The next thing I was aware of was an absence. Somebody who was supposed to be there, wasn’t. I craned my neck to see, and there was nobody else in the room, which wasn’t a room, actually, but rather an enclosure of curtains. A small room. A tent, sort of. Then I made out a face—a dark one, floating disembodied at the foot of the bed. No, it was attached to a body, of course it was, a body dressed in white to match the curtains. Very clever.
“Henrietta, what are you wearing that silly outfit for?” I mumbled, but I don’t think it came out that way, because what I heard was a sort of spluttery groan, and Morrison hadn’t said anything, so it must have been me. I tried again.
“Water, please.” The dark Henrietta person came forward and produced a cup with a bendy straw in it, and I drank. Then in a horrible wave of knowing, I guessed who was missing. My Sprog. Bess. My hand, after touching my belly, which felt like jello, or a burst balloon, started searching frantically amongst the bedclothes. She’d fallen out. I had to put her back in. Oh, God—maybe she’d gone over the cliff. I tried to sit up, but nothing below my chest seemed to be working properly. “Bess. I—where’s Bess?”
“It’s okay, Polly. Don’t worry, it’s okay,” Morrison said. His voice sounded funny, like he was talking around a mouthful of crackers. I turned to look at him. Someone had thrown some water at him. He was all wet. He was covered in fog, like the last time I had seen him, coming out of the fog like a monolith, a stonehenge person, the one I’d slammed into. Right behind him, then and now, was the face of Richard Seth. Impossibly young and full of some emotion I couldn’t begin to understand. He reached a hand towards me, then let it fall.
“Your baby is all right, Ms. Deacon,” the dark, disembodied face said and touched my shoulder, pressing me down into my pillow again. “Premature, but perfectly fine.” She/he was doing something to a tube in my arm. “Sleep now, everything’s all right.”
“Earlie?” He was disappearing into the fog again.
“Polly, don’t worry. She’s beautiful,” he said, and then I fell over the cliff and into a warm sea.
Coming out of sedation feels like you’ve lost years, even if it’s only a few hours. I woke, and it was night. My first thought was panic again, as I felt the physical void in my middle—the part-of-me lump that I’d lived with for twenty-eight weeks. Earlie Morrison was still there, sitting in a chair drawn up to my bedside, his eyes luminous in the light from the monitor thing attached, I presumed, to me.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s me.”
“I know it’s you. How did you get here?”
“On a plane, then I drove,” he said. “It took a while to track you down.”
“How come you came?” I said.
“Instinct, maybe. I found some stuff that worried me. And I thought, you know, that you could use some help.”
“Nice timing, Earlie.”
He grinned then, a sheepish grin.
“A little tight, I thought.”
“Tell me about Bess.”
“Is that what you’re calling her? She’s in the neo-natal unit, in intensive care. It’s okay—they’re really good, here. You can go see her in the morning.”
I felt a tight ache in my breasts, and suddenly had a really strong stab of sympathy for Julian of Norwich, George’s prime dairy goat, whose udder, when full, ballooned out like one of those exercise balls. At the thought of her, something gushed, and I felt my chest grow damp. “She’s really okay? Tell me the truth, Earlie, please.”
“The doctor said they’ll have to monitor her for a few weeks. There’s stuff about preemies that you need to know. He thought I was, um, her father, so he probably told me a lot that he shouldn’t. But she’s big, for a little guy, if you know what I mean. And strong, he said.”
“How big?”
“Three pounds, two ounces,” he said.
“Oh, my God.”
“No—no. That’s good. He said he thought she should be smaller, considering. But she’s got some growing to do—I won’t try to explain it. Let him do it. But you’re not supposed to worry, Polly.”
“Really?”
“Really. Now you gotta rest.”
“Nope. I’m wide awake, now. And my, excuse me, my breasts are killing me. Can you buzz somebody?”
