hung around with a bad crowd.’ Bobby, Marissa’s father, wasn’t good at making eye contact. Whether it was caused byhis sorrow or reluctance to talk to outsiders about his only child, Hudson wasn’t sure.
Marissa’s bag had been found by the police in the hedge at the side of the road; it must have been thrown there on impact. Inside the bag had been the purse with the photograph of Lena wrapped in the blanket Hudson and Nadia had seen the night the baby was left at the airbase.
‘We’re happy to answer any questions you may have.’ Nadia spoke gently and mainly to Jane because Bobby’s face and body language was so closed off. He might well still be in shock; sometimes it took a lot longer than hours or days to process something so monumental.
Hudson addressed both parents, a folder of information on his lap even though he didn’t want to bombard them with too much detail. Some families wanted all of it; others wanted very little at all. ‘We have the full reports from our crew of the emergency pre-hospital care your daughter received, if you’d like us to go through it.’
Jane’s fingers traced the edges of the silver crucifix around her neck. ‘Did she suffer?’
‘From what we know, it was very quick.’ Nadia put a hand on the one that wasn’t preoccupied with the crucifix and kept it there while Hudson went through the various steps that the road ambulance paramedics and then the critical care paramedics had performed.
‘The police say there was a lot of alcohol in her system.’ Jane was by now gripping Nadia’s hand. ‘Was that true?’
Bobby turned away, looked out of the window.
‘Yes, that’s correct.’
‘And that she walked out in front of a car.’ Jane gasped, closed her eyes, gathered herself.
‘That’s right,’ said Nadia.
Bobby still had his back to them when he spoke again. ‘Marissa was trouble, big trouble, for years. We didn’t know what to do with her. In the end, we fought so much about the way she was living her life – the clubbing, the drinking, the drugs on occasion – that one day, she walked out and never came back.’
‘We thought she’d have her time away from us and then come home,’ said Jane. ‘But a few days went by, a week, a month. It was almost a year since she left and we heard from her twice, when she needed money. We paid it into her account; she sounded in a state both times she called. I begged her to come home… I said that we could fix this. And now we’ll never get the chance to make things right.’
Nadia wrapped Jane in a hug, rocked her while she cried.
‘I’ll never forgive myself,’ said Bobby. ‘If I hadn’t been so stubborn, so angry with her…’
‘She had a baby without her mum,’ Jane wailed, ‘a baby, our grandbaby.’
When things calmed a little, Hudson and Nadia talked about Lena, how well she’d been cared for prior to being left at the airbase, they discussed next steps with the social worker, let the couple know that Hudson would liaise with both parties on that.
By the time Hudson and Nadia left the Wallaces, they were spent. The couple had so much grief, so much blame and regret, and none of it was going to change the fact that their daughter was gone.
‘What happens next?’ Nadia asked as they did up their seat belts ready to leave. ‘You probably said when we were in there, but…’
