Little Darlings

by Melanie Golding

  “So, I can talk to her?”

  “I suppose it’s worth a try. I can’t promise she’ll give you the answers you want. Some days she doesn’t say a word.”

  * * *

  High-backed armchairs lined the room, most of them empty but one or two occupied by an elderly person. A care assistant was helping one of the residents to drink through a straw. Amy and Harper waited in a corner, smiling at orderlies, refusing offers of tea. When Robert arrived, late and hassled, he greeted the staff by name, then introduced himself to Harper and Amy before leading them through to the far side of the sitting room and down a corridor to his mother’s room. The man was tall and rangy, physically similar to DI Thrupp but with none of the self-confidence. He wore brown leather sandals and a slightly defeated expression that stayed in place even when he tried to hide it behind a smile.

  Outside the room he placed one hand on the door handle and turned towards them.

  “Just, don’t expect miracles, OK?”

  They nodded and he led them inside.

  Victoria sat in a chair by the bed, her unfocussed eyes staring at a spot not quite near enough to the TV screen for her to be seeing the images flashing there, soundlessly.

  “Hello, Mum,” said Robert, taking a seat next to her and gently lifting one of her hands into his own. “I’ve brought you some visitors.”

  The woman’s head swivelled slowly towards him. Her faint smile faded as she took him in. “Who are you?”

  “It’s me, Mum. Robert.”

  She pulled her hand away, frowning. “Robert who?”

  “Your son, Robert.”

  “I don’t know you.”

  While the men and women in the sitting room were curled and ancient, the woman in front of them was young in comparison. Only sixty-eight years old, her hair still mostly brown, her skin mostly unlined. She turned her body away from Robert’s and Harper saw his shoulders droop slightly with the rejection.

  “I come here every day,” he said to them. “Sometimes she knows me straight away, and we have a nice chat. Other days, she thinks I’m my brother Vinny, or my father. And then sometimes she’s like this, and she won’t even speak to me. It’s a cruel disease, Alzheimer’s.”

  Victoria had resumed the position she’d had when they entered the room, staring at the wall near the TV screen, her expression tranquil.

  Amy said, “It must be terribly frightening for her.”

  “I meant for me. She’ll have forgotten it in five minutes. I’m the one who has to bear it.”

  Harper pulled up a chair near to Victoria’s.

  “Excuse me, Mrs Settle? I’m a police officer. I wanted to ask you some questions about something that happened in 1976.”

  The woman didn’t move or look at the DS. Harper glanced over at Robert, who shrugged.

  “Go on,” he said, “you might as well try.”

  “It’s about the twins,” said Harper, “your little babies. Robert and Vincent.”

  “Where are the twins?” said Victoria, turning her head to look around the room. “Where are my boys?”

  “I’m right here, Mum,” said Robert. “Vinny’s in Australia, remember?”

  Victoria stared at her son, clutching the arm of her chair until it creaked. Harper saw a flicker of recognition. “Robert?” She reached a hand towards him and he took it.

  “Mum?” he said, a wobble in his voice.

  She gazed into his eyes. “Where are my boys?” she asked, desperate now. Robert kept hold of his mother’s hand, and she let him.

  “Victoria,” said Amy, “we found a newspaper article that said there was a kidnapper in the maternity ward, who tried to take your babies.”

  “Yes,” she said, taking her hand from her son’s and glaring suspiciously at him before turning towards Amy. “Yes. Horrible woman. I stopped her. She was going to take my boys. But I stopped her.”

  “I didn’t know anything about this,” said Robert. “Who was it, Mum? Who tried to take us?”

  “Where are they?” said Victoria, glancing around despondently, but she was drifting off once more. “Did I lose them? I keep on losing things.”

  “Can you tell us anything about what happened, please?” said Harper. “What was she like, this woman? Can you describe her at all?”

  But Victoria stared at that spot on the wall, and didn’t speak.

  Robert turned to Harper and Amy. “I don’t think you’ll get much more out of her today.”

