The Chinese Egg

by Catherine Storr

  She told him again what she’d said on the telephone. Price put her through some sort of third degree too. At the end of twenty minutes she was on the edge of tears, but her story hadn’t varied by a hairsbreadth. She’d seen a street, people, all quite ordinary, then this fantastic palace, floodlit. It didn’t make sense. Price began to wonder if one of them was hallucinating. Even if the couple had somehow managed to evade the watch that was being kept on all ports and had slipped across the Channel, how could they have possibly got as far as was suggested by the Eastern look the girl had described?

  The telephone rang. Price said into it severely, “I told you not to disturb me unless there was something really urgent.”

  “Inspector Drinkwater thinks you ought to hear about this one, sir.”

  “What is it?”

  “Description of a van seen parked last night in Brighton, sir.”

  The duty sergeant was surprised by the roar with which the Chief Superintendent greeted this. “Brighton! My god, what a fool I’ve been! Yes, send it up, Sergeant. It could be important.” To Vicky he said, “Here’s a pencil and there’s a pad. Draw what this building was like.”

  “I’m not much good,” Vicky said.

  “Never mind. Just to give me a rough idea.”

  While she was drawing, the message came, in. A Mr. Mackenzie had found the parking space outside his house in Messenger Street, Brighton, occupied when he’d got back from the pub on Saturday night. It wasn’t one of his neighbours’ cars, he knew them all. It was a van. He couldn’t be sure of the registration, he hadn’t bothered to look. It had gone now.. He thought it was a green van, but he couldn’t be sure of that. He’d gone out to look at tea-time because of hearing the police notice on the radio, and his wife said he should. Why had his wife said he should? Because she said she’d heard a baby crying early in the morning and there weren’t any babies near that she knew of. He hadn’t heard any baby, but then he was a bit on the deaf side.

  “Follow it up. Ask all along the street if anyone put up a couple with a baby last night. And the two streets next to it. Anywhere near where they could have lodged. House-to-house inquiry. Put out notices for a green van, probably going west from Brighton. Say the girl has short hair and has the marks of injury on her face. Get someone to examine this Mackenzie chap and see if he can’t remember a bit more about the van. He’ll probably come out with the make, even if he didn’t notice anything else. And hurry. The baby’s still there. We’ve got to get to it soon.”

  “It’s nothing like it. I told you I can’t draw,” Vicky said.

  Price looked.

  “Have you ever been to Brighton, Vicky?”

  “No. Been to Eastbourne, though.”

  “Wait a minute,” Price said. He rang downstairs again and made an unlikely request. Five minutes later a grinning sergeant brought in a handful of picture postcards, sent back to the staff-room by officers on holiday to excite envy in those left working. They came from all over the world. Many from Spain, several from France, one or two from America, a sprinkling from Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, some from neglected England. The first one from the south coast was the usual fat-lady-knickers type. The next showed a pier, the third chalky cliffs. The fourth Price laid in front of Vicky, covering the place name with his hand. “Is that your Kremlin?” he asked.

  The Pavilion jumped at Vicky with its impossible pale un-English colours, its ridiculous, frilly, superb, extravagant form. She said, “Where is it then?” and Price said, “Where it should be. Where it was built, for a Prince. And the baby’s still there. We might catch them yet.”

  Sunday evening

  Vicky didn’t get home till nearly nine. Her mother would certainly ask questions too difficult to answer if she stayed out any more of the day. But she was possessed by a sort of feverish impatience which made it impossible to sit still, to eat, to talk normally. She wanted all the time to be doing something. While she tried to conceal from her Mum’s quick eye the fact that she had hidden most of her tinned salmon under her knife and fork, while she tried to listen to the others’ conversations and to make appropriate replies, she wasn’t really in the kitchen at home at all. In her mind she was scanning the southern coast of England for the van. She was cowering with the girl away from being hit all over her face. She was remembering Sally Wilmington and the way she’d said to Mr. Wilmington, “You won’t let them hurt Caroline Ann?” and then that girl’s voice saying, “You said you wouldn’t hurt her.” She remembered the Super saying to Stephen this afternoon, “Was it. . . alive?” It had been alive in Stephen’s picture, but they didn’t know just when that was. It could still be tomorrow, it could be today. She had caught Price’s fear and she shivered. Mrs. Stanford saw it.

  “Vicky! What’s the matter? And you’ve not eaten anything either!”

  “I’m just not hungry, Mum.”

  “Do you feel ill? You’ve hardly said a word all through tea.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t feel well, though?”

  If she said No, it would get her out of having to explain. But then she wouldn’t be allowed to go out and meet Stephen tomorrow, and if they couldn’t meet they might not be able to save the baby. She said, “I’m all right. Truly, Mum. I’m just tired, that’s all.”

  Mrs. Stanford waited until she and Vicky were washing up alone, then she said, “There’s something wrong, Vicky. Want to tell me?”

  Vicky shook her head. She found she was surprisingly close to tears.

  “Have you and Stephen fallen out?”

  Vicky shook her head again.

  “You’re seeing a lot of him, aren’t you? Considering you told me it’s nothing serious.”

