by A J McDine
Detective Inspector Ian Jones was a thickset man with slate grey hair, a deeply lined forehead and a mouth that turned down at the corners. Dressed in a crumpled grey suit and clutching a folder under his arm, he reminded me of Eeyore.
‘Mrs Cooper,’ he said with a nod as he followed the family liaison officer into the house.
Adrenalin had been coursing through my veins from the moment Sam had called. Clearly there’d been a development. Was it a bad sign that they wanted to deliver the news in person?
I’d tried phoning Stuart, but it had gone straight through to voicemail, so I left a message. Images of him in bed with another woman crowded into my head, but I pushed them away. His affair was the least of my worries.
Sam went straight to the kettle. How many cups of tea must she have made during her years as a family liaison officer? Cup after cup after cup for the devastated relatives of people who’d died before their time.
‘Two sugars please, Sam,’ DI Jones said. And to me, ‘Is your husband at home?’
‘He’s out looking for Immy. I’ve left a message telling him to come straight home. Why, have you found her?’
‘Is there somewhere we can sit down?’
My legs threatened to buckle beneath me. This wasn’t looking good. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Follow me.’
I pushed open the door to the front room and pulled the curtains. DI Jones eased his bulk into an armchair and smiled briefly. ‘I’m afraid we haven’t found Imogen yet, although we’re doing everything we can to locate her. You’ve been briefed on the search, I believe?’
‘Yes. Sam has been keeping us up to speed.’
‘My team has been looking at other lines of inquiry, and it was during one of our routine checks that we discovered something I don’t believe you shared with us when you reported Imogen missing.’
I stared at my hands. Bloody Stuart. I knew we should have told them.
‘According to Social Services, Imogen isn’t your birth daughter. Is that correct?’
I nodded.
‘Can I ask why you didn’t inform officers that was the case?’
I deliberated for a beat. I’d have happily told them Immy wasn’t mine. It wasn’t as if it was some big secret, after all. I’d kept it to myself because Stuart had wanted me to. But I should have trusted my own judgment, because now it looked as though we had something to hide, and I couldn’t blame DI Jones for giving me a grilling. He was only doing his job.
I licked my lips and went with the truth. ‘I was going to, but my husband didn’t think it was relevant.’ DI Jones raised an eyebrow. ‘I was happy to go along with his decision, because Immy is mine as far as I’m concerned,’ I added with a shrug.
‘We need to know details like these if we’re going to find your daughter, Mrs Cooper. According to the birth certificate, Imogen’s mother is a woman called Niamh O’Sullivan. Do you know her?’
‘She was our au pair. She fell pregnant while she was working for us and when the baby - Immy - was born, she asked us if we would look after her. We didn’t want our son to be an only child and as I’m unable to have more children we agreed.’
‘But private adoptions are illegal in the UK,’ DI Jones said.
‘I expect you noticed Stuart is listed as Immy’s father on her birth certificate,’ I said. DI Jones nodded. ‘Niamh was adamant that she wanted Immy to be ours. The only workaround was to put Stuart down as Immy’s dad. That way, she could legitimately live with him. With us.’
‘He’s not the father?’
It was as if an image of the condoms had burned onto my retinas. I blinked it away. ‘He’s not, no. Niamh fell pregnant while we were on a family holiday in Corfu. She’d come with us to look after our son. She went drinking one night with some boys in the village and, well, you can guess the rest. I asked her who the father was, but she said it was no one she knew.’
‘Where do you think Niamh is now?’
‘Working for a family in Rochester, as far as I know. We didn’t keep in touch.’ I clocked his expression. ‘Her choice, not ours. She wanted a clean break.’
He steepled his fingers. ‘In that case, I have something to show you.’
Chapter Twelve
My heart thudded in my ribcage. ‘What?’
‘Once we’d established Niamh was Imogen’s birth mother, we did a few background checks on her. As part of our routine inquiries, you understand. How old would Niamh be now?’
I counted on my fingers. ‘Twenty-two.’
‘We found records of a Niamh O’Sullivan of that age living in the Medway area. I have a photo I need you to see.’
