Stolen

by Lesley Pearse

  It was the story from this point on that Bryan wanted repeated, so he could be sure it was absolutely clear on the tape.

  ‘You want me to tell you again about when I smothered the baby?’ Howard asked. He actually smirked as he spoke, as if he was proud of the way he’d got out of the no-win situation.

  ‘That’s right,’ Bryan agreed, trying very hard to hide how much he despised him. ‘You said it was the first of May, is that correct?’

  ‘Yes, we went up to London that day to see someone about a passport for the baby. We didn’t have any luck because they couldn’t do one for a child born to American parents. We were both really tired and blue when we got back, and the baby wasn’t crying. Fern was afraid to go and look in case she had died, so I went up. She wasn’t dead, just lying there quietly. I just thought, this is the way out! Pillow over the face, over and out. Problem solved.’

  Bryan’s stomach churned at such callousness.

  ‘Go on,’ he prompted.

  ‘I took one of the pillows off our bed and did it, pressed it hard against her face. I felt bad, she was after all my daughter. But we couldn’t take her to the States and we couldn’t stay here for ever. It took about five minutes, she struggled a bit, then I put the pillow back on our bed and went down to tell Fern I thought it was a crib death.’

  Mike Manning, the solicitor, looked shell-shocked and blinked furiously.

  ‘So were you and Fern OK together after this?’ Bryan went on.

  ‘Hell, no!’ he exclaimed. ‘She was like a bear with a sore arse, I’ve never known nothing like it, shouting, crying, going on and on about how I screwed up. Me! It was never my idea to keep the girl against her will, or to force her to have a baby for us. That was hers, the crazy broad. Then she came up with the idea of putting the girl in the sea with the baby; she said they’d get washed up and everyone would think Lotte threw herself in because her baby died.’

  ‘And what was your view of that plan?’

  Howard was silent for a little while. He looked exhausted and Bryan thought the solicitor would say the interview had to be halted till the morning, but he didn’t.

  ‘I thought it was a good one. It wasn’t messy, it would be easy, and we could get a flight back to America the next day if we wanted.’

  ‘Can you confirm what day this was?’

  ‘May fifth,’ Ramsden replied. ‘About seven in the evening I got Lotte up from the basement. She seemed real calm, asked for a sandwich and a glass of milk. Then, just as Fern was about to pass her the glass, she produces a knife out of nowhere and sticks it in Fern’s chest.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Well, I tried to catch the little bitch, but she kept dodging round the table. She even threw a coffee pot at me. Fern was staggering about with blood coming out of her chest.’

  ‘Were you aware that Fern’s wound wasn’t a fatal one?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t very deep but she was losing a lot of blood and I knew she needed a doctor. But I couldn’t get a doctor, could I? Not with a dead baby in the house and Lotte creating a rumpus.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘Well, I guess I kinda freaked out because Lotte had run into the lounge and was throwing stuff at the windows to try and break them. I was scared someone would hear her, and Fern was begging me for help. All at once I had the knife out of a drawer and I was sticking it in her.’

  ‘What kind of knife was it?’ Bryan asked.

  ‘One of those big ones you chop stuff with. It had a triangular blade.’

  ‘So you are admitting you stabbed your wife?’

  ‘You know I did, you’ve seen the other wound on her!’

  ‘I want you to say what you did.’

  ‘I stabbed her, right here in the heart.’ He touched his chest with his left hand.

  ‘And tell me again where Lotte was while you were doing this?’

  ‘She was in the lounge screaming and throwing stuff at the windows to try and get out that way. Soon as I finished Fern off I went after her to tie her up.’

  ‘Did she know Fern was dead?’

  ‘Yes, I told her, but she thought she’d killed her. She started on saying I should ring the police and she’d tell them it was her fault. But I wasn’t going to do that.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I wrapped Fern up in a picnic blanket and tied those elastic tie things with hooks on either end round her. I’d already put the baby in the van. I took Lotte out next, then Fern, and drove down to my boat.’

  The rest was just like Lotte had already told Bryan, except Howard admitted that after casting Lotte over the side and throwing the baby in too, he found it really hard to get Fern up over the side of the boat on his own because she was heavy with the big stones he’d put inside the blanket. He said as he finally got her half-way over, some of the stones fell out of the blanket into the water.

  ‘I thought she’d sink anyway, and she did, disappeared right under the water. I said a few prayers and then I turned the boat around and went home.’

  ‘You said a few prayers?’ Bryan was so incredulous he couldn’t resist commenting.

  ‘Sure, I said I was sorry, but she got me into all this and it was the only way out for me.’

  ‘I think we should stop the tape now and let my client have some rest,’ Mike Branning said.

  The interview was formally ended and the tape recorder turned off. Bryan walked away from Ramsden’s bed without even saying goodbye for he was sickened by the man’s final remark. He had claimed to have loved Fern; according to Lotte they had been together for almost thirty years and before things got out of hand they were very happy together. Yet he had killed her and his own baby to save his own neck.

  A nurse came into the room after the police had gone. She offered Howard a bedpan, gave him some further medication, plumped up his pillows to make him more comfortable, then left, leaving just a dim night light on above his bed.

