BONE BABY: chilling emotional suspense with a killer ending

by Diane M Dickson

“I borrowed some books from the library. I’ve been planning and scheming for such a long time. From when I knew that we could have him. I have thought it all through. We can ring the office tomorrow. I’ll do it, I’ll tell them that we both have nasty colds and we will be taking the week off. That will give us a chance to organise things and I have already found the name of a woman who does baby and childcare. I made a call, told her I was asking on behalf of my sister. I used your name.”

  They had done this before, when they felt it was better to keep their true relationship private. Sisters sharing a home, it was a common thing. Less so as the war years drew away but still nothing untoward. No-one had ever questioned it, and Lily simply nodded.

  “But how can this work? How can this be alright?”

  “Well of course it can. We are financially sound. We have our own home. We are intelligent, mature women. For heaven’s sake, anyone can have a baby, even girls straight from school can have a baby. But we have so much more to offer him. Think of all the women who, after the war, brought up children who had been born to other people. Sisters, daughters, grannies, just neighbours. He needed someone like us, it’s all fine.”

  Lily had thought often that it had been a clue. The reference to a girl straight from school. She had used that to try and convince herself that they were doing a good thing. She built a picture of a young woman, frightened and in trouble. A desperate child who they were rescuing from the mess his careless mother had created. In the event, it had been such a very short and precious time that none of it had ever really mattered. The baby carer, the pram, the high chair. None of it had been needed. The cot had been used just briefly and then afterwards they had burned it in the back garden, sobbing in the smoky air and clinging to each other in despair.

  When he was first sick, Charlotte Mary had insisted it was normal. “His little stomach is only just getting used to food. All babies are sick, it’s in the books. It’s nothing.”

  But it hadn’t been nothing. It had come so very quickly that by the time they realised, it was too late and he drifted away, his mewling cries less and less until they just watched him leave them.

  They had been guilty, of course they had, but it had been such a frightening time and she wasn’t clear just what they were guilty of – legally. They should have called the doctor, but he would have wanted to know where the mother was. They considered, briefly, just leaving him at the hospital, but he had wrapped his baby fingers so tightly around their hearts that they couldn’t do it. They tried dripping teaspoons of sugar water into the tiny mouth. They cleaned him and rocked him and by the time they understood how very ill he was, it was over.

  The grief did something dreadful to Charlotte Mary. The disappointment, the sense of loss – all of it turned her hard. Where Lily sobbed, and staggered down into the cellar to hide in the dark and murmur words of regret and sorrow, Charlotte Mary took herself off to parties, to weekends in London with the young people who they worked with. She wouldn’t speak of him, wouldn’t consider telling anyone. “Don’t be ridiculous, it would ruin us. Can you imagine the fuss there would be? We would lose everything, and for what? He’s gone Lily, let him go.”

  Locked together by the awful guilt, and the lying, and the unnamed crime, they were like tigers sharing a cage. They pushed and prodded at each other and niggled and nagged.

  They hid it well – none of their friends, none of their work colleagues were aware of the disintegration of the idyll.

  And so it had been until the fast living, the cigarettes and drink, and ultimately the drugs had taken their toll. Lily believed it was grief, swallowed down and held back, and the fury at the way it had all turned out. She believed that the darkness inside her partner had become a physical thing, and in the end, it had killed her.

  Chapter 8

  The morning was bright, birds flicked back and forth across the garden, and the sun through the window was warm. Dust motes danced and spiralled in the living room. Lily didn’t feel the comfort of the sun, or hear the birdsong. It was outside of her world, experienced through a grey veil. With the morning had come the now familiar sense of doom and emptiness. She had this one great task to perform and then she was done.

  She went into the cellar. The flowers were limp and drooping, and she put them aside to take to the compost bin. She had brought a new candle for the little glass holder. She kindled the tiny flame and sat for a while watching it burn, steady and bright in the stillness of the damp room. It might be a fire risk, but she didn’t see how and couldn’t bring herself to care. She left it glimmering in the darkness, climbed back to the kitchen, and gently closed the door.

  That done, she was ready. She walked to the desk and pulled the small box towards her. She slit through the wax seal. Holding the lid with both hands she flipped it open.

  There wasn’t much. She had expected a letter. Declarations of love, regret, and perhaps an apology, and of course the vital information. She felt a sharp sting of disappointment that there was nothing like that. There was a small brown paper bag, the sort that vegetables used to come in. The top was folded over and it was tucked in, filling the small space. She pulled at one corner, gently. It looked fragile.

  She peered into the bag. There were just a few items and they had slid into the bottom. She tipped it gently and everything inside slithered out into a little pile on the blotter.

  There was a card, smaller than a postcard and flimsier, a short piece of blue plastic and a folded paper. Lily pulled the box towards her, peered inside, but there was nothing more.

  She lifted the plastic strip and turned it over. Her breath caught in her throat as she handled the tiny bracelet. It had been cut just near to the plastic popper fastening. In a wider part, a piece of card had been slipped behind a clear window. The writing was faded but still legible, Baby Robertson.

  The same name was written in a neat hand on the top of the blue card. There was a date, a weight and some sort of code. Just letters that meant nothing to her.

