The Chinese Egg

by Catherine Storr

  This Monday evening, Mrs. Hedges had a long story about her sister’s husband’s interesting operation in one of the big London hospitals. What the surgeon had said and what Mrs. Hedges’ sister had told him to his face, and the appearance of whatever it was they’d taken out of his stomach, occupied the first half hour of pleasurable horror. Then Mrs. Morley wanted to tell them about the customer she’d served in the department store where she worked who had tried to get out of the store without paying. And Mr. Griggs, the elderly widower, who was supposed by the other ladies to have a soft spot for Mrs. Plum, wanted to talk about some bill that was just going to be put through Parliament and made law; he got very indignant about it, and Mrs. Morley joined in and there was quite a tussle between them. After which it was Mrs. Plum’s turn to relate anything of interest in her life; but she felt that her tenants and even the happy married lives of her two daughters were rather small beer after shouting surgeons and dishonest shoppers, so she only just mentioned that she’d let her front double on the first floor to a young couple with a baby, and that the baby cried a lot and the girl didn’t seem to know the first thing about looking after it, and then she was ready to move on to more general topics. But it was, surprisingly, Mr. Griggs who took her up, reminding her of her duty as a citizen to keep abreast of the news and to relate it to her own life.

  “What about this young couple, then? You been listening to the news tonight?”

  “Not tonight, I didn’t. Tell you the truth I was upstairs seeing to the drains. The cistern of the toilet’s been overflowing again, and there I was standing on the seat, if you’ll pardon the expression, trying to get the valve to close off when it should, like my son-in-law told me to.”

  “You didn’t hear the six o’clock news then?”

  “That’s the radio, isn’t it? No, I didn’t. I watch the telly. I like seeing the chap who’s telling it. Makes it seem more as if it mattered.”

  “But this was yesterday’s.”

  “Sunday? No. Six o’clock I’d got over to my eldest daughter’s place. They don’t watch much. There’s always kiddies about, see? Why, what’d it say?”

  “About this baby that got snatched from its pram.”

  “Yes, I did hear about that. Dreadful thing, isn’t it? And I was just saying to young Mrs. Deptford, that’s the girl in my front double, I don’t know how anyone could! What a dreadful thing to do, I said to her, suppose it was your little Linda, I said, whatever would you do?”

  “Didn’t you say this girl didn’t seem to know how to look after her baby?”

  “That’s right. How the hospital ever come to let her. . .”

  “You ought to tell the police,” Mr. Griggs surprisingly said.

  Mrs. Plum was shocked. “Go to the police for a thing like that?”

  “Mr. Griggs means she may be treating it really badly. Battering, they call it,” Mrs. Morley said.

  “No, I don’t. Though there’s that to think of as well. . . .”

  “Then what do you mean about the police? I’d have thought it wasn’t their job to see that a girl knows how to handle her own baby. . . .”

  “Ah!” Mr. Griggs said with immense meaning.

  “What’s ‘Ah!’?”

  “How do you know it is her own baby? That’s what ‘Ah’ is.”

  “But whyever..?” Mrs. Plum began, when Mrs. Hedges, always rather inclined to do everyone else’s talking for them, cut in.

  “What Fred’s saying, Mary, is how do you know this isn’t that baby everyone’s looking for, that was taken from its pram in Kensington last week?”

  “I suppose you haven’t seen that baby’s birth certificate, have you?” Mr. Griggs asked.

  “No, of course I haven’t. When a young couple come to take a room and they’ve got a baby with them that they say’s theirs, I don’t go asking for certificates.”

  “Did the girl say where she’d had the baby?”

  “Said she’d had it in hospital in Birmingham.”

  “She tell you what sort of time she had with it?”

  “No. . . o. Now I come to think of it she didn’t say much. And whatever hospital it was, they ought to be ashamed of their-selves, letting her go out with a baby and not knowing the first thing about how to look after it.”

  “That’s the point. She probably never did. What sort of a girl is she?” Mrs. Hedges asked.

  “She’s a poor soppy thing. Doesn’t look to me like a girl who’d go and do a thing like that. Not enough guts, and not bad either. Tell you the truth, I’m sorry for her,” Mrs. Plum said.

  “She must be wicked if she took the baby,” Mrs. Hedges said.

  “She might have been made to. What’s the husband like?” Mr. Griggs asked.

  “Now there you may be right. I don’t much take to him. He’s quite polite. Speaks quite well. But I don’t like his looks. He’s what I’d call the ferretty type.”

  “Carroty?” Mrs. Hedges asked.

  “I said, ferretty. I don’t know what coloured hair he’s got, he’s always got a hat on when I see him.”

  “Not in the house?” Mrs. Morley said.

  “In the house as well as out. I remember the first time I noticed it, I wondered if he was bald. Being a young man, he mightn’t want anyone to know.”

  “How long have they been with you, Mary?” Mr. Griggs asked.

