by Tim Adler
This time I really shook her. Hard. I wanted to shake this nonsense out of her. When she looked at me again, it was as if she had come to, or just woken up from a dream. It was a hard dream to say goodbye to.
"I'll go and pack my things," Alice said. "You stay here with Little Miss Frigid. I'm glad she can't have a baby, 'cos you're not having this one."
"Alice. Wait." This was exactly what I'd wanted to avoid. I felt intense relief that she was finally moving out; on the other hand, Mole would be home tomorrow morning, and then what?
I followed Alice down the hall and into her room. She pulled down her cheap suitcase from the top of the wardrobe and flung it onto the bed. She started ransacking her wardrobe, lifting armfuls of clothes on hangers and throwing them in. Then she wrenched the chest of drawers open, lifting an entire drawer with both hands and emptying it into the suitcase. Blouses, tights, knickers – they all went in. She started buckling up the straps like a woman possessed. I wanted to say something but couldn't. I just watched from the doorway, unable to move one way or another. Then she swept her hand along the top of the chest, sending everything flying: picture frames and necklaces and pots of cream. She let out a scream so loud that it penetrated the brickwork. Jesus Christ, I said. I reached out to stop her, and that was when she hit me.
She picked up a brass candlestick and smashed it across my bad shoulder.
I went flying backwards across the bed. For a moment I thought she was going to come after me again, bringing the candlestick down on top of my head. I shouted "Alice. Stop!" and threw my arm up to block her. Instead, she grunted and, satiated, threw the candlestick down. It clanged to the floor. Then she started dragging her suitcase down the hall. My God, she was as strong as an ox.
My shoulder hurt like hell, and I wondered if she had broken it. The same shoulder that I had hurt playing squash. It began throbbing like a pump. I struggled off the bed after her. "Alice, come back. We can work this out. You can't just leave."
I found Alice standing in the hall with the front door open. She was panting and had her keys in her hand, which she threw at me. I ducked, and they clattered across the parquet. The last thing our surrogate said to me was, "You've got no idea what's going on. Not a fookin’ clue."
And that was the last time I saw Alice Adams alive.
Once she had gone, the reality of what had happened knifed in. My God, she could have killed me. My arms started shaking uncontrollably as the adrenaline wore off, and I felt myself going into shock. I slid down the wall with my legs splayed, and I watched them shaking. Alice was obviously mentally unbalanced and needed professional help, but how was I going to explain to Mole why she had gone without telling the truth?
The reason our surrogate had walked out was because I had fucked her. Simple as that. Perhaps I could wheedle round this by saying that she had fallen in love with me and that I had asked her to leave. I don't know how long I sat there, turning over various unlikely scenarios in my mind.
Thinking about her Facebook page, the one with that photo showing us getting married, made me wonder where she had got the other photos from.
Our photograph album was stored in a cupboard in the sitting room. Sure enough, Alice had gone through it, tearing out random pictures. Four sticky corners marked where the snapshots used to be. But she had done something far worse, though: she had hacked into every other photograph showing us together.
Mole's head was missing from each photograph.
I didn't get much sleep that night. Where had Alice gone, and what was she going to do with our baby? Lurid thoughts. I kept picturing Alice waiting to be seen in an abortion clinic, being helped onto an examination table. Eventually I got up, gritty-eyed with lack of sleep, made some coffee and watched the sun rise like a threat. Buildings slowly revealed themselves in the greyish light. How the hell was I going to explain this?
I cancelled the morning's meeting and drove to Gatwick, using the journey to run through what I was going to say.
Mole walked through the doors into Arrivals looking blond and slim and pretty. She was wearing her leather jacket and a beret and that beautiful chiffon dress I had bought her. The moment I saw her again, I remembered how much I loved her. This was going to be worse than hard.
"How was your flight?" I asked, taking over her wheeled suitcase and steering her towards the car park.
