Emma's Baby

by Taylor, Abbie

  There was a silence. Then Lindsay said, 'Emma . . . what have you been doing?'

  'Listen,' Emma said. 'Listen, and I'll tell you.' She did her best to give as clear an outline of the story as possible, but the coffee grinder at the counter had upped its setting to Road Drill, and the women at the table beside her were laughing in great, cackling shrieks. The noise pressurized her. She got mixed up, speaking faster instead of louder until all her words came tumbling out on top of each other. Lindsay had to interrupt to ask her to slow down.

  'Emma . . . Emma, take it easy,' she said. 'I'm not getting everything you're saying. What was that last bit again? Did you say you had a sample from France, of that boy's DNA?'

  'Yes.' Emma took a breath. 'I told you, didn't I? I told you it was him. I knew that woman messed with the DNA test. I knew she did.'

  'But how—'

  'You need to check this new sample against my DNA. Then you'll see he's mine. You'll see he really is Ritchie.'

  Lindsay said, 'And this DNA is on a fruit?'

  'On a walnut, yes.'

  There was a pause. Then Lindsay said, 'Emma . . .'

  'What harm can it do?' Emma asked. 'You keep saying you want to help me. If you do, then this is the way.'

  'I do want to help you,' Lindsay said.

  'Then where's the problem?'

  'Come in,' Lindsay said. 'Come and meet me at the station today, and we'll talk about it.'

  'But you'll do the test?' Emma persisted.

  Lindsay hesitated.

  'I'll have to talk to the DI first,' she said, 'before I can authorize anything like that.'

  She suggested a time for them to meet at the Fulham Palace police station. Emma ended the call in frustration. She was no closer to knowing whether things were going to go anywhere than before she'd picked up the phone.

  She said to Rafe, 'I don't think Detective Hill is going to like this.'

  'I thought this might happen.' Rafe was hunched forward, stirring the remains of his coffee with a spoon. 'I don't know much about DNA, but I do know that we've got no proof of where I got that walnut from, or who was eating it. Plus, it's contaminated. I touched it, and so did that woman Philippa. Though to be honest, I don't think either of us touched the sticky part of it that Ritchie chewed. But still. It might be hard to convince the police.'

  'Well, then,' Emma cried, 'we won't wait for them to make up their minds. We'll just go ahead and organize our own test.'

  'Maybe,' Rafe said. He sat back, flipping the spoon between his fingers. 'I think we're going to need some extra muscle here. Maybe I should phone Mike again.'

  'Mike? Your friend who gave us the address?'

  'Yeah. Mike's a bit of a golden boy. Detective Sergeant since January, in the Drug Squad. But he's a decent bloke. He'll vouch for us at least. Make a couple of calls on our behalf.'

  'Ring him, then,' Emma urged.

  Rafe dug his phone out of the back pocket of his jeans. It was lunchtime, and the queue for the cashier stretched back as far as the door. The customers had to bellow their orders to be heard. Rafe took his phone outside to talk in peace. While she waited, Emma stroked the bag on her lap, smoothing the gnawed, misshapen fruit inside.

  Come on, little walnut. It's all up to you now. Don't let us down.

  Emma had thought it was just going to be Lindsay meeting them at the police station but, to her surprise, when she and Rafe were shown into the room where she'd watched the tape of Ritchie at the airport, Detective Inspector Hill was there as well. So were a couple of other people she didn't recognize. One of them, a large, untidy-looking man with very fair hair and eyebrows, nodded at Rafe in a friendly way.

  'Mike!' Rafe sounded pleased and surprised.

  Detective Hill, on the other hand, didn't look any friendlier than usual. He was leaning against a table, his arms folded, his bulgy blue eyes colder than ever.

  'I've told DI Hill what's happened,' Lindsay explained to Emma.

  Five pairs of eyes bored into her. Emma didn't waste any time.

  'This,' she said, holding up the plastic bag with the walnut inside, 'has got Ritchie's saliva on it. We got it from him in France. If you compare the DNA with a sample from me, it'll prove once and for all that I'm his mother.'

  Her hand shook. The bag crackled. She took a firmer grip on it, holding it straight out in front of Detective Inspector Hill. He kept his arms folded and stroked at his moustache.

