by Adam Creed
She kneels down, the ground sharp on her bare knees.
Her hands shake as she lifts the baby into her breast. She presses her cheek to its head and whispers into the baby’s ear, soft as skin, ‘Please God, please don’t. Please God, please be all right.’
She rocks and holds her breath and searches for the baby’s temple with her finger, holding her breath still deeper, that she may sense a pulse or feel the whisper of breath. But nothing.
Her stomach yawns. She wants to scream and curse whoever did this. She holds the baby tighter, struggling to her feet and walking towards the back door not knowing whether to go fast or slow. And then it happens.
The baby screams. Into her ear. Deep and hurt, the baby screams with every surge of blood and well of air from its egg-sized lungs. A last, despairing cry to be saved. Josie slumps to the ground and rocks back and forth, back and forth, holding the baby’s head in the palm of her hand.
When they come, Jombaugh kneeling beside her and trying to prise the baby away, Josie won’t let go, simply says, over and over, until the ambulance arrives, ‘For the grace of God, for the grace of God …’
And even then, she won’t let the paramedics take the baby without her going too, quite convinced that this baby will surely die if it is taken from her sight.
*
The wine has made Eve loose. Her hair is ruffled and her eyeliner is smudged – as are her words. Her smile comes easy and she speaks faster, her northern accent thicker now. She toys with her glass and supports her chin with the palm of her hand, looks up at Staffe as if he is the only person in the room. But she had done the same with the doorman and the waiter. On the way, she told him how she came to London four years ago with a friend. She hated it, but it’s not so bad now, and she can’t imagine herself ever going back.
Staffe watches the act up on the stage. They are at a small table in the Boss Clef. The audience is hemmed in to the stage by a horseshoe of red drapes. He thinks, how refreshing, that she knows he is a copper but hasn’t delved at all into his job, or his life.
At the end of the song, Eve spins on her seat, joins in the applause and leans into him, her lips on his ear and whispering, ‘We haven’t talked about you at all, have we? But I know.’ She pulls away.
‘Know?’
The applause subsides and Eve picks up her glass and finishes her vodka and soda. ‘Your sergeant told me all about you.’
Staffe’s instinct is to tell her that he’s really not got his head round his ex, that he’s actually not made love since then and has barely had the inclination. Suddenly, he knows he should see Sylvie. It’s the least she deserves – an explanation. Perhaps she deserves to never see him again. What does he know?
‘He told me about your ex.’
‘Sylvie?’ He likes the word in his mouth.
‘Let’s not talk about her.’ She finishes her wine.
He wants to tell Eve he is too old for her. Suddenly, in his battered leather jacket and his boot-cut jeans and his grown-out hair and his day’s growth, he feels the full weight of his years.
He looks at his mineral water and Eve’s empty glass, and gestures to the waiter, asks for another vodka and a Laphroaig. ‘A large one.’
‘Don’t drink on my behalf,’ she says, straight-faced. ‘Not unless you want to.’ Her face cracks into a smile and she slaps his leg, says, ‘Let’s dance.’ She nods to the small gap between the stage and the front line of tables – enough room for a few people to shuffle. Nobody is dancing.
Eve stands and holds out her hand towards Staffe. His heart sinks and he looks around the room. He knows what he would think of a man like him dancing in public.
She tugs him and he surrenders to it. He lets her lead him between the tables and he smiles apologetically, in case anybody cares to look. He feels the heat of the stage lights on him. The singer raises her hands and claps, smiles at Eve, whose hips draw figures of eight. Staffe doesn’t know where to put his hands, what to do with his feet, but Eve reaches out and takes his hand and winds herself around him, under his hand and twirling in his grasp. By the end of the song, there are a dozen people on the dance floor.
When they get back to the table, the drinks have come. Staffe pours some water into his whisky and feels his phone vibrate.
He should ignore it.
‘You’re ringing,’ says Eve. ‘You should answer. I understand.’