"Have you patched things up with Alice yet?" was the first thing she said. I said something non-committal. I was so busy running through what I’d planned to say that I didn't really take in her reply.
The moment came when I turned on the ignition. "You keep ducking the question. Have you two patched things up?"
"I don't quite know how to tell you this. She’s moved out for good."
"What do you mean, she's moved out?"
What are you, deaf? I wanted to say. Instead I said, "That fight we had, it wasn't about how messy her room was. She's built this Facebook page about me. She's taken photographs from our wedding album and photoshopped them, putting herself in your place. Every photo had her face. It freaked me out."
"I don't believe it."
"I'm telling you the truth."
"How do you know about this Facebook page?"
"It was on her computer. We had a row when I confronted her about it. She said I had no right to be looking at her Facebook page, that it was her private stuff. I pointed out that she was stealing our photos–"
"Well, do you know where she's gone? When she’s coming back?"
"I don't know."
"She can't just walk out like that, she can't just disappear–"
"Wait, there's more. When I came home last night, she'd made this romantic dinner. Like we were on honeymoon or something. I tried letting her down gently. Then we got into this fight. The clinic warned us that some surrogates can get possessive. Then there's this." I pulled down my shirt to show her. My shoulder had turned a nasty blackish-blue colour, and it still throbbed. "There. Is that proof enough for you? She hit me with a candlestick when I tried to stop her leaving."
"Good God," Mole said, gently touching my bruise. "Have you seen a doctor?"
I shook my head and told her I'd put a frozen bag of peas on it. A BMW rubbered round the car park looking for a space as we sat there listening to our car's engine.
Finally, Mole said, "I know you. You never quite tell me everything. Hugo, I'm asking you to tell me the truth, please. Whatever it is, we promised we'd never lie to each other."
So help me God, I lied straight to her face.
Mole shook her head. "She's such a down-to-earth girl. I find this hard to believe. And she didn't say where she was going?"
"She just stormed out, and she hasn't returned any of my calls." I was on a roll now. This conversation was going much better than I had expected.
"She just can't walk out like that. She's carrying our baby."
"Look, you know how moody she can be. She just needs to calm down. I'm sure she'll come back if we wait a few days." And then what, my other voice said. The truth was that I was glad Alice Adams was out of our lives. We could start again, try for a baby with somebody else. The thought occurred to me that I was being given a second chance, an opportunity to turn the clock back to before this nightmare had begun.
"I'll phone her myself. But before I do that, you must tell me, was there anything, anything else that might have upset her?"
"She told me you didn't love me. She's crazy, Mole. We got into bed with a crazy woman."
"She has our baby," Mole said quietly. "Whatever's happened, we must get our baby back. It's not about the money." She turned to look at me and her eyes were pricking. "This baby, it's yours and my DNA, it's our future–"
Is it really our baby? I wondered. "I know," I said gently, folding my hand over hers. "Whatever it costs, whatever we have to do, we're going to get our baby back. I promise you. First thing we must do is go to the police. This is kidnap." The truth was going to come out, I knew it. Well, let it. Even if i
t cost me my marriage, I had made a solemn oath to protect this child, even if it wasn't even Mole's baby. Please God, let us find our child. Nothing else was as important.
Starting up the engine, I pulled out of our parking space, and immediately the Porsche started making a thumpety-thump sound. I pictured us driving on metal rims. Oh great, a flat tyre. I reached for the emergency parking indicator and pulled over. "I think I've got a flat," I said, getting out of the car. The car door pinged until I slammed it shut. Moving round the car, I could see that I didn't just have one flat tyre – each one of them oozed onto the concrete.
Somebody had slashed all four of them.
Chapter Fourteen
I scanned to see if she was still in the car park, hiding behind one of the pillars. She would want to see her handiwork and gloat over what she had done. I could almost hear her laughing at us. "Alice," I shouted. "I know you're there. You can come out now." My voice echoed round the car park. Was this how she was going to start taking revenge? A series of pranks that was going to escalate? In my heart, I knew this was just the beginning. I did a complete circle of the car park. Nothing.
