The Dead Line

by Holly Watt

  Emily stopped talking. She gazed across the pond, to the chestnut trees in the distance. The sky was cold pastels.

  ‘She lived in Yorkshire, and we would drive up and down for the scans and everything. I got to know her really quite well. I’d go up for some of the midwife appointments. I heard the heartbeat.’

  Casey imagined Emily picking out baby clothes, appraising the candy-coloured prams.

  ‘We got the call late one night,’ said Emily. ‘The surrogate – Naomi, her name is – had gone into labour. Dominic and I, we drove through the night. We were so excited. Thrilled. Grinning, like a couple of idiots. And we got there, to the hospital, just after the baby was born.’

  The wind caught the chestnut trees, sending branches rustling like secrets.

  ‘And then Naomi decided that she didn’t want us to see the baby.’ Emily spoke as if she were reciting a story. ‘Not that night, she said. We tried to stay calm. We went to a hotel. The Premier Inn, just down the road. It’s funny, what you remember. Plastic carpets, and a bored teenager on reception, and windows you couldn’t open even a crack. We lay on the bed all night, the two of us. Eyes wide open, face to face, promising each other again and again that it would be all right. That Naomi would feel differently in the morning. That there was hope.’

  Emily rubbed her face for a second.

  ‘But the next morning, Naomi hadn’t changed her mind. The nurse said that she was keeping her. And that was that. She was keeping our baby. I fainted, right there in the hospital entrance. When I came to, I was looking up at all these pale faces. They were staring down at me as if I were some sort of experiment.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have fought it? If Dominic was genetically the father?’

  ‘Our lawyers said we could,’ said Emily. ‘But the law is so hazy. Legally, Naomi was the mother, and that was the end of it. They lived in a lovely house, right up near the moors. Nice enough place, nice enough family. It would have been very hard to show that they weren’t the perfect parents. Brutal, the lawyers warned us. Recent court cases have been more sympathetic to the intended parents, but back then . . . I could have killed Naomi. I hated her, and I’ve never been that person.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Casey.

  ‘I drove up to near where they lived once,’ said Emily. ‘Parked the car just above their house. You could look down at the house from the road. I could see the washing on the line, and two cars parked in the little driveway. It looked normal. I imagined our child, my child, just learning to walk.’

  Casey imagined it. The car parked awkwardly up on the moor. The gorse, and the heather, and the beautiful girl crying over the steering wheel.

  ‘I went a bit mad,’ said Emily. ‘I saw her everywhere, our baby, the girl she would be. I kept seeing glimpses of her, in every face we saw. By the time the courts started finding in favour of the intended parents, it was too late. She would have been a child, by then. You couldn’t . . . You couldn’t just take her.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Casey said again.

  ‘I thought about it though, you know. A baby, somewhere. Anywhere. Just grabbing, and running. I can see how people get to that point. How women end up . . . But then I imagine another woman glancing up, one morning. To that empty pram in the front garden. And I couldn’t. I couldn’t . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I know. Everyone is terribly sorry.’

  In the park, all around them, women pushed prams, wiped noses, lost tempers. Everyday, every day.

  Emily turned towards Casey, meeting her eyes. ‘So you see why I can’t give up this child. Not again. I can’t bear it. When Dr Greystone suggested this, it seemed like a miracle. Thousands of people have gone to places like India and Thailand and Nepal. And they don’t ask all these questions, so for all they know, anything could be happening there. We thought we would help people. I was promised that the women volunteered, that they wanted to do it. I had no idea . . .’

  I, not we.

  Casey was silent.

  ‘Oh God.’ The words burst out of Emily.

  The little girl in the red coat had run out of bread. Gently, her mother tugged at the tiny hand. A swan lumbered past, awkward on the paving stones.

  Emily’s shoulders slumped.

  ‘I have to do it, don’t I?’ It was as if she was talking to herself.

  Casey stared across the park, to where the children came to play.

  ‘I’ll talk to Dominic. I promise. I will talk to him.’

  23

  Casey bit her nails to the quick, waiting for the Burton-Smiths. Wait, and wait, and wait. Over the years, she had learned patience, quite against her nature.

