Bye Bye Baby

by McIntosh, Fiona

  ‘You need to explain what you mean, Dad. You said that you and Mum adopted me — there has to be paperwork attached to that.’

  ‘There are no papers attached to you at all, Peter. You weren’t born in a hospital or at home with attending medical people to witness your birth. As far as the authorities go, you weren’t born at all.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ Peter scoffed. ‘Here I am!’

  ‘But no one knows who you truly are.’

  ‘Dad, this is pissing me —’

  ‘Except myself,’ his father finished.

  Peter rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses. He preferred to wear contact lenses but his eyes were too tired today. This was going to make it worse and he could feel a headache forming. ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  ‘I bought you,’ his father began, lighting another cigarette. ‘No, don’t interrupt me,’ he said to his son who had turned angrily on him. ‘Let me finish this, okay?’

  Peter nodded, a mixture of disbelief and fear etched on his face.

  ‘I bought you from a man I met in a pub. Your mother wanted a child so badly and . . .’ His voice wavered.

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘And it seemed I was to blame, according to the doctors. The look on your mother’s face when we found out broke my heart. I had let her down, but I had especially let her folks down. We’re both only children. Our parents only had us to produce their precious grandchildren. The pressure . . . well, you can’t possibly imagine. But her mother, your nanna, was such a bitch about it. You don’t know what it’s like to feel so controlled, so manipulated, by parents.’

  ‘I think I do,’ Peter said, more sourly than he’d intended.

  ‘No, you and Pat not marrying is nothing compared to us not giving her mother a grandchild. Trust me on this! We’re modern parents to you by comparison. You simply make a decision, inform us, weather the initial storm and then it’s over. No, son, we had to pay our penance every day — Elsie questioning us constantly, and relatives and then friends, and then friends of friends, winking at each other, raising their eyebrows at the family gatherings. Your nanna couldn’t bear it that her sister had a truckload of grandchildren and so she punished us. It was awful.

  ‘Your mother — I can’t blame her — finally broke down and admitted it was me. I was the reason we couldn’t have children. So she was let off the hook, you could say, and all the attention swung entirely to my shortcomings. And that only made it worse. Not only did I have a low sperm count, but their constant fuss and attention meant I could no longer even get it up. I just got angrier and angrier. It was a terrible time in our life and I considered leaving your mother so that she could find someone new, start again, have her family. I even thought about running away completely — going to Ireland or even overseas.’

  ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this.’

  ‘We’ve never told you this but we did separate for a while in 1974. It was the beginning of autumn. I remember the leaves on the ground in all the parks, but it was a short separation — we were together again by Christmas. It was a terrible time of rage and bitterness for me, but through it all I loved your mother and we couldn’t bear to be apart. So we reunited and thought about adoption. But finding an English child was impossible — it seemed we were never going to be considered for anything other than Asian children, and your nanna would have howled each full moon if we’d gone down that path. We spent months looking into it, being constantly disappointed — you see, in the early 1970s young women were encouraged to keep their children. The government did everything to make it easy for them. And then this golden opportunity presented itself. A man offered to get me a child for five hundred pounds, no questions asked. It was all of our savings but we paid it gladly, and all I asked was that the child had dark hair, so that he or she could pass as our own.’

  ‘You negotiated a deal for me?’ Peter asked, incredulous.

  ‘It was a mad time, son, you can’t know what torment we were going through. Your mother wanted a child so badly that it warped us into taking such risks.’

  ‘And Granny and Grandad were okay about this?’

  ‘We didn’t tell them. They went on that coach trip around America for ten weeks. By the time they came back, we just pretended you’d been adopted properly. They were so blinded by joy they didn’t ask any more.’

  ‘But what about Nanna and Pop? Surely they didn’t go along with this?’

