Someone Else's Baby

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

  ‘Yeah, from Leeds.’ We were actually getting somewhere.

  ‘Could Malcolm have gone back there?’

  ‘Worth a try.’

  I asked her for the address. Her answer came straight back. I drank a mouthful of coffee and scanned her reply.

  I really don’t want to give it to you, then you disappear too!

  PLEASE! I messaged back YOU’RE OUR ONLY HOPE! I balled my hands into fists.

  Steve leant against the window.

  Five long minutes later, she messaged the address to us. I burst into tears.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  We drove to Sheffield and arrived in Hillsborough at almost 9 p.m. It was a quiet, leafy road. The guest house was a double-fronted property surrounded by a low neat hedge. The old couple that answered the door wore green matching fleeces. They introduced themselves as Sarah and Paul. We followed them into their vast farmhouse-style kitchen. Rows of different-coloured teapots were lined up on a Welsh dresser.

  ‘Good journey?’ Sarah smiled, peering over her glasses as she shook our hands.

  ‘Not bad, thanks.’

  ‘What’s the little one’s name?’

  ‘This is Alice,’ Steve said, holding her tight.

  ‘She’s just fallen asleep.’ I held her favourite blanket.

  ‘Bless her. Paul will show you straight up so you can get her settled in.’ She unhooked a key from a selection in a small cupboard. ‘Then come and have some hot chocolate and supper, when you’re ready.’

  ‘Have you come far?’ Paul asked, striding up the stairs, two steps at a time.

  ‘Been on the road from Aberdeen since about seven thirty this morning.’

  ‘Driven some miles today then.’ He waited for us at the top.

  ‘Clocked over four hundred in all.’ Steve carried Alice up and I followed with our rucksack.

  Paul opened the heavy wooden door to our room and handed us the key. He pointed out an en suite with a sliding door in the corner. The double bed sat in the middle, with plenty of room to walk around it. A travel cot stood right next to the bed with a side table behind it. The room had a homely feel. They’d left a few toys in a box and an extra blanket on the end of the bed.

  As soon as we’d changed and settled Alice, we went back down to the kitchen, lured by the aroma of grilling bacon.

  ‘Are you passing through or stopping in Sheffield for a while?’ Sarah asked, putting the milk away. The fridge door was covered from top to bottom with postcards from around the world, held there with souvenir magnets. She brought our sweet-smelling hot chocolate drinks to the table on a tray. Steve opened his mouth to speak, but I shoved his leg under the table and spoke first.

  ‘We’ve come to search for someone.’

  Steve and I exchanged a look. I didn’t want either of us saying too much about our reasons for being there.

  ‘We have an old address for them in Sheffield so thought the new people might remember him.’ I glanced at Steve, passing the baton of our story.

  ‘We’re on our way back from Orkney.’

  ‘Been searching up there too? That’s a hell of a hike with a little one.’ Sarah buttered our bread and placed three rashers of bacon in each sandwich before chopping them in half and handing them to us on blue and white striped plates. If she’d taken a moment longer, I would have started drooling. I hadn’t realised how hungry and tired I was.

  ‘Is it a relative of yours?’ Paul asked me.

  ‘No, we’re not exactly related.’ I looked at Steve to help.

  ‘He owes us money,’ Steve said.

  I pinched his leg under the table.

  ‘Oh dear, that doesn’t sound too good.’ Paul sat at the other side of the table filling his pipe.

  I pressed my lips tightly and smiled. ‘Who are all these lovely postcards from?’

  ‘Colourful aren’t they? They’re from some of the children we’ve looked after over the years. All grown up now with their own families.’ Paul’s smile brightened his whole face, making him appear younger. He beckoned us into the sitting room and pointed above a piano. Scores of framed photos of various aged children filled the wall.

  ‘We couldn’t have our own, so we decided to foster,’ Sarah said from the doorway, ‘it’s been the greatest joy of our lives.’

  ‘A life’s work.’ Paul nodded, gazing over each little face. ‘We remember all their names, don’t we, pet?’