  Dash stopped beside her desk. ‘I’m just back from lunch. Everything OK?’ He waited for her answer.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You sure?’ Ask the same question all the different ways, he told her once, and really listen to the answers.

  ‘Yes.’

  A pause. ‘Anything new on this story?’

  ‘I went to see Greystone’s house this morning,’ Casey leapt on the change of subject. ‘It’s up in Hampstead. Amazing place.’

  The avenue was even more opulent than the sprawl of Surrey. The Greystones’ house was a mansion: pillars and dark brick, peering suspiciously down a driveway.

  Next door to the Greystones, a house sagged. Windows barred by thick steel plates, the roof beginning to go. The grounds were a riot of brambles and green, a secret garden forgotten.

  On this Hampstead street, the houses were so valuable that they were allowed to rot. Mere bricks were almost worthless. This was a land of gold taps and thirty pieces of silver, maybe, where foreign princes bought sanctuary for ever, as an expensive refuge, far from the mob. A safe room from the world. There, always, just in case.

  As Casey walked again past the Greystone house, a black Porsche Cayenne powered down the street towards her, the gates purring open at its approach. The Porsche jerked to a careless halt in front of the house, and for a moment, Casey caught a glimpse of a woman stepping up to the front door. Greystone’s wife, Casey thought: Clio Greystone. Understated elegance. A black jersey and grey capri pants, blonde hair caught back by her sunglasses. The woman walked quickly to the house, a bounce in her step, the sun glinting off her hair.

  ‘Greystone seems to have a lot of money then,’ said Dash.

  Follow the money, still the battle cry of any reporter.

  ‘Yes,’ said Casey, ‘there’s certainly a lot of it there.’

  ‘Good. What else is—?’

  ‘Look over there.’ Casey dodged more questions.

  Dash stared across the office at Eric’s desk. An angry woman in a furry cat disguise was sitting on the floor beside his desk.

  ‘What,’ Dash raised an eyebrow, ‘is that woman doing there?’

  ‘It’s Xav’s fault.’ Eric scowled at the columnist a few desks away. ‘He wrote something about vegans that the vegans didn’t like, and she came rampaging into the office this morning, shouting and screaming. She shrieked, “Which one is Xavier Crittenden?” Xav pointed at me, and now she’s chained herself to my bloody desk. It’s not fair.’

  ‘Where the hell was Jose?’ Dash asked, knowing the security guard had been flirting with the trainee barista next door.

  ‘Fuck knows.’ Xavier was enjoying himself hugely.

  ‘Is she pro-vegan or pro-meat?’ Dash asked.

  ‘I’ – Xavier flicked through his English-Latin dictionary – ‘have no idea.’

  ‘It’s all right for you.’ Eric glowered at the woman, who glowered back. ‘But I’ve got to write six hundred words on potato farming and I’m on deadline. It’s very distracting.’

  ‘Six hundred words on potato farming?’ Xavier looked appalled. ‘Christ, what is this paper coming to?’

  ‘Piss off back to doing your expenses,’ Eric snapped. ‘About the only time you get creative.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ Dash cut them off. ‘Has someone called
a locksmith?’

  As he turned back to the investigations room, Casey’s phone rang. She pounced on it.

  ‘Casey?’ Emily’s voice.

  24

  The kitchen was sleek, glossy, hardly used. Most of the room was an extension, built out into the dark, spotlit garden. The roof was a cage of white steel and glass.

  The tulips – stems cut down, flowering pink now – were in a blue vase on the table, looking oddly out of place.

  ‘I don’t really cook,’ Emily said vaguely. She was looking for wineglasses, opening and closing cupboards. She smiled at Casey, almost conspiratorially, and Casey found herself smiling back.

  Casey tried to imagine Emily painting in this house, surrounded by buff and biscuit, tan and taupe. She couldn’t.

  Dominic was sitting at the kitchen island, glowering at Miranda. Miranda met his eye, her smile quite empty.

  ‘How?’ Dominic stared at Casey. ‘How can you possibly pass yourself off as Emily?’

