by Adam Creed
Staffe feels his chest tighten as he watches the shape of his sergeant fade to nothing, his light dying. Just him and Asquith left. One map, two torches and God knows how many tunnels.
Five
DCI Pennington slaps his rolled-up Telegraph in the palm of his hand, with a steady beat. He has a smile on his face as he approaches Pulford’s desk. Opposite, Josie’s desk is empty. She is at the hospital, but must have left Baby Grace at some point the previous evening because, as is proven by the unfolding of Pennington’s newspaper, the national papers had photographed her, palpably worn by events. She looks straight into camera, beneath the headline ‘Blue Angel. WPC saves abandoned baby’.
‘For once, the press regards us kindly,’ says Pennington, ever aware of the political aspects of his job. A smile forms on his gaunt face.
‘It’s wrong, though,’ says Pulford. ‘The baby is not saved yet. She is on life support.’
Pennington turns the pages, trails a finger along the columns, and taps the newsprint where his own name is writ. ‘As I say, had DC Chancellor not found the baby and acted with such professional instincts, Baby Grace would be dead now. She gave that baby a chance.’
‘But I know her, sir. She’ll blame herself if anything happens to the child.’
Pennington reinstates his resolute exterior. ‘We’ll have a chat with her. Now, how’s the investigation going?’ He looks around the room. ‘And where’s Staffe? He’s not in his office.’
Pulford feels a pang of dread, having left Staffe down in the tunnel with that spooky amateur historian, Asquith.
Pennington sits in Josie’s chair, looking across the shared desk at Pulford. ‘I hear the husband is the father – not so for the other kids. If she was going to get rid, he could have held her, against her will. You can tell this Degg that if he confesses, he will not get a rough ride. The public will be with him. It’s a saved baby we’re talking about, and he played his part. Do you understand?’
‘Have you spoken to Degg, sir?’
‘No.’
‘I don’t think he could harm Kerry Degg.’
‘I’ve read the notes. He was saving the baby, not harming the mother. Think positive, Pulford. Now, where did you say Staffe was?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
*
Staffe lies in the dark. He is flat to the cold, damp ground, imagining what it would have been like for Kerry Degg. Rats scuttle and he sniffs at the putrid air, wonders how long you could stand it down here – let alone with new life growing inside you every second, every minute, getting closer to that moment when another human pushes and strains and finally punches their way out of you and into the world.
He is at a low, tight dead end within the petering network of tunnels. According to Asquith, the engineers may have decided the geological substructure was wrong here. Asquith had suggested that money, or lack of it, might have had a part to play in abandoning plans for a station on this part of what became the Metropolitan Line, a line along which they generally cut and covered rather than burrowed.
Staffe’s breathing is constricted and he twists over, looks across at the array of plastic bags. He can’t help sniffing. The bags hold the detritus from weeks, maybe months: drink cartons, vitamin supplements, rotted fruit skins, takeaway dishes – and shit. Human shit.
He is exhausted and slides his way out of this low enclave. From what they have discovered, he is certain that Kerry Degg didn’t have the baby above ground and then come down here.
Staffe picks up the plastic bags, trying not to inhale the smell as he makes his way out. The uniformed officer at the entrance to the tunnel looks at him oddly as he passes, watching Staffe put the bags in the footwell of his Peugeot, then open all the windows.
He places a smaller bag on the front seat. It holds what looks like dried-out offal. He suspects it might be the placenta – from the little he knows of such human biology. And they found an iron loop, low down on the wall at the dead end of the furthest tunnel. It could have been used to restrain Kerry. It would account for the bracelet marks on her wrists. What must it have been like for her? She is strong. He thinks she will survive, speculates as to what kind of a tale she will tell.
*
Jadus Golding sits in a wing-backed chair looking out across the Limekiln estate and sips from a can of Nourishment drink. In his left hand, a half-smoked spliff burns away. He is all alone in this room full of people: family and friends.
When he sees Staffe, his eyes brighten, temporarily, then close down their hoods, as if he is struggling not to surrender to sleep. Jadus’s way.
