by Fiona Barton
She hadn’t gone out of the house for a couple of days. Too shocked to leave the nest. But finally, she’d taken Emma to be weighed at the medical center. She didn’t want any trouble about missing appointments.
Dr. Grundy had been pleased to see her—he always was. Other patients complained about him, especially after his lunchtime session in the local pub. But she singled him out for appointments and, with a little careful flirting, had become one of his favorites. He’d told her so, holding her hands in his shaky grasp. He’d told her off for delivering Emma at home with a doula when she’d brought the baby to him the first time, but she’d cooed her explanations and he’d been putty in her hands. He’d tutted and signed all the paperwork.
After he’d weighed Emma on the last visit, Jude had told him she’d decided to go home to her parents and he’d looked disappointed. “We’ll miss you, Jude,” he’d said.
“And I’ll miss you, too, Dr. Grundy,” she’d said and kissed his papery cheek.
It had been a hard decision but she needed a new start. With Charlie gone, she’d have to support herself. She couldn’t work and look after Emma. And she didn’t want to leave her with a childminder. She needed help.
Her parents knew Emma had been born but had chosen to stay away, signaling their disapproval of their daughter’s life choices with a resounding silence. She’d go to them. They wouldn’t be able to resist their first grandchild.
Her mum and dad had given her the “more in sorrow than in anger” treatment with a dry peck on the cheek and serial tutting when she’d appeared at their door with a suitcase and Emma in her pram. Her mum had bristled all morning but Jude pretended not to notice.
Lunch was hideous. There was meat—a joint of bloody beef—and her mother shrugged as her vegetarian daughter helped herself to cauliflower. “Well, we didn’t know you were coming,” she said.
A stifling silence followed. Jude struggled to fill it, talking about the baby, her job, how lovely the garden was looking.
“So, Judith, where is the father?” her mother said as she handed her the roast potatoes.
“Gone, Mum,” Jude said, keeping it simple.
“I see,” she said. “And how long are you staying?”
“Not sure, Mum,” Jude said.
“Your baby needs stability and she’ll get little of that if you flit off again.”
“Deirdre,” her father said, a warning note in his voice. “Now is not the right time for this conversation.”
Jude gave him a tight smile of thanks.
“Well, when is the right time? She doesn’t contact us for months, gets herself pregnant and throws away a perfectly good career, and then turns up and we’re supposed to pretend nothing’s happened? For goodness’ sake, Judith. You can’t imagine how much unhappiness you’ve caused. I haven’t slept for months.”
Jude stabbed a potato with her fork.
“I was not trying to make you unhappy, Mum. I made the wrong decision. Can we leave it at that? There’s a baby to consider now. Can I have some carrots, please?”
And, trained to be polite even in the midst of a row, her mother passed the bowl with a face like thunder.
FORTY-FIVE
Kate
THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 2012
She rang DI Sinclair early that morning, eager to hear the latest in the investigation before the Editor’s news conference. She hoped the officer would have something for her. She and the DI were getting on like a house on fire after their shaky start. She’d made sure of that. This was a story that could run and run, and she was going to keep him onside, whatever that took.
So she behaved herself, never straying from the official lines. It had been a happy collaboration so far; the DI was very pleased with the public response provoked by the Post’s story—mothers who’d given birth at the same time as Angela, the nurses who’d searched for Alice, even one of the officers who had investigated the case. Their chats had got cozier.
Kate now knew he had kids the same age as hers and he supported Spurs.
“Hello, Andy,” she said. “Sorry to be an early bird. How are you?”
“Been better, Kate,” he said, sounding weary.
“Sorry to hear that. Heavy night?”
“No. Not really.”
He hesitated and she let the silence force him to continue.
“Look, something has come up on the Alice Irving case. Bit of a problem. Can we talk off the record?”
“’Course,” she said, brain on full alert. “Problem, Andy? What kind of problem? Is it the DNA tests?”
“No, no. The match is solid. But there is a major snag with the timeline.”
Kate pulled out her notebook. Off the record now but she wanted to get it all down for later. In case things changed.
“Go on,” she said.
“As we know, Alice was taken on March 20, 1970,” DI Sinclair said.
“Yes . . .”
“Well, she wasn’t buried in Howard Street until the 1980s. Couldn’t have been.”
“What? Why? How do you know?” Kate said.
“Forensics are telling us the paper wrapped round the body was from the eighties—something to do with the ink on the newsprint, haven’t got the details in front of me—and we’ve been looking at the history of the site. Should have done it earlier but the DNA match blindsided us. Anyway, the houses had tiny concrete yards, not gardens, until the end of the seventies. The yards backed onto a Boys’ Brigade hall and workshops. The buildings were only knocked down in 1979 when the houses were bought by a developer and the gardens extended. So the body couldn’t have been buried before then.”
Kate swallowed hard.
“Peter, the lad who found the body, said there were concrete foundations in the garden,” she recalled. “They were digging them up. Underneath where the urn was.”
“Did he? I’ll go back to him,” DI Sinclair said, making his own notes.
“So, what does this mean, Andy?” The million-dollar question.
“I suppose it means that Alice’s body must have been kept somewhere else for ten years.”
