A Family for His Tiny Twins

by Josie Metcalfe

  ‘Obviously that’s because you weren’t married to the right woman,’ she fired back. ‘If she was, there was no way she could have walked away from your babies, even though someone else had to carry them for you.’

  Trust Nadia to put into words the disappointment he’d felt when Norah had abandoned their marriage just because she couldn’t have the child she wanted.

  ‘Childlessness affects different people in different ways,’ he said in mitigation. ‘She’d had her heart so set on getting pregnant that when she found it was probably never going to happen for her—’

  ‘She didn’t have enough love in her heart to give to a helpless baby, no matter who had carried it? She couldn’t love that child simply because it wasn’t hers?’

  ‘Could you?’ He turned her argument back on her and for just a second caught a glimpse of something gleaming in the depths of her eyes before she hid it behind a deliberate blink.

  ‘Could I love a child that wasn’t mine?’ Her eyes betrayed her, straying towards the cot beside them for a second before she could control them, and he felt a fierce burst of exultant delight when she added, ‘Of course I could.’

  What was he trying to do to her?

  Nadia bit her lip hard to stop the tears falling, but that didn’t stop the ache in her heart.

  How could Gideon have asked her if she could love a child that wasn’t her own? Surely he knew that Amy and Adam meant every bit as much to her as if they had come from her own body? And the fact that they were his children only seemed to make them more precious.

  And he’d used that roundabout way of saying that he wanted her to care for the two of them when it was time to take them home. At least he had no way of knowing that it was what she’d been dreaming about for weeks in the loneliness of her little room.

  That was why she’d distracted him by telling him that he needed to look for a wife. She knew that even if he was able to get past the failure of his first marriage, she certainly wasn’t the sort of person he could—or would—ever love, especially as she would feel honour-bound to tell him what had happened to her in the past.

  The fact that she’d been stupid enough to fall in love with the man would mean nothing to him once he knew about that.

  She was concentrating so hard on what was going on inside her head that she’d completely forgotten to keep her eyes open in case Laszlo was about, and when she bumped into the same man who’d been outside the lifts at the start of her shift she gave a shriek, convinced that it was Laszlo’s hand gripping her arm to prevent her falling over. Or was he stopping her from running away?

  ‘Let me go!’ she pleaded, mortified to hear her voice sound as weak and pathetic as it had when she’d been sixteen.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the man said gruffly, and immediately released her. ‘I thought you were going to fall,’ he added, and it was only when she registered that his accent was pure English that she realised it wasn’t Laszlo at all.

  ‘No. I’m sorry. I thought you were…someone else,’ she apologised, but she was speaking to his back as he hurried away from her, almost as if couldn’t bear to be near her.

  Nadia could still see him making his way towards the end of the corridor and turning into the visitor’s toilets as the lift doors slid closed, and she wondered idly why he was wearing such a voluminous coat when the hospital was kept so warm…and why he was walking in such an awkward, hunched way. She hadn’t noticed his strange gait before, but perhaps he had some sort of injury or spinal disease? Scoliosis, perhaps?

  Her eyes scanning everyone she could see once she reached the ground floor, she was making her way towards the big double doors when a burly security man suddenly stepped out in front of her, barring her exit.

  ‘Can I ask you where you’ve just come from, miss?’ he asked while the radio in his free hand squawked unintelligibly.

  ‘The fourth floor,’ she said, wondering what on earth was going on, especially when her answer made him frown.

  ‘Would you mind if I were to have a look in your bag, miss?’ he asked, but she had a feeling he was going to look whether she wanted him to or not.

  ‘Of course I don’t mind.’ She held the soft cloth bag out, holding it open wide so he could see that she had little more than her purse and a few odds and ends in it. With any luck he’d never notice that she had her essential papers such as her passport sewn into the lining in the bottom. It would be difficult to explain why she never went anywhere without them.

