Coincidence: A Novel Read Free

adult alongside the little girl, but she – or he – was in shadow, and the police could not be sure if this mystery person was Azalea’s missing mother or just an innocent stranger. No unclaimed blue car was found in the fairground car park, or in the streets nearby.
    By the end of the second week, the police operation in Torquay was already being scaled down. It was July, and the holiday season was in full swing. This was the busiest time of the year for the police in this part of England. One officer was still assigned to the case, but she was overdue for maternity leave and when she called in to the Chief Inspector to say that her waters had broken, the case was not reassigned.
    Four months later, Azalea Ives was placed into the care of a second foster family, this time in Exeter. Two more months passed, and approval was given for her adoption. She was adopted by a childless couple from the Cornish village of St Piran. The couple were Luke and Rebecca Folley. They were teachers. So Azalea Ives became Azalea Folley, and the events of 21 June 1982, when a small girl was discovered to be lost at a travelling fair, were gradually forgotten.
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    But there are postscripts to the story of the foundling girl, and these are significant too. In none of these cases did anyone appreciate at the time quite how relevant each of the events might be to the life of Azalea Ives. The first such event occurred in May 1983, almost a year after Azalea’s appearance at the fairground. The body of a young woman, very badly decomposed, was discovered on a beach in North Devon, near Bude. She had been dead for about a year. She lay unidentified in a refrigerated store for eighteen months until instructions were issued for her burial. In 1986, a police constable in Cornwall, carrying out a cold-case review, was able to point to a number of similarities between this case and the case of ‘Girl A’. In particular, he noted, both the dead woman and Girl A had red hair. He speculated that the body at Bude could have been related to Girl A. In particular, he thought, the dead woman might have been Azalea’s mother. His report was seen by an Inspector in Exeter who considered the theory briefly and then dismissed it. The conclusions were too circumstantial. The official explanation for Azalea’s presence at the fairground was still deliberate abandonment, and the Inspector saw no reason to change this. There was no DNA testing, but crucially, the conclusions of the Cornish policeman were diligently recorded on the file.
    The file on Azalea I ves was closed on 6 June 1986, and in 1992 all the documents associated with the case were sealed and sent to Exeter for long-term storage, where they still exist in a brown cardboard document box among several thousand others in a warehouse near the old docks. In all this time only one person consulted them – a private detective called Susan Calendar. We will come to her, in good time.
    Neither Azalea nor the Folleys were ever officially told about the body discovered on the beach; not by the police, at least. There were insufficient grounds to warrant such an intrusion into their lives. And this could have been the end of the official story of Azalea Ives, and in many ways it was, except that the list of postscripts kept on growing. In 1990, eight years after the discovery of the girl, a fifty-year-old man called Carl Morse was arrested in Liskeard, accused of abducting a student nurse from a fairground and raping her. The girl survived the ordeal, escaped from a locked car by kicking her way through the rear windscreen and led the police to her attacker. At his trial, Morse confessed to an earlier abduction. According to Morse, he had been invited by a young woman into her car at a travelling fair in Totnes in 1982. He couldn’t remember the exact date, but records confirmed a fairground had been there for the last two weeks in June. Morse denied having murdered the