  Sarah gave a long satisfied nod, her broad smile clearly lit from within.

  ‘Goodness, what a wonderful thing to do.’ My throat choked up. If only we could have helped a couple like this.

  ‘Over a hundred in all.’ Paul linked his hands behind his back and puffed out his chest.

  ‘We only stopped a couple of years ago,’ Sarah said, turning back to the kitchen.

  ‘Decided we needed to slow down after my heart attack,’ Paul said.

  ‘Sorry to hear that. Are you better now?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve made a good recovery, thank you. I go for a walk twice a day and I’ve cut out red meat.’

  We gathered back in the kitchen and finished our drinks and sandwiches.

  ‘I don’t suppose you have a phone charger I could borrow please?’ I’d spotted that Sarah’s mobile was the same make as mine.

  ‘Yes of course. Take it up with you.’

  ‘Don’t go running off with it though,’ Paul said.

  Everyone laughed except me. We’d been too trusting of people we hardly knew, and they’d run off with something much more precious than a phone charger – my babies.

  We said good night and went upstairs. Alice didn’t stir. I plugged the charger in next to the bed and lay back on the soft candlewick cover, just like the one Nan used to have, only pink not yellow. As soon as my phone came to life, three missed calls pinged onto the screen.

  ‘Steve, look at this.’ I held it up. ‘But hang on, I don’t recognise this number.’

  He took the phone from me and pressed return call, but there was no ring tone. ‘Whoever it is has blocked your number.’

  ‘What if it’s Brenda?’ I snatched it off him.

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘Who else would it be? She must have seen my message on the forum begging her to call me. What if Malcolm saw it first and took her other phone away to stop her contacting me? And now he’s blocked me from this one.’

  ‘Maybe the police will be able to trace the number so we can find them.’

  ‘Do you think she’s all right?’ I clasped my hands together.

  He shook his head. ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘She was trying to tell me something once, when we Skyped. It was about the only time I spoke to her without him there. I’m sure he caused her bruises otherwise why else would she hide them? I keep going over it in my head. I’m sure she’d contact me if she could. My gut is telling me there’s no way she would deliberately do anything to hurt me or the twins.’

  ‘Keep your phone switched on then. If it was her, maybe she’ll try again.’

  But it stayed silent.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  The next morning, we thanked Sarah and Paul for their hospitality and drove to the address the woman from the forum had given us. As far as she knew, Malcolm had lived in the terraced house on the steep road in Middlewood, two years ago. Now it was full of university students. A boy with scruffy hair answered the door. It looked like we’d woken him up. He said they’d only been lodging there since September and hadn’t heard of Malcolm under any of the names we gave him. It didn’t seem to me the sort of place that would appeal to someone like Malcolm, with his expensive tastes.

  The disappointment sapped our strength. All the way home, I kept my phone practically strapped to my hip. But there were no more calls. I tried calling the number back again, but the line was definitely dead. Steve said it couldn’t have been Brenda. If it was her, why would she give up so easily? My thought that Malcolm had discovered her trying to contact me and had for
bidden her to reply was only strengthened. I prayed she was being more assertive when it came to protecting the twins. But a voice in my head whispered back at me: stop kidding yourself.

  * * *

  We arrived home at lunchtime. All I wanted to do was sleep. What a wasted journey we couldn’t afford. I didn’t know how we were going to find them.

  I collected the post from the box. Steve sang ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’ with Alice while he strapped her into the high chair. She swayed from side to side, palms up, singing, tick tock, tick tock, long after the end.

  I sifted through the junk mail and found my letter to Brenda marked, Return to Sender. I showed Steve, then chucked it in the bin.

  I cooked Alice toast soldiers and cut up cubes of cheese. Steve and I sat in front of the TV with a Cornish pasty from the garage and a bag of crisps each.

  He switched over to the news. I went to the bathroom. As I washed my hands, I stared at my pale face in the mirror. Part of me was missing, gone forever. We were back to square one and I’d given away my two beautiful babies. What killed me most of all was not knowing how they were or where they could be. I couldn’t imagine this deep longing for them would ever go. Why hadn’t I listened to Mum?

