Death in the Family

by Jill McGown

  It was funny, Judy thought. Someone, somewhere, would be very upset, because these dolls that looked almost exactly like real babies cost a lot of money and it had presumably been lost. But it wasn’t a real baby, and that put the loss of an expensive toy into perspective. And her mistaken belief that Emma was dead had put her disappearance into perspective, too; it seemed somehow less hopeless. Everything was relative.

  “That couple look as though they must be kosher. They were interviewed separately, and they both saw Andrea with the baby in a pram but said they didn’t see the baby on its own. And the husband saw a couple of other people while he was there painting, but . . .” He shrugged. “He says they weren’t still around by the time the girl arrived. He saw you, and gave a good description, so I think he’s quite reliable.”

  Judy didn’t ask what the description was; she felt she’d rather not see herself as others saw her.

  “We’ve got security camera videos of the Bridge Street car park, and they picked up Andrea taking the baby out of the car and putting her in the pram. There didn’t seem to be anyone taking any interest in her, and no one followed them from the car park.”

  Judy pushed the remainder of the sandwiches over to him. “Do you think Andrea could be involved?”

  “You’ve thought that all along, haven’t you? What makes you think she is?”

  “Two things, really. One is the way she was acting. She said she didn’t see anything, but I felt as though she knew more than she was saying, and she seemed so calm about it all, even though she’d just been screaming her head off.”

  “And the other thing?”

  “It was what you said earlier. About the only person who saw the baby left unattended having stolen her. If you think the couple had nothing to do with it, that makes five people in the immediate area who all saw the girl with the baby, and yet no one noticed the baby on her own.” She shrugged. “It just seems odd.”

  “It does, doesn’t it? But she did go back to her car for her phone—the security video confirmed that as well. All the same, I hadn’t thought about that. I’ll see what McArthur thinks about leaning on Andrea a bit.”

  “If he agrees that we should,” said Judy, “see if he’ll let you do the leaning.”

  “Why?”

  She once saw an angelfish on a wildlife program. There it was, swimming along, gently opening and closing its mouth, looking as though it thought only beautiful thoughts and longed for nothing more than universal love and world peace, when it turned its pretty head toward the fellow marine creature swimming by its side and, without breaking its aquatic stride, ate it.

  She smiled. “Just because.”

  “Well, well, well. If it isn’t the prodigal nephew.”

  She looked older, he thought, as he pecked her on the cheek. But then, she would. He hadn’t seen her for a long time. How old was she now? Seventy? Seventy-five? He knew she was quite a bit older than his mother, but he wasn’t sure by how many years. He smiled. “Can I come in?”

  “How long for this time?” she asked, standing aside to admit him. “Ten minutes or ten weeks?”

  “The weekend, if it won’t put you out too much.” He followed her through to the living room and put his overnight bag down on the trendy wooden floor. Not for his aunt the time capsules that so many solitary elderly people made for themselves. She had acquired a wide-screen telly, he noticed. One of his aunt’s prouder boasts was that she had never needed a man to provide for her. She had had a good job with a good pension and she had invested her savings well and wisely, which was why she could afford to retire to her seafront bungalow. She wasn’t short of a bob or two.

  “No, it won’t put me out.”

  She sat down, but he stood by the window, looking out at the sea. When he was little they had come here on holiday; he used to stand on the shore and imagine how one day he would go to sea. He was going to join the navy and see the world, his mother would say. But he had become an accountant, and he still regretted that just a little. No one wrote rousing drinking songs or romantic adventure stories about accountants. No accountant had ever had his likeness put on top of a 185-foot monument. Accountancy did not inspire poets to stirring lines of verse. Home is the hunter, he thought, home from the hill, and the accountant, home from the office. Ah, well. At least he’d seen some of the world now.

  “What wound are you licking this time?” she asked.

  He turned. “What makes you think I’m licking a wound?”

  “Because the last time your wife had left you. And the time before that you had been made redundant.”

