The Truth

by Peter James

  Had she had another attack of pain? She’d sounded fine when he’d rung her a few hours earlier on the mobile – she’d just got home from her weekly appointment with Van Rhoe and had told him the obstetrician was happy with everything. Her car was outside, she must be home. Then to his relief he heard her voice up above him.

  ‘Just finishing!’

  He climbed the stairs, then called out again. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In here!’

  There was a strong smell on the landing that he thought was paste, and he could see the door of the little spare room ajar and the light on. He walked down towards it. ‘Susan?’

  ‘Come and take a look!’

  He went in. And he stopped dead. And he thought, Oh, shit.

  Scenes from nursery rhymes covered every wall. Susan, in overalls over her dungarees, was balanced on a plank between two step-ladders, smoothing a section of this wallpaper in place. ‘How do you like it?’ she asked, beaming at him with happiness.

  ‘Susan, what is this?’

  ‘Bump’s room. Figured I’d better start getting it ready, in case, you know …’ She gave him a doo-lally grin. ‘Sort of premature, it could happen, it’s best to be prepared.’

  John looked at Jack and Jill, at Little Bo-Peep, at the bright yellow background, and wondered if she had flipped.

  Keeping calm, with considerable effort, he walked over to her. ‘Darling,’ he said gently. ‘Hon, look –’

  She turned away from him, carried on smoothing out the strip, trying to get the join straight. ‘Like it?’ she asked. Her voice was oddly detached: it sounded as if it was a stranger talking, not Susan. ‘Pretty, isn’t it? I got curtains to match, and I got extra material to make a covering for the cot. This room is the best because it gets the morning sun and it’s cool in the afternoon, I think that’s best for a –’

  He raised his voice but still kept the tone gentle. ‘Susan! Darling! Listen! This baby – we are not keeping this baby. As soon as it’s born, Mr Sarotzini is taking it away, it isn’t going to be coming home, we don’t need a baby’s room here.’

  Now she sounded hurt. ‘We have to keep up appearances, John. We agreed that. All my friends have been asking me which is gonna be the baby’s room. Kate Fox told me I was mad not getting the room ready, in case it was premature.’

  ‘Susan, you could have just painted the room a bright colour, you didn’t need to get this wallpaper. If you’d just painted it we could have used it as another spare room.’

  She turned towards him and the look on her face scared him. He’d never seen venom like this in her eyes before. She dunked the pasting brush in the tin and left it there. Then she came down the step-ladder, and he braced himself, because she was balling her fists and he thought for one moment she was going to strike him.

  She stopped, spitting distance in front of him, and said, ‘I went to Elizabeth Frazer this afternoon. The lawyer at Cowan, Walker – you’ve heard of them?’

  He stared at her in disbelief: was she about to tell him she was divorcing him? ‘They’re one of the big London law firms, yes.’

  ‘Elizabeth Frazer is the one who’s been in the news recently – specialises in surrogate cases. She’s the one I was recommended. Want to hear what she said?’

  It felt suddenly as if the floor was made of quicksand and he was sinking into it. ‘Recommended? By whom?’

  ‘By the helpline on the Internet,’ she said, in a matter-of-fact way.

  John stared at a panel showing Little Miss Muffet: the spider dangling beside her looked a friendly spider, it wouldn’t scare anyone. He did not want to hear Elizabeth Frazer’s opinion, he really did not.

  Susan said, ‘She thinks we have a strong case.’

  John put his hands lightly on Susan’s shoulders, and drew her gently towards him. Her hair had a coarse, unwashed smell, which was unlike her: she always took great care of appearance and hygiene. Was she going to pieces? ‘Hon, it doesn’t matter how strong the case is because we’re not fighting it. I don’t want someone else’s baby in my life, can’t you see that?’

  She moved away from him with a feral ferocity that spooked him. This really was a stranger in the room.

  ‘It’s my baby, it’s not someone else’s baby, it’s mine.’ She tapped her swollen abdomen. ‘This – see it? This is me. It’s my egg that’s made this baby, OK? It’s my body that this baby is growing inside. It’s me that’s getting all this pain. This is my body. This is my decision.’