Mole got out of the car looking anxious. "Hugo, for God's sake, you sound mad," she said. I kept shouting Alice's name. I knew she was out there, she had to be. Mole came forward and tried putting her arms around me. "Stop mothering me," I said, shrugging her off. The bitch was watching us, laughing at us.
In the end there was nothing we could do but wait for the AA van to come out.
We wasted an hour while the mechanic changed the tyres and then drove home from Gatwick to report our baby missing. It was a nasty foggy day in September, and my headlights reflected the fog blankly. Without looking at each other we discussed whether to post a reward, and then realised how little we really knew about our surrogate. All we had was the form the clinic had supplied us with – everything else we had taken Alice's word for. It all could have been a pack of lies. Was Alice even her real name? How I wished we had listened to people's advice and not gone anywhere near her. She was out there. Somewhere. A young woman carrying our baby in a city of eight million people. And what if she went back up north? Then we really would never find her. I thought of our baby, perhaps a little girl by then, all grown up and wearing a school uniform, completely unaware that her real parents lived nearly two hundred miles away and had searched desperately for her. It was too sad.
If our baby lived, that was.
This other possibility was too dreadful to think about.
I thought back to my sleepless night. What was to stop Alice going to a family planning clinic and having the baby aborted? As far as the clinic was concerned, it was her baby. She would invent some cock-and-bull story about a one-night stand and within an hour our baby girl would be dead, bagged up in a yellow sack marked medical waste. I didn't want to think about that. I looked over at Mole. My God, she was lovely. She was salve to my soul. I thanked my lucky stars or whoever for bringing her into my life and thought about how I had managed to royally screw things up. Either way, the clock was ticking. We just had to find Alice.
A derelict was sitting staring down at the floor when I went up to the officer behind the scratched window to report our baby missing.
"Hello," I said. "I want to report a crime."
"What sort of crime, sir?"
"Kidnapping. Our baby. Our unborn baby," I said, feeling vaguely self-conscious. I turned to Mole for support. Go on, she nodded.
The policeman put down his pen and scrutinised me. "Are you saying your child's been stolen?"
"Not exactly, no. It's complicated. Look, is there anybody in charge I could see? I don't want to talk about this in public." The tramp lifted his head from his hands, interested in our conversation.
"I’ll need all the details. I have to register the crime first. Now, when did your baby go missing?"
"Last night at around half past ten. Look, our baby hasn't actually been born yet. We're using a surrogate mother. It's our surrogate who's gone missing. We don't know where she has gone to. I've tried calling her and texting her, but she hasn't replied. I'm worried. Both for her safety and our child's."
"So really you want to report a missing person?"
"I suppose so. But as far as I'm concerned, this is kidnap. She's carrying our child. It's our baby, not hers."
The officer's pen scratched over the report sheet. He shook his head as he finally caught up with what I was saying. You could tell he thought this whole thing was amusing. "What's the name of the missing woman?"
"Alice Adams. Age twenty-six. She was living with us during the pregnancy. Her home address is in Manchester somewhere. I can give you a photograph–"
He shook his head. "Sir, if you sit down, somebody will come and get you."
"Fine. I'm glad you find this funny." I raised my hands in the air and walked back to where Mole was sitting.
"There was no need to be so rude," Mole whispered. "He was only doing his job."