Four
Even in the dead of night, Keller ward is bright and clean. It smells of talcum powder and warm milk. Brightly coloured animals romp across the walls in primary colours and the distant reprise of cartoon soundtracks swoons through the halls of new life, like lullabies. It is a world away from Kerry Degg’s small room, just a couple of corridors away.
However, in a room built for one tiny human, a row of glum people huddle along one wall: a uniformed officer, a doctor and a nurse, who Staffe recognises from Kerry’s ward – the one with the golden hair.
DC Josie Chancellor sits by the plastic-domed cot. Within the germ-free bubble is the baby they have called Grace. The DNA has been sought and is being analysed, but the outcome is widely predicted: Baby Grace is the daughter of Kerry Degg. The father? That remains to be seen.
‘I found her, sir,’ says Josie, looking up with wide eyes, her kohl bled black in gothic zags down to her cheeks.
‘I’m sorry, Josie. I should have dealt with Degg myself.’
‘No!’ says Josie. Her eyes are glazed and her lips are plump, blood red. ‘If anything had been different about tonight, I wouldn’t have found her. She might …’
‘She won’t go home. We keep telling her,’ says the nurse.
‘She was so light, like lint. And she screamed for me. It was the most beautiful thing.’ Josie turns towards him and Staffe wraps her up in a tight embrace. ‘Sir, it was the most beautiful thing.’
He thinks, he must smell of drink and the club and maybe scent. ‘Thank God you went out when you did.’
‘Jombaugh got a call, sir. About two minutes after I found the baby. It sounded like a woman, but he couldn’t be sure. They were talking through some kind of device. We’re having the tape analysed.’
‘Where was the call made from?’
‘A prepaid mobile. No chance of a trace.’
‘They told Jom about the baby?’
‘Described the exact place. Said to call an ambulance, that the baby wasn’t taking its food properly and she was ill.’
‘Why wouldn’t they take it to a hospital?’
‘A police station’s the next best thing? You know how quiet the City is at night. They must have passed her through the railings. Might even have been on their way here and lost their nerve, or got spooked by something.’
‘And Sean Degg was here. He couldn’t have brought her. Not personally.’
‘I thought she was dead but she screamed. Another few minutes … They say she may die, still. Who would leave her like that?’ Josie pushes Staffe away and turns to the plastic bubble, staring intently at the baby, naked save a nappy that swamps her. Her eyes are shut, tight; her tummy swollen and her ribs push against her blue-white skin. She has a swirl of matted black hair that winds around the crown of her head. ‘She has nails. Have you seen, sir? She has nails and she can kick her legs and she held onto my finger. She made a fist.’
The nurse says, ‘Her brain is growing. Even in sleep, babies learn about their world.’ She smiles, beaming. ‘It’s proven.’
*
In the corridor, the ward sister tells Staffe that the baby’s depositor had ensured the baby was fed and wore a disposable nappy of the Mamapapa range. The doctors reckon she is a couple of days old and is very weak, quite probably premature. The baby has a chest infection and her heart is weak.
‘Consistent with being born in a cold, damp environment?’ Staffe says.
The sister nods. ‘I’ve heard about the woman Degg. If she’s the mother you will find the bastards that did it, won’t you?’
We mig
ht already have them, he thinks. Staffe can’t get his head round what might possess Sean Degg to be involved in treating his only child in such a way. He decides he needs Pulford, that his party will have to be interrupted. He makes the call, tells his sergeant to pour some coffee down and to get a taxi to Flower and Dean, meet him there in an hour. And he makes his way to Leadengate, to get the key off Sean Degg.
In the corridor, a commotion erupts outside Baby Grace’s private room. A doctor runs past them and when they look back, Josie is being led from the room in the clutches of a nurse. In the clean and brittle hospital air, a silence descends, into which the high-pitched squeal of a cotside monitor begins to soar.
*
Sean Degg is beginning to look as if he hasn’t slept in a long time. The skin under his eyes sags. His face is grey and he stares into his clasped hands. Stan Buchanan comes in and sits alongside him. He chews on gum, but the stain of the night is still thick in his air.