  ‘I’m one of the nurses in the premature baby unit,’ she volunteered, flicking open her purse to show an ID card. ‘What are you looking for? Drugs?’

  ‘Someone has kidnapped a baby…one of a pair of twins,’ he informed her, and she felt her heart stop beating.

  ‘No!’ she moaned in anguish, grabbing for his arm with hands that trembled uncontrollably. ‘I only left them a few minutes ago. How could this have happened?’

  The whole department was run with stringent security to prevent anything like this happening, every baby issued with a tracking tag as soon as they were born so that they couldn’t be taken past the sensors without setting off an alarm.

  ‘I have to go back up,’ she declared, and made a beeline for the lifts.

  All the way up to the fourth floor her brain was whirling with questions. Had anyone contacted Gideon? Did he know that one of his precious babies had been stolen?

  How had the kidnapper accessed the unit? If he wasn’t the parent of one of their tiny charges he wouldn’t have been given the key code to open the door.

  Then the worst question of all formed inside her head. Had Laszlo done this? Had he taken Gideon’s child because she was the one caring for them? Was this her fault because she hadn’t left as soon as she’d recognised him?

  CHAPTER NINE

  NADIA’S hand was shaking so much that she could barely tap out the code on the security pad. And then she was stumbling into the unit, her feet drawn inexorably towards the glass wall of the nursery…to see a scene of utter tranquillity within.

  Where were the police? Where were the security guards?

  All she could see was Jenny beside the isolette, smiling as she checked one of the monitor leads, her mouth moving as if she was speaking soothing words to the two babies sleeping soundly…

  Two babies?

  She blinked and looked again, wondering if she was simply seeing what she wanted to see rather than what was actually there.

  ‘Jenny?’ She didn’t dare do any more than stick her head around the door with a mask held over her face. The last thing she wanted to do was introduce a potentially deadly infectious organism into the nursery. ‘Are they all right?’

  ‘Of course they are. Why wouldn’t they be?’ she demanded with a slight edge to her voice, as though hurt that Nadia would doubt her care.

  ‘I was stopped by Security. They said someone had kidnapped a baby from the fourth floor…one of twins…and I immediately thought…I was afraid…’

  Nadia didn’t know how to finish the sentence. She could hardly tell the young woman that she’d been convinced that it was one of Gideon’s babies who’d been stolen, and that Laszlo was behind the theft because of her.

  ‘Oh, Lord above,’ Jenny said in a shocked voice. ‘How could anyone even think of doing such a thing? And how would they get the baby out of the hospital? Surely the electronic tags are there to prevent that happening.’

  Nadia was trembling in the aftermath of the rush of adrenaline and would need to sit down with a strong cup of coffee before she made another attempt to go home.

  In the meantime, a glance along the corridor gave her just a fleeting glimpse of one of the security guards with the company insignia emblazoned on each epaulette. The sight jogged something in her memory, but she was too jittery to think what it was. Perhaps, when she’d found that coffee, she’d be able to get her brain working properly again. All she could think of now was that Amy and Adam were safe and well and Gideon wasn’t having to face the heartbr
eak of losing one of those precious babies.

  ‘Gideon!’ As if her thoughts had conjured him up, there he was, sprawled out in the most comfortable of the available chairs. ‘I thought you’d be on duty by now.’

  ‘I thought you’d be home, putting your feet up with a big cup of tea,’ he countered, and made getting out of the sagging cushion look effortless. ‘What brings you back? Surely they didn’t call you in for a double shift?’

  ‘I never made it home,’ she said, grateful to sit down before she fell down. To go through that much stress at the end of a long day on her feet wasn’t good, and her feet had been aching before she’d run all the way up the stairs to the fourth floor. ‘Security stopped me at the main doors and searched my bag to see if I was the one who’d just kidnapped a baby—one of twins.’

  ‘What!’ Shock had him whirling towards her with the kettle in his hand without remembering to turn off the tap, and the water hit the sink full force to shower across his back, soaking the thin cotton of his scrubs and plastering it against his torso.