Earlie stepped outside the curtains while a nice nurse [name tag: Nurse French] introduced me to the joys of the breast pump. She said that Bess would enjoy what we produced (and I felt like Julian again, let me tell you) at breakfast time in a couple of hours. “When can I breast feed her myself?” I asked. Nurse French shot me a look.
“Has the doctor talked to you yet?”
“No.”
“Well, it’ll be a while before you can do that, luv. But don’t worry. Your milk will go to her in the meantime, and there’s nothing better.” She carried the pumped milk away with her, and I had a sudden flash of Eddie and me in the barn, weighing the goat’s milk and noting down in George’s book which song we had sung and how much each goat had produced. I resolved to sing to myself next time, to see if it made any difference.
Earlie came back in, after the nurse had helped me change into a fresh gown-thingy—the kind that did up the back with string. Apparently, my premature Sprog had appeared in the conventional way, as I couldn’t find any sutures on my belly, and there were parts of me that felt like I’d been run over by a truck. Still, I was in one piece.
“You’ve seen her? Bess? You’ve seen her?” I asked him.
“Yep. I’ve been going to check on her every so often,” he said. “I haven’t told them that I’m not, you know—that we’re not, you know.”
“Good,” I said. “Don’t tell them. I need you here.” He smiled and blushed a little. He was wearing a big green sweater and baggy jeans. His hair was rumpled, and he had a growth of stubble on his chin. How long had we been here? I didn’t like to ask. I could do that later.
“So, what does she look like?”
“She’s about this big,” he said, holding his hands an impossibly short distance apart—nine or ten inches, “and she has black hair, although they say that’ll probably fall out and get replaced. Her eyes are closed, so I can’t tell what colour they are.”
“Aren’t all babies’ eyes blue?”
“I haven’t got a clue,” he said. “By the way, Susan and George are all set to come over if you want.”
“No, they don’t need to do that. The goats, and everything. We’ll be home soon enough, right?”
“It’ll be some weeks, Polly. You can’t fly with an incubator. She needs to get stronger, first.”
“She will, though, right?”
“With a mom like hers? She’d better.” We smiled at each other. A nice moment.
“Did I see Richard here, earlier? Richard Seth?”
“Yeah,” Earlie said. “He insisted on coming down with me. I found him when I was trying to find you, eh? At the Bed and Breakfast place. He helped fill in the details, and then when I said I was driving down here, he got into my car and wouldn’t get out again, just sat there with his arms crossed, so I let him come. He really cares about you, eh? He told me some personal stuff.”
“He did, did he?”
“Yep. And he feels really guilty about letting you go on this trip by yourself. He said he wouldn’t have let you go if he’d known.”
“It’s not like he could have stopped me,” I said.
“Nobody can ever stop you from doing what you want, Polly. But maybe if you’d let him come, it would have turned out different.”
“Maybe. Where is he now?”
“He went back to Canterbury—to the conference, and he didn’t want to miss his flight home. He said he’d get in touch with you back in Kuskawa.”
“That may not be a good idea,” I said.
“Huh. Well, whatever. You should know that he stayed here watching over you like I did all the time you were unconscious, though, eh?”
“Nice of him,” I s
aid. Then there was a pause. I asked the question that hung between us like a dark shadow, like the disembodied face of the doctor or whoever it was I’d seen in my first wake-up moment.
“Where’s Becker?” I said.
“He’s, uh. He’s detained right now. He would have come if he could.”
“Detained?”
“Well, yeah. Sort of an investigation thing he’s involved in.”
“Typical,” I said. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
“I guess I should fill you in, eh?”
“Please.”
On secondment to the Pearson International Airport people, Becker had been helping redesign the security system—I knew that. What I didn’t know was how far he was prepared to go, in order to test it out.
“You know he didn’t want you to make this trip, right?” Morrison said. I nodded.
“So, he decided to use you as a guinea pig.”
