Hold My Hand

by M. J. Ford

  ‘And would you recommend that?’

  The doctor – well-tanned, athletic, expensive-looking wire-rimmed spectacles – spread his hands.

  ‘In most cases, the initial hormone boost should allow us to harvest more than one egg. Of course, probability-wise, you are more likely to conceive the more cycles of fertilisation you undertake.’ He looked at the papers in front of him. ‘Based on your age, any single attempt yields a twenty-two per cent chance of a successful pregnancy.’

  ‘One in five,’ said Jo flatly.

  ‘A little better that that,’ replied the doctor.

  Not great odds either way. Her phone stopped ringing.

  The doctor cocked his head sympathetically and removed his glasses.

  ‘Ms Masters, I realise this is a big decision for anyone, whether a woman of twenty years, or someone older. No fertility treatment is foolproof. But I can assure you that here at Bright Futures, we are solely concerned with providing you with the best possible care and outcomes. Our protocols are designed to the highest medical technology standards in the field. Our results reflect that – we’re in the top ten percentile points of success.’

  ‘So three grand?’ said Jo. If she got the promotion to Detective Inspector, it wouldn’t be a problem. ‘Do the eggs have a best before date?’

  The doctor smiled. ‘Not in practical terms, no.’

  ‘And can I pay in instalments?’

  He looked taken aback. ‘Erm … that isn’t something we usually do.’

  Jo stared at him. Told herself not to get flustered. Just be straight.

  ‘Right, but can you?’

  Christ, I sound desperate.

  The doctor looked away first. ‘There may be ethical considerations,’ he said. ‘If we were to freeze your eggs, then subsequently, through no fault of your own, the payments were to fall into default—’

  ‘Is that a “no” then?’

  The doctor placed his glasses back on. ‘Perhaps you could excuse me for a moment? Hopefully I can discuss the matter with my colleague.’

  Jo nodded and watched him stand up and walk out, leaving her alone in the plush room.

  She let her gaze travel around the dark wood furniture, clean lines, books neatly stacked. Perfect, sanitised order. She wondered how much a gynaecological consultant earned. Probably a hell of a lot more than a DS for Avon and Somerset Police. There was a single photo frame on the desk, facing partly away. Jo leant forward to look. It showed Dr Kasparian with a man who must be his partner – dark-haired, well-groomed facial hair, maybe fifty, but with a carefree face that looked ten years younger – and two teenage boys. All hanging off each other on a leather sofa. They looked perfect too.

  Good for them.

  The door opened and she sat back in her chair.

  ‘Good news,’ said the doctor. ‘Monthly payments for six months should be fine. Would you like my secretary to start the paperwork, or would you like to go away and think about it? There’s really no rush.’

  Isn’t there? thought Jo. Easy for you to say.

  She’d have preferred a year of payments, just to be safe, but she could probably afford it over half a dozen instalments.

  ‘Yes, please,’ she said, and though it galled her to add it, ‘Thank you.’

  The phone in her pocket was ringing again.

  Just leave me alone, Ben. Just for ten fucking minutes.

  * * *

  The paperwork didn’t take long, but the questions got more personal as they went along.

  First, the basics. Name (Josephine Masters); address (she gave the rented place in the south of the city; didn’t need Ben somehow getting mail about this); DOB (as if she needed reminding); occupation (copper). Then medical history. Clean bill of health, apart from the scare last year; alcohol unit intake (everyone lied, right?); do you smoke (no, but gagging for one right now); last period (the 18th); last instance of sexual intercourse (regrettable); last pregnancy (she paused a moment, wondering whether it was the conception date they wanted, or the date of the miscarriage, then opted for the latter). The secretary tapped deftly at the keyboard with manicured fingers. She was perhaps early twenties, a pretty, natural blonde, combining elegance and amiability in a way Jo could never have managed at that age.

  Jo wondered what the young woman thought of her. Did she judge? What did she think of the going-on-forty-year-old sitting opposite, her hair needing a colour, her crow’s feet obvious, her sensible shoes and middle-of-the-range navy suit? Did she wonder why Jo was here, why she didn’t have a partner, if …

  You’re getting bitter, Josephine. Stop it.