  He gasped and quickly rectified the situation, giving her an enticing view of an unexpectedly muscular torso before he turned back to face her again.

  ‘What baby?’ he demanded, already striding towards the door.

  ‘Stop, Gideon!’ she called, silently cursing herself for not making it perfectly clear that Amy and Adam weren’t involved. ‘They’re safe. It’s not one of yours,’ she added, and saw the tension leave him like the air leaking from a balloon.

  There was a knock at the door and he was still close enough to reach out to open it immediately, startling the officer on the other side for a second.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Doctor,’ he said formally, the ubiquitous notepad in his hand, ‘but we’re making enquiries in case anyone saw anything suspicious within the last hour. Can you tell me what time you arrived on the fourth floor and if you saw anyone acting in a suspicious manner?’

  Nadia had to bite back a chuckle, in spite of the serious situation. The man sounded so much like the stereotypical stage policeman that it was hard to keep a straight face, especially when she caught an answering glint in Gideon’s eyes.

  She listened quietly while the officer went through his questions but all the while there was something nagging at the back of her mind…something that she really should be able to recall…something—or someone…

  ‘There was a man!’ she exclaimed suddenly, startling them all. ‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised hastily, ‘but I just remembered.’

  ‘Where was this man, miss, and when did you see him?’ There was a new intensity to the officer’s questions and he made her think of a dog who had just found the scent of something important and had no intention of losing it.

  ‘I don’t remember exactly when I saw him for the first time,’ she admitted, and the man almost seemed to wilt with the vagueness of her answer. ‘He’s been here at least three times, and at first I thought he must be the husband of a woman in labour. Someone who had come out of the room to get a breath of air, perhaps?’

  ‘Are you sure that isn’t what he was?’ the policeman challenged. ‘It took nearly thirty hours for my first one to be born.’

  ‘But you probably weren’t wandering the corridors dressed in an overcoat while she was in labour,’ Nadia retorted. ‘And you weren’t wearing a hat with the peak pulled down so that the CCTV cameras wouldn’t be able to see your face.’

  The more she thought about it, the more shifty the man’s behaviour seemed. And even though she was certain that it had been the same man each time she’d seen him, she still couldn’t be certain what his face looked like. It could even have been Laszlo…but, no, that didn’t feel right. She didn’t have the same feeling of menace that she’d felt when she’d been so aware of the sensation of being watched as she’d crossed the hospital grounds.

  ‘Which cameras would have caught him?’ The man seemed almost excited now as he pressed the keys on his phone. ‘The security team can let us look at the footage if we know where you saw him and a rough time.’

  ‘I can show you,’ Nadia offered, her tired feet suddenly forgotten as she leapt to them and led the way out into the unit.

  She pointed to the bank of lifts in the wide stretch of corridor that joined the highly specialised premature baby unit with the rest of the obs/gyn and maternity departments.

  ‘About half an hour ago, he was standing by the lifts as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to press the button.’ She paused a moment to get the sequence of events in her head and to censor the part where she’d convinced herself that Laszlo had discovered where she worked. ‘I overbalanced and he grabbed my arm to steady me, but then he set off along the corridor in that direction.’ She pointed away from the unit they’d just left.

  ‘Exactly what was he wearing?’ The man’s pen was flying across the page as he took every detail down.

  ‘A hat with a peak and a rather shabby, rather large overcoat that didn’t look as if it belonged to him, unless he’d lost a lot of weight. Except…’

  She frowned, because in her final image of him, just before he’d entered the toilets at the end of the corridor, the coat had seemed to fit him better, as though he’d suddenly put the weight back on.

  ‘He went into the toilets,’ she gasped and set off at a run. ‘The man went into the visitors’ toilets and I think he had something hidden under his coat.’