  His father shrugged. ‘Elsie did, and your pop did what he was told anyway. They weren’t happy about it but they couldn’t bear watching their daughter disintegrate. I thought your mother might lose her mind at one point, then you came along and suddenly our world righted itself. The madness had passed. Your mother’s parents, especially Elsie, were practical people — when they heard about your background, they stopped fretting over it. They knew we could offer you a better life. It was Nanna who gave us the money to move to Rottingdean and start afresh, so no questions would be asked. We cut ourselves off from all the people we’d known before so we could have a year with you and then pass you off as our own, as though we’d got lucky and been blessed by Mother Nature.’

  ‘So tell me about my parents,’ Peter demanded.

  Garvan shook his head. ‘The father is unknown. The mother was a slut, I was told. She apparently slept around and you were one of many bastards. She took her money and ran. But we got you, Peter, and we gave you a life that you could never have known with her.’

  ‘That’s all irrelevant. It’s the deceit, Dad, the fact that I’ve been led along all these years thinking I was adopted.’

  ‘You were,’ his father said, his tone beseeching.

  ‘I wasn’t adopted! I was stolen and that’s the truth of it. How could you trust this bloke? Who is he?’

  His father shrugged. ‘Went by the nickname of Pierrot.’

  ‘He didn’t even give you a name?’ Peter all but yelled. ‘How could you trust that what he was telling you wasn’t simply a pack of lies?’

  ‘I told you, we were desperate. We would have believed anything. You had to live it to know what we were going through.’

  ‘But, Dad, my blood parents could be decent people. How could you have known? Their son could have been stolen!’

  ‘Impossible. Why wasn’t there a hue and cry? Why weren’t the local papers full of a kidnapping if a beloved son was stolen? There was nothing. If your biological mother cared, she had a strange way of showing it. No, Peter, your true mother is upstairs crying her eyes out, the same way she did on the day I walked in carrying you.’

  On the last word, his father’s voice, which had been threatening to break, did. Peter shook his head sadly, unsure of what to say next. He waited but his father said nothing. When he finally spoke again his voice was laden with sorrow.

  ‘Dad, how did you do it? How did you pull this off?’

  ‘It wasn’t hard. We lived in Hove, and the week you came into our life we moved to Rottingdean, started again in a new neighbourhood, found new jobs, changed everything.’

  ‘But what did the family think?’

  ‘What did they think? They were told we’d been successful in finding a baby boy to adopt. No one was any the wiser. The only people who knew the truth were myself, your mother and her parents. As I told you, they gave us the money to move here. They loved you. With us you had a future. You were loved from the instant we all set eyes on you.’

  ‘And Sheila and her family?’

  ‘Sheila sewed your christening outfit! She doesn’t know the secret we’ve kept for almost thirty years.’

  ‘Thirty years . . . seems a lot happened back then, Dad.’

  Garvan looked startled. He swung around to Peter, his eyes narrowing. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, only last night you were glued to the telly. That bloke, the victim of that killer — you said you knew him thirty years ago.’

  ‘Oh, that.’

  ‘Yeah. You were — what? About twenty-seven?’

  ‘S
omething like that. Anyway, that’s irrelevant, we’re talking about how your mother and I came to have you, Peter. Yes, I was twenty-seven, hot-headed, humiliated by my impotency, angry, desperate to please our families like any good son.’

  ‘Dad, what you did was illegal.’

  ‘But —’

  ‘Actually, it’s worse. What you did was criminal. You took someone else’s child. The last time I checked, human trade was punishable by law.’

  ‘We adopted you,’ his father said firmly. ‘It was just done a little differently.’

  ‘A little differently?’ Peter echoed, aghast. ‘You paid someone to steal me from my parents!’

  ‘And he paid the fat pig who gave birth to you and happily turned her back on you.’

  ‘Until you can prove that, be careful, Dad. If I find out that my mother did not give me up willingly . . .’ Peter didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. The alarm in his father’s face was enough to stop him making any further threat.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Garvan asked.

  ‘Find her!’

  ‘Peter, no! It will kill your mother.’

  ‘Listen to me. Last night I was the happiest person alive. Today, I’m shattered. I can’t think straight. Last night I didn’t care who had given birth to me — I knew only two parents and loved them blindly. Today I must know who carried me in her belly. I must!’

  ‘Why?’ his father begged.