Before he reached into his folder, I held up a hand. ‘Wait. Why do you have a picture of her?’
‘I’m not at liberty to divulge that, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh, cut the crap, please,’ I said. ‘I have a right to know.’
‘I’m afraid you don’t,’ he said mildly, handing me a sheet of paper. ‘Is this her?’
My fingers trembled as I studied the blurry black and white printout. A gaunt-looking girl stared back at me. Her expression was blank, a tattoo was inked on the side of her neck and it looked as if someone had attacked her beautiful long, red hair with a pair of shears, but there was no disputing it was Niamh.
‘Oh my God,’ I whispered.
‘So, it’s her,’ DI Jones said.
‘It’s a custody shot, isn’t it?’
He and the family liaison officer exchanged a look. Sam said, ‘It is in the public domain, boss.’
He scratched his chin. ‘I suppose it is. Niamh was found guilty of nicking some perfume from a local department store a couple of years ago. She was given a community service order.’
‘But that’s not all, is it?’ I said. ‘Just tell me. Please.’
He sighed. ‘You didn’t hear this from me, all right? According to my oppo at Medway, she’s since switched to prostitution to fund her heroin habit.’
The room started spinning, and I grabbed the arm of the sofa to steady myself. ‘I don’t understand. She had a job lined up as an au pair. I wrote the reference for her new family myself. Yet you’re telling me she’s a drug addict and a… a prostitute?’
I let DI Jones’s revelations sink in. It was impossible to equate the tattooed woman in the custody picture with the diffident girl from rural Ireland we’d welcomed into our home.
‘Where is she now?’ I asked.
‘The last we knew, she was living in a squat in Chatham. My oppo sent a patrol round there this morning. Niamh left a month or so ago. No one seems to have seen her since.’
My stomach clenched. Niamh was missing. And so was Immy. The picture slipped out of my grip and fluttered to the floor. With a grunt, DI Jones bent down to pick it up. He slotted it back in the folder and waited for my reaction.
Finally, I met his gaze. ‘You don’t think it’s a coincidence, do you? That both Niamh and Immy are missing?’
He seemed to choose his words carefully. ‘Uniform favour the hypothesis that Imogen let herself out of the gate and fell into the river. And it seems the most likely scenario. But I don’t like coincidences, Mrs Cooper. Let’s just say I’m keeping an open mind.’
Sam offered to come and keep me company after she’d driven the DI back to the station, but I thanked her and told her I’d rather be on my own. I needed to process everything I’d discovered in the last couple of hours. Stuart’s probable affair, Niamh’s descent into addiction, and DI Jones’s theory that she may have had something to do with Immy’s disappearance.
I ran upstairs and rifled through the drawers in my desk, looking for the file containing Niamh’s contract and details of her next of kin. I found it tucked underneath a Lonely Planet guide to the Greek Islands. The irony didn’t go unnoticed. I opened the file and pulled out the sheet of paper I was looking for, surprised to see that the only contact details Niamh had given for her parents, Maggie and Patrick O’Sullivan, was a scrawled mobile number. The space for an addre
ss was blank. I hadn’t bothered asking for references when we’d taken her on - there’d been no point as we were Niamh’s first host family. And I’d been desperate for her to start so I could get back to work.
I stared at the phone number. Did they even get a signal in the wilds of County Cork? I dialled, tapping my fingers on the desk while I waited for someone to pick up.
Eventually, there was a click, and a woman said, ‘Hello?’
‘Mrs O’Sullivan?’
‘And who is this?’ Her voice was so faint we may as well have been using plastic cups and string.
‘My name’s Cleo Cooper,’ I said loudly. ‘Your daughter Niamh was my au pair for a while. She looked after my son, Nate.’
A sharp intake of breath. ‘Niamh?’
‘Look, is there a landline I can phone you on? I can hardly hear you.’
She ignored me. ‘What about Niamh?’
‘I wondered if I could speak to her?’