  'All right,' he said. 'All right. Without for the moment even going into how you managed to obtain,' a glance at Rafe, 'this item, my main question for now is: are we to just keep on repeating DNA tests on this French child until you get the result you want?'

  Lindsay looked compassionately at Emma.

  'I only want it repeated once,' Emma said. 'That other test was wrong. How can it hurt to just do this? You'll see it shows he's mine.'

  'It may well do,' Detective Hill said, 'but we've already had a test done that shows he's someone else's. There'll need to be some quite solid grounds to order a repeat. And, with respect, how do we know that this . . . what, walnut? . . . came from that child in France? That it's not something Ritchie was eating here in London before he disappeared?'

  Rafe said, 'Walnuts don't grow in the UK.'

  There was a silence.

  The other detective, a thin man with a biggish nose, spoke up: 'Actually, they do. My aunt has an orchard in—'

  'I doubt if Ritchie was in your aunt's orchard recently,' Rafe snapped.

  Emma burst out: 'Anyway, so walnuts grow in the UK. So what? There could be walnut trees all over London for all I care. But how many of them grow outside my flat? And even if Ritchie found a walnut somewhere before he was kidnapped and chewed it, why on earth would I have kept a half-eaten piece of fruit lying around the flat and not thrown it away?'

  She thrust the plastic bag out again, so they all had a clear view of what was inside.

  'Look,' she said, 'you can see it's just starting to go ripe. Ritchie's been gone for over two weeks. If this walnut had been lying around the flat for that long, don't you think it would have gone rotten by now?'

  She waited for Mr Orchard to say that walnuts never rotted, or something like that. But he didn't. Nobody spoke for a minute.

  Then Detective Hill said to Mike and Rafe, 'Could I have a word?'

  'Of course.'

  Detective Hill got up off the table. His coat made a swishing noise as he left the room. Rafe caught Emma's eye and made a face, a quick, comical downtwist of his mouth at the sides. Then he followed Detective Hill and Mike out to the hall. After glancing at each other, so did Lindsay and the man whose aunt grew walnuts.

  Emma was left on her own. The room had a tight, cloying smell: crisps, and the harsh, chemical tang of marker. Beside the table, a whiteboard was propped on a frame, with writing on it, as if someone had been giving a lecture. 'Public Perceptions of the Community Support Officer' was circled on the board. Arrows pointed out from the circle. At the end of one of them, a cartoon stick-man flexed his biceps and brandished a gun. Underneath him, someone had scribbled the word 'Rambo'.

  They'd been gone a long time. What were they all talking about? Surely it was a case of a simple yes or no? Then it struck Emma that what Rafe had done, pretending to be a gardener like that, might well be against the law. Oh, this was great. Just wonderful. Were they going to arrest him now, thanks to her, on top of everything else?

  The door opened, and Lindsay came back into the room. She closed the door behind her.

  'We've decided,' she said.

  Emma waited.

  Lindsay glanced down, delicately spreading the fingertips of both hands on the table as if she was playing the piano. Then she looked up again.

  'First,' she said, 'I need to say something. There are still several other leads we're following up on. That child in Manchester I told you about, for one. We've got a car number, we're—'

  'If you follow that lead,' Emma said in a hard voice, 'you'll be wasting you
r time.'

  Lindsay sighed.

  'Emma,' she said, 'we're going to do the test.'

  Thank God.

  'DI Hill isn't happy,' Lindsay said. 'You really shouldn't have gone back to that house at all. Or Mr Townsend shouldn't. Another thing you should know is that the DI has discussed this with one of our colleagues, an expert in DNA, and he says there's a high chance that the walnut will show up nothing at all. The acid from the fruit will almost certainly have destroyed any DNA that was on it. And since it's been lying around for quite a while, and handled by several different people, testing it is going to be very difficult. It could take days. Weeks, even.'

  'But I—

  Lindsay held up a hand. 'But Detective Sergeant Evans,' she said, 'assures us that your friend Rafe wouldn't have done what he did unless he honestly thought there was a very good reason. So that's our decision. We're going to go ahead with it.'

  Emma breathed again. 'Thank you,' she said. 'Thank you very much.'