  John walked towards her and tried to put his arms around her again, anxious to try to tame this wild creature, to talk reason into her before things went any further, but she pushed him away so sharply that he lost his balance, tripped over an unopened tub of paste, and fell on to the bare floorboards.

  Susan walked out of the room.

  John climbed to his feet, shocked and mentally dazed, with a large splinter painfully embedded in his thumb. He sucked it, thinking hard. What on earth had got into Susan? Was it three nights of being on her own? Had he been stupid going away on business, leaving her with too much time on her own to think about everything?

  He found her downstairs, in the kitchen, taking tomatoes out of the crisper in the fridge. He stood, working on his splinter, pinching the skin hard either side trying to force the point out and grip it with his nails or his teeth, while she ran the tomatoes under the tap. Then she put them on the wooden cutting block and started slicing them.

  ‘Tomatoes stop you getting prostate cancer,’ she said, without looking round. ‘I read it in a magazine. You have to eat a lot of tomatoes. We haven’t been having enough tomatoes in our diet, I’m going to change that.’

  John looked uncomfortably at the sharp, serrated knife in her hands, but all the same he went up behind her, put his arms around her waist and kissed her on the neck. ‘I love you, Susan.’

  She yielded a little and he felt the curve of her back pressing into him in acknowledgement. She laid down the knife, but she didn’t turn round.

  ‘I don’t want this thing to destroy us, Susan.’

  ‘It’s not a thing,’ she said calmly, like a head teacher now. ‘It’s a baby.’

  ‘If you want to have a baby, if this is so important to you, OK, let’s have a baby, but let’s have one of our own.’

  ‘I want this one.’

  ‘Susan, hon, I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what this lawyer woman’s put into your head today.’

  ‘She hasn’t put anything into my head. She just told me the facts. Surrogate mothers are allowed to charge expenses but nothing beyond that. We could easily show a judge that the paying off of the overdraft and our mortgage was the consideration for the arrangement and that it was illegal. If the judge ruled for us, Mr Sarotzini would have to hand back the shares in DigiTrak and the deeds of this house. We could go before a judge in chambers the moment Bump is born, ex parte, and get an interim injunction and we could apply to have Bump made a ward of court.’

  John found her use of legal jargon distancing. ‘Susan, I understand how you feel. Turn round, look at me.’

  She ignored him.

  He tried to nuzzle closer, but she squirmed away. ‘Susan, come on, hon, we’ve always been close. Don’t you remember something you said to me after the first time we ever made love?’

  Silence.

  ‘You looked me in the eyes and you said, “Let’s promise always to be truthful with each other, no matter what happens.” Remember?’

  She still said nothing.

  ‘You’re not being truthful with me now. We should have discussed this before you went shooting off to a lawyer.’ He held her to him again and this time she yielded a fraction. ‘You have this huge biological change going on in your body right now. All these mothering instincts are coming out, and they’re bound to – it wouldn’t be normal if they didn’t – but they’re affecting you. Maybe rather than seeing lawyers, what we should be doing is seeing a counsellor. Shall we try and find a counsellor who special
ises in this area?’

  Taking her continued silence as a good sign, he hugged her a little tighter and softened his voice. ‘Look, hon, I know you’ve been through a lot, and you’ve been brilliant about it. It’s nearly over. Forget the deal now and just think about us. How do you think I feel? You want me to look at this baby, this child, the adult it’s going to grow into, every day for the rest of my life? Knowing that half of it is Mr Sarotzini?’

  She still said nothing.

  ‘And feeling the guilt that we reneged on a deal we’d made? And that we deprived Mr and Mrs Sarotzini of their child that they wanted so desperately?’

  Susan said quietly, barely louder than a murmur, ‘Fergus Donleavy thinks Mr Sarotzini is going to sacrifice the baby.’

  John wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. ‘He said what?’

  ‘Scotland Yard have a file on Miles Van Rhoe. He said Mr Sarotzini died in nineteen forty-seven. Mr Sarotzini wants me to have this baby so that he and Miles Van Rhoe can sacrifice it at a black mass.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s true.’