There was a pause, and for a moment I wondered if we’d lost the signal. I stared in exasperation at my phone and was about to redial when Mrs O’Sullivan said, ‘We haven’t seen Niamh for four years. She left for England the summer she finished her Leaving Cert and never came home.’
‘Oh.’ I picked up a ballpoint pen and began clicking it, watching the tip appear and disappear. ‘Is she in touch with you at all?’
‘No. I’m afraid she and her da had a falling out before she left. He wanted her to stay on the farm, but my little fledgling was determined to spread her wings. You’re the one she worked for? The lady with the sandwich business?’
‘Organic meal kit company,’ I said. ‘Niamh stayed with us for a year, then went to work for a family in Rochester.’ There was no way I was telling this woman her precious daughter was a prostitute. ‘I don’t have their contact details, and the mobile number I have for Niamh rings out.’
‘Why do you need to speak to her?’
Click, click, click went the pen.
‘Mrs Cooper?’ Mrs O’Sullivan said, her voice soft and insistent. ‘Tell me, why do you need to speak to my Niamh?’
I stared at the whitewashed church on the front of the guidebook until it blurred. ‘My daughter’s missing. She’s only three…’
‘I’m truly sorry to hear that. And you wanted to let Niamh know? That’s very thoughtful of you.’
‘No, it’s not that. I wondered if Niamh knew where she might be.’
Her voice sharpened. ‘Why would she know such a thing?’
Because Immy is her daughter. Your granddaughter. And there’s a sliver of a chance that Niamh’s taken her. But I didn’t say this. Instead I said, ‘You’re right, I’m clutching at straws. I’m sorry to have troubled you.’
‘Ah, you’re all right. I understand. I feel as though I’ve lost my daughter, too.’
I nodded, forgetting she couldn’t see me. ‘If you hear from her, will you let me know?’
‘I will,’ Mrs O’Sullivan agreed.
I gave her our landline and my mobile number, asking her to repeat both back to me so I knew she’d taken them down correctly.
‘I hope you find your little girl,’ Mrs O’Sullivan said. ‘What’s she called?’
‘Imogen.’
‘An Irish name!’ she said with delight. ‘That’s grand, that is.’ Her voice turned grave. ‘You and little Imogen will be in my prayers. God bless you.’
I thanked her and ended the call.
But as I clicked my pen and stared at the guidebook, I knew I needed a miracle, not a prayer.
Chapter Thirteen
Stuart let himself into the house just after two. I confronted him in the hallway.
‘The police know Immy’s not ours.’
His eyes widened. ‘How?’
‘Because they’re not stupid. They’ve seen her birth certificate. I’ve told them we only put your name down so we didn’t have to go down the adoption route. We should have told them from the off. It smacks of deceit. But that’s not all. You won’t believe it, but Niamh’s on drugs.’
He did a double take. ‘She’s what?’
I recounted the conversation I’d had with DI Jones as I followed Stuart into the kitchen. He went straight to the sink, picked up a pint glass from the draining board, filled it with water and drained the lot, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand before turning to me. His forehead glistened with sweat.
‘I’m sorry.’
I eyed him with suspicion. ‘What for?’
‘You were right. We should have told the police.’ He rubbed the back of his neck. ‘But at the time it didn’t seem important. The important thing was finding Immy.’
‘I know.’ I gathered the accounts, straightened them and replaced them in the box file, realising I hadn’t phoned Bill back to ask him about Blackberry Organics. Exhaustion hit me like a steamroller. I didn’t have the energy to speak to Bill, let alone tackle Stuart about the condoms. Both could wait. ‘Have you spoken to Melanie today?’
‘Mel?’ he asked. ‘Why would I?’
‘I thought she might have rung to see how we were doing.’
‘You know Mel. She won’t want to interfere.’ He peered at me. ‘You look terrible. Why don’t you have a lie down? I’ll pick Nate up.’
‘What’s the point? I won’t be able to sleep.’
‘Then just rest.’
‘You’ll let me know if there’s any news?’
‘Of course.’
‘All right,’ I grumbled. ‘Just for half an hour.’