  ‘To set things straight. To be sure that she gave me away willingly and didn’t have me stolen from her.’

  ‘I beg you, son.’ Garvan reached for the boy he had loved since that day he’d handed the infant Peter to the woman now staring out of the upstairs window at them, weeping uncontrollably. ‘Don’t open this box that has been sealed shut for all these years. Please.’

  Although it pained him to do so, Peter pushed his father’s hands aside. ‘I have to, Dad. I couldn’t live with myself otherwise. And, frankly, I don’t know how you and Mum have done so for my whole life.’

  34

  Kate leaned against the wall next to where Jack was crouched before a door, staring at its lock.

  ‘Sir, this is illegal!’

  ‘Have you ordered the warrant?’

  She let out an angry breath. ‘Yes, while you fetched your gear.’ She glanced down at the roll of miniature tools Jack had unfurled minutes earlier.

  ‘Then you’ll know that on a weekend we’re hours away at best from having a legal search warrant.’

  ‘But —’

  ‘Sssh!’ he ordered, trying to concentrate. Then he stopped, looked back at her. ‘You set this in motion. Now, either you’re right and congratulations, or you’re wrong and you’ll never be able to look me in the eye again, let alone feel comfortable at the Yard.’

  ‘Threats aren’t going to help —’

  ‘I’m not threatening you, Kate, I’m simply telling you how it is. You’ve gone too far now with this theory to back off. You’ve meddled in my life and you’ve presented a scenario that you believed in enough half an hour ago to blackmail me over. So don’t baulk now that I’m taking it seriously.’

  ‘Blackmail?’

  ‘What else do you call it when you threaten to go to the Super unless I explore this crazy notion fully?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it blackmail,’ she shot back. ‘I’d call it good policing.’

  ‘Then trust your hunch, Kate. I have to, but then I have no choice, do I?’

  Nothing was said for a few moments as Jack worked.

  ‘Where did you learn to do this?’ Kate asked eventually. ‘Not cadet school, I’m guessing.’

  ‘I know a couple of guys on the Ghost Squad.’

  ‘You look like a pro.’

  He gave a humourless smile. ‘This is my first time for real.’

  Again, a silence fell between them until Jack gripped the doorknob, twisted and it clicked open. He looked up at Kate and she could see the loathing in his eyes for what he had just done.

  ‘Wait!’ she said.

  He paused while she gathered her thoughts, then said, ‘Well, Sherlock?’

  ‘I just don’t think you’d do this if you thought it was as crazy as you’re making out.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  She nodded. ‘Listen, before we both break the law, can I just say something?’

  He wrapped up his tools, put the roll in his pocket and straightened. He gave her a hard, unblinking stare. Kate swallowed, realising suddenly how tight and dry her throat was.

  ‘Jack, I just want you to know how sorry I am that you’re in this position and I’m still hoping I’m wrong. If I am, I’ll resign immediately and you can reassign me to parking attendant, but unless I’ve never read you right, then I think you also have some doubts. Tell me you do.’

  Jack’s hand gripped the doorknob. ‘Let’s go in.’

  ‘No, please, tell me first that you are harbouring some sort of suspicion.’

  He sighed and a bleak pause reigned in the corridor before he finally answered her. ‘Apart from the fact that Sophie claimed she was on a train to Exeter this morning that I now know never existed, something’s been nagging at me.’

  ‘What is it?’

  Jack shrugged. ‘She’s much too toned, her body’s too heavy with muscle to be wheelchair-ridden. Her limbs should be more wasted. She hides her arms. And now that I really think on it, I reckon she’s wearing coloured lenses. I’ve always thought her eyes to be curiously dark. Perhaps beneath they are blue . . . intense blue, as Moss once described.’

  He lowered his head and Kate felt a strong urge to step forward and put her arms around him. Instead she said, ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, I’m guessing that if Sophie is Anne then she must have found out I was going to be heading up Operation Danube before I did. Sharpe appointed me on my birthday but she’d moved into this apartment a couple of months earlier.’

  ‘So what does that mean?’ Kate frowned.