  John released Susan. This was so absurd that he started grinning – he couldn’t help it. ‘When did he come out with this gem?’

  ‘On Monday.’

  He looked for the whisky bottle, saw it, and poured himself three fingers. Then he broke out some ice cubes. ‘I thought Fergus was a sensible guy. What on earth did he tell you crap like this for?’

  ‘Because he cares about us.’

  John splashed a little tap water into his glass, shook the mixture around, and drank some. Then he sucked his splinter again. ‘Do you believe him? What he said?’

  Susan felt guilty that she’d let Fergus in on their secret. ‘I –’ She wasn’t sure what she believed. She’d tried ringing him several times yesterday and today, but all she’d got was his answering machine. He had still not rung her back, and this surprised her because he normally returned calls promptly.

  She’d been churning the same question John had asked over and over in her mind ever since Fergus had left. Whatever the truth was, she was certain that Fergus knew something about Mr Sarotzini or Miles Van Rhoe that he wasn’t telling her. He was holding something back. Maybe she shouldn’t have told Fergus about the surrogacy. Perhaps that had been a mistake. Perhaps he might have told her more if she’d kept that bit quiet. But why?

  All she knew now was that she felt confused and incredibly tired. It was an effort to think. But each time she did think, she felt increasingly frightened. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, finally. ‘I don’t know what I believe. Last year I had a very strange conversation with him, at lunch one day. He told me suddenly, out of the blue, that I would fulfil my destiny.’

  ‘Fulfil your destiny?’

  She nodded.

  ‘What kind of New Age crap is that?’

  ‘Fergus isn’t into New Age.’

  ‘I don’t know what he’s into,’ John said. ‘It sounds like he’s losing his fucking marbles.’

  Susan stared at the tomatoes. ‘You want supper in here or in front of the television?’

  ‘Let’s have it in here and talk,’ he said. ‘Tell me exactly what he said about this sacrifice stuff.’

  Susan told him what Fergus had told her about Emil Sarotzini, that people had called him the Antichrist, the Devil incarnate, that he had been the role model for Aleister Crowley, and that he had purportedly died in 1947 but might not have done.

  ‘So Mr Sarotzini is a one-hundred-and-ten-year-old superman?’

  She smiled. ‘He can’t be.’

  John smiled also, relieved to see she had some sense of humour back. ‘No. And if he is a hundred and ten I want to know what pills he takes, because I want some too!’

  Then she told him about the Scotland Yard file on Miles Van Rhoe, and the obstetrician’s presence at a coven meeting where they had been allegedly going to sacrifice a child.

  John shook his head, grinning in disbelief. ‘I’m sorry, I just don’t buy this. I mean, OK, the fact that Van Rhoe is famous doesn’t mean anything, there are plenty of people with respectable façades who get up to freaky stuff when they’re off duty. But it’s just absurd.’

  He sucked the splinter again. ‘I mean, look at it rationally. Here you have not just any ordinary guy but the most famous obstetrician in the country. He’s delivered royal babies. The police raid a black-magic mass, and find him there, dancing naked around a pentagram or whatever, and it never hits the press? Come on, get real. The police love this kind of stuff. You can be absolutely certain that if it really had been your Van Rhoe, some cop who’d been on that raid would have been on the phone to every paper in London within an hour, flogging the story.’

  ‘Fergus said a journalist from the Evening Standard tried to go with the story but his editor wouldn’t run it. He then tried to take it to Private Eye, but died before he could. Don’t you think that’s a bit sinister? You don’t want to believe this, do you, John? You’re trying to blank it out. You don’t care. You just want to hand this baby over and wash your hands of it. Well, it’s not so easy for me.’

  John sat down on the edge of a chair. ‘I understand that, hon. But let’s look at the facts. There is no way the Mr Sarotzini we are dealing with is a hundred and ten years old, right?’

  Reluctantly, Susan nodded.

  ‘OK, so Fergus is wrong to put crazy thoughts in your mind about him. And in the same breath he’s telling you Miles Van Rhoe is a closet satanist who sacrifices babies.’