  Steve was standing behind the sofa when I went back in. He’d paused the news, staring at the screen.

  ‘You need to watch this.’ His voice broke in several places. He reached out to the sofa to steady himself, his hand trembling as he pressed play.

  ‘The body of a woman has been found at the foot of a cliff at West Bay in Dorset at five past six this morning. Her identity has been confirmed as Paula Bennett from Sheffield. Her next of kin has been told.’

  ‘How awful,’ I said.

  Steve put a finger to his lips and pointed at the TV. A photo of a ginger-haired Brenda filled the screen.

  ‘Oh my god.’ A shiver ran through me.

  ‘In a statement, Paula’s husband confirmed that she had gone missing from the family home over a year ago. She leaves two teenage sons, aged sixteen and nineteen. Her death is not being treated as suspicious.’

  ‘What the actual fuck?’ I shouted, planting my hands on my head.

  Steve stared at the TV in a trance.

  ‘Did they say anything about the twins?’

  He shook his head, hands cupping his nose and mouth as though trying to stop himself throwing up.

  ‘Why would she do that, I mean really?’ Tears fell from my eyes. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. Why was she on a cliff in Dorset?’ I wiped my eyes.

  ‘I can’t believe how much she lied to us.’ Steve rewound the programme and we watched it again, sitting on the edge of the sofa, eyes fixed to the paused image of Brenda.

  I grabbed the laptop and searched for the story. ‘Says here, Paula’s husband came home from work one day and his wife was missing, along with a few personal possessions. He’d suspected her of having an affair for some time and guessed she’d left him, but there was no note from her. He only became worried when she hadn’t contacted him or their boys after about a week. She’d been registered as a missing person ever since. So, she must have gone off with Malcolm and changed her name. Except this is only fifteen months ago. They told us they’d been together twenty years and we bought every word of it.’

  ‘Hang on, hang on, don’t you see?’ Steve said, ‘Brenda – the woman we know, who we think we know – doesn’t even exist.’ He flung his palms open as if it was obvious and we were the biggest idiots for believing them.

  ‘She existed to me,’ I cried, staring at him, while everything wound down to slow motion. His dry lips cracked open as he spoke. A tiny bead of blood burst out. He licked it away with his tongue.

  ‘But don’t you see? She was pretending to be this poor childless woman when she was already an experienced mum of teenagers. She lied to us every step of the fucking way. She lied to you, Charlotte, completely took you in.’ He slapped his hand on his forehead.

  ‘If Brenda’s dead, who’s looking after the twins?’ My words dragged into a slur. I covered my face with my arms.

  ‘We have to think this through.’ He knelt next to me. ‘We’re absolutely certain this woman is Brenda, right?’ We paused at the photo in the news story, made it as big as possible on the laptop screen. We nodded at each other. Even though it was taken a few years ago, there was no doubt it was the woman we knew as Brenda. ‘So where’s Malcolm? Is that even his real name?’

  ‘Her husband’s called Nathan, I think.’ I scrolled up the news story. ‘Yes, Nathan Bennett. Could he actually be Malcolm?’

  ‘I thought he was the lover she ran off with? Are there any photos of him?’

  ‘We don’t know that for sure. I can’t find any,’ I said, scrolling up and down. I did a general search for his name but nothing came up.

  ‘We need to get back to the women on the forum. Get them to prove they really knew Malcolm.’

  I passed the laptop to Steve and he messaged all of them, asking them to provide some proof. Within the hour, the first woman emailed a photo of her cheque. ‘She says she wanted a reminder of receiving that much money. Ironic isn’t it? See the name, L. Brown.’

  ‘That’s definitely him then.’

  ‘One of the other women has come back with a scan of the parental order.’

  ‘We’ll have to go to the police.’ Steve squeezed my arm. ‘These babies could be in real danger.’ He caught me with a look of fear in his eyes I’d never seen before.

  My body gave an involuntary shiver. I couldn’t bear to admit it had crossed my mind more than once.