“Go on,” I said. I knew what was coming. All that stuff about his dad wanting his ashes scattered off Beachy Head—all that had been made up. It was a story to get me to try to take the contents of the blue bag through customs. And the contents? Four pounds of premium grade cocaine. The kind that, if you’re caught with it, sends you to prison for a long, long time.
“He said he’d worked it all out with the airport authorities beforehand. It was supposed to test their search procedures and so on,” Morrison said. “When they found it, they’d arrest you, but your file would be computer flagged, and he’d be right there to cover the thing—you know—spring you and identify you as someone working with the OPP.”
“I see. Except that I didn’t know I was working with them.”
“That was the idea. They wanted you to be a typical drug mule—someone who doesn’t know she’s carrying.”
“Charming. A mule. Hee haw. So, what happened?”
“Well, you got through, didn’t you? They didn’t find it.”
“And was he there, in the airport?”
“Apparently. And he was plenty pissed off that you got through, I should add.”
“Jeez, Morrison. It was right there in my knapsack with my toiletry bag. Right out in the open.” I told him about the security people ripping my puppet case apart and x-raying my puppets.
“Yeah, well, I guess the system still has a few bugs, eh?”
“So how come the thug-people were involved? Was that Becker testing his drug connection policies?”
“He made the mistake of sending a lot of the information via email,” Morrison said. “That’s how I clued in to it. I was using his computer, you know, while mine was busted, and I got into the file by mistake.”
“And I guess somebody else got into the file too, eh?”
“Yep. The guy at Pearson—we figure he was the first—a runner for a Canadian biker gang that does a lot of hacking into police computers. It’s hard to track. But he was just small-time. The guys at this end—well, we’re working on that. But they tracked you from the moment you got off the plane, I guess. And they hacked into your Hotmail account to find out where you were going and what you were doing. You know—that stuff you sent me about your itinerary. While you were keeping us in the loop, you were keeping them in the loop, too.”
“So when I got through security, why the hell didn’t Becker get in touch right away?”
“He said he was dealing with damage control at his end. Seems he didn’t exactly have authorization for the thing to begin with. At least, not the cocaine part.”
“Where did he get it, then?”
“We’re working on that. Becker’s not talking.”
“Ah. So he’s, um, detained right now?”
“Big time.”
“I hope he gets life,” I said. There was a nasty little pause. Morrison didn’t disagree with me, either.
“What was all the stuff about the hand-over, then?” I said. “You’ve talked to Potts, right?”
“Yeah, he’s here now, dealing with the guy we nabbed up on the cliff. The English guys think the gang over here intercepted the information from the Canadian gang—or maybe they’re linked—we don’t know yet. We figure they thought it was a legitimate drug-mule delivery—well, legitimate to their way of thinking, and they were told to connect up with this Canadian puppet maker.”
“So the thug was told to expect cooperation from me?”
“We think so. That’s not clear, yet. Probably won’t be, either.”
“So, who attacked Alma?”
“The woman who looked like you? Same people, probably the same guy, Polly.”
“And you’ve got him, right? And ‘his people’?”
“Not really. It’s only in movies where all the bad guys get caught at the end. But they’re working on it, Polly.”
“I can’t believe that Becker set me up like that.”
“Me either. But remember, as far as he was concerned, it would all have been fixed at Pearson International, and you’d have come home, perfectly safe, the way he planned it. But it’s a lot to get over, eh?”
“What makes you think I’m planning to get over it?”
“He made a mistake, that’s all.”
“A mistake? You call that a mistake? Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Earlie, that was more than a mistake. He used me as a goddamn pawn in some weird little police game, and even if it had gone the way he planned, I would have missed my flight and probably missed the conference, and I would have killed him with my bare hands right there in the airport terminal.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You would have forgiven him eventually, Polly.”
“Hah. No way. Not in a million years. I’m glad he gave me Bess, and I’ll always be glad about that, but she’s the last thing he’ll ever give me, and if he thinks he’s going to have anything at all to do with her, he’s nuts. I’ll tell her that her father is dead. Or beamed up by aliens. Forgiveness? I do not think so.”
