Someone Else's Baby

by Someone Else's Baby (retail) (epub)

  ‘Seems so, until the last payment bounced. Shit. We’re never going to get that last fifteen grand are we?’

  ‘We’ve still got money from the second cheque, although I planned to save that for Alice. Have any of them reported him?’

  ‘One of them has, but the police pretty much ignored it.’

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘At least it’ll be on record.’ He shoved his plate on the table.

  ‘If this really is Malcolm, he needs to be stopped.’ Why had I been so trusting? If only Brenda would call and tell me what was going on. I kept thinking back to the day we handed the babies to them, how off she was with me, suddenly like a stranger. Could she have known that Malcolm didn’t intend to keep in touch with us? Perhaps Steve was right, she was as bad as Malcolm. But I kept coming back to the bruises. The times she’d seemed scared of him.

  ‘What about these other babies?’ Steve said. ‘That’s what, at least five he’s fathered?’

  ‘What does he want all these children for?’ I’d seen grotesque news stories passed round Facebook, of drug cartels kidnapping children in south America, harvesting their organs to sell to wealthy foreigners, and another of children being trafficked and sold as sexual or domestic slaves, some while still babies. I held my throat, willing myself not to be sick.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  We set off on Saturday morning after scraping the ice off the car. I brought sandwiches and a flask of tea. Alice slept for the first three hours. But when she woke up, she wouldn’t stop crying and kicking the back of my seat. We pulled over at the services. Steve and I drank coffee and hot chocolate while I fed Alice a ham sandwich cut into soldiers. Maybe we were mad going all the way to Orkney. But I couldn’t think of any other way to contact them.

  When we were back on the road, my phone rang. My heart leapt. I fumbled in my bag, praying it was Brenda.

  ‘Where are you?’ Mum’s spiky voice drilled in my ear. ‘I thought you’d be here by now.’

  I appealed with my eyes to Steve. He pulled a face.

  ‘You’ve forgotten, haven’t you?’

  ‘Mum… I…’

  ‘Garden centre?’

  I’d been so consumed with contacting Malcolm and Brenda over the past couple of weeks, I’d completely forgotten we were taking Alice to Santa’s Grotto.

  ‘I’ll go and see Santa myself then, shall I?’ She sniffed.

  ‘Oh Mu-um, I’m sorry, we can go next year.’

  ‘I thought it’d be nice. So, where are you? You’ve not even phoned.’

  ‘We’re away for the weekend.’ I clenched my teeth. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what we’d found out.

  ‘So close to Christmas?’

  This was the last journey I wanted to be making. ‘We’ll be back in time for Christmas day, I promise.’

  ‘Where is it you’re going to?’

  ‘Um… Scotland.’

  ‘Oh. What are you going up there for?’

  ‘We just fancied it.’ I blinked at Steve.

  ‘Isn’t that where those people live?’

  ‘Sorry, Mum, got to go, the line is breaking up, speak soon.’ How could I tell her the truth?

  Steve and I sat in silence for the next hour. I tried to work it all out in my head. There had to be an explanation for all of this, why Brenda wasn’t answering my calls, why Malcolm seemed to have had children with other women, but my brain was all over the place, I couldn’t make any sense of it.

  ‘It’s obvious they don’t want contact with us any more,’ Steve said.

  ‘Doesn’t explain the cheque though.’

  ‘If it really is him that’s had those other babies, I’m guessing he never intended to pay it, same as the other surrogates. They knew we’d have no comeback, that’s why they’ve scarpered.’

  ‘But they’ve been so generous up till now.’

  ‘I bet that was part of getting us to trust them.’ He clenched his jaw and gripped the wheel tighter. ‘Don’t you see? We’ve been well and truly scammed.’ He banged his fist on the car horn at a lorry swerving into our lane.

  ‘But we’ve become friends with them. They’ve paid us a lot of money. It doesn’t make sense for them to suddenly duck out of it.’ I daren’t even contemplate them cheating us because it made me worry even more about the twins.