“Christ. This is all becoming pretty macabre.” Who else knows this? she thought.
“Indeed,” he said, adding as if reading her thoughts, “No one outside the team knows yet, Kate. I haven’t even told Angela. Want to be absolutely sure we’ve got everything right.”
“I’d love to write this, Andy.”
“Yes, I bet you would. Hold off until tomorrow, though, Kate. Then you can write as much as you like. I need your help getting this new timeline out there.”
“’Course. Whatever we can do to help.”
Her brain was racing. Who was living in Howard Street a decade later? Where would you keep a body?
“Thanks for telling me, Andy. I’ll sit on the info until you are ready. Let’s talk later,” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
• • •
She rang Bob Sparkes immediately. Her touchstone.
“Kate,” he said. “I’m driving. I’ll put you on loudspeaker.”
“Right. On your own?”
“Yes. Why? What’s happening?”
She told him the highlights of the conversation with DI Sinclair and he left her hanging while he thought it through.
“The body could have been kept anywhere in the country for ten years. Throws the whole investigation into the air again. Could have been someone already living in the house who needed to move the body, or someone who moved in and brought the body with them.”
“Or one of the workmen working on the demolition of the Boys’ Brigade hall?” Kate added.
“All possibilities. Poor Andy Sinclair. Does Angela know?”
“Not yet. Glad it’s not me telling her.”
“And me,” Sparkes said. “Keep in touch, Kate
.” And gone.
Joe arrived as she put her phone down.
“You’re in early, Kate,” he said. “Have I missed anything?”
“You could say that, Joe. Sit down,” she said quietly. “Bit of a spanner in the works as far as Alice is concerned.”
“What, what?” Joe stuttered, wheeling his chair closer to Kate so he could hear. “What’s happened?”
“We’ve got to fast-forward to the 1980s, Joe. Alice was buried in Howard Street in the eighties, not the seventies. But no one else can know yet. Andy Sinclair told me this morning but it’s still unofficial.”
Joe rocked back in his chair. “But she wasn’t killed in the eighties . . .”
“No, or we’d have the body of a ten-year-old, wouldn’t we?”
“’Course, ’course,” he said. “Just thinking out loud. So where was the body for ten years?”
“Exactly,” Kate said. “And who buried it in Howard Street? Let’s concentrate on that.”
“Well, it couldn’t have been Marian Laidlaw,” Joe said. “I looked for her last night in the records and she died in 1977.”
“God, that was young. What a bugger,” Kate said. “Well, it was a long shot—Len Rigby said she had an alibi—but it would have been a great story if she’d confessed all these years later. So who was alive at the time?”
“Barbara,” Joe said. “She was living in one of the houses then.”
FORTY-SIX
Kate
THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 2012
Miss Walker’s flat was empty when they got there but a note on lined paper flapped on the front door, telling callers she was out shopping. Back by 3 p.m., she’d written.
“Good grief, she might as well have added ‘PS: Help yourselves,’” Kate said, pulling it off the door and stuffing it in her pocket.
It had begun to spit with rain and she led the way to the pub. “She’ll be back in twenty minutes,” Kate said.
Graham laughed when he saw them. “You can’t keep away, can you?”
He called through to the back: “Toni, the press is back.”
“Your wife?” Kate asked.
“Yes, that’s me,” she said, emerging from the back room. “Graham says you’re a reporter,” she added, as if it was some sort of guilty secret. A species apart. Kate waited, expecting the usual snide remark. Things had changed since the days when people thought being a reporter was glamorous. Now, journalists were down there with tax inspectors and traffic wardens.
It seemed everyone was jumping up and down about the press and their methods of getting information. But it was all about the technology nowadays. When Kate had been starting out, her ex–Fleet Street boss had told her how to disable a public phone box so no other reporter could use it—unscrew the receiver—and once ordered her to take a hidden camera into a hospital ward to photograph a famous patient.
She hadn’t done the sneaky hospital bed photographs. She’d been frightened enough of her boss—an alcoholic whose mood for the day could be gauged by the way the office door swung open in the morning—to do almost anything he ordered, but not that. She’d taken a photo of her coat and pretended the camera had gone wrong.
But her old boss sounded like a character out of an Ealing comedy in comparison with some of the new dark arts. Breaking into phone voicemails, bank accounts, and medical records had become the norm in some newsrooms, it was said, more and more loudly.
Some newsrooms. But it didn’t matter who’d done what anymore. They were all guilty as far as the public was concerned, and they all had to face the reckoning.
Kate’s paper had escaped a police investigation into hacking and paying officials for information—“It may happen yet,” Terry had said over a beer one evening, deep in a pit of despair.
“Don’t be daft,” she’d said. “I’ve never hacked anything—wouldn’t have known where to start.” But she knew it didn’t change the public opinion that all journalists were scum.
“Yes, but crème de la scum,” Mick the photographer had boasted.
• • •
The pub landlady kept quiet and looked at her expectantly.
“Er, yes, I’m Kate Waters from the Daily Post. Nice to meet you.”
“I’m Toni. You don’t look like a reporter,” she said.