  The bank details came last, and then, when the printouts were signed, they set a tentative date for the hormone infusion. Jo knew she’d have to check her shifts and told them she’d be in touch. She was glad to be out of there, stepping onto a quiet mews street in the shadow of the cathedral. Though in the shade, the summer air was warm. She guessed the cottage would once have held a member of the clerical staff. Now the only sign it was a commercial property was the discreet Bright Futures plaque beside the listed front door.

  She checked her phone and saw nine missed calls, all from Ben.

  It was almost eleven. She’d blocked out three hours for the meeting, saying she was taking her mother to the doctor’s in Oxford, so she still had forty-five minutes before she was due back at the station for the weekend briefing. It was Paul’s birthday party that night and she still hadn’t got him a present, though she knew exactly the thing. Her brother, like their dad before him, had started balding in his early thirties, and Bath was the sort of city that still had gentlemen’s outfitters. A quick Google had given her a promising place off Wallford Street. She walked across the cobbles, then stepped out into the throng.

  Bath was never quiet, of course, but Friday lunchtime in the summer holidays was pretty close to Jo’s idea of hell. An engine of commerce. Tourists jostling with street performers, gaggles of teenagers up to nothing. Workers – mostly Europeans and South Americans – on breaks from jobs at hotels. People spilling out of cafes, bars and shops. And here and there, the city’s true denizens – Jo’s bread and butter. The drug addicts, leaning towards their next fix. The pickpockets, swimming with the tides. The petty criminals who existed in every city; the grit in the machine.

  Jo fought through the pedestrians outside the Assembly Rooms before slipping off into a narrower alley, a row of bikes chained up against a set of railings. She found the hat place, and though at first she thought it must be closed, when she pushed the door, it opened, a bell above her clanking. A small, very elderly man with luxuriant white hair and a stoop looked up from behind a counter.

  ‘Good day to you,’ he said.

  Jo smiled at the unexpected chivalry, but just as she was about to speak, her phone rang again. This time the vibration was different.

  ‘Excuse me!’ she said, and she backed out of the shop to take the call.

  ‘Why aren’t you answering?’ said Rob Bridges, her DCI back at the station. ‘Ben’s been trying for the last hour.’

  It took Jo a moment to gain her composure. ‘With my mum,’ she said. ‘It’s in the diary.’

  Bridges breathed a sigh. ‘Fine, can you talk?’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘We’ve got a body. Bradford-on-Avon. A kid.’

  Jo looked at her reflection in the window of the shop, swallowed. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Thames Valley have already sent someone, but I want you there.’

  ‘Why Thames Valley?’

  ‘Something to do with identifying features. They think it’s one of their mispers.’

  ‘Text me the address,’ said Jo. ‘I’ll call when I’m on my way.’

  She hung up. Paul’s present could wait.

  * * *

  It took Jo three minutes to get back to her car, another seven to get out of the car park. She plugged in the address as she did so, but it looked like it was the middle of a random field. Bradford-on-Avon was
a well-to-do market town about five miles out from Bath – all Cotswold stone and shops she could never afford. The sort of place her mum would’ve liked to spend an afternoon, before her world shrank to the four walls of a room in a residential care home. As soon as she was out of traffic, her phone rang again. Ben. This time she answered on the hands-free.

  ‘I’m on my way,’ she said.

  ‘So what’s wrong with your mum?’ No pleasantries.

  ‘Y’know,’ Jo replied airily. ‘What’s right with her? She’s old. I took her to the doctor’s.’

  ‘Really? When you didn’t answer, I rang the home looking for you. She’s there. You’re not. They couldn’t remember the last time you’d visited.’

  Dammit.

  ‘You should have called me on the station line.’

  He didn’t answer for a few seconds, then said, more softly, ‘Can we talk later?’

  Jo’s hands tightened on the wheel. ‘There’s nothing to talk about.’

  ‘It’s been months, Jo. We can’t just avoid the subject forever.’

  ‘There is no subject,’ she said. ‘That’s how breaking up works. Put Rob on.’

  ‘He’s already on his way as well.’

  ‘Well, you fill me in then.’