  “Moved in last Thursday evening. He—Mr. Deptford—he’d been along in the morning and said how his wife was coming down from Birmingham that evening with the baby. He took the room, said how much he liked it, and then went off to fetch her from the station, he said.”

  “Which day was it the baby was taken?” Mr. Griggs asked, and Mrs. Hedges answered at once, “It was last Thursday, that’s right, because I was up in Oxford Street for the late night shopping, and when I come back and Julie told me I said, There now, I said, I might have been in Kensington myself, I did think of going on there if I couldn’t get what I wanted in Oxford Street. I might have been right there and seen it happen, I said. I’ve never been so shocked in my life!”

  “Anything else suspicious about them?” Mr. Griggs asked Mrs. Plum.

  “I don’t see that the girl’s not knowing how to look after the baby’s all that suspicious,” Mrs. Morley objected.

  “When she’s arrived but of nowhere the very day the baby was lost?” Mrs. Hedges said.

  “There’s plenty of girls don’t know how to look after babies and plenty of them probably moved one day last week.”

  “All right, there may be. What I’m saying is, Mary ought to go to the police. In the news tonight they sent out an appeal to anyone who’s noticed anything funny going on with a baby.”

  “I shouldn’t have thought they’d be very impressed by hearing there’s a mother can’t stop her baby crying,” Mrs. Morley rather acidly said.

  “Trouble with you, Marge, you’ve no imagination,” Mrs. Hedges said.

  “It’s true I’m not always seeing things that aren’t there, or thinking things mean something special when anyone with a bit of common sense can see they don’t,” Mrs. Morley replied.

  “Wait a minute! There’s one thing we don’t know, and it could make all the difference. That baby that was snatched, was it a girl or a boy? Because if the kid in Mary’s rooms is the other one, then we’re getting all steamed up about nothing, aren’t we?” Mr. Griggs said, happy to be able to interrupt.

  “It’s a girl,” Mrs. Hedges said at once.

  “And what’s this one that cries all the time?” Mr. Griggs asked Mrs. Plum.

  “She’s a girl too. Linda. Pretty little thing.”

  “Like the picture in the papers? You’ve seen them? They’ve been in the papers every day since.”

  “I never thought. . . . Yes, I suppose it could be the same. Only Linda, she’s got more hair.”

  “That picture they had of her was taken more than a month ago. She’d have changed quite a bit since then,” Mrs. Hedges said.

  “You reall
y should go to the police, Mary,” Mr. Griggs urged her.

  “Suppose it was her and you didn’t go! You’d never forgive yourself,” Mrs. Hedges added.

  “If it was me, I shouldn’t do anything in a hurry. Why don’t you ask them a few questions and see what they say?” Mrs. Morley said.

  “If they’re innocent, they’ll have nothing to hide,” Mrs. Hedges said.

  “It wouldn’t be very nice for them, though, would it? Being questioned by the police and that,” Mrs. Plum said. She thought of Maureen, sitting on the side of the big bed, tears running down her cheeks. She didn’t want to get the poor girl into trouble. She’d already reckoned it was a runaway match and that more than likely they weren’t properly married. They hadn’t done her any harm, she didn’t want to make more difficulties for them.

  “I’ll come with you to the police station round the corner if you like,” Mrs. Hedges said.

  “What, tonight?”

  “No time like the present,” Mrs. Hedges said, ready to get up and go any moment. But her attempt at hurry had just the opposite effect to what she’d intended. Mrs. Plum settled herself more firmly in her seat and shook her head. “Not now, I’m hot going. I’ll have to think about it, first.”

  “I’ll come round tomorrow morning and go with you, then.” “No thanks, Pat. If I decide I ought to go, I’m quite capable of going on my own. But I haven’t made up my mind yet. I might do what Marge said, just have a few words with the girl and see how she takes it.”

  “Another Guinness while you’re thinking it over?” Mr. Griggs suggested. But Mrs. Plum didn’t want to be put under any more pressure, and she left the three of them discussing the rights and wrongs of the case and went home. As she let herself into the house, she heard the baby crying again. The sound pushed her a fraction nearer the decision she’d got to take.

  Twenty One

  The next morning, at twenty-five minutes past ten, Mrs. Plum was seated in her local police station, telling the superintendent her story. She was relieved that it was heard with dead seriousness, and flattered, though also rather alarmed, at having it all taken down by a very young police officer with steel-rimmed glasses, who sat behind her and scribbled away as she talked. She told the superintendent about the Deptfords’ arrival on the Thursday evening. She told how her friends the night before had reminded her about the missing baby and had told her she ought to go to the police. She told how she hadn’t wanted to do anything in a hurry. She did hope if it was all a false alarm they wouldn’t make trouble for the poor girl, who was so tired she couldn’t hardly stand, and who didn’t look like the sort of girl to go snatching other people’s babies, and who certainly didn’t mean to be unkind to Linda, seemed even quite fond of her, only clumsy! All thumbs! And not too bright with it.

  “Were the couple in the house when you came out this morning?” the superintendent asked her.