  ‘What about Malcolm being weird when I took their photo?’

  ‘They wanted to keep their privacy. I respected that.’

  ‘They didn’t want us to have any evidence, more like.’

  ‘Maybe not.’

  ‘What if they heard you on the radio – twice – and they’re thoroughly pissed with us?’

  ‘Does that even matter after what the other surrogates have told us?’

  We carried on for another hour. Neither of us brought up what we would do if we didn’t find them in Orkney, but the question hovered in the air between us.

  I dozed off and dreamt we pulled up to their big house just as Malcolm was unloading their suitcases from the Jag. Brenda was already indoors, putting the twins to bed in their fairy-tale cots. Julia and Joseph were so beautiful and smiled when they saw me. Brenda was beside herself with guilt that she’d switched her phone off and we’d had to make this frantic journey to find them. We stayed the night in one of their luxurious bedrooms and the next day, Malcolm handed me fifteen thousand pounds in crisp fifty-pound notes. They invited us to stay with them at their holiday home next summer, so we could spend three glorious weeks with the twins.

  I woke up as Steve stopped the car in Blackpool. The Tower and famous Golden Mile of Christmas lights were welcome beacons in the darkness and rain. We ate kebab and chips in the car, fed Alice and used the public toilets. Then we carried on through the evening to Glasgow, where I’d booked us into a B&B.

  I slept heavily that night. It was the first good sleep in days, from pure emotional exhaustion.

  After breakfast the next morning, we checked the forum. I read out a message from yet another woman who said she recognised Malcolm as Peter Finch, living miles away in Cornwall. She had their baby boy six months ago. Again, the last cheque had bounced. They’d tried to find him but it had backfired.

  ‘What do you think she means?’ I said.

  ‘Ask her, we need to know everything.’

  I typed a reply but nothing came back.

  Steve started the car and we set off again. The icy wind picked up, driving rain at us like the edge of a knife. I thought we’d never reach Kirkwall, but we managed to catch the ferry from Aberdeen. We arrived at the remote B&B at 11.30 p.m.

  The woman let us in and fed us home-made soup full of indistinguishable chunks of meat and thick rye bread. Our room right up in the loft could only be accessed by a narrow staircase. Steve carried a sleeping Alice into the dimly lit space with a slanted low ceiling. He laid her in a cot decorated with painted daisies.

  I woke at first light and stood at the small leaded window, looking out at the barren landscape. It didn’t seem like the sort of place Malcolm and Brenda would choose to live for their jet-setting lifestyle.

  After breakfast, we headed towards their address. My stomach turned over. What if they weren’t there? What would we say to them if they were? We parked on the street. It was an imposing property, even more stunning than in the photos. An old E-type Jaguar was parked outside the garage. We walked up the drive, Steve carried Alice, who pointed at our feet crunching through the tiny stones. I banged on the door with a lion-head knocker. After a few minutes, the door was opened by an elderly man wearing beige trousers and shirt.

  ‘Can I help you?’ He sounded like royalty.

  ‘We’re here to see Malcolm and Brenda Stewart, are they in?’

  ‘Who’s that?’ He tipped his ear, touching a hearing aid with his finger. Perhaps this was Malcolm’s father.

  I repeated their names more slowly.

  He shook his head, appearing to be completely baffled.

  ‘Who is it, Dad?’ a w
oman called to him from the other end of the hall. He turned back to tell her, but she was behind him in a moment. ‘Can we help you?’ she said, taking off a pair of worn-out gardening gloves.

  We repeated our question.

  ‘I’m sorry, we don’t know these people, have you got the correct address?’

  I showed her the court papers.

  ‘Oh, it’s very odd. That’s clearly our address, but I’ve never heard of them. Who are they exactly?’

  I explained what had happened.

  ‘I think you need to report them to the police. This is not where they live, I can assure you. This is my parents’ home and has been for the last thirty years.’

  For a second, I was too stunned to speak, my head spinning.

  ‘We’re sorry, but can you show us proof?’ Steve asked, moving Alice onto his other hip.