  Baby Robertson.

  24th July 1978.

  7lb 6ozs.

  Her body had forgotten how to breathe. It was only when the room tipped in dizziness that she realized she was no longer drawing air into her lungs. She gasped, and reached trembling fingers to the small piece of paper. It was a name and address. Charlotte Mary’s writing, faint after many years, but unmistakable. A time, and the figure – five hundred pounds. There were two signatures, Charlotte Mary’s, oh so familiar, and another. A ‘C’ she thought or possibly an ‘L’, followed by Robertson.

  It was all there, so clear, so obvious. It was the answer to most of Lily’s problems, the first step in the journey she had to make. But how very heart-breaking it was. Such hope, dashed. Such joy, defeated, and such a small, small price to pay for a life.

  Charlotte Mary had not let him go unmarked into the beyond. She had simply waited until she herself had moved on, and then left it to Lily to tidy up the dreadful loose ends. She had known that was what would happen, and in either kindness or guilt, had pointed the way, handed on the baton.

  Her dying had taken such a long time, and the sorry state of their relationship had precluded real grief but now, on this bright day, in the comfort of their home, Lily missed her friend, her lover. She lowered her head to the desk and let the tears flow. Sorrow for Charlotte Mary, and for the tiny life that had touched theirs so briefly but with the force of a tsunami, and had ultimately destroyed them.

  Baby Robertson.

  She opened the document on her computer and alongside the name Peter, she put in the new information. It felt wrong to add the name that they had chosen, the one that he had worn for such a short time, to the name that was rightfully his, but to call him Baby wasn’t right either. So, there it was, his two worlds coming together, Peter Robertson.

  He couldn’t have a birth certificate in the other name. Charlotte Mary had said that they would need to register him, so all the plans were changed. She didn’t need to do anythi
ng the way she had intended. It was going to be a different sort of search. She would find the address in Bath. She would go and find her, that other woman.

  Surely, she had a right to know. She must have wondered over all these years just what had happened to her son. Now that Lily knew she was nearing the end of her life she must act, and make sure that his family knew just what had happened to him and yes, she must arrange for him to go home.

  He may have siblings, aunts and uncles. No grandparents surely after all this time, but he may well have extended family and when she was gone there would be people who would carry his memory forward. He would not be forgotten.

  Chapter 9

  It was almost too easy. Instead of surfing the net, tracing records, fighting for information, she had it all at her fingertips. A piece of paper with an address and a surname. She typed the details into Google Earth, and watched as the image swooped into a square almost in the centre of the city. Not far at all from the railway station, walking distance for certain.

  Of course, there were no guarantees. The chances that this person was still there after all this time had to be slim, but it was a beginning.

  Even buying the train ticket was straightforward. No need to even leave the house, all done online. She would go on Monday. The weekend was a bad idea, it would be busy on Saturday, and Sunday, the trains may not be reliable. Monday, mid-morning, arriving in Bath at lunchtime.

  Now that the thing was underway she was excited. She had often thought of Peter’s mother. If she had been correct, and Charlotte Mary had inadvertently given things away by referring to a young girl, then she would have been sixteen maybe, seventeen, or even younger. So, now she would be late middle-aged – maybe a bit beyond that. Very likely still working, with a family grown up, and even a grandchild. She paused, that could have been her. If it hadn’t gone so tragically wrong, would she now have grandchildren? A family, people who cared and whom she could visit, whom she could love? It would have been a strange background for him, but things had come so far that today it wouldn’t really matter that his home had two women and no man. She smiled – what would they have been called? – ah, it was no good, there were no grandchildren, so they had never been called anything. There was nothing but sadness and regret, and the memory of horror.

  She didn’t feel hungry exactly, but she had to have something when she took her medication. She warmed some soup and ate it standing in the kitchen. She was no longer pretending to set the dining table. They had always done it, napkins and water glasses, china and shining cutlery. What was the point? It was all play acting anyway. In the early days, they had embraced these little rituals. But as their partnership disintegrated they had become the glue that held their lives together, and now there was no longer any need. She hadn’t yet been reduced to lounging on the sofa with her meal, so if she did eat at all, she did it on the run, a quick snack, undeserving of any performance.

  Late in the night she went back down to the cellar. It had become familiar to her again as it had been all those years ago. No hesitation now on the creaky stairs. She replaced the candle and sat for just a little while.

  At first, she hadn’t spoken aloud but slowly she began to verbalise the things in her mind. She talked to him, as you would to a child. “I’m going to go on a train, Peter. It’s not very far. I might find your mummy. Your real mummy. I’m going to tell her about you and what happened. I think she will be sad, but at least she’ll know and then we can decide what to do next.