  He sat down then and thought about that. “Do I really only come to see you when I’ve got problems? I hadn’t realized.” He smiled. “Shows you how few problems I’ve had in my life, doesn’t it? I promise I’ll come and see you some time when everything’s going great.”

  “I’ll get us some tea.” She went through to the little kitchen, and he heard the kettle being filled.

  He noticed another acquisition. “When did you get the computer?” he called through to her.

  “Oh, a couple of years ago. I thought it was time I found out what the information superhighway was all about.”

  He grinned. “And do you surf the Net often?”

  “When I want to find things out,” she said, coming in with cookies and little cakes. “And I like E-mail. It’s a lot cheaper than the post, for one thing.”

  “What, are all your cronies on-line, too?” He followed her into the kitchen and plucked mugs from the tree. No china tea services for Auntie.

  “I don’t write to my cronies.” She put tea bags in the pot and poured on the boiling water. “What would I want to write to them for? I see them every day.”

  “Who then?”

  “Whoever I feel like writing to.”

  “I’ll have to give you my E-mail address. Then we can keep in touch. Have you got a mobile phone yet?” He picked up the tray on which she had put milk, sugar, and the teapot, complete with cozy, the only old-fashioned touch he’d noticed, so far. She had always been practical; no sense in letting the tea get cold just to be modern.

  “Not yet, but I’m thinking about it. I should keep one on my person at all times, according to the advice sheets. You never know, at my age—I could fall and break my hip.”

  Lesley had kept hers on her person at all times; clipped to her belt or in her pocket. Organized, well-meaning, infuriating, misguided Lesley. Phil sighed as he set the tray down on the coffee table.

  Jean sat down as he poured the tea. “What have you been up to, Phil Roddam?”

  “Nothing very clever.” He put her mug down in front of her. “You wouldn’t want to know.”

  And the wonderful thing about his Aunt Jean was that she would accept that nonanswer and inquire no more deeply into the circumstances.

  Bob Sandwell had put out a description of the Audi driver, and his sister, coming in for her night shift, had discovered that Barton General had a patient answering that description whose clothes had been stained with someone else’s blood. The staff in the accident and emergency department had been debating the ethics of telling the police; she made their minds up for them and phoned Bob.

  Fletcher’s police record had been brought up on the computer, and Bob, resourceful as ever and a great believer in the six degrees of separation theory, had rung a friend of a friend of a friend until he had spoken to someone in the Met who had actually worked on the investigation into the sexual offense for which Fletcher had been imprisoned. According to him, Fletcher had found Kayleigh through an Internet chat room, arranged to meet her, cynically and systematically abused her over a period of several weeks, then claimed that she had misled him.

  “I put him in here,” the doctor said, stopping at a side room off the main ward. “We’re keeping him in overnight because of the blow to the head. And I can only let you see him for a few minutes. He’s really very tired.”

  Lloyd nodded and went in. “Dean Fletcher?”
>
  The young man lying on the bed nodded wearily. His mouth was swollen; his arms had masses of tiny cuts and scratches on them. His ribs were strapped up.

  “My name is Lloyd. I’m a detective chief inspector with Stansfield CID.” He showed Dean his warrant card. “Can I ask where you were at around eleven o’clock this morning, Mr. Fletcher?”

  “In Stansfield.”

  “What brought you to Stansfield?”

  “I went there to meet Kayleigh Scott.”

  Lloyd nodded. “Would you like to tell me how your clothing came to be stained with blood?”

  Fletcher sighed. “I fell over a dead body.”

  Lloyd walked round the little room, glancing out of the window, opening the door of the cupboard beside the bed, picking things up. His purpose, if it could be called that, was twofold; one, it tended to unnerve people when he did it and gave him the chance of catching them off guard; and two, he wanted to give himself a moment to try to assess Fletcher. To Bob, he represented the prime suspect, and Lloyd could hardly disagree; he was there, objecting to their taking Alexandra to Australia, and he ran away. But Lloyd couldn’t see how that argument would lead to his battering Kayleigh’s mother to death, and Fletcher could just as easily fit the description of the witness shy of giving his name to the police.