  The woman’s dark eyes bored into us. Her skin flushed pink from her neck up. In one swift move, she turned to the hall table behind her, grabbed a utility letter from a gilt tray and held the envelope up for us. Mr and Mrs J. Hutton and their address behind the little plastic window. I stared at it, my pulse rocketing.

  ‘Thank you, we’re sorry to have bothered you,’ Steve said.

  The woman nodded and shut the door.

  ‘Shit. What do we do now?’ He ran his hand through his hair. ‘We’ve been properly mugged off. Not the only ones either.’

  We trudged back to the car.

  ‘How will we ever track them down if he’s using different names, different addresses and having babies all over the country? Where can the twins be? What have they done with them?’ My voice became shrill. ‘What if he’s a paedophile?’ I stumbled onto my knees and vomited in the grass by the fence.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  The line between the murky sky and sea blurred together. I gave Alice a bottle of juice and hugged her to my side on the back seat. Could Brenda have betrayed me? Apart from the last time we saw them, she’d always been so thoughtful and kind. I’d tried again for her after the miscarriage, because she was so desperate. She’d made me feel like I was her final hope. What was I supposed to think now? Did they want to go it alone as parents and pretend they never used a surrogate? Maybe they wanted to make out to their friends that Brenda had given birth to the twins herself. But why make up their address? What about the other women and babies?

  ‘If the address on the court order is false, how can the transfer be legal?’

  ‘I don’t know, maybe it isn’t.’ Steve checked the forum on his phone. ‘No more messages, not even from that last woman.’

  We drove to the local police station and asked to speak to an officer in private. I’d already decided before we got there that I didn’t want to tell them at the counter window, because you never knew who was earwigging. One of Nan’s favourite words. After a few minutes, we were shown into a room not much bigger than a cupboard. I explained our situation to the female officer who came to talk to us. She invited us to sit at a table. She sat opposite with a notepad and pen. I parked the pushchair next to us and handed Alice a picture book.

  ‘So, you see, we believe the new parents of our baby twins have given a false address on the parental order.’ I placed the document on the table while Steve explained that we’d gone to the address.

  ‘And the people living there confirm this is their address, and that these people aren’t residents, and are not known to them in any other way?’

  ‘That’s right. And we can’t get hold of them on the phone or online. It was our last resort coming all the way up here to try and speak to them face-to-face.’ Steve sighed deeply.

  ‘If something has genuinely happened to Malcolm and Brenda so they can’t respond to our messages… it makes me worry about the welfare of the twins. But it doesn’t explain the false address,’ I added.

  ‘I understand your concern, but there may be a perfectly reasonable explanation for this. I’ll take a copy of the parental order and check out its authenticity. If it is proven to be a false address, the document will be invalid.’

  ‘And what would that mean for us?’ I asked.

  ‘I imagine parental responsibility would revert to you.’

  ‘But we don’t have a clue where else to look for them.’

  ‘If this couple are found to have deliberately given you a false address, they would be deemed to have kidnapped your children.’

  ‘Oh god.’ I blinked black dots in front of my eyes. Steve took my hand.

  ‘There’s also a woman who’s been following us. We took a photo of her in Brighton. We’re not sure if it has anything to do with all this, but it’s the same woman who we’ve seen outside our work and home.’ Steve leaned his elbow on the table and showed her the picture on his phone.

  ‘I’ll take a copy from you, but if you see her again and are still concerned, do report it to your local police.’

  We left in a daze as we made our way back to the car. It was hard to take in that we’d got to the point of having to report it.

  ‘I honestly don’t know what we should do next,’ Steve said, unlocking the car. He strapped Alice in and we shut the doors just as the first few spots in the air turned into heavy grey sheets of rain.

  ‘I just wish Brenda would contact me to explain herself.’

  ‘Face it, hun, it’s not going to happen. And if the police do find out the papers are false, how are we going to find our twins then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I peered out of the window but couldn’t see anything beyond it. We were trapped inside this tiny prison. The noise of the rain grew so loud, I had to raise my voice. ‘I’m really glad you’re calling them ours. If we do get them back, are you okay that they’re not biologically yours?’