  But although Howard shut his eyes he could not drop off to sleep. He felt as if Fern was in the room with him, vengeful and angry because he’d betrayed her.

  He wished it was possible to go back and do things differently. He had loved Fern for his whole life, and he knew how awful it was going to be without her. Since the night he put her in the sea, he hadn’t had one moment’s peace of mind.

  If he closed his eyes he could see her so clearly, her beautiful red hair waving on her bare shoulders. He’d always loved the way a sprinkling of freckles came out on her shoulders and arms in the sun, just as he’d loved her shape – full breasts, small waist and a backside that wiggled in such a sexy way when she walked.

  Fern Swann was sixteen years old when he met her in 1974. He, Howard Barnes, was seventeen. Her folks came to live in the same trailer park he lived in, just a few miles outside Kansas City. It was called Merrywood, but the only merriment there ever was, was the first couple of hours’ drinking on a Friday night; later it would be the same old cursing and fighting that went on all week.

  There was no wood either. The trailer park was situated between two highways, with only a chain-link fence to stop the many dogs and small children getting killed on the roads. In summer the dust was so thick you could clean a window at nine in the morning, and by noon you wouldn’t see through it.

  It was the last-chance trailer park. If you got thrown off there, there was nowhere else would have you. By the time a child was nine or ten they knew their place was right at the bottom of the heap.

  Fern was the eldest of four, he was the eldest of five. All either of them had ever known was being dirt poor. They both had weak, messed-up mothers, and dads who hardly ever worked and liked to drink all day. They both knew more than was good for them about the adult world. They’d seen their mothers with black eyes, tried to soothe their younger siblings when they were hungry or when they were ridiculed at school for being dirty or smelly. Fern had helped her mother when she had a primitive abortion and Howard was weary of putting up ‘welc
ome home’ banners when his father got out of prison.

  Fern was waiting on tables, Howard working in a gas station, and most of the money they earned had to be handed over to their mothers for the whole family. They had no decent clothes or any real friends, and they both had the burden of caring for their younger siblings. Maybe if they had met and fallen in love with someone who lived the same sort of life and didn’t dream of a better one, things might have turned out differently. But from the first time they sat out together one night on a couple of old car seats someone had dumped at the trailer park, and aired their little dreams to each other, they both sensed they’d found the one person who could make them come true.

  The East and West Coasts of America may have been infected by the Peace and Love Movement of the late Sixties, but it had virtually bypassed Kansas. The thousands of well-attended churches, chapels and meeting houses right across the State were testament to Kansas being a God-fearing State. If not for this, Fern and Howard might well have drifted off on a completely different path, perhaps even straight to a criminal one, but instead they chose to join the Christ The Redeemer Evangelical Church.

  The love of God or piety had little to do with it. Fern heard churchy folk handed out clothes to the needy, and she reckoned that she and Howard could move up a notch or two with some better ones.

  They were given clothes, not only for themselves but their siblings too, but what really influenced them to keep going to that church was the preacher. He talked with such passion about God washing away men’s sins and raising them up to the heavens that the people in the congregation couldn’t wait to open their wallets, purses and pockets and fill the collection plate as it was passed around.

  ‘I’m going to be a preacher,’ Howard said with utter conviction to Fern one night after a service. ‘We’ll get married and travel all over America in a bus preaching the Word.’

  It was the showmanship of preaching that Howard was drawn to, along with all that money in the collection plate. He would’ve preferred listening to poems than verses from the Bible, for there were times when he barely understood them. But he loved it when people stood up around him and bore witness to God calling them away from drink or a life of crime. It was high drama, exciting, moving, and both he and Fern were quick to notice it was a great way to induce people to put even more in the collection plate.

  Doubtless sexual frustration boosted their religious fervour too. They were both virgins when they met, and they were both only too aware that an unwanted pregnancy would mean they would be trapped in Merrywood for ever. But they were a passionate couple, and the frantic petting they did nightly behind bushes and in back alleys did nothing to satisfy their needs. Throwing themselves into the Evangelical Church with its spirited music, extravagant witnessing and exaggerated claims of brother- and sisterhood, made them feel part of something bigger.

  The preacher must have seen a kindred spirit in Howard as he took him on as his aide, giving him room and board at his house, and Fern trained to be a nurse so that she too could leave the trailer park.

  Three years later they got married when Fern landed a job at a nursing home. The owners of the home liked the idea of having a ‘man of the cloth’ around to talk to the patients, so they let the couple have a small apartment on the premises.

  Both Howard and Fern had always looked back on that time as being the happiest of their lives. They were together as man and wife at last and unable to get enough of each other. But it was also their lucky break. The lonely old patients were so grateful to the couple for all their kindnesses that many of them left them money in their wills. Had anyone cared to take a little more notice, they might have observed it was the richest of the patients and the ones with the fewest relatives the couple made a fuss of. But the people who owned the nursing home were too busy cutting corners and planning their own get-rich-quick schemes to notice what anyone else was doing.