Then there was the agonising wait for something to happen as other people came in and were seen before us. I don't know how many times I read the notices above the bucket seats opposite. Occasionally I checked my BlackBerry and saw the incoming emails piling up, which only added to my stress level. I squeezed Mole's hand to reassure her that everything was going to be all right, and she squeezed mine back. I knew that I had been lucky up till now. My parents' splitting up when I was a teenager was really the only blemish on my childhood. Dad had paid my way into public school (I had failed the entrance exam, and he had promised the school a new sports hall or something), and had then waltzed into a job I was never even interviewed for. Currie's jibe about being born with a silver canteen in my gob was right. I was earning over a hundred thousand pounds a year, drove a Porsche and owned a luxury Docklands penthouse. So far I had been untouched by the car crashes and train wrecks that happened to everybody else, the nagging disappointment that somehow life had not turned the way you expected it. And yet now my life seemed to be caving in. One small error, a tiny mistake – losing my wallet – had led to a series of events that had unravelled everything. I began to wonder whether losing my wallet had even been an accident. I remembered how Alice had barged into me that afternoon. Wasn't that what pickpockets did? I was in the middle of wondering whether Alice could have pick-pocketed me when another policeman stuck his head round a side door. "Mr and Mrs Cox? Could you come this way, please?"
He led us down a canary-yellow station corridor, our steps ringing out along the floor. More notices. The constable showed us into an interview room. The walls were painted municipal grey. A steel strip, some kind of panic button, ran along one wall, and two CCTV cameras looked down at the table and four chairs. I found myself walking around the table, touching it, unable to comprehend why. Then it struck me. I had seen this room so often on television, but only in two dimensions. The police constable asked if we wanted something to drink. A cup of tea, Mole said. I nodded. Same for me, with two sugars. We sat down, but my chair wouldn't budge. To stop people throwing them around, I supposed. "They can follow where she went just by looking at CCTV images," I said, glancing up at the camera. I imagined jerky time-lapse footage of Alice banging through a Tube barrier and following her journey to God knows where. I mean, you saw this stuff all the time on TV.
The constable reappeared holding two steaming plastic cups with lids. Sorry I can't give you mugs, he said. Health and safety. The sugar in the tea tasted silky and delicious.
Detective Inspector Deepa Syal was not what I expected. For a start, she was a frumpy, middle-aged Indian woman, not the haunted-looking detective you expect from TV shows. She was wearing a cheap-looking trouser suit. We shook hands, and she sat down clutching the crime report the desk constable had filled out. Our detective got right down to business.
"So, let me get this straight, the woman who's stolen your baby, you paid her to carry your child?" she said.
"That's right," Mole said. "I can't get pregnant, so we
decided to use a surrogate. Her references were really good–"
I interrupted, "She even had a criminal-record check. The clinic told me it had come back fine."
"–and so I asked her to move in with us. I wanted to keep an eye on our baby."
DI Syal frowned. "Is that normal? To have a surrogate live with you?"
"It depends," Mole said. "It's entirely up to you. She needed somewhere to live and I thought, why not? She moved in, and I thought everything was fine, and then Hugo, well, you explain what happened next ..."
I cleared my throat. This was going to need careful handling. "I, uh, noticed she began to have certain feelings for me. I made clear this was just a financial arrangement."
"What do you mean, 'certain feelings'? Can you be more specific?" DI Syal spoke as if she was attacking me. She came across as very aggressive. Perhaps she didn't like men, or she'd had to act doubly tough to get on in a man's world.
"I found a Facebook page she'd made, all about the two of us being together. She seemed to think that we were in a relationship. She'd stolen photographs from our wedding album and superimposed her head on my wife's. It freaked me out."
"I'm sorry, but I have to ask this. You gave her no cause to think you were interested?"
I shifted in my seat. "Of course not. As far as I was concerned, this was purely a money transaction."
"How much were you paying her?"
"Well, the clinic charges sixty thousand pounds. Half up front. I don't know how much of that went to Alice."
"I want to stop and slow down. How did you meet? Was she a friend of yours?" Syal asked Mole, who shook her head.
"My gynaecologist recommended this clinic. We did everything by the book. The clinic has hundreds of surrogate mothers on its files–"
"–We just happened to choose the wrong one," I said, finishing her sentence. The possibility of suing the clinic hadn’t entered my mind before. I made a mental note to have a chat with Nigel Rosenthal about our legal position.