  Harper said, “It was worth a shot. Thanks for letting us try.”

  As they turned for the door Harper heard Victoria gasp and turned back. The older woman’s hand flew to her mouth and she said, “That woman. I remember now. She had her own babies, horrid little things they were too. She wanted to swap them for mine—for my perfect bonnie lads. Ha. I remember now. ‘No,’ I said, ‘no no no, get away with you.’ I had to kick her. Good and hard. I’d do it again.”

  With the word kick she kicked a leg out and nearly caught a slippered foot on the bed frame. Her hands fluttered by her sides and she glanced frantically from left to right. “Are they here? Where are the twins? Have you seen them? She’s not having them. She’s not.”

  “Calm down, Mum, you’re safe now. I’m here, I’m right here. We’re all grown up now, there’s no danger.”

  Victoria seemed to take some comfort from her son’s words. She let him pat her knee and grew gradually calmer.

  “You should probably go,” he said to Harper and Amy. Harper nodded and took a step towards the door.

  “They were named for the rivers,” murmured Victoria.

  “What was that, Mum?”

  “Their names are Bishop and Selver,” she said.

  “The rivers?” said Robert, shrugging at Harper, see, this is what it’s like. “That’s right, Mum, the rivers are called the Bishop and the Selver. That’s right. Then there’s the Don, and the Loxley …”

  Victoria pushed her son’s hands off her lap. “I’m not talking about rivers,” she said, “I mean the twins. That horrid woman’s twins. ‘Remember their names,’ she said to me. Their names are Bishop and Selver. I’ve never forgotten. I kicked her. I’d do it again.”

  Harper and Amy waited for a long time, but Victoria didn’t say anything more.

  * * *

  Back in the car, Amy said, “What do you think?”

  “I felt for her,” said Harper, “but I’ve no idea what she was saying. The Bishop and the Selver? Some kind of sordid forced child exchange?”

  “Yes. Very weird.”

  “Funny names for kids. Who’d call their babies those names?”

  “I can look them up if you like, see how many Bishops and Selvers are on the electoral register. Maybe we can find the perpetrator that way.”

  “No,” said Harper, “don’t worry. I think it’s pretty clear she was confused. Maybe she was remembering that the rivers all dried up in that heat wave, when she had her babies, and the words got mixed up somehow.”

  Amy said, “Well, sorry about that, Joanna. Another dead end.”

  “There’s still the CCTV from the hospital. And the recording from the 999 call. I just need to find a way to get them analysed. Then we’ll have the full picture, and perhaps a new lead on a suspect. If only Thrupp wasn’t such a tight arse.”

  Amy got out her phone and began to search through her contacts.

  “Leave it with me,” she said. “I think I know someone who can help us.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  In the daytime, most of the rooms were unlocked for freedom of movement within the unit. Lauren’s room was not one of them, but she knew that the other patients had more liberty than she did. She’d seen them coming and going, unchaperoned, when she herself was being led as if in shackles to the day room, or up to the therapy room.

  “You’re category A, love,” Pauline had said, when pressed. Apparently Lauren was among the very few in the unit assigned such close observation, never to be left alone even for a mome
nt. There was a hierarchy of madness, here.

  In the little, hot room, the babies were asleep and swaddled, and Lauren and Patrick sat in limp silence with the nurse a short distance away in a chair, twirling the end of her leather belt over and under her fingers, endlessly. The bedroom was oppressive, and it had become uncomfortable. The wide open space visible just the other side of the barred window was tantalising, and yet unreachable without special permission, and a chaperone. It was a strange kind of gratitude Lauren felt towards Nurse Pauline then, when she said, “Shall we go for a walk outside?” and led the way, through the security doors and into the grounds.

  The Tranters became one of the slow-moving knots of people pacing the nuthouse lawn from end to end in the sun, each group harbouring a baby stroller or two, and among their number, always, a white-coated figure acting as guide, spy, and protector.