  Jack’s mind irrationally leapt to DCI Deegan as the villain, but he dismissed the thought as quickly as it arrived. ‘Well, probably that she’s infiltrated the Met.’

  ‘Oh, my god,’ Kate breathed.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s do this.’

  They stepped inside the apartment and moved into the living area. His arrival into somewhere so recently familiar prompted a bittersweet sensation in Jack: memories of lovemaking and laughter were suddenly tarnished by doubts and dark thoughts of murder.

  Kate broke the difficult silence. ‘She’s got great style.’

  ‘Mmm,’ he muttered. ‘When she’s not out murdering people, she’s an interior designer and property developer.’

  ‘Sorry, Jack, I —’

  ‘Don’t,’ he warned, his jaw working to keep his emotions in check. ‘Right, you do a search of the apartment. I’m going to fire up her computer.’

  ‘What are you going to look for?’

  ‘The history mainly. I’ll see what she’s been hunting on the net, check her email, perhaps see if she’s kept any files that might point to the victims. I’m no expert — we can take the computer in if we need the techno wizards to find out more.’

  ‘Unlikely that she’d be silly enough to leave that information so accessible.’

  ‘Unlikely also that her home would be broken into by her lover who is now under the impression that she’s a serial murder. But here I am.’

  Jack watched Kate suck in a breath and whatever retort was coming back at him. He wanted to hold on to the anger and Kate was the easiest of targets because she was the cause of this pain. Although the worst part of this disturbing sitution was the vicious certainty that his colleague was right.

  * * *

  Anne looked at her watch. It was nearing five and the day was darkening swiftly. She didn’t want the headlights of the van to be noticed by any potential witnesses so had planned to leave the South Downs before darkness fell fully. That would mean she could leave Billy’s body at St Ann’s
Well Gardens during the night. The location had a crisp symmetry for Anne. So far she’d dumped bodies in a public toilet and an alleyway, both symbolic of her own memories of her childhood trauma. It was fitting that she leave at least one corpse in a park. Hove Park would have been the ideal choice, but since the great storm of 1987 her childhood playground had lost virtually all of its woodland and was now a huge, open expanse with houses on all sides. The chance of someone seeing her there was too high. And so the pretty gardens at quiet St Ann’s Well would do instead. Her own name aside, it was still a park in Hove and also in very close proximity to the home of the policeman who had tried so hard to help her when she was in that hospital bed, still shaking from the birth and loss of her baby. She could remember Sergeant Moss as clearly as if it was yesterday — his eyes filled with regret and his kindly voice, the smell of tobacco that clung to him and the outrage she sensed he felt on her behalf. She had wanted to tell him everything and yet something prevented her. Whatever it was, it kept her throat closed and her voice silent. She had been in a deep state of shock and disbelief then, had built a shell around herself that she permitted no one to break through. Although she’d taken the time to hunt down where he lived these days, she held no grudge against Moss. In fact, Billy was her gift to him. A response to all those questions she’d been unable to answer so many years ago.

  Anne looked at Billy. She’d forced enough of the drugged water down his throat to kill him she was sure. She hoped so. Leaning across, she felt at his warm neck for a pulse, her fingertips scratching on the stubble of his chin and neck. Billy had borne out his promise of good looks. The lines of age added depth and interest to what had once been just boyishly handsome. Stray strands of his dark hair rested against her hand and Anne could imagine how today’s William Edward Fletcher could likely win almost any woman who caught his attention and was open to his charm. She wondered about his former wife and the present girlfriend and whether Billy could ever sustain a long-term, honest relationship after what she imagined was probably years of philandering. She herself had found it easy enough to lure him, which suggested that Edward the man wasn’t really so different from Billy the boy — easily led. She decided that was being harsh and she should give him the benefit of the doubt. Poor Billy. He really had sounded so remorseful. She believed he had genuinely wished he could turn back time and change the course of their individual histories. Perhaps what had happened to her had been eating away at him for years, which might explain why, against his instincts, he’d agreed to spend time with her. Perhaps Billy had been trying to atone for his sins.