I trudged upstairs, each step an effort. My body felt heavy, as though I’d aged thirty years in the last twenty-four hours. As I passed Immy’s bedroom, I paused. The door was ajar, and I pushed it open and walked in, pulled by an invisible thread. I sat on her bed, tugged her pyjamas from under her pillow and held them to my nose, inhaling the baby-scented sweetness of her. A primitive longing buried deep in my chest rose inside me and I let out an anguished sob. If only she was beside me, snuggled up under her duvet, her thumb in her mouth, her eyes glued to a book as I read her a story. If only I could fold my arms around her and never let her go. I would give anything: the business, the house, a kidney - fuck it, both kidneys - to have her home.
I clasped the soft cotton pyjama top to my cheek. People thought I was a career bitch because I went back to work when Immy and Nate were both a month old, but they were wrong. Just because I loved my job didn’t mean I couldn’t love my kids. The two weren’t mutually exclusive. And it frustrated the hell out of me that people thought they were.
Because the kids came first. Always had, always would. I would kill for my kids.
A spiteful voice in my head whispered, ‘Did you always put Nate and Immy first? What about the concerts you missed, the days you were late picking them up from school, the bedtime stories you rushed because you couldn’t resist the siren call of your laptop?’
A hot wave of shame washed over me and I shoved Immy’s pyjamas back under her pillow as I remembered how I would skip whole pages of the kids’ favourite books when they were tiny, so I could go downstairs, pour myself a glass of wine and dive into my inbox. How, if Stuart had freelance work on, I’d arrange holiday playdates with children they didn’t much like so I could spend a couple of hours at the office. If only I could turn back the clock, I’d do it all differently. The kids would come first. Always.
To distract myself, I stood and walked around the room, picking up things and putting them down again. We always joked that Immy was a little magpie, cramming her room with treasures. Not the gleaming gems magpies favoured, but things that caught her attention because they were beautiful in their own right. A sapphire-blue kingfisher’s feather. A shiny black button from one of Stuart’s old suits. A fossil found on the beach at Lyme Regis. Next to the fossil was a photo of a beaming Nate holding Immy when she was a few days old.
I traced her tiny face with my finger and remembered those exhausting first few weeks after she was born. I hadn’t bonded with her as
I had with Nate. Not at first, anyway. But that was understandable, wasn’t it? She wasn’t my flesh and blood; she didn’t share my DNA. She was a demanding baby, waking several times every night until she was almost a year old, and even though Stuart had taken on the lion’s share of the childcare once Niamh left, the lack of sleep hit us both hard. I begrudged Stuart for having an easy ride at home with the kids while I worked like a dog to provide for them all. He begrudged me for being able to escape to the office every day. We bickered and sniped and seethed with resentment.
Sweet, uncomplicated Nate was oblivious, but Immy seemed to sense the undercurrents in our marriage and was fractious and needy. I found it hard to connect with her, and when she was hungry or tired she reached for Stuart, not me, and it stung.
But I worked hard at winning her over, and as time passed and Immy grew into a curious, perceptive toddler, we grew close. The first time she chose me over Stuart to read her bedtime stories, I had to bite the inside of my cheek to stop myself from bursting into tears.
Nate loved me unconditionally. Immy’s love had been hard fought and was more precious for it.
But every day she looked more like her mother. Those green eyes, her dark red hair, the smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose were constant reminders that she wasn’t truly mine. Always, in the back of my mind, was the fear that one day Niamh would realise what she’d given up and come back to stake her claim. I didn’t know if this would be two, five, or ten years down the line. But, as I clutched Immy’s picture to my chest, I realised I’d always known we were living on borrowed time.
I must have fallen asleep on Immy’s bed, because the next thing I knew Nate was shaking my shoulder, urging me to wake up.
I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and attempted a smile. ‘Hello sweetheart, how was school?’
‘Horrible. I told you it would be. Everyone kept asking me where Immy was, and I couldn’t tell them because I don’t know. Fergus Barton said his mum said she was dead.’ His voice quivered. ‘She’s not dead, is she?’