  At first, being outdoors diminished Lauren further; beneath the sky she felt small, an ant under a glass. The skin on her hands seemed semi-opaque in the sun, veins standing out. She found herself jumping at the unexpected movement of birds, gripping Patrick’s arm when a squirrel ran along the branch of one of the huge old oaks. But after a short time she started to breathe easier, and her muscles relaxed slightly. Her gait went from shuffle to meander. She hooked her arm through Patrick’s and laid her head on his shoulder. She hung back, allowing their unit to split into two, allowing a distance to open up between them and the listening ears of the nurse, who had volunteered to push the twins. Up ahead, she could hear the babbling of the babies, and the silences in between, when they themselves were listening.

  “What did you do with our double stroller?” said Lauren.

  “I took it to the tip, of course,” said Patrick, slightly defensive. She suspected, from his tone, that he might not have done it yet.

  “That’s good,” said Lauren, “I didn’t want you to sell it. It’s bad luck.”

  “Bad luck to sell it?”

  “No, I mean the thing itself. It’s got bad energy, luck, whatever you want to call it. Best not to pass it on to anyone else.”

  Lauren thought, I don’t believe in luck. Neither does Patrick. But nevertheless I don’t want anyone else having that stroller, and I never want to see it again.

  Patrick cleared his throat. “Well, it was covered in mud round the bottom, anyway. It stained the fabric. No one would have paid money for it.”

  They walked along in the shadow of the old stately home. The nurse was out of earshot: perhaps now they could talk about what they were going to do to get the boys back.

  “Patrick, I—”

  “Listen, darling. I need to say something first. Earlier, when Ruthie was here, and the boys were crying,” said Patrick, “I know it sounded like they were making words—”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you don’t really think they were, do you? It sounded like words, sure, but they weren’t actually speaking. You know that, right?”

  Lauren didn’t say anything. She stopped walking, and looked him in the eye. Smiled a little, looked away. For a moment she thought she might cry. But then she took a breath and smiled again, with more certainty. So, she was alone in this, as in everything.

  “Of course I know that, silly. They’re only four and a half weeks old. They can’t speak yet.”

  He drew her towards him, held her pressed against his body. After a while he pulled back and smiled at her, brushed a springy strand of hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear. “Nearly five weeks now,” he said. “Seems like a really long time. Almost like we’ve always had them.”

  “Time feels like a completely different thing now. To what it was before.”

  “Yeah,” said Patrick, though he sounded unsure.

  They walked in silence for a while, across the soft grass towards the chain-link fence where you could look out over the valley.

  They both watched the back of the nurse up ahead, pushing the stroller in the sun.

  “What do you think will happen to that girl, Natasha?”

  “I don’t know,” said Patrick, his voice clipped. “I suppose she’ll be charged with abduction.”

  “That’s if it was her. I’m still not sure how it can be …”

  “Huh,” said Patrick, “if you knew her, you’d know this is just the kind of thing she’d do. She’s vicious.”

  “In a way it doesn’t matter what she’s like. I’m supposed to look after them, protect them from danger. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t fallen asleep in the first place.”

  “You can’t blame yourself, my love. You were having a hard time. I should never have insisted you go out. I’m so sorry.”

  He turned towards her and she saw that tears stood in his eyes, waiting to fall.

  “I’m sorry too,” she said.

  “You’ve nothing to feel sorry for.”

  “I do though, for what I did when they were given back, trying to push them into the river. But I couldn’t help it, I thought they’d been swapped over—which is nonsense, of course. Then, when you brought them to the unit, I don’t know why I reacted the way I did. I was missing them so much. I must be going mad.”

  “You’re not mad, honey. At least, we’re not supposed to call it that, according to the doctor. You just need a bit of a rest.”

  She slipped her hand in his, squeezed.

  “It’s good, don’t worry. It’s all good, don’t you see? I can see it was all in my head, and the solution’s simple. I can get better. I feel better already.”

  “The important thing is, we have them. They came back to us. That stupid girl took them, but she brought them back.”