Staffe had gone back to his flat in Queens Terrace and cleaned up. He’d rustled up some coddled eggs and munched down an entire cantaloupe melon, washed that through with two cans of Red Bull, then dropped the bags off at Forensics. Two blocks away in a £5 car wash, a youth had given Staffe’s car the third degree. The youth had tied a West Ham scarf around his face to guard against the smell and quoted twenty quid for a quick valet. Danger money, he had called it.
He kisses Jasmine on the cheek and she says how nice he smells. She introduces Staffe around the room and he shakes the hands of Jadus’s family. His father is absent, which is a cause for relief. The last time Staffe saw him, Mr Golding spat at him; the day Jadus was sentenced to seven years. Partly because of Staffe’s efforts, the boy, now a man, had served less than half.
Jadus’s grandmother grips Staffe tightly by the hand and thanks him. The grandfather turns his back.
Jasmine puts some music on: calypso, he thinks. An uncle and an aunt get up and dance, gliding across the floor, hips undulating to the beat. The grandmother serves some punch. Jadus, unmoved in his winged armchair, catches Staffe’s attention, beckons him. ‘Didn’t think you’d come.’
‘I said I would,’ says Staffe.
Jadus smiles, doped. ‘Thought it’d be all crack pipe and Cristal and pussy, right?’
‘You have a good family, Jadus. You’re lucky.’
‘Oh, I’m lucky all right.’ Jadus looks around the room, a serious expression establishing itself. ‘Got my Millie to tend for now.’ Suddenly, Jadus looks sad.
Staffe doesn’t know why this twenty-one-year-old isn’t more pleased to be free once more.
‘You are going to be all right?’
‘That job’s not there. Jasmine’s cousin with the pie shop is a prick. I can’t work for him.’
‘When’s your first session with probation?’
‘If I can’t get a job, the whole thing’s fucked, man. I got no chance.’
‘Why did you lie?’
‘Who’s going to give me a job?’
‘Plenty of people. You’re an intelligent man, you’re prepared to work.’
Jadus feigns a weak smile and raises the spliff to his mouth, takes a long drag. ‘You know, I don’t understand why you chose me.’
‘Chose?’
‘Visiting me. You said you wanted to help me turn my life around. Your words.’
‘In my job, people like you and people like me … it’s a battle. We win, we lock you up. You win, you do it again. I just wanted to try the middle way.’
‘You really don’t think I’ll do it again?’
Staffe looks across at Jasmine Cash, beautiful and happy and surrounded by family in the home she has made from the sty; baby Millie on her hip. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Maybe I could walk the fucking beat, hey?’
Staffe sneaks a look at his watch, but Jadus catches him. ‘There’s somewhere I have to be. Sorry.’
‘I guess there’ll always be another me, waiting to fill the empty bed, right. You go catch the poor motherfucker, Inspector. Don’t let me stop you.’
Staffe mulls what Jadus had said, and, true enough, by the time he is caught in traffic, where Old Street meets City Road, his mind is turning towards the hospital, the bed of Kerry Degg. Will he get to talk to her, ever? Would she have known her captor?
*
A un
iformed officer guards the door to Kerry’s room and the doctor brings Pulford up to date. They can’t prescribe any stronger doses of antibiotics even though the infection is spreading. Kerry isn’t strong enough to withstand an operation, but if she doesn’t improve in thirty-six hours, they will have to employ the knife anyway.
‘Will she make it?’ asks Pulford.
‘She’s very poorly,’ says the doctor.
‘If you had to say one way. If you were a betting man.’
The doctor looks at Pulford as if he is unclean. ‘We may well have to gamble, Sergeant. But I’m not a betting man. These conversations are worthless.’
Pulford sits with Kerry and is still there when Staffe arrives. He watches as his DI reads the spreadsheet analysis of all the Underground Victorians. Of the contacted members, none of the cells (address, employment, dependent profiles, performance, criminal activity) tally with Kerry’s.