  Ben gathered himself and gave her the details. A skeleton had been unearthed in the grounds of a derelict house off the Frome Road. They’d found a body by the pumping house of the drained pool. From the size, it could only be a child.

  ‘Any idea when the pool was put in?’ asked Jo. The satnav said she’d be there in twenty-one minutes.

  ‘We’re looking into it – still trying to track the owners of the house. It’s been a wreck for eighteen months. Electrical fault caused a fire, apparently.’

  ‘So what makes them think it’s an Oxford misper?’

  ‘There’s clothing that matches an old file,’ said Ben. ‘A Liverpool football club shirt.’

  Jo’s foot touched the brake involuntarily, and the BMW behind beeped as it drove up into her rear-view mirror.

  ‘You okay?’ asked Ben.

  ‘I’ll be there in fifteen,’ said Jo. She stepped on the accelerator, feeling the engine surge along with her racing heart.

  Chapter 2

  The sign for the Hanover Homes development loomed large over the hedgerows at the side of the B3109. The space promised 240 units, ‘built to house the local community’, whatever that was supposed to mean, here in the middle of nowhere. The road was spattered with mud from the procession of vehicles using the site, and when Jo turned into the entrance, her small car rocked and bounced over the hard ruts in the ground. It hadn’t rained for weeks, and the weather forecasters were saying it was already the driest summer on record.

  She passed a couple of temporary cabins, several stacks of scaffold and a concrete truck. A squad car was parked up alongside her boss Rob Bridges’ scarlet Volvo, along with a battered Discovery, a Toyota and a police-issue Vauxhall. DCI Bridges, in plain clothes, was talking to a woman in a hard hat, making notes in his book.

  Jo killed the engine and climbed out.

  ‘Can I see?’ she said straight away.

  ‘Who’s this?’ said an older, silver-haired man whose grey pallor suggested he was at least one heart attack down. His suit looked thick, maybe woollen, and completely wrong for July. Jo frowned; there was something familiar about him.

  ‘Detective Jo Masters, meet Harry Ferman,’ said Bridges. ‘There’s a DS from Thames Valley round the back already.’

  The older man held out a massive, paw-like hand, and Jo shook it.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said. His teeth seemed a little too big for his mouth, and she guessed they were dentures.

  As he led her under the secondary perimeter police tape and around a bend between overgrown hedges, Jo wondered who he was. He had police written all over him, but he had to be at least sixty.

  A substantial Georgian house came into view at the end of the drive. Though the stone was still pale in places, a lot of it was stained by sooty streaks, darker above the paneless window arches. The roof was a mess of exposed joists, many collapsed already. A uniformed officer took their details at a second line of tape by the side of the house and gestured them through.

  ‘Who found the remains?’ said Jo.

  Ferman was wheezing a little. ‘Skull came up in the claw of the digger when they were excavating round the pool. Must have been a hell of shock.’

  It is a shame it’s been disturbed, thought Jo.

  At the side of the house, what had been a set of French doors opened onto a wide terrace with stone balustrades and steps leading down to the old pool. On the left-hand side, a two-person forensics team was already at work, erecting a white awning over the site. Jo greeted them, and they nodded back from behind their masks. A slight man, just a few years older than her, with dark, sharp features, was crouching nearby.

  ‘You must be Masters,’ he said, standing up.

  ‘Call me Jo,’ she replied.

  The man straightened. ‘Detective Sergeant Andy Carrick, Thames Valley. Pleased to meet you.’

  Jo looked behind him. The bones were dark, clotted with mud, but still recognisably in the shape of a body. She could see a small skull. They lay there, half-wrapped in a piece of semi-transparent plastic, which, she thought, was probably what had preserved the clothing too – a scrap of dirty red material. The forensics team had an open case and Jo fished for a glove and booties from the dispensers. She donned the gear, then edged closer to the body to check the yellow lettering on the front of the shirt: ‘Crown Paints’ – and a Liverpool FC crest.

  ‘You really think it’s Dylan Jones?’ she asked, peering at the bones. It was impossible to say much at all, but pathology wasn’t her field. When it was all cleaned up, they’d get more answers.

  ‘Looks about right,’ said Ferman. ‘You’re familiar with the case then?’