Earlie just looked at me, an expression of inestimable sadness on his face.
A week later, after our usual morning visit with Bess, who was fighting apnea, jaundice and a host of other maladies that preemies are heir to, we took a trip, Earlie and I, back up to Beachy Head.
It was a sunny day, and the sky was a heartbreaking blue, the sun a lemon yellow, and I was wearing my Queen Elizabeth head scarf. Hassan waited in his cab for us, wearing a white bandage on his head, where he’d been coshed by the thug that stole his taxi, after a chase scene that didn’t, apparently, turn out like they do in the movies.
We hiked along the gorse-lined path and out to the edge—not too close, but close enough. It was a clear view, and, like the guidebook said, you could see the beaches and town of Eastbourne, the Pier and the Harbour, and then on to Pevensey Bay and Hastings. We could even see Dungeness in Kent, nearly forty miles away.
“You sure you want to do this?” Earlie said.
“I’m sure.” I reached up and unclasped the chain that I wore around my neck. I took one last look at Becker’s ring—quite a pretty one, really, if you liked diamonds. Then, with all my strength, and emitting a grunt like a shot-put athlete, I threw it over the edge and out to sea.
Epilogue
I did meet Mr. Fogbow, the anthropologist, again, just as he had predicted. He was in Eastbourne researching the phenomenon of Spanish girls coming to England to learn the language, working for slave wages in the restaurant trade and trying to meet an English husband. We met by accident on the street and ended up having lunch together (real fish and chips) in a seaside resort place. I filled him in on my own personal mating habits, which had come to a dead end in a most spectacular way, and we parted cordially, promising to stay in touch.
I stayed in England for another five weeks, until Bess was big enough and well enough to travel. She is very, very small, and I have been warned to expect any number of health problems arising from her premature birth, but nothing nasty has transpired so far. I’m living at the farmhouse, for the time being, and George and Susan are head-over-heels in l
ove with my daughter, as I am.
Before I left, I visited Edith again. As soon as I walked in, she hailed me as Lady Deacon, and shouted for Henrietta to bring on the tea. I had brought some nice pastries from an Eastbourne bakery, and we had a great time in fantasy-land. Nurse Hopkins was a sweetheart, playing along like an extra in Pride and Prejudice. I went back a couple of times and promised to write when I got home, although Nurse Hopkins told me that I shouldn’t be too upset if I didn’t get an answer. I think people underestimate Edith, though. I think she’s only as loony as people want her to be, and I bet she lasts a good few years yet, provided the institutional soup doesn’t get her.
There was an internal investigation about Becker’s Great Drug Exploit, but nothing much came of it in terms of his job. There was a hearing. He was reprimanded, and Morrison told me that, in spite of it all, Becker apparently got a commendation as well, after the Canadian biker gang connection was followed up and resulted in an arrest or two. Morrison had had more to do with that than Becker did, but then life is never fair. Though I was told I had every right to press charges against Becker for more or less framing me and endangering my life, I didn’t bother.
We met on neutral turf, the Tim Hortons, of course, next to the cop shop. I’d had a difficult time deciding whether or not to bring our daughter with me, and I’d asked Susan for her advice.
“Some people,” Susan had said, “naturally hanker after things they can’t have. If you keep Bess hidden away from Mark, he will quite understandably want to see her. Given the circumstances, you have every right to keep her away from him, but let him see her at least. You owe him that.”
“I don’t owe him a goddamn thing,” I said, but I brought her with me anyway.
“After this,” I said, stirring a large coffee to go, “I don’t want to see you ever again.”
“I understand that,” he said. He had hardly looked at the tiny angel in the baby carrier beside me. Maybe it hurt him too much to look, I don’t know. But it hurt me that he didn’t, too. He didn’t even want to hold her.
Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle Page 99