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I sprinted away without waiting for him to reply. Down in the cellar, Mr. Marley was probably freaked out, but who cared?
The door to the Dragon Hall was open just a crack, and even from a distance, I could hear my mum’s agitated voice.
“What’s this meant to be, an interrogation? I’ve told you my reasons already. I wanted to protect my daughter, and I hoped Charlotte would be the one to inherit the gene. That’s all there is to it.”
“Sit down again.” That was unmistakably Mr. Whitman, in the tone he used for troublesome students.
Chairs were shifted. Several people cleared their throats. I slowly stole closer.
“We did warn you, Grace.” Falk de Villiers spoke in icy tones. Mum was probably staring at her shoes and wondering why the hell she’d taken so much trouble with her outfit. I leaned back against the wall by the door, so that I could hear them better.
“It was stupid of you to think we wouldn’t find out the truth.” Dr. White’s grumpy voice.
Not another squeak out of Mum.
“We went on a little excursion to the Cotswolds yesterday to visit a Mrs. Dawn Heller,” said Falk. “That name means something to you, doesn’t it?”
When Mum still said nothing, he went on, “She’s the midwife who helped to bring Gwyneth into the world. Since you paid the rent of her holiday cottage with your credit card not so long ago, I’d really have expected you to remember her better.”
“Dear heaven, what have you done to the poor woman?” exclaimed Mum.
“Nothing, of course. What in the world are you thinking of?” That was Mr. George.
And Mr. Whitman, his voice dripping with sarcasm, added, “But she seemed to think we wanted to involve her in Satanic rites of some kind. She threw a fit of hysterics, crossing herself the whole time. And when she saw Jake, she almost fell down in a faint.”
“I was only going to give her a tranquilizing injection,” grumbled Dr. White.
“In the end, however, she calmed down enough for us to have a reasonably sensible conversation with her.” That was Falk de Villiers again. “And she told us the very interesting story of the night when Gwyneth was born. It sounded like something out of a cross between a fairy tale and a horror story. An honest but credulous midwife is called out to a young girl in labor. The girl has been living in a small terraced house in Durham, hiding away from a Satanic sect. The cruel sect, fixated on numerological rituals, is after not only the girl but also her baby. The midwife doesn’t know exactly what the Satanists plan to do with the poor little thing, but her imagination obviously works overtime. She has such a kind heart, and she is also being paid such a considerable sum of money—you can tell me how you came by it sometime, Grace—that after helping the baby into the world in a home birth, she falsifies the date on the child’s birth certificate. And she promises never to tell anyone a word about the deal.”
There was silence for some time. Then Mum said, a little defiantly, “Well, what about it? That’s exactly what I’ve already told you.”
“And so we thought ourselves, at first,” said Mr. Whitman. “But then we found that a few details of Mrs. Heller’s story surprised us.”
“You were almost twenty-eight in 1994—but yes, admittedly in the midwife’s eyes you could still have been considered a young girl,” Falk went on. “In that case, however, who was the anxious, red-haired sister of the mother-to-be whom Mrs. Heller mentioned?”
“She was getting on in years at the time,” said Mum quietly. “Sounds as if she’s senile by now.”
“Possibly. But she had no difficulty at all in recognizing the young girl in a photograph,” said Mr. Whitman. “The young girl who had a baby daughter that night.”
“It was a photograph of Lucy,” said Falk.
His words hit me like a punch in the stomach. As an icy silence spread in the Dragon Hall, my knees gave way, and I slowly slid down the wall to the floor.
“That’s … that’s a mistake,” I finally heard Mum whisper. Footsteps were coming toward me along the corridor, but I was unable to turn my head. Only when he bent over me did I realize that it was Gideon.
“What’s going on?” he whispered, crouching down on the floor in front of me.
“A mistake, Grace?” I could hear Falk de Villiers quite clearly. “The woman also recognized you in a photograph, as the supposed big sister who handed her an envelope with an extraordinarily large sum of money in it. And she recognized the man who held Lucy’s hand while she was giving birth! My brother!”
And as if it hadn’t quite gone home to me yet, he added, “Gwyneth is the child of Paul and Lucy.”
I let out an odd sort of whimper. Gideon, who had turned very pale, took my hands.
Inside the Dragon Hall, my mum began crying.
Except that she wasn’t my mum.
“None of it would have been necessary if you’d all of you left them alone,” she sobbed. “If you hadn’t pursued them so mercilessly.”