  Lauren thought, if only that were true. But I’ll find them again, even if I have to do it alone. Even if it kills me.

  “When they were gone,” said Patrick, “in that short time when we didn’t know where they were or who had them, I felt like I’d died and gone to hell. We’d lost our babies, and the life I took for granted had been lost along with them. I got a taste of what it must be like to lose them for good. It was devastating. It changed me.”

  “Yes. I know,” said Lauren, thinking, it changed me too, but not because they came back; because they didn’t.

  They stood on the edge of the estate, a little way from where the nurse was standing looking through the wire mesh of the security fence towards the valley. Pauline must have decided they’d had enough couple time. She started to wheel the stroller in their direction.

  Lauren could feel the creatures getting closer. She began to tense up.

  “I’m so glad you’re feeling better,” said Patrick, kissing her on the top of her head. “For a moment there, I thought I’d lost you as well.”

  Lauren let her eyes drift down across the valley, where the sunset bloomed on the surface of the reservoir. “Hopefully I’ll come home soon, and we can get back to normal. Those boys need a mother, not a mental patient.”

  “It’s not for long,” said Patrick, wrapping her in his arms, forming that barrier between his wife and the rest of the world. “It’s going to be alright, I think. We’re all going to be all right.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “Is this right?” said Harper, hoping there’d been some mistake. Amy had directed her to an address she knew already from her days as a uniformed constable. The man who lived in this house was a known drug dealer, and was also on the “watch” list at the station for having links to extremist eco-anarchist groups.

  Amy turned towards her from the passenger seat and looked up through her eyelashes. “Now, Jo. Gideon is an old friend, like I explained. He’s an absolute genius with technology, and I guarantee he’s trustworthy.”

  “I wouldn’t have come if I’d known who you meant. When you said you had a friend with specialist knowledge in ICT I was imagining, I don’t know, an office? Maybe a web designer, a computer engineer. I know Gideon Jones—and he knows me. I arrested him last year for a public order offence, along with a few other crusties who we
re staging a protest in the centre of town that got out of hand.”

  “Oh, did you?” said Amy, brightly. “Well, never mind. He’s very forgiving. I’m sure he’ll have forgotten all about it.”

  “I doubt that very much. I haven’t. He wasn’t terribly happy with me at the time. What makes you think he’s going to help us? Or anyway help me—a police officer? I’m pretty sure he was wearing a T-shirt that read Pigs are Scum.”

  “He and I go back years. I’ve known him since university—I even lived here for a while in my second year.”

  “I’m not sure, Amy. He tried to kick me in the face when we were putting him in the cells. I don’t think he’s my biggest fan.”

  She leaned her head to one side, considering. “No, perhaps he’s not.” She opened the car door to step out. “But, he’d do anything for me, darling.”

  As she got out of the car, a dark part of Harper thought, oh really, why? What is it that you do for him, or did do for him once? Her mind concocted a montage of beautiful Amy and wrinkled, crusty old Gideon, laughing together, kissing, worse. But then even as she thought it she knew the scenario was unlikely, or at any rate irrelevant: Harper herself would have done anything for Amy, and there’d never been anything more between them than a bit of light arm-linking.

  The building was a once-proud Edwardian semi at the dead end of a wide street lined with mighty limes, the roots pushing up the pavement in ripening humps that swelled and cracked gently with each passing year. The trees were reclaiming the street: we are stronger, they said. Given time, we shall prevail. The trees and the high wall at the end of the road together blocked most of the light and formed a lush green cave, carpeted with a mulch of fallen vegetation, old and new. Houses here were well spaced, large and set back from the road with their own private driveways, but Gideon’s was not a drive you could pull into, crowded as it was with high grasses and wild shrubs that spilled from the borders, untamed.

  Harper followed Amy along the narrow path of trodden grass that led across the drive and round to the back door—there was no way through to the front door. It seemed that no one had used it for years. As she got closer to the house she could hear a repeated bass line, the unmistakable fuzzy groove of trance music.