  'One other thing I must tell you,' Lindsay said, 'If Ritchie's DNA does shows up on the walnut, all it means is that we would have grounds to have the official test repeated. On its own, the walnut won't be enough for us to just go out there and take him back. Do you understand that?'

  'Yes.'

  'All right then.'

  Lindsay nodded.

  Then she said, 'We've always looked for him, you know. I know you think we haven't, but we have.'

  She sounded quite emotional, for her.

  She said, 'I would love if the test showed it was Ritchie.'

  'So would I,' Emma answered simply.

  She didn't want to spend any more time talking. She wanted to get things moving. Take the next step.

  'What happens now?' she asked. She was prepared to go anywhere for the DNA test. To a lab, or a clinic, or the hospital. Whatever she had to do.

  Lindsay said, 'We're going to check the walnut against a sample of Ritchie's DNA from your flat. We'll take a sample from you as well. Also one from Mr Townsend, so the lab will be able to tell which DNA on the walnut is his. We can do that for you today. A specialist is on his way right now.'

  The specialist, when he arrived, took details from Emma: her name, her date of birth, her address. He filled out them all out on a form. Then he held up a stick with a white cotton-wool ball on one end, like a giant ear-bud.

  'Open your mouth, please,' he said.

  It was like being at the dentist. Emma sat on the grey plastic chair and opened her mouth wide. She felt a ticklish pressure swooping around the inside of her cheek. This was what it had been like for Ritchie. She was almost certain he'd have tried to bite the stick.

  The ear-bud was whisked away. Emma's lips and the inside of her cheek were dry. She licked around them with her tongue. The specialist rubbed the cotton-wool ball over a square of card. Then he folded a flap over the card, sealing it shut. He put the card into a plastic bag, along with the form he'd filled out with Emma's details.

  'That's it,' he said. 'You can go.'

  She left the room, elated. Finally. After all that, Ritchie's walnut was on its way. Where had Rafe got to? They'd never have agreed to this if it wasn't for him. She'd never have got the DNA if it wasn't for him. Imagine if this was it. The final proof. She couldn't wait to talk it over with him.

  Outside the police station, Rafe's friend Mike was standing with his hands in his pockets, swaying a little on his heels as he looked out over the street. He was a big man, as tall and bulky as Detective Hill, but kinder-looking, with small, crinkled eyes. When he heard the door opening, he turned at once.

  'Emma,' he said, and came to shake her hand. 'Mike Evans. Good to meet you.'

  'Thank you for being here,' Emma said, suddenly shy in front of Rafe's friend. She didn't mention his having given them the address in France, in case she wasn't supposed to know where that had come from.

  'No problem,' Mike said. 'I owe your friend Rafe. We trained together in Brixton; he got me out of a couple of situations. He's got a good head in a crisis.'

  'Where is he now?' Emma asked.

  'Having a little chat with the Governor. Probably getting a slap on the wrist for what he's been up to.'

  'A slap on the wrist.' Emma was dismayed.

  'Don't worry. Our Townsie'll be all right. As long as he doesn't get up to anything else before he heads off to South America, or Juliet won't be too happy with him.'

  'Juliet?'

  'His girlfriend.'

  Emma was startled. Rafe had a girlfriend called Juliet?

  'I'm sorry.' Mike put his hand to his forehead in a comedy-slap kind of way. 'I forgot you and Rafe don't know each other that well. Come to think of it, I haven't seen Juliet for a while myself, but they've been going out for . . . what? Two years? Last I heard, she was making plans to take a gap year and join Townsie on his travels.'

  'Oh, I see.' Emma was still recovering from the surprise. Rafe had never mentioned anything about a girlfriend. But then, why would he have?

  The door to the police station clattered open. Rafe arrived out on the steps.

  'Brrr,' he said, rubbing his hands together in a dramatic way. 'I have to tell you, I'm very happy I don't need to deal with that kind of shit any more.'

  Mike said, 'You know, mate, you never should have left the job.'

  'Yes, I should. Best decision I ever made.'

  'I don't think so.' Mike looked at him. 'You were a loss to us.'

  Rafe didn't respond to this. He said to Emma, 'We were thinking of going for something to eat. Will you join us? There are a couple of decent old places on the river.'