  ‘They look similar enough,’ Miranda said briskly. ‘Same general description. Brown hair, grey eyes, quite tall. You would give us your passports, and Casey and one of our colleagues would travel out to Bangladesh together. They can carry their own passports for border control. But they would take yours too, in case whoever you meet up with wanted to check. Unless someone had met both Casey and Emily, they wouldn’t know the difference.’

  ‘Was that all?’ Emily sounded wondering. ‘Was that all you were looking for? Back in that waiting room?’

  She was quieter than she had been in the park, almost distracted. Oddly likeable, even now, Casey thought. A naive charm, too trusting.

  Dominic stared at the ceiling, his anger visible in glints, like white-topped waves in a storm. Casey wondered what it was like for him, living in this house. That hollow key sound, every evening.

  There had been a floorplan, in the estate agent’s particulars. Casey had glanced at it. Up the elegant staircase, down a corridor, third door on the right: a lovely bedroom, windows to the garden, photographs of toys, a cot, clouds stencilled on the ceiling.

  I know too much about you, Casey thought, and far too little.

  ‘What happens,’ said Dominic, ‘when you get her home? Our daughter. Would you go to the authorities then?’

  ‘You’d be our source,’ said Miranda. ‘We always protect our sources.’

  ‘How can you be sure? We’d end up all over the Post.’

  ‘You have my word,’ said Miranda.

  Dominic looked at her with near-contempt.

  ‘How,’ Emily said wonderingly, ‘do you get to make that decision? What gives you the right?’

  Miranda tilted her head and stared at her.

  ‘Who,’ Dominic straightened up finally, ‘would stand in for me, if we go ahead with this mad idea?’

  Miranda glanced at Casey. ‘I know someone. He’s excellent at this sort of thing. Done it before.’

  ‘No one from the Harley Street office actually travels out to Bangladesh with the couples.’ Casey seized the opportunity to drag the conversation back to logistics. ‘We know there is a fixer who organises it all on the ground. You wait in a hotel in Dhaka, and they just bring the baby to you.’

  They were nodding, Casey realised. They knew this already.

  ‘Greystone said they didn’t keep notes,’ Dominic said unwillingly. ‘Our names would never be connected to all this. They don’t have photographs of us to send out to Dhaka.’

  You knew, thought Casey, and she watched Emily’s eyes swoop to her husband.

  ‘I go out there instead.’ Casey moved the conversation on swiftly. ‘And find out as much as I can about the whole operation. Where they keep the women, who they are, how they find them. And I’ll try and work out who is organising the passports at the High Commission now, too.’

  ‘You don’t,’ Miranda asked Dominic, ‘have any idea who organises the passports at the moment?’

  But he only shook his head. Casey wondered if he might lie out of habit.

  ‘And would the passport be all right,’ Emily’s nerves surged, ‘doing it this way?’

  ‘We’ve worked it out,’ Casey didn’t quite answer.

  ‘Couldn’t we go?’ Emily begged again. ‘I’d ask all the questions, I promise. I would find out everything you wanted to know.’

  ‘We only have one chance,’ said Casey. ‘It would be far too risky, you doing it. And it could be dangerous.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re doing, Emily,’ said Miranda bluntly.

  ‘I could try,’ Emily whispered.

  ‘It wouldn’t work,’ Miranda flattened her.

  The Burton-Smiths turned to each other.

  ‘Dominic?’ Emily’s voice was high, wavering.

  ‘I love you.’

  And Casey saw that he did. It was for Emily that he had rammed together the pretty little jigsaw pieces of their lives, although he knew they would never quite fit.

  ‘You promise?’ Emily turned to Casey. ‘You promise that if we do this, you will protect us for ever? Never give up our names? Never tell anyone about our baby? We can just live our lives, and forget this ever happened?’

  ‘Yes.’ It was the only promise Casey could make. ‘I promise, I will keep your involvement a secret.’

  ‘But you can’t tell a soul either,’ Miranda warned them. ‘Especially while they’re abroad. Anything that endangers Casey risks the baby too.’

  Casey saw the shudder run right through Emily’s frame.

  ‘I promise you,’ Casey said to Emily again. ‘We will keep her safe, your baby girl.’

  ‘Poppy,’ Emily whispered. ‘We are going to call her Poppy.’

  ‘Poppy,’ said Casey. ‘I promise you I will bring Poppy home to you.’