  Jo glanced at him, wondering what he was doing here. He didn’t look at all well, and she’d guess he was way past retirement. But she was sure their paths had crossed before.

  ‘Sort of,’ she said.

  ‘You look too young,’ said Ferman. ‘It was over thirty years ago.’

  ‘Flattery will get you nowhere,’ said Jo. ‘I was a witness to the kidnapping. I was eight.’

  ‘You serious?’ said Carrick. Jo nodded, and he whistled. ‘I’m not normally suspicious, but that’s a coincidence and a half.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Ferman. ‘I remember you!’

  His face had lifted, and the years fell off. And then Jo realised where she’d seen him.

  ‘You were there, that day,’ she said.

  Ferman nodded. ‘I was still training for CID. Came with my gaffer.’

  Jo edged back as one of the forensics team approached with a camera. ‘My brother made the call,’ she said. ‘Someone had cut the temporary line from the circus. He had to run to the nearest farmhouse. You came to my house and took a statement.’

  ‘You couldn’t stop crying.’

  ‘I thought it was my fault.’

  It was my fault.

  Ferman came closer, moving with difficulty down the steps, until he was standing beside Jo and Carrick, looking at the remains.

  ‘You were the only witness,’ he said. ‘And pretty reliable for a young girl. Still, it wasn’t much to go on.’ Though he was staring in the direction of the skeleton, he had a faraway look in his eyes. ‘We interviewed over forty people,’ he said. ‘Didn’t get a damn thing.’

  Jo heard the scuffle of footsteps and looked up to see DCI Bridges.

  ‘We’ve got an address for the parents, Jo,’ he said.

  ‘Still the place off the Banbury Road?’ asked Ferman.

  Bridges looked impressed. ‘That’s right. I think we owe them a visit.’

  ‘Bit premature, guv?’ said Jo. ‘Shouldn’t we wait for a positive ID?’ She glanced at the child’s skull. ‘Dental comparison?’

  ‘Dylan was seven,’ sa
id Ferman. ‘I doubt there were any records. At least, I don’t remember any at the time.’

  ‘Ben’s got Carter looking into when the pool was built,’ said Bridges. ‘We’ll need some swabs from the parents.’

  ‘And you want me to do it?’ asked Jo.

  ‘Given your connection with the case, I think there’s a sort of poetry to it, don’t you?’ said Carrick. He sounded pleased to be rid of the cold case.

  ‘What connection’s that?’ said Bridges.

  Jo explained, briefly, staring at the remains. Nothing poetic there. It was a dead kid.

  ‘Gosh – isn’t that uncanny?’ he said.

  ‘Want a lift back to Oxford?’ Carrick asked Ferman.

  ‘I’ll accompany Detective Masters to the parents’ house,’ said Ferman. ‘If she doesn’t mind, that is.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Jo. The thought of such a steady presence was comforting.

  As Ferman and the others went to sign themselves out of the crime scene, Jo remained for a few moments. One of the forensics team was photographing the site from every possible angle, and Jo knew they wouldn’t be done here until it was dark, would spend hours scouring the earth for any extra material. The body might get moved tomorrow, and they’d likely have it bagged and driven to Salisbury for the coroner to take samples and try to discern the cause of death. Jo stared at the skeleton, trying to imagine it as the little boy from the circus that day.

  In truth, she could barely remember Dylan Jones, other than his red hair and the look of pure gratitude he’d given her when she’d let him take her final kick on the football game. In the weeks following the summer holidays had taken over, and then it was school again. Life had moved on, and though she’d occasionally thought of Dylan after, it was only ever fleeting, and mostly with an uneasy sense of guilt. She guessed her mum and dad would have done their best to keep her away from the unfolding investigation, moving any lurid headlines out of reach, switching over the channel if it came on the news. It would be next to impossible these days, but in the era of four TV stations and no internet, sheltering your kids wouldn’t have been all that hard.

  There’d been a bit of teasing at school, but kids could be pretty brutal without really meaning it. She wondered about the last time she’d seen Dylan, hand-in-hand with his abductor. Had there been fear on his face, or had he been struggling? She didn’t think so.