Sean Degg says, ‘They told me a baby was found. A girl.’
‘We’ll be needing your key, Sean.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t need to give you a reason. We have the warrant.’
‘Something has happened,’ says Sean.
‘The baby might not survive. She has an infection.’
Sean puts his head in his hands, says, ‘What do you know about the baby?’
‘We’ll check her out. Someone will be in for your DNA.’
‘Is she mine? Mine and Kerry’s?’
‘All I know is we won’t rest until we find who left Kerry down in that tunnel and who dumped that baby. So you’d better tell us now, everyone she knows. Anyone who hated her.’
‘Nobody hated her.’
‘Then who loved her?’ says Staffe. ‘You can love someone too much, can’t you, Sean? What about family?’
Sean looks at his feet, looks cagey. ‘You want me to do your job for you?’
‘You want us to find who did that to Kerry, don’t you?’
‘And you’ll release me – if I help?’
‘He should be with his wife,’ says Buchanan.
‘Tell us,’ says Staffe.
‘She has a sister, Bridget,’ says Sean.
‘Maybe Kerry went to stay with her, when she left you.’
‘They don’t get on.’
‘Where does she live?’ Staffe hands him a piece of paper and a pen. ‘And what about any friends Kerry has? Special friends.’
Sean shakes his head. ‘I’d be the last to know. I always was.’
‘Why did you stay with her?’
‘Because I can’t leave her. I tried once, but I can’t be without her.’
‘My client has co-operated fully,’ says Buchanan. ‘His wife is in hospital and there is no evidence that he has had any contact with her since he reported her missing nearly three months ago. He hasn’t had a proper meal …’
‘So take him, Stanley,’ says Staffe. ‘Take him for a pub breakfast in Smithfield Market. Jom will sign him out.’
*
Staffe looks at the address for Kerry Degg’s sister, Bridget Lamb: 16 The Green, Thames Ditton. ‘Shit,’ he says. He knows the house, less than half a mile from where he grew up. It is a smart place. A different world from Flower and Dean.
As he drives to Degg’s house, he rings Josie. Her voice sounds gluey and he can tell she has been crying. ‘How is the baby?’ he asks.
‘They’ve put her on life support. They say they can’t increase the dosage for the infection. She can’t take it.’
‘Try and get some sleep, Josie.’
‘Good night, sir.’
It is a bright spring morning.
Staffe flips through his notebook, runs his finger down to the name of Paul Asquith of the Underground Victorians. He calls the number, apologises for the hour, but needn’t have worried. When he asks if Asquith would mind terribly helping him with a further investigation of the Smithfield tunnel, the amateur historian actually gasps with uncontained pleasure.
*
The deeper Staffe scratches at Sean’s house, the more he realises that he isn’t close to understanding Kerry Degg, née Kilbride. Apart from her book collection, which includes first editions of Philip K. Dick and Angela Carter, he soon uncovered notebooks full of poems and sketches; untravelled charts of life-affirming journeys, by foot, across the continents of Africa, Asia and South America. There were self-scrawled vocab books for Spanish and French, and he flicked through the Spanish one, gleaned from the familiar shapes of the foreign words that she was of an intermediate standard.
He sits cross-legged by her desk in the bedroom and reads her poems, soon gathers that they follow two themes: the futility of the search for a perfect love; and the loneliness of her childhood.
Staffe doesn’t know how long he has been here, reaching into this dying stranger’s life, but when he hears a creak in the hall, he looks at his watch, realises he will be late for Asquith. Without looking up, he says, ‘You done, Pulford?’
The springs on the bed behind him heave and when he looks up, he sees not Pulford’s long legs or trendily sculpted hair, but the hunched and emaciated frame of Sean Degg, who talks to the floor: ‘She never let me into her notebooks. And I never looked. I could have, but I didn’t. Nobody knows her like I do. Does she write me in a bad light?’
Staffe closes the book. He can’t work Sean Degg out. To look at him, you might think he is a low-life loafer, scruffily dressed and unkempt. But the things he says suggest someone else. ‘In this job, it sometimes pays to think ill of people. It’s an instinct.’