  25

  ‘Ed?’ Miranda asked. ‘Can you work with him?’

  Will he work with you? she didn’t quite ask.

  They were back in the office.

  Casey looked up. ‘I have no idea.’

  A few years earlier, Casey had been packed off to chase pirates around the Indian Ocean.

  The Ministry of Defence allows journalists to ‘embed’ with armed forces around the world. Hacks fly all over the world, right alongside British troops. Over the years, Casey had travelled to Afghanistan and Iraq, deep among the fighting units.

  Then piracy around the Horn of Africa became a story.

  For years, a plague of international trawlers had systematically stripped Somalia’s coasts of all marine life. Finally, furiously, the locals started to retaliate. Desperate Somalis began to set sail on tiny, inadequate boats, bobbing around the coast until they tracked down one of the slow-moving tankers cruising through the Red Sea.

  Then somehow, madly, they fought their way on to the huge ships.

  Kidnap and ransom, K&R. A booming business, quite suddenly. Billions of dollars of goods forced to cat-and-mouse through one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, only to be snatched, one by one.

  A bottleneck, just where the world couldn’t afford it.

  Cash ransoms – millions and millions of dollars – were parachuted onto the decks of vast supertankers.

  It was the spiralling insurance premiums that finally caught the attention of the international community. That, and the rage of the shipowners who dotted Eaton Square. The government listened to that, fast.

  British Navy ships were dispatched to the Indian Ocean, to police thousands of miles of ocean. Casey was dispatched too.

  Ed had been the captain of the group of Royal Marines, on board the HMS Apollo. By the time Casey joined the ship, from a scruffy port in Oman, his team had been at sea for almost six months.

  Having joined the ship in Salaleh, Casey found herself stuck on board for three weeks.

  Ross had not been delighted by her prolonged absence.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Several thousand miles from the coast of Kenya, by all accounts.’r />
  ‘Can’t you fucking swim for it?’

  ‘They’ve mentioned sharks. And the pirates I’ve just filed about. Why? You missing me?’

  ‘Fuck’s sake.’

  ‘Turns out these things don’t have to go back to land for ages,’ said Casey, admiring her suntanned arm.

  Both oddly shy, Casey and Ed avoided conversation for the first ten days.

  She noticed him, of course. Dark hair cut close, and a smile that flickered for a second. Rainbow eyes turned down at the corners, and when she looked closely she saw his eyes had flecks of grey and green, blue and brown. He moved with a careless grace, swinging down the ship’s ladders.

  In the evenings, she watched him playing cards. He was so good that they accused him of cheating, and he would laugh, and smack away the hands that reached for his chips.

  Later she watched from the bridge, high above the ocean, as the Marines stormed a little pirate ship, knifing through the water in splinters of spray. She only realised the danger when an officer holding binoculars relaxed. ‘They’ve got her. Surrendered. All safe. Nice job.’

  That evening she went to what she called the back of the boat and the Marines called aft. The Somali pirates were being held there, in a huge black cage. Fifteen of them, all silent. They were dressed, incongruously, in padded black nylon jackets, crouching on the desk, feet flat to the floor. They had separated into groups, even then divided by the Somali fight-to-the-death clan system.

  Ed was keeping watch there, reading a book. He was always reading. A habit picked up in one of those bases in the wilds of Afghanistan, with no television and no fun.

  Casey tried to speak to one of the pirates, who had a few words of French. This man seemed to have a brother in Manchester, a cousin in Glasgow, an uncle in Marseille.

  He was friendly; they all were, trying to bridge the language gap.

  Eventually, having exhausted her French and her sign language, Casey flopped onto a pile of rope to write up her notes.

  ‘We found a beacon on their ship,’ said Ed.

  ‘What?’ She looked up, surprised that he was speaking to her.

  ‘A solar-powered beacon in their dhow. The trawlers round here dump the huge dragnets overboard, and attach a solar-powered beacon. Then they keep going, drop more nets, keep going. A few days later, when all the fish are tangled in the nets, the trawlers go back to that first solar beacon, and bring the nets in. Everything gets caught in those nets. Dolphins, turtles, tiny fish no one will ever eat.’