Staffe looks at Kerry Degg. She appears calm, almost serene. Her eyes are closed, her limbs laid straight: still as a windless night. He tries to recall her bursting with life and theatrical allure, on stage back in October in the Boss Clef. He wonders if she knows she has a new baby daughter; and will she ever sing her a lullaby or see the baby’s father ache with worry about her?
He eventually says, ‘I found new evidence. Forensics have got it all, but I’m pretty sure the bastards kept Kerry down in the tunnel for weeks. And she had the baby down there, too.’
A knock at the door and the uniformed officer comes in, says to Staffe, ‘You’re needed, sir. Up at the station. It’s DCI Pennington. Said it was urgent. Apparently, he’s been after you for a while.’
*
On the way to see Pennington, Pulford says to Staffe, ‘How did you get on with your nurse the other night? You left early.’
‘You told her about Sylvie.’
‘She was asking about you. It was a party; I’d had a bit.’
‘I’d rather you keep out of my private affairs.’
‘Is that what it is?’
‘Shut up, Pulford.’
Staffe knocks on Pennington’s door and the DCI beckons them in. He is frowning. ‘Well, it didn’t take long for this to go tits up,’ he sighs.
‘How, sir?’ said Staffe.
‘The DNA results came through. It’s Sean and Kerry Degg’s baby all right.’
‘But that’s good news. And it consolidates his motive.’
‘You’d think. But I got this half an hour ago.’ Pennington passes an A4 piece of paper. Staffe reads it quickly, says, ‘Oh, God,’ then reads it again, slowly, before handing it to Pulford.
On the letterheading of a group called Breath of Life – which carries neither address nor telephone number – the letter briefly introduces Breath of Life as an independently funded community of Christians who ‘enforce the sacrosanct rights of our Unborn Population’.
It explains that their sources had advised them that Kerry Degg had attended a consultation at City Royal Hospital and had requested a termination which had subsequently been denied on the grounds of the unexpired term being too short.
Acting on reliable information regarding Kerry Degg’s intention to pursue her proposed termination through a ‘Private Murdering House’, Breath of Life felt they had no choice but to treat Mrs Degg themselves, providing an ‘Assisted Childbearing’ on a ‘Secluded Site’.
‘Is this right?’ says Pennington. ‘About her consultation at City Royal?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘Well, you should.’
‘We’ll check.’
‘I already have. And it’s confirmed. She went there at the beginning of her twenty-fifth week. The sixth of bastard January.’
Staffe takes the letter back from Pulford, squints at the signature.
Pulford says, ‘I think it says “Lesley Crawford”, sir. I’ll get onto it and search for the group, too.’
‘Call themselves bloody Christians,’ says Staffe. ‘We have evidence that she had been held down there for weeks, sir. Forensics are checking it out, but we found food and drink debris down there, and faeces, too. There was tissue, or organs, as well.’
‘Christ alive,’ says Pennington. ‘We have to foreground the positive in this case, the Josie Chancellor angle.’
‘What will the press make of Lesley Crawford and her mob?’ says Pulford. ‘There’s plenty of people will see it as a life saved, sir.’
‘That’s nothing to do with us,’ says Staffe.
‘Exactly,’ says Pennington. ‘Let’s hope that mother and daughter both survive and we can pin this on Crawford sharpish.’
Staffe rereads the letter, examines the wording closely and fears the worst.
Six
Staffe drives through Richmond Deer Park and picks up the river road at Kingston, passing Surbiton with its tree-lined streets of Victorian villas that run down to the Thames. He parks up on the Green at Thames Ditton. The daffodils are out and the schools must have broken up for Easter because mothers sit in clusters, forming rings and watching each other’s children play, cajoling excellence from their offspring. An old boy in a panama makes measured progress, stick in hand. He checks his watch and veers to a bench, knowing the Angel will not be open for another half-hour.
16 The Green – the home of Bridget Lamb, née Kilbride, sister of Kerry Degg – is just how Staffe remembers it: a double-fronted, stuccoed, Georgian residence with a perfectly tended garden and a freshly painted, racing-green front door. He presses the bell. It rings brilliantly in the spring morning.