  “I didn’t hear him go out. Yesterday he went off to work about half-past eight, but I don’t know about this morning.”

  “What time did you leave the house?”

  “Let’s see. I did my bit of washing-up because I like to leave the place tidy. Then I went out to do my shopping, nice and early, see? That’d have taken me half an hour. No, more. I had to wait at the vegetable shop. Then I went up and did the rooms of my two gentlemen who go out all day. Then I come here. Must have been around half-past nine when I come out of my front door.”

  “Was the girl there with the baby when you came out?”

  “She was when I went to do my shopping. The cooker for that room’s out on the landing, see? And she was there heating up the baby’s bottle.”

  “Did you speak to her?”

  “Asked her how she’d slept. Because the baby was crying again last night, so I thought. . . .”

  “Did you have any other conversation with her?”

  “I may just have asked her if she was quite comfortable. Something like that,” Mrs. Plum said.

  “You didn’t mention your suspicions about the baby?”

  “Nothing like that,” Mrs. Plum said, in rather too much of a hurry. She didn’t want to tell them she’d asked Mrs. Deptford about that street name again, to make sure she’d heard it right.

  The superintendent sent for the police car, and he and Mrs. Plum rode through the streets in it back to Magfontein Road. There was a plain clothes man and woman with them, and the car stopped in Shelley Lane, round the corner, and Mrs. Plum had to go in first with the policewoman, with the others watching from the end of the street in the car to make sure that no one got away. Mrs. Plum opened the front door and she knew in a minute, as you do know with a house you’ve lived in for a time, that it was empty. She went up the stairs and saw the door of the front bedroom open and the mess inside. Just to make sure, she said, “Mrs. Deptford? Mrs. Deptford, dear?” But there was no answer as she’d known there wouldn’t be, and she went downstairs and told the young policewoman waiting in the hall.

  “Sure they’re not just gone out?” she said, very neat and trim and not looking like what she was at all, wearing a red miniskirt and a tight white top that any girl might have liked to be seen in.

  “All the cupboards are empty. And the baby’s things aren’t there.”

  “The pushchair? Where did they keep that?”

  “Upstairs in their room. It was a folding one. That’s gone too.”

  It was, Mrs. Plum thought, a bit of a do. In a way she wished she’d never made up her mind to go to the police. If she’d known what they were going to do to her front double, turning everything inside out, testing for finger-prints, photographing, spending the whole day there, she might not have. And the questions were worse. She was taken to another police station, in Kensington, and spent the whole afternoon there with a new chap, quicker and more of a gentleman than the other, looking at photographs of boys and girls, hundreds and hundreds of them, till she got so tired she felt like picking any one of them and saying, “That’s her,” just so she could stop. She had to tell her story a dozen times, with different bits of it being picked on each time for her to be asked about. They gave her cups of tea and biscuits and they were quite polite, but she got tireder and tireder. The bit they always came back to, again and again, was what she’d said to young Mrs. Deptford that morning before she’d gone out for her shopping. She stuck to it for ever so long that all she’d said was to ask if everything was all right. What had the girl answered to that? She’d said she was all right, only tired because of the baby crying again. Hadn’t Mrs. Plum said any more after that?

  No, she didn’t want to stand there gossiping, she wanted to get her shopping done.

  She hadn’t asked the girl any more about the baby?

  She might just have asked how Linda was this morning.

  What did the girl say to that?

  “If I asked, I suppose she said she was all right,” Mrs. Plum said carefully.

  “Did you ask?”

  “I might have.”

  “You were a bit puzzled in your own mind about her, weren’t you? You were wondering whether you should come to see us to mention your suspicions.”

  “If I’d known all the fuss there was going to be, I’d have kept my mouth shut,” Mrs. Plum said smartly.

  “And let them get away with snatching the baby and possibly putting its life in danger?”

  “Who said its life was in danger?” Mrs. Plum demanded.

  “The parents are very wealthy people. The usual thing in these cases is a demand for money. If it isn’t paid, the child’s life is threatened.”

  “I’m sure that girl wouldn’t do anything to harm it, poor little thing.”

  “What about the man?”

  “I didn’t see much of him.”

  “And you didn’t like much of what you did see?”

  “Well. He spoke very nicely, to me, he did.”

  “But not to the girl?”

  He was quick, this one, Mrs. Plum had to admit. “I did think once or
twice she acted as if she was frightened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She hadn’t really meant to tell this part of the story, but it came out. “There was one night the baby cried and cried, and she went and sat in the toilet with it. One of my lodgers, a Mr. Bodman he’s called, he found her there next morning. Asleep on the floor she was. When I asked her, she said she didn’t want the baby to wake Johnny. That was what she called him.”

  “She never said anything to you about him? About how they’d met? Anything like that?”

  “Only about her wedding. According to her they’d had a big wedding. But she did say not to talk to him about it, and I thought, that’s funny. Why should a young chap mind having his wedding spoken about? If it really happened, that’s to say.”

  “You think they weren’t really married?”