Kate wasn’t sure what to say. She wondered what Toni thought reporters looked like. Men, probably. Men in dirty macs rummaging through dustbins, quite possibly. She tried not to sigh.
“Well, we come in all shapes and sizes,” she said and laughed.
Toni laughed, too. “I hear you’re asking about the baby in the garden. Incredible it’s that little girl . . .”
Kate nodded. “Incredible . . .” she echoed.
“Your husband was saying that you grew up in the street, that you might remember some of the people who were around in the seventies and eighties,” Kate said, shuffling round to give Toni room to sit.
“Yes, my mum and dad had the pub, and before that, they lived at number 57 for years.”
“Was your maiden name Baker?” Kate asked.
“That’s right. How did you know?” Toni said.
“I’ve been looking at the electoral register from those days, that’s all,” Kate said. “Did they sell to Mr. Soames?”
Toni rolled her eyes. “The local sleazebag. He was revolting, all hands. Always after the girls. I stayed well away.”
Kate underlined the note “Find Soames” in her notebook. “What about the girls you knew in the eighties?”
“I thought the baby was taken in the seventies?” Toni said.
“Well, the police are looking at a wider spread of years to be thorough,” Kate said quickly. She’d almost given the game away. Sinclair would go mad if she said anything before he gave the go-ahead.
“Right. Well, let’s see, there was quite a gang. They all came to my sixteenth birthday party. That was 1985. It was a brilliant party. A disco, just down the road at the new Boys’ Brigade hall. God, I can’t believe that’s almost thirty years ago.”
Kate smiled winningly.
“We must be about the same age, then,” she said. Kate was a good six years older but never mind. “Best days of my life, too. Do you remember Jackie? I loved that magazine. Read it every week and put the posters on my bedroom walls. And the fashions. Can’t believe some of the outfits I used to wear. My boys think I’m making it up.”
Toni lapped it up. “I wore a miniskirt and fishnet gloves, like Madonna, to my sixteenth. Thought I was the bee’s knees. I think I’ve still got photos from it somewhere.”
“Oh, I’d love to see them,” Kate said quickly.
“I’ll get them,” Toni said happily, getting up and disappearing through a door marked “Private.”
“You’ve started something now.” Graham laughed. “Hope you’ve got nothing else planned for the day. Toni loves a trip down memory lane.”
“Oh, so do I,” Kate said. “I’ve got all the time in the world.” She looked meaningfully at Joe and hoped he wouldn’t get restless.
Ten minutes later Toni emerged, her arms filled with a stack of fat photo albums and several framed pictures.
“I’m not sure which ones are the party so I brought everything,” she said. “And these in the frames were in the same box so I brought them, too.”
She heaved them onto the table, sending up a cloud of dust. “Haven’t looked at them for ages,” she said, apologetically waving away the evidence of neglect.
The two women sat side by side on the velour banquette and began trawling through the pages, Toni pointing and giggling while Joe looked at his phone and Graham polished the glasses behind the bar.
“You ladies want a cup of tea?” he called across when he’d finished. Joe looked up. “Sorry, mate,” Graham said. “Tea for everyone?”
“Yes,
please, love,” Toni called over her shoulder. “He’s a treasure. Oh, I think these must be the party ones.”
Spilling out of the album were loose snapshots and birthday cards. Kate scooped up a handful of photos that had fallen onto the floor and laid them out on the table like playing cards.
“That’s the gang,” Toni said, delighted. “Look at us all dolled up. We all got together in my bedroom before the disco to do our makeup and hair. You could hardly breathe for hairspray and perfume. Takes me straight back.”
Kate was scrutinizing the faces. “Which one’s you?”
Toni tapped a smiling face near the center of the group. “There I am. I had a feather cut then. Everyone did. We all thought we were Sheena Easton. Hideous now but it was big then. Literally.”
She smoothed her shiny bob nostalgically.
“And look at the makeup. We used to put blusher on with a trowel.”
Kate laughed loudly. “Looks like you should all have been down at the burns unit. Didn’t we used to put the same stuff on our lips and cheeks? I remember it was sticky and smelled of bubble gum.”
“Yes. And I had that lip gloss that tasted of strawberries. Revolting!”
“So who are the others?” Kate asked, anxious to get them back on track.
“Now then, that’s Jill, Gemma, Sarah B., and Sarah S., not sure about her—think she was only at our school for a term. I think that’s Harry Harrison and her weird friend. They were a year below us at school, but Harry knew my brother, Malcolm. Well, she fancied him rotten—all the girls I knew did. Poor Malcolm. Too gorgeous for his own good. Anyway, Harry begged me to invite her. I think they went out for a while—oh, and then he dumped her for Sarah S. I can’t believe I’ve remembered that, it’s a million years ago. I do remember that Harry was always in trouble at school, but she was a great laugh.”
Kate was writing down names, occasionally staunching the torrent of gossip and memories to check surnames and spellings.
“Don’t suppose you knew an Anne Robinson?”
“Only the one from The Weakest Link on the telly.”
“No, that isn’t her,” Kate said. “Who still lives round here?” she asked during a pause for a second cup of tea. “Who can I go and see?”