  ‘I’ve known Fergus a long time,’ Susan said. ‘He’s straight, he’s honest, he’s highly respected in a wide range of circles, he’s not the kind of man to make wild accusations.’

  ‘I know, I’ve always respected him too. If it’ll set your mind at rest, why don’t I call him, have a word with him? I just think he’s got his wires crossed on this one. There’s just a coincidence of the names here, that’s what I think. And another thing, why you? There are thousands – probably millions – of unwanted babies born around the world every day. If they want babies for sacrifices there are places they could get them for a few pounds. Why pay all this money? Why should Mr Sarotzini have gone to all this trouble.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said, challengingly. ‘Why?’

  ‘We know that. It was a combination of looks, ancestry, intelligence. Mr Sarotzini told us all the reasons.’ He stood up, held her again, eased her gently round to face him. ‘Maybe Fergus is under a lot of strain. Stress affects people in different ways. Sometimes the most together person can just crack up and have a breakdown. Fergus has his wires crossed. This has to be a coincidence.’

  ‘That’s one of the big differences between you and me,’ Susan said. ‘You can accept coincidences, they don’t mean anything to you, you just think they’re pure random chance. I don’t. And I really don’t buy this one. And I don’t buy that Fergus is cracking up, either.’

  She tried phoning Fergus Donleavy twice that evening. And after she had gone to bed and fallen straight into a troubled sleep, shortly after ten, John tried, but all he got was the answering machine. He left a message.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Susan could hear Joe clumping around above her in the loft. She was checking the wallpaper in Bump’s bedroom, smoothing it down in a few places where it had curled since yesterday, and moistening it where there were still air bumps, trying to flatten them.

  Then she heard the phone ringing, and hurried out, down the landing, past the ladder up to the loft, through into the master bedroom to catch it before the answering machine did. It was a dead heat. The caller got her recorded voice together with her live voice.

  ‘Hang on!’ Susan said.

  The caller waited patiently until the machine had lost interest, then Susan said again, ‘Hallo? Sorry about that!’

  It was Kate Fox, at the office. Her voice sounded oddly formal. ‘Susan?’

  ‘Kate, hi, good seeing you last week.’

  ‘Yes, er – thanks for the l
unch.’

  ‘The roast peppers, with the tomatoes and anchovies, did you like them? That was the first time I’d tried that – it was a Delia Smith recipe.’

  ‘Yes, they were good.’ There was a brief silence. ‘Susan, I don’t know if you’ve already heard …’

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘About Fergus Donleavy?’

  ‘What – what’s happened?’ Susan’s nerves jangled as if a violin bow had been drawn across them.

  ‘I’ve just had a call from a reporter wanting to speak to Fergus Donleavy’s editor, to get a quote about him. It was the first I knew about it. Then two detectives came round. They’ve been interviewing us. I wondered if you knew any more.’

  ‘I don’t know anything. Detectives? What’s he done? What’s happened? Tell me?’

  There was a long, awful silence, and then Kate said, ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Dead?’ Susan felt as if she had been enveloped in a terrible blackness. ‘Fergus is dead?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

  Susan’s legs buckled and she sank down on the edge of the bed, the mattress making a tiny creaking sound beneath her. There was something unreal about this. Kate must have made a mistake, she must. ‘I – I saw him on Monday. I’ve been trying to get hold of him for the last couple of days – I left messages – I –’ She stopped talking as tears flooded her eyes. ‘Just a moment,’ she said, sniffing, looking around for a tissue. She found one in her dungarees pocket and dabbed her eyes with it, feeling a stark, terrible, overwhelming sense of loneliness.

  Fergus dead?

  There was heavy clumping up above her, then hammering, then the whine of some power tool. She was shivering: it was cold in here. There was a mistake, there must be. Fergus was too huge an intellectual, too young, too big a personality to die.

  ‘I gave the detectives your number – I hope that’s all right? One was called Shawcross, Detective Sergeant Shawcross. They wanted all of Fergus’s contacts.’

  ‘Wh – what –’ Her voice was choked and she stopped again, sniffed, stared around the empty room through a mist of tears. ‘What’s happened, Kate? How? How did …?’