  She might have started running first, but the two men had longer legs and both had overtaken her by the time they reached the cloakroom door. Gideon’s hand hit the door first but the officer was first into the room beyond.

  The room was empty.

  There were no red-faced men at the short row of urinals and there were only two cubicles with doors and neither lock was engaged.

  Except she didn’t think they were both empty, in spite of appearances.

  For the first time in her life she voluntarily entered this all-male domain, approaching the almost closed door of the second cubicle on silent feet. A passing glimpse of herself in the mirrors over the basins told her that she looked completely ridiculous, like a cartoon cat creeping up on an unsuspecting mouse, but then she heard a rustling noise that certainly shouldn’t be coming from the cubicle if it really was empty.

  A hand fastened around her arm and she nearly squeaked until she saw that it was Gideon, holding her back and gesturing for her to let the officer lead the way.

  Nadia was frustrated that she wasn’t the one to push the door open. From the position by the door that Gideon had drawn her back to, she didn’t even have a view of the interior of the cubicle, until she realised that the mirrors reflected them perfectly.

  That was why she was able to see that, when the policeman gently swung the door open, he revealed the man she’d seen, but this time he was sitting on the lid of the toilet with the missing baby on his lap while he frantically sawed away at the security tag with a metal file.

  There were tears streaming down his cheeks and his expression looked no more dangerous than that of a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car when the officer said, ‘I think you’d better come with me, sir.’

  ‘D-don’t take him away,’ the man stammered, abandoning his fruitless attempt to remove the security tag. ‘Th-they’ve got another one. Th-they don’t need him, n-not like Sally and m-me. W-we need him. We’d l-love him…s-so much.’

  Nadia almost felt sorry for the man as she carried the infant out to find the nearest paediatrician for a quick check-up before he was returned to his frantic mother. She could only imagine what circumstances had driven him to do something so desperate. She knew only too well how the traumatic loss of a child had changed her life for ever.

  It was another hour before she was ready to leave the hospital, an hour in which she’d sat and talked idly with Gideon while they’d waited for confirmation that the baby had been returned safe and sound to his mother.

  They’d also learned that the man and his wife ha
d exhausted their savings and put themselves in serious debt in their failed attempts at IVF. Their last attempt had resulted in a spontaneous abortion at four months, in spite of the consultant’s best efforts and far too soon for Nadia’s unit to have been able to do anything to help, and had coincided with hearing that one of their fellow IVF patients had just delivered twins.

  ‘That must have been the last straw,’ Gideon had said thoughtfully, ‘the reason why he flipped.’ And she somehow knew that he was thinking about his ex-wife and the way she’d become completely obsessed with the idea of carrying her own child.

  ‘Basic biology,’ Nadia whispered, feeling the empty ache inside her and wondering if it would ever go away. ‘The fundamental animal need to procreate, to leave some part of your genetic inheritance behind when you leave the world.’

  She’d felt that overwhelming need once, so she could understand it.

  In spite of the way in which her baby had come into being, once she’d known Anya was inside her she had loved her, bonding with the fact that half of every cell contained her DNA that was multiplying and growing with every day, until…until Laszlo had found out she was pregnant.

  ‘Are you ready to go home?’ Gideon’s prosaic question snapped her out of the nightmare that had been about to overtake her. She was about to be her usual evasive self when he continued, ‘I walked in to spend time with Adam and Amy, so I’ll be walking back and stopping off to get some food on the way. I live in one of the flats in the road that goes past the cinema. Which way do you go?’

  She was surprised to discover just how close they had been living all this time. ‘I’m going in the same general direction, but I live on the other side of the main road, in one of the streets behind the railway station.’

  She didn’t need his swiftly controlled grimace to tell her that it wasn’t the nicest area. In fact, the building she lived in had once been an old workhouse, converted into accommodation in a rather rough-and-ready way, but the rent was affordable and it was close enough to walk backwards and forwards to the hospital so that she didn’t need the expense of a car or public transport.