  “Next week I’m bringing…” She paused. She had been going to say Aunty Charlotte. But they had never been that. She didn’t know what they had been but surely, given time, they would have come up with something different: Mama one and two, or Mummy Charlotte, Mummy Lily perhaps. Anyway she left it. He couldn’t hear her and he couldn’t care that the ashes were coming back to the house. She hadn’t decided yet what to do about all that. She didn’t want to spread them down here on the damp earth. She couldn’t walk on them and she couldn’t contemplate spreading them on Peter’s grave. Leaving them at the garden of rest was too much of a rebellion. She glanced around. Perhaps she would just leave them here in the container, or whatever they came in. Surely it wasn’t an urn. That had become a bit comic, they must have something new. Maybe a little bag, or some sort of a box. The truth was that she really didn’t want to bother at all. Charlotte Mary was gone, why couldn’t she just be gone? She sighed and pushed herself up from her perch on the ledge. She was a stupid old woman sitting in the cellar talking to the ground.

  Chapter 10

  The train was about half full. Lily found a single seat in a corner. She wanted to be left alone. It would have been more comfortable to stretch out in a four-seat arrangement, but that would have meant there would be others. She would feel obliged to smile at them, to nod and acknowledge that, here we all are together on a journey, and she didn’t want any of that. She wanted to sit with her shoulder leaning against the cold, hard interior of the train and to close her eyes and listen to the mumble and hum around her, and so she did.

  The sleepless nights had made her mind foggy and, as the train roared on through Hampshire and into Somerset, she was assaulted by short daydreams. Memories that she didn’t want and didn’t need flickered in and out of her consciousness: the vision of herself and Charlotte Mary wrapping the tiny body in a blanket, tucking it into a transport box that had been kept because it was solid wood and too good to throw away.

  The soil in the cellar had been hard packed, and the top layer tough to break. But once they were through the crust of it they had quickly made the hole big enough, deep enough. She remembered how they had baulked at stamping it down, walking on the new grave, so they had smoothed it over and over with the back of the spade and then patted it with their hands. Charlotte Mary had lost her mind for a moment and begun to thump with her fists, crying and wailing, an animal noise that played and replayed in Lily’s ears for days. She had wrapped her arms around Charlotte Mary’s shoulders and held her tight until the storm passed, and then wiped away the tears and the snot with the hem of her dirty cardigan. They hadn’t wanted to leave him, and sat for hours in the dark, until eventually they crawled up into the house on hands and knees, feeling in the gloom for the wooden steps and sobbing and gulping with grief.

  The next morning Lily had felt ill, battered and exhausted. Watching Charlotte Mary at the dresser, smoothing concealer over swollen eyes, and sweeping the red lipstick in a gash across her pale face, she had been surprised. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m getting ready for the office. You need to get a move on. You’ll be late.”

  “What on earth do you mean? We can’t go into the office, what are you thinking?”

  Charlotte Mary had swivelled towards her. “So, what should we do Lily? There is nothing to do, it’s over.”

  “But we have to…”

  And Charlotte Mary had simply nodded. They had made the decision already, dreadful mistake that it had been. They had hidden him away and pretended that he had never been.

  That had been the first day of the torment, and if Lily had known, if she had seen what the rest of her days would hold, she would have clambered down into the cellar and joined him there in the dark and been with him for all this time. But she hadn’t, she allowed herself to be persuaded that it was for the best, that they should move along, and all would be well.

  She jerked awake now and looked around. The woman on the other side of the aisle glanced across and smiled. “Soporific, aren’t they? Trains. Rocking you off to sleep.”

  Lily wanted to cry.

  She took out the map printed from the Google Earth image and followed the crowd out of the station and into the town centre.

  It had been years since she had been to Bath and the redevelopment left her completely unsure. But she didn’t need to go into the shopping area. She turned and headed away from the hustle, across the Halfpenny Bridge and towards Widcombe.

  It was a steep climb u
p Lyncombe Hill but only a few hundred yards to Southcote Place. She paused on the corner of the quiet square. There were birds in the trees and a black and white cat in the grass. Her shoe heels clumped loudly against the old stone flags. Her heart was pounding, her palms damp, and she wanted nothing more than to turn and run.

  The houses were a mixed bag. Some looked grand and well maintained, blinds and swagged curtains at gleaming windows. Tidy gardens with tasteful ornaments. Others, including the one before her now, were obviously converted into flats. She took the few steps across the pavement, through the metal gate and up a short pathway.

  She glanced down. This basement, so different from the one back in Southsea, had been made into accommodation. She could see a neat kitchen, with a table and chairs and a baby seat on the floor. She turned her face away and peered at the bell pushes beside the door. There were no names, no numbers. She reached a trembling finger towards the lowest of the round, brass buttons.

  Chapter 11

  Only the hum of traffic on the main road at the bottom of the hill disturbed the chilly afternoon. There was no answer to her first attempt so, after a couple of minutes, Lily tried the second bell. She heard the distant sound of feet on the stairs, the door swung open and a tall male figure appeared in the dim hallway.

  “Oh, hi.”

  “Hello. I’m sorry to bother you but I’m trying to trace an old friend.”

  “Right.” He was young, good-looking and dressed in jeans and a smart jacket with a blue T-shirt underneath. He carried a cycling helmet in his hand.

  “It’s a long time ago and they may well have moved by now, but this is the last address I have.”

  “Okay. So, who was it?”

  “Robertson, her name was Robertson.” Behind her back Lily had crossed her fingers. It was such a tenuous thread after all this time, and she wasn’t sure what she would do if it unravelled at this stage.