  By the time Fern and Howard were in their late twenties they had amassed a tidy sum between them and Howard had become a formidable preacher. They moved to Alabama to start their own church, but Fern also did private nursing in people’s homes, invariably the old and frail. Sometimes, too, she was hired to care for a new mother and her baby, sometimes she was called in by a midwife to assist her, and this was where she learned the rudiments of midwifery.

  Howard felt that this period in his life was when he was at his very best. Preacher Barnes became renowned for his fiery sermons that kept the congregation enthralled. He took witnessing a stage further than any other preacher, creating the best show in town as he urged sinners to come forward and testify to their sins and let Jesus into their hearts.

  Folk often marvelled how so many broken people, the damaged, drunks and ex-criminals, found their way to him, but it was more to do with him giving them a few dollars to bare their souls than a call from God.

  It wasn’t all trickery, though, for he and Fern fed these people a hot meal and gave them sympathy and hope when they told them they had been saved by Jesus. Most soon slipped back to their old habits, but as Fern always pointed out, the flood of life’s rejects, the dispossessed, mentally ill and the inadequate, would never dry up, and if they genuinely saved just one in a hundred, that was God’s work. And as long as Howard continued to put on a show at the church, his real congregation would continue to put money in the collection box.

  It was in Alabama that they arranged the first adoption. No money changed hands; the young girl had come to Howard and Fern distraught because her family would disown her if they were to discover she was having a baby. The Barneses also knew a couple desperate for a child. The girl had her baby in Howard and Fern’s small home, with Fern assisting the midwife, and soon after the birth the baby was handed to its new parents. The papers were signed later, and the adoption became a legal one.

  That arranged adoption and helping the young mother was an act of pure altruism. But it led to others where they asked for a small fee to cover expenses. There were real expenses too, for the midwife, the laundry and the mother’s food while she was with them. Howard was satisfied with just the gratitude from the couples who had waited so long for a child of their own. But Fern pointed out that gratitude wouldn’t keep her and Howard when they were old.

  It was around that time that Howard realized Fern wanted far more than he did. He was entirely happy and contented with his life as a preacher. The role gave him dignity, poise and importance, and it pleased him to see his wife nursing in the same community, for that proved they were totally dedicated to helping others.

  But Fern was growing tired of sitting people on bedpans, of changing dressings and bed linen, of bathing, monitoring and handing out medicine. She wanted to wear beautiful clothes, see foreign places, have her nails painted scarlet and be admired as a woman, not just for her nursing skills.

  She often teased Howard by saying she led him around by his penis, and it was very true that she used sex to get what she wanted. They were both highly sexed, but Fern could hold out, and frequently did until he agreed to whatever she was asking.

  That was how she got him to go along with the plan for the adoption agency. Hartford in Connecticut was the place she picked; close enough to New York and Boston to make it practical for prospective adoptive parents, but distant enough for the mothers to feel secure in the knowledge that their relatives wouldn’t drop in.

  There in a large house on the outskirts of town, Howard and Fern became Dr and Mrs Kent and set up their business, with an associate who had fingers in various pies and would direct would-be adoptive parents to them for a fee.

  White babies were at a premium in the early years, and Howard often donned a dog collar again to go down to New York. It wasn’t just in the hope of finding frightened pregnant girls a long way from home who might be tempted by the offer of free room and board in return for giving their baby away. He also looked for girls who for a sum of money would agree to have a baby for someone else. Sometimes the girls were impregnate
d with the sperm of the would-be adoptive father. But mostly Howard used his own, telling the parents it came from a sportsman, scientist or mathematician, whichever he thought they’d prefer.

  It was soon a thriving business which they ran efficiently between them, outwardly as a charitable trust which helped unmarried mothers estranged from their parents through their confinement. Not even their closest neighbours or those who came in to clean, cook or garden, suspected they were in fact selling the babies. This was partly because they made sure they displayed no signs of wealth, and they had an office elsewhere in town where they handled the business side of things.

  But when they went away on cruises or to New York, Boston or England, sometimes as Gullick, sometimes as Ramsden, Fern wore the kind of clothes and jewellery she had always craved.

  The drug smuggling was born out of this. They had met Jarvis in a hotel in the Bahamas and when they told him they often went on cruise ships, he put the proposition to them about booking on a Dutch cruise line to South America and picking up a package for him in Colombia.

  The danger element in the drug smuggling worked like an aphrodisiac on them both. They became more and more sexually charged as the ship neared Colombia and the pick-up point, and again as they approached Rotterdam at the other end. Once they’d delivered their package and picked up the money, they invariably went straight to a hotel and had wild sex which lasted for hours.

  When Jarvis retired from drug trafficking, they did too, for they felt their run of good luck couldn’t last much longer. They took cruises to places other than South America, and concentrated their energies on their adoption business.

  It was rather ironic that they were back in South America when they got involved with Lotte. They had never been to Chile before and thought it would be wonderful to see the fiords. In truth they were a little disappointed; the ports along the way were dull, and the scenery wasn’t as spectacular as they’d expected.

  If it hadn’t been for meeting Lotte, they might have given up the adoption business, sold the house in Hartford and probably the one in Itchenor, and moved to Florida. They could have been sitting out by a pool now, watching the sunset with a drink in their hands. Now she was gone, and he was dying. It had all been for nothing.