  All Lloyd knew right now was that Fletcher had broken the conditions of his parole in order to come to Stansfield and that was very stupid, very brave, or very calculating. Already Lloyd had discounted the first possibility, because even tired and in pain, there was an alertness in the eyes that simply wasn’t present in truly stupid people. But either of the other two could apply, and while the picture painted of Fletcher by Sandwell’s contact suggested the latter, Lloyd wasn’t convinced.

  “You fell over a dead body.” Lloyd put on his glasses and looked at the chart at the end of the bed. It meant nothing to him; he just liked having props. “Where?”

  “In a cottage in the middle of a wood.”

  “And what were you doing there?”

  “I told you. I went to meet Kayleigh. But she wasn’t there. And I tripped and fell as I went in. I landed on a dead body.”

  “And is that how you cracked your ribs and banged your head?”

  “No. I did that when I fell over the branch of a tree.”

  Lloyd looked at him over his glasses. “You seem to have been particularly unfortunate.”

  “Yeah, well. It makes a change. I’m usually lucky, apparently.”

  Lloyd could hear the bitterness in Fletcher’s voice. “A man answering your description was seen abandoning an Audi Quattro, and running into Brook Way Wood. Was that you?”

  “Yes. I took the car from the garage.”

  “In that case, Mr. Fletcher, I’m arresting you for the attempted murder of Ian Waring.” He noticed but didn’t comment on the show of innocent puzzlement from Fletcher, at odds with his candid answers. “You will be taken to a designated police station as soon as the hospital releases you into our custody, where you will be questioned about these events. I will be removing your clothes in order that they may be forensically examined. You will be given suitable clothing to wear while yours are being examined.” He cautioned him, informed him of his right to free legal representation. “Do you understand?” he asked routinely.

  “I understand the caution. I don’t understand what you’re arresting me for.”

  A male nurse appeared, and Lloyd left, without further enlightening Mr. Fletcher, and headed back to Stansfield.

  There wasn’t much they could do on the murder during the night, but Lloyd didn’t want vigilance relaxed even though they had apprehended the prime suspect. He wanted every call to the incident room followed up until it was too late to do so, every statement cross-checked, and he wanted Phil Roddam found.

  Fletcher hadn’t mentioned Alexandra, and though it was becoming more and more unlikely, there was still a possibility that the baby was Emma, because they still hadn’t found anything at all to suggest that a baby was moving into the cottage. Lloyd had no sooner thought that than PC Sims, on attachment to CID on Tom’s recommendation, knocked and put his head round the door. “Alan Marshall found a pram dumped in Brook Way Wood this afternoon, sir. He’s downstairs with it—he says he thinks you’ll want to see it.”

  Downstairs, Lloyd found Marshall, standing as proudly by the pram as any brand-new father. “It’s been dusted for prints,” he said. “Just in case. It was in a clearing where people do fly-tipping, but it’s far too good to have been thrown out, so I think it must have come from Mrs. Newton’s car. And I found a handbag—probably Mrs. Newton’s, since hers is missing. I think the car was looted by those kids as soon as it was abandoned.”

  Lloyd was impressed. “What made you think of searching the woods?”

  “He did.” Alan Marshall jerked his head toward Sims.

  PC Sims looked a little bashful. “I asked the lab to take a look at the Audi to see if it had fixings for a baby seat—it occurred to me that if Alexandra had been transported in it, it should have had a baby seat in it.”

  And why hadn’t it occurred to anyone else? thought Lloyd. More specifically, why hadn’t it occurred to him? Because, he thought, he had been so convinced that Alexandra was Emma.

  “And they confirmed that there are fixings, and since the baby seat had gone, I told Alan I thought the car might have been looted.”

  “Very good.” Lloyd looked closely at the pram. “It’s a collapsible pram, isn’t it?” he said.

  The other two agreed that it was.

  “Did you find it like this?”

  Marshall nodded.