A man of similar age to Staffe opens the door. He is dressed for retirement, though, with thick brogues and mustard cords, a Bengal shirt and hair oiled with pomade. ‘Mr Lamb?’ he says.
The man nods, looks at him, inquisitively. For a moment, he appears to be taken aback. Beyond, the hallway is tiled, after William Morris. The house is shiny and silent. ‘Inspector? She’s expecting you.’ Lamb shows Staffe into a room at the back of the house. The french windows are open and a woman sits at a table on the patio, a fresh cafetière yet to be plunged and a crystal pillbox piled with Parma violets.
Bridget Lamb wears sunglasses. She has fine, blonde hair in a bob and ruby-painted lips. She looks ten years older than her sister, maybe more. When she speaks, it is a child’s voice. She holds out a hand and Staffe takes it, mindful not to be too firm. Her hand is cold, the grip firm. She says, ‘It’s terrible, what’s happened to Kerry. I would visit, but I don’t want to upset her.’ Her breath is strong and floral from the violets.
‘You don’t get on?’
‘It wouldn’t take a policeman to discover that we are chalk and cheese.’
She plunges the coffee and it takes all her might. Slowly, as if recalling the lines of a poem from prep, Bridget elucidates the ways in which Kerry had made different choices. She makes it sound deliberate, can’t mask her disappointment.
‘I’ve seen her school reports,’ says Staffe. ‘Was there a point when she lost interest?’
‘She was a woman very young. I’m two years older, but Kerry was first to most things. I’ve had analysis.’
Staffe looks back, into the house, then checks the garden out. ‘You don’t have children?’
‘You’re here to talk about Kerry, aren’t you?’
‘Her social workers say she didn’t have the emotional strength to be a mother, but she appears to love the children.’
‘She loved the fathers more.’ Bridget looks away from Staffe as she says it, ashamed, as if she had bitten into something unexpectedly foul.
A device within the house pings.
‘You and your husband …’
‘I must go in now.’
As they pass through the house, a smell of something freshly baked drifts from the kitchen.
Bridget fusses in the kitchen, struggling with the Aga, using oven mitts. Crouched, and with her back to Staffe, Bridget says, softly, ‘I find it upsetting to talk about Kerry.’ She waits for Staffe to come c
loser. ‘My husband said I should co-operate.’ She lifts a tray onto the top of the oven. It bears two small, golden cottage loaves and Staffe wants to rip into them right now, while they are hot.
‘Your sister is very ill and it is none of my business, but if anything happens – which is quite possible – I would hate to think you had missed an opportunity to see her a last time.’
Bridget gasps, swallowing her own breath and puts a hand to her throat. She shakes her head and steps away, knocking into the open oven door and blinking, her eyes watery. ‘You should go,’ she says. ‘Please go.’
On balance, Staffe decides to comply. But as he gets to his car, Bridget’s husband appears from nowhere, rag in hand. He had been crouched behind his car, supposedly waxing it. ‘You don’t remember, do you, Will? Malcolm Lamb.’
Staffe squints, feigning incredulity. ‘Malcky?’ He remembered him from the minute he clocked Bridget’s married name, put it with the address.
‘I remember your parents. Always very decent to me. Such a terrible shame. Did they ever catch those people?’
Staffe shakes his head, recalling that he hadn’t always been decent to Malcky Lamb. On close examination, he sees how little that shy boy, who now lives in his parents’ house, seems to have changed, and as he drives away, he is transported to the day his own parents died – the aftershock from that Biscay bomb.
*
Josie’s eyes are dark and hollow, her shoulders sag. She stares vaguely at the collected monitors and sacks of liquid that stand beside the confined cot that holds Baby Grace. Tubes and wires feed life through airlocked holes into the incubator.
Staffe draws up a chair and sits beside Josie. After a minute or so she holds out a hand. He takes it, puts an arm around her shoulder and draws her to him. She rests her head against his neck and he feels her breathing slow down a little. Shortly after, her body jolts. In her dreams, she must have fallen. He stays with her until Sean Degg arrives. Then, he whispers in her ear, ‘The father has come. You’d better leave him alone with the baby.’