  ‘We have to go right now.’ He transferred the photo of Malcolm and Brenda from his phone onto his laptop as well as the one from my phone, so they could be blown up bigger.

  ‘We have to go for another ride, sweetheart.’ I gathered Alice in my arms. Steve carried his laptop out to the car.

  As we drove off, everything that had been said, everything that had happened flooded my mind. Somehow, I had to hold it together.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  At the police station we told the duty officer that we had information relating to the death of the woman at West Bay. He told us to wait while he went off to speak to a colleague.

  We were led through an electronic locking door into an incident room, an empty space except for a solid metal desk and four plastic chairs on one side. Above it was a double tape machine housed in an industrial-strength casing, jutting out of the painted brick wall.

  Steve held his laptop under his arm and stood staring out of the tiny barred window. I hugged Alice tight, trying to hide my trembling body. After a few moments, Police Inspector Johnson came in and introduced himself. He invited us to sit down. We explained our story, how we knew Brenda, about the money owed to us and the women online who’d recognised Malcolm by different names.

  ‘So, let me get this clear, you know the dead woman under the name of Brenda Stewart?’

  ‘Yes, it’s here on the parental order.’ I passed him the piece of paper.

  ‘But do you have any evidence that this is the same person as Paula Bennett?’ He dragged his hand across his bald head as though rearranging a full head of hair.

  ‘I have a photo of them on my laptop I downloaded from my phone,’ Steve said.

  ‘Okay, let’s see it.’

  Steve opened up the photo. ‘I took it at the twelve-week baby scan. Malcolm got really upset, insisted I delete it.’

  ‘But you didn’t.’ The officer peered at the image. ‘Can you make it any bigger?’

  ‘I thought he was being out of order so I copied and pasted it, told him it was gone.’ Steve grinned at his ingenuity.

  ‘All the time we knew Brenda, her hair was dyed blonde, but I noticed ginger roots coming through once,’ I said, rocking Alice in my arms.

  ‘It’s not quite clear enough, do you have any other photos?’

  ‘The only other one is from Charlotte’s phone, we took it at the hotel when we handed the twins over ab
out two months ago.’ He showed it to him.

  ‘Yes, I can see now that it’s the same woman.’

  ‘She had an American accent but it often slipped. She said she lived in New York when she was young, but now I’m not sure if anything she said is true.’

  He wrote it down.

  ‘Do you know who the man is?’ I asked. ‘I mean, it’s not Paula Bennett’s real husband, is it?’

  ‘I’ll need to speak to Dorset police. I suspect it’s the man Mr Bennett thinks Paula ran off with.’ He wrote in his notepad.

  ‘They told us they got married twenty years ago and had gone through several miscarriages.’ Saying their lies aloud made the truth hit me. I rearranged Alice on my lap, trying not to cry. If I told him about Brenda’s bruises he’d think I was a terrible mother for handing over the babies when I already had doubts about them.

  ‘Can I see the photo on your phone so I can check the date it was taken?’

  I handed Alice to Steve and took my phone from my back pocket.

  ‘I’ll need to take a copy of this for evidence.’

  ‘I hope it helps. I’m really worried about the twins. We showed the parental order to the police in Orkney, because the new parents lied about living at this address, but they never got back to us.’

  ‘I’ll pass this information straight on to the investigating team in Dorset. They may already be looking for this Malcolm character. Then I’ll check their address on the parental order with my colleagues in Orkney.’

  I nodded and squeezed my hands together. The inspector left the room.

  ‘I can’t believe we’ve been so dumb.’ Steve scratched his head.

  ‘Or that she had two teenage sons. I completely fell for their story. No wonder she seemed so natural with babies.’ I pressed my fingers to my forehead, trying to force it all to sink in. She’d lied to us and now she was dead, and we had no idea what had happened to the twins.

  Twenty minutes later, the inspector came back.

  ‘It’s definitely her. This information has been enormously helpful to the investigating team. They believe your first photo was taken about five months after Paula went missing from her family home.’