  ‘Yeah, pretty much.’

  ‘You said ages ago that you’d put one up for adoption if they didn’t want it.’

  ‘That was before all this. Anyway, I saw them coming into the world, didn’t I? I held them, fed and cared for them, almost as much as you did.’ His face crumpled as he turned to the window.

  ‘I know and I’m pleased. I needed to check, that’s all.’ I rested my head on his arm while we waited for the rain to ease off.

  * * *

  All the way back to Aberdeen on the overnight ferry, my brain would not switch off, even though my eyes were scratchy and half closed with exhaustion. Steve checked the forum before he went to sleep, but there were no new messages.

  Reasons why Malcolm and Brenda had lied to us swirled around my mind. A growing dread trickled through my veins. Why so many babies? What if they’d planned to traffic them abroad all along?

  Stop! I shook my head, trying to scramble these thoughts, telling myself they were alive and well. I longed to see my babies so much my arms ached to hold them. I had to believe they were being well looked after or I’d drive myself insane.

  I checked the time. It was three in the morning. I logged onto the forum one last time before I tried to sleep. There was one new message. I clicked on it, but there was no name, only a line of words and symbols. STAY SAFE!!! STOP SEARCHING!!! I blinked at the letters all in capitals – shouting at me. Could this be Brenda? WHO IS THIS? I messaged back. When there was no reply. I typed, CALL ME, PLEASE!!

  I switched my phone on, but the battery was running low. In my rush, I’d packed the wrong charger. I fell asleep holding the phone to my ear so as not to miss a ring or a text, but by the morning, the battery was dead.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Alice cried half the journey down to Edinburgh, leaving my nerves brittle, ready to shatter at any moment. At times I wished I could cry along with her. I needed to sleep and not wake up until this was over. I told Steve about the anonymous message. It couldn’t have been Brenda, she would have tried Steve’s number too, wouldn’t she?

  We stopped at Stirling Services on the M9 for a coffee and to check the forum on Steve’s phone. The early mist was beginning to clear but small wisps still hung in the air like lost spirits.<
br />
  ‘There’s one message,’ he said, when I came back from changing Alice’s nappy.

  ‘Who’s it from?’ I slotted a coffee for us to share in the cup holder on the dashboard. Steve kissed Alice’s face and chatted to her as he strapped her back in her seat.

  ‘It’s from the woman that contacted us before, the last one that said she knew Malcolm as Peter. She’s warning us not to look for him.’

  ‘Why?’ I poured two tubes of sugar into the cup. I didn’t usually sweeten my drinks, but I needed the extra energy boost. ‘What does she say?’

  ‘Are you sure you want to hear this?’ He sat back in the driver’s seat and turned the heater fan down.

  ‘Of course I do. Did she send that warning to me last night as well?’

  ‘I don’t think so. She says, “I don’t advise searching for this man. My husband went looking for him four months ago, hoping to get the money owed to us. He’s been missing ever since.”’

  ‘Shit. Poor woman. She must be out of her mind with worry. I wonder what’s happened to him.’

  ‘Whoever sent you that text last night thinks we’re in danger as well.’

  ‘I hope she’s reported it to the police. Ask her where he was looking.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we need to go there.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ Steve frowned. When I didn’t frown back, he raised his eyebrows and typed a reply. ‘There, done. Happy?’

  ‘It’s our first genuine lead.’ I took the phone from him and immediately checked for a reply.

  ‘Except we don’t know anything yet. Ask her if the police have searched for him,’ Steve said.

  The sugar shot through my veins. What could have happened to her husband? Were we really in danger too?

  The ping of a reply gave us both a start.

  Peter was living in Sheffield at the time. That was one of the places my husband went to look for him. The police searched but by that time there was no sign of him (Peter/Malcolm).

  ‘Didn’t one of the other surrogates mention him moving to Sheffield?’