  A puzzle, thought Lloyd. “So why wasn’t it collapsed? Surely it would be easier to transport that way?”

  “The kids probably used it to wheel away anything they could sell, and then dumped it,” said Marshall.

  Sometimes his little puzzles didn’t last very long. Lloyd was a bit surprised that the boys who stripped the car hadn’t been a little more enterprising, because prams were expensive, as he had recently found out, and it would certainly have a secondhand value. But the missing baby things had ceased to be a puzzle, and Alexandra wasn’t Emma. Tom had been right; Sims would be an asset.

  Lloyd brought the baby-snatch team up-to-date, and now he could concentrate fully on the murder. Tomorrow he would have everyone’s background thoroughly researched, Theresa Black’s movements checked, and the times that Waring was at her flat confirmed by the security cameras in the garage area. This case, he felt certain, was far from over, whatever everyone else thought.

  But tonight, Lesley Newton was in the mortuary, Ian Waring was in intensive care with Theresa Black by his side, and Dean Fletcher was in Casualty with an officer right outside the door, well aware of his charge’s history of absconding. With almost all the major players tucked up, one way or another, in Barton General, Lloyd really could go home, this time with a clear conscience.

  “No, mate, sorry. No one like that.”

  Tom was back to square one, now that Lloyd’s mystery baby was almost certainly no longer a mystery. McArthur had said that he could interview Andrea Merry tomorrow; as his last job tonight, he was trying the bus drivers, but he was down to his last one.

  Judy had been suggesting that Andrea herself had taken Emma, but that wasn’t borne out by the video camera evidence. All the same, Tom thought, it was odd that no one saw Emma in the pram on her own. And while it was true that they all saw the baby with a girl, they might not, it seemed to him, all have seen the same girl; the clothing was hardly distinctive. They had been thinking in terms of an older woman, but it could have been a young girl who had taken Emma. So he asked if they had seen anyone carrying a baby, especially a youngster.

  “Most of them are youngsters,” said the one he was speaking to now. “Never heard of contraception, these kids.”

  “Was there one who had the baby in her arms, rather than in a carry-cot or whatever?”

  “No. I m
ean, you notice. You see them making their way down the bus with a baby, and you know you’re going to be there for ages while they find the pushchair or the wheels or whatever it is they’ve got, and get it out and all that—sometimes you’ve got to get out and help them or you’d be there all bloody day. If one got off the bus with a baby in her arms and didn’t pick up a pushchair . . . you’d notice.”

  It had been the same story from the taxi drivers. Pushchairs and folding prams were bad news—they always held things up. Besides, a baby who wasn’t in a carry-cot or one of those pouch things—you didn’t see that very often, not in the middle of town. You’d remember if you picked up someone with a baby in her arms, wouldn’t you?

  And, so far, no one had reported seeing anyone at all walking with a baby in her arms. They had had one or two calls from neighbors who reckoned that they had suspect babies next door, but so far they had turned up nothing.

  If it had been a professional snatch, the baby could be anywhere by now, Tom thought gloomily, especially if Andrea was in their pay. And if that was the case, he had to hope that he could gain her confidence enough for her to get cocky. Just one slip, that was all they would need, and McArthur could be relied upon to put the fear of God into her, Tom was sure.

  He drove home to his own children, safe and well with their expectant mother, and hoped that this last throw of the dice would be successful and that the hunt for Emma didn’t turn into the kind that made national headlines.

  It hadn’t surprised Dean when the cop had appeared; he had known, as soon as he was put in a side ward, why he was getting VIP treatment.

  It hadn’t surprised him when he had been arrested; that had been going to happen the minute he had fallen over the branch. He had known there was no way he could avoid capture, because those kids had seen him and he couldn’t run, not this time.

  He had declined the nurse’s offer of something to help him sleep, but now he wished he had taken him up on it, because in addition to being in pain and scared about what was going to happen, he was completely baffled, and that was what was keeping him awake. Because what had surprised him was what he had been arrested for.