Stolen by Lesley Pearse Read Free Book Online Page B

everything.’
    ‘My parents came last night,’ Lotte said, her eyes misty with unshed tears. ‘Well, they said they were my parents, but they didn’t mean anything to me. Are you sure that’s who they are?’
    That remark brought a lump to Dale’s throat, for clearly Lotte had picked up on her parents’ disinterest even though she probably had no memory of what love or friendship actually meant or felt like. How awful it was going to be for her when she did recover her memory and found she was unwanted by her parents, that she’d been raped, and perhaps someone had even tried to drown her. Perhaps it was better to have no memory if that was what it held.
    ‘It’s been a while since they saw you, and you look very different,’ Dale said, stroking Lotte’s hair back from her forehead. ‘Your hair was very long, right down your back and very shiny. You loved the colour pink, and it suited you because you were a very girlie girl.’
    ‘Pink to make the boys wink,’ Lotte said with a smile. But then she frowned. ‘Why did I say that? It just popped out!’
    ‘I expect that’s the way your memory will come back,’ Scott said. ‘A bit here and there, and one bit will loosen another memory and soon it will be a flood. But you need to sleep and get strong again. We’ll come to see you again tomorrow night.’
    As DI Bryan walked back with them to the police car they told him everything that had been said. Dale asked him if he’d been in the room when Lotte’s parents saw her.
    ‘Yes, sadly,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen a less emotional couple. They didn’t touch her once, not a kiss, a squeeze of the hand or a pat on the cheek. Yet they had tears in their eyes when they told me about their other daughter dying. It was all I could do not to slap them round the head and remind them they’ve got another daughter here who needs care and attention badly.’
    ‘What will happen now?’ Dale asked.
    ‘A psychiatrist will be coming in tomorrow morning to see her,’ the policeman said. ‘Let’s hope he has some way of unblocking her memory. We are of course going to run pictures of her in the press again and ask members of the public to come forward if they remember her.’
    ‘What if whatever happened to her was so bad her brain has blocked it out to help her recover?’ Dale asked. ‘I read somewhere that can be the reason for amnesia.’
    ‘Yes, I believe that is so,’ Bryan said. ‘And it’s very frustrating for us police when we need to know who is responsible for her trauma and apprehend them. But I have it on good authority that this kind of amnesia is not permanent.’
    Lotte lay back on the pillows, staring up at the ceiling. It was after eleven now, dark outside and much quieter everywhere. The main lights in the room had been turned off earlier and the nurse had just left the reading lamp above the bed on, turning it away so it didn’t shine down on Lotte’s face.
    People kept asking her how she felt, but she couldn’t explain because she had no idea what she felt like before she ended up in the sea. She wanted to sleep for ever, her whole body ached and there were sore patches which the nurse said had been caused by the shingle of the beach. She kept looking at the purple marks on her wrists, wishing she could recall the face of the person who tied her up. The way Dale and Scott had talked to her made her think she must have been a nice person, so why would anyone want to restrain her?
    Everything in the room felt oddly familiar, not necessarily as if she’d been in here before, but somewhere just like it. But then she supposed most hospitals were more or less the same.
    She found it weird that loss of memory was so selective. It hadn’t stopped her being able to speak, read, use a knife and fork or use the toilet, yet when she was told her name, she didn’t know that.
    ‘Pink to make the boys wink,’ she muttered to herself again. ‘Why did that pop into my head?’
    She could see