  Emma shook her head. 'Would you mind if I went for a walk by myself?' she asked. 'I'm grateful, really I am. But right now, I just need to clear my head and be on my own for a while.'

  As soon as they'd left her, she went straight to her flat. From the cardboard box at the top of her wardrobe, she took her emergency credit card and driver's licence. She wiped a film of dust off the licence with her sleeve. The last time she'd driven a car was when she'd managed to pass her test, first go, in Bristol when she was eighteen. Her passport was still in her backpack, along with the map of France she'd bought with Rafe. She stuffed a few more items into the pack and left the flat again without looking back.

  At Liverpool Street station, she took cash out of the ATM, as much as the machine would allow her in one go. The next train to Stansted was leaving in two minutes. She hurried to catch it.

  When she was settled in a seat by the window, she sent Rafe a text.

  'Tired. Going to have early night. Don't call.'

  Then she put her phone back in her bag.

  It felt wrong, lying to Rafe after all he'd done. But she didn't want to waste her energy arguing. Or get him into any more trouble.

  She sat back, pushing her hair out of her eyes.

  In a way, she supposed, she'd come to see Rafe as a sort of extension of her and Ritchie. He had come into her life almost at the very moment of Ritchie's disappearance. Ritchie was all they'd ever discussed in any great depth; he was the only thing that filled her mind, and, she'd assumed, Rafe's too. He'd even postponed his trip to South America to help her.

  But Rafe had his own life, of course he had. Stupid of her not to have seen it before. With Mike on the scene, and now this Juliet person as well, Rafe was turning out to have a whole other world, filled with people and interests she knew nothing about.

  Juliet. The name gave her a funny little thud. It was a lovely name. Classy and romantic. She was probably very beautiful. Rafe wouldn't settle for anything less. Well, he deserved it. Funny, just, that he'd never mentioned her at all. But then, why would he have? The topic had never come up. And it wasn't as if he'd ever acted in any way inappropriately. He'd been nothing but a good friend to her and Ritchie when they needed it most.

  She looked out the window. London was behind them now. Scrubby fields spread beyond the tracks. Behind them, trees pointed at the sky; black, spiky pencil drawings o
n a pink background. Stansted airport was less than fifteen minutes away. Last stop before France.

  Emma felt a rush of determination.

  She'd been there before, and come away without him.

  It would not happen again.

  Her excitement had risen by the time she got to the airport.

  'Next flight to Bergerac, please,' she said breathlessly, holding her passport out to the girl at the reservations desk. She waited, tapping her foot, as the girl keyed a couple of sentences into her computer.

  'Sorry.' The girl made a regretful little moue. 'You've just missed one.'

  Emma nodded. 'All right, then. I'll go on the next one.'

  'No more flights to Bergerac this evening,' the girl said.

  Emma couldn't believe it. Of course, Bergerac wasn't a major city but she'd never thought of there being no more flights for the day. Now what was she going to do? How was she going to wait another whole night to get back to Ritchie?

  The girl pressed another couple of keys on her computer.

  'There's a flight first thing in the morning,' she said. 'Seven fifteen. Is that too early for you?'

  'No. No, it's not. I'll take it. Thank you.'

  It was better than nothing. Emma handed over her credit card and took the precious plane ticket. She folded it into her passport and zipped everything carefully into the side of her pack. Then she stood there, looking around the concourse. Now what? She could hardly hang around here for the night. But she didn't fancy going all the way back to the flat again either.

  She bought a sandwich from one of the coffee outlets and sat at the end of an empty row of seats to eat it. It was quiet there, and warm. She must be under a heating vent or something. By the time she'd finished the sandwich and screwed the wrapper up, not one person had come to sit near her, or even walked past. Emma got up to poke the wrapper through the hole in a nearby bin. A lone passenger wandered in the distance, his footsteps echoing behind him on the tiles. The airport seemed to have quietened down for the night.

  Someone had left an Evening Standard folded in half on top of the bin. Emma took it back to her seat. She opened it out, spreading it across the cushions to protect them from her shoes. Then she lay down sideways across three of the seats, using her backpack as a pillow. She got herself into a comfortable position, bunching the backpack up, moving it around so that a soft part of it ended up under her cheek.