‘So she did write ill of me?’
‘She writes ill of herself and of love and her childhood. If it is her wish that you don’t read them, you wouldn’t want me to say any more than that. But I wouldn’t say she wrote ill of you.’
‘I couldn’t ever harm her.’
‘Before, you said you “curated” Kerry.’
‘I have always worked in performance. I went to university, you know. I studied stage design.’
‘Where do you curate?’
‘Residencies, tours, one-off nights.’
Staff tries to disguise his scepticism, says, ‘Tell me about her father.’
‘Because I am older than her?’
‘She was sixteen when you met.’
‘And I was twenty-nine. You think that’s sick, do you?’
‘It’s unusual, but not sick.’
‘I couldn’t stay at the hospital. It was too much.’
‘You think this baby is yours?’
‘They said she might die.’
‘The baby, or Kerry?’
‘I have a feeling one of them will be taken from me.’
‘I asked you about her father.’
‘I don’t know him.’
Staffe watches as Sean looks away. He can tell when a man is lying but has a lesser instinct for the truth. He gathers together what he feels he needs and makes a list, hands it to Sean, returning the rest of Kerry’s possessions to her desk.
Degg looks at the list: notebook, red; notebook, blue; school records; doctor’s notes; sundry photographs x 12. He doesn’t look up or reply when Staffe bids him farewell.
*
‘What exactly are we looking for?’ whispers Pulford, to Staffe, straining to see beyond the twenty-foot beam from his head torch. Paul Asquith marches ahead, carrying a larger lamp, casting a wider beam far into the dark. He strides confidently into the Spitalfields tunnel where he had discovered Kerry Degg. ‘We’ll have to watch him,’ Staffe whispers.
‘You don’t think …?’
Staffe raises a finger to his lips and glares at Pulford. The ethanol afterburn of the sergeant’s party is strong.
As they follow Asquith, Staffe ponders quite what sequence of events might have brought Kerry Degg to this place, having had her baby already. Could that be possible?
When they reach the spot where Kerry Degg had been found, with its dark stains illuminated
by Paul Asquith’s powerful torch, Staffe says to the historian, ‘Where would you hide something – from here?’
‘There is a series of spurs – some were trial tunnels, others to accommodate machinery. We haven’t actually finished mapping them. The documentation isn’t what it might be.’
‘But you have maps?’
Asquith smiles, proudly, and holds up a clipboard, to which he has taped a plastic envelope. He shows it to Staffe. ‘The red-hatched areas are what we sourced from the original documents.’
‘And the yellow?’
‘That was our mission. To verify these minor tunnels and spurs.’
‘And we are here?’ Staffe points to a red area.
Asquith nods, sagely.
‘Knowing what you do of the system down here, and if you had brought someone down here, say, a week ago, and wished their presence to be untraceable, where would you store the provisions – and secrete the traces of life?’
‘Food and water and ablutions? I can’t be sure, but there is a link a hundred yards or so to the west. It is in some documents but not others.’
‘Is it safe?’ asks Pulford.
‘This could have been a station. That’s what I think. But they chose Aldgate.’
‘Is it safe?’
‘We shall see.’
Pulford takes a step away from Asquith’s arc of light, holds Staffe’s sleeve and tugs, waits until Asquith has advanced beyond earshot. He hisses, ‘They could be down here, still.’
‘Who?’
‘We have an officer on the door. Nobody has come out. If they were down here when you answered Asquith’s call, doing whatever they were doing with Kerry Degg – they could still be here. They would have to be.’
Asquith turns, thirty yards ahead, says, ‘I’m willing to take my chances.’
‘And so am I,’ says Staffe, who turns to Pulford, says, ‘Go back above ground, start phoning around everyone in Kerry’s address book. And check out all the Underground Victorians. I’ll be up when we’re done here.’
‘Are you sure you want to go further down there?’
‘I’ll be fine, Pulford. Go on.’