“He’s dead?”
“Yes.” Ollie pried Shay’s fingers from his arm and guided him away from the grave to a nearby bench. “I know his story, and your mother’s, but it’s not an easy one.”
“I want to know.”
“I know you do, but it doesn’t have to be like this. I can turn the camera off and we can go someplace else.”
“Like where?”
“Anywhere.”
Shay shook his head. “The camera is why we’re here—both of us. We need to finish the show.”
Ollie didn’t argue. But he gave Shay a moment while he dug a folder from the bag Shay hadn’t noticed at his feet. When he straightened, he nodded. “Ready?”
“I’m ready.”
Ollie held out a piece of paper. “This is a newspaper report from 1997. A woman, Ava Martin, went missing on her way home from work. Three days later, her body was found on Hawksworth Moor. She’d been murdered… by her ex-boyfriend.”
Shay blew out a breath. “By my father?”
“Yes. He was tried and convicted and hung himself in Wakefield Prison not long after he received a life sentence.”
My father was a murderer.Nausea roiled through Shay. His fingers tightened around the newspaper report, crumpling it.
Ollie took it away. “From what I understand, it wasn’t a premeditated killing, but Rudek had multiple convictions for petty violence and drug offences. Ava had reported him for domestic violence more than once, but no charges had ever been filed.”
“Was she my mother?”
“No.”
“So who was?”
Ollie pressed another piece of paper into Shay’s hands. A police report this time, dated six months before Ava Martin’s death. A house fire on a Leeds housing estate. A twenty-six year old woman had died. Her name was Francesca King.
King.Shay’s mind raced back over every name Ollie had ever given him. Joyce King, the woman who’d built ships in the Second World War had once been a Kaspersen. She’d married and had children… grandchildren.Jesus Christ.“Are you telling me my mother is dead too?”
“I’m sorry, Shay.”
Shay sat back on the bench. The newspaper picture of Francesca King was grainy and blurred; he could hardly make her out, and for some reason, he was glad of it. The photographs of his relatives from centuries ago had excited him, his connection to them distant enough for curiosity to be his strongest emotion, even when he’d learned their fates.
This was different. These people were his parents… by blood, at least. “Do you know anything about Francesca?”
“A little,” Ollie said. “She had no siblings, and her parents—your grandparents—are long dead, but she was an accomplished hockey player, so I’ve found some reports and stuff from when she was at school. Do you want to see them?”
“Maybe later.” Shay cast his gaze back to his father’s grave, chasing the missing links that had led to this point. “Where was I when the fire happened? Was I there?”
“Not as far as I can tell,” Ollie said. “That’s what I was checking this morning, an archived report of the fire. You would only have been a few months old, but there was no mention of a baby.”
“But I was two when I was adopted, and I’d been in foster for only six months before that. What happened to me in between?”
Ollie bit his lip. “That’s part of the reason I brought you here… more than for Rudek. I’m going to put the camera on the gimbal, okay? Then we’re going to head over there.”
Shay followed the jerk of Ollie’s head to the back of the graveyard. “To the trees?”
“Yeah. Just give me a sec.”
Shay couldn’t wait. Ollie briefly forgotten, he rose from the bench and drifted to the back of the cemetery. There were no graves there, only trees of varying ages, plaques and tablets, and a couple of benches. Memorials. Shay scanned every name until his breath caught.