  “I did tell you, Mum. We keep on having to see the police about that kidnapping.”

  “I thought you’d told them what you’d heard. Why do they want to go on and on about it?”

  “There’s lots more questions they think of to ask us all the time.”

  “It isn’t they think you had anything to do with it?”

  “Oh Mum! Of course not”

  “I can’t see why you and that Stephen boy have to be at their beck and call all the time, for all that.”

  Vicky said, “They’re frightened about the baby.” Her voice broke.

  “Is that what’s worrying you, love?”

  It was such a relief to say, “Yes,” and to allow the tears to come. Mrs. Stanford abandoned the washing-up. She sat herself down and took Vicky, great grown-up, nearly sixteen-year-old Vicky, on to her lap. Vicky cried wetly and almost enjoyably. It was wonderful to sit on Mum’s lap like this as if she was six, and simply let go. She cried with great choking sobs, not trying for the stiff upper lip or being a big girl now. She didn’t think. She melted.

  Mum was fantastic. She simply held Vicky and allowed her to cry. After a time Vicky lifted her head from that comfortable shoulder and said, “I must look awful.”

  “If you’re thinking that you must be better.”

  “It was just. . . Mum, that baby!”

  “I know. Only I keep thinking of its mother. What must she be feeling?”

  Vicky said, with difficulty, “Mum! Did my Mum—you know. Did she. . . Did she feel like that when she knew she wasn’t going to go on living? About me?”

  “I don’t think she knew she was going, love. Thing was, she got so weak she didn’t hardly know anything.”

  “Did she know you’d be taking me home?”

  Mrs. Stanford knew when a whole truth was not called for. She said, “She knew if anything happened to her I’d look out for you.”

  Vicky said, “I don’t think anyone ought to take babies away from their Mums and Dads. I think it’s cruel. I think it’s the worst thing anyone can do.”

  “She’s only young. She could have another one,” Mrs. Stanford said, seeing the picture of young Mrs. Wilmington in the paper.

  “But it wouldn’t be the same, would it? She’d always want that one. W
ouldn’t she?” Vicky said.

  “‘Course she would. I shouldn’t have said that. When I think how it would be if you or Chris had got taken and I’d thought I’d never see you again. . . . Knowing I could have twenty more wouldn’t make me feel any better,” Mrs. Stanford said.

  Vicky dared to ask the question she’d often thought, never said. “Mum! Do you feel different about us? Because Chris is yours and I’m not? Would you. . .?” She couldn’t finish. But Mrs. Stanford understood, and knew that only the truth would do here.

  “I’ve often asked myself the same. Do I feel different about Chris being mine? I don’t know, Vicky, and that’s the truth. Thing is, I’m so used to having the two of you, I can’t tell what it’d be, not to have you both. ‘Course it isn’t the same. Not for me any more than it is for you. I’m like you, sometimes I wonder about what your father was and how it all came about. But it doesn’t worry me now. It used to, right at the beginning. I’d think, Suppose I don’t do the right thing by the child, when she wasn’t mine to start with? And then—I don’t know. It seemed so sort of natural to have the two of you, and I’d have felt so bad if I’d had only the one, I stopped feeling like that. I just felt pleased. And Chris wouldn’t have been so happy as she is if she hadn’t had a sister. I’ve seen it with onlies. It isn’t right.”

  “Chris’d have been all right anyway.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  Vicky yawned.

  “You ought to go to bed, my lass. You’re tired out.”

  Vicky realized, astonished, that this was true. She got up off her Mum’s comfortable lap and stretched.

  “I will. ‘Night, Mum.”

  “‘Night, love.”

  So much you didn’t say. Stephen’s father would have wanted to have it all spelled out or he wouldn’t know it was there. Vicky felt drained. Better for all that crying, guilty because it hadn’t helped to find the baby. But she had to sleep. She’d meet Stephen again tomorrow. Tomorrow. Would the baby see tomorrow? If she hadn’t been so tired she’d have lain awake worrying, but as it was she was asleep five minutes after getting into bed.

  Sunday

  Skinner slept late that Sunday morning. Maureen had crept around the van, getting feeds ready and looking for something to eat herself. She was starving. If she didn’t eat something soon, her inside rumblings might wake Skinner, and then, where’d she be? She made herself tea and put in some of the baby’s dried milk. It was ever so nasty, but it did make her feel a bit better. She badly needed to go to the toilet, but although Skinner was so fast asleep she didn’t think he’d have woken if she’d been able to open the back doors and slip out, she couldn’t risk disturbing him by searching for the key which was in his pocket, and he’d gone to sleep in his clothes. She had to make do with the bucket, which she knew wasn’t nice, but she couldn’t choose. Then she must have dozed off again, because the next thing she knew, Skinner was saying he was going out for a bite of lunch, she was to stay there and he’d bring her back something. She didn’t like that, she’d begun to say, “Why can’t I come too, Skinner?” but he’d gone and shut the door very quietly behind him. She heard the key turn in the lock. She sat there then, with Linda, crying a bit and feeling really bad, stuck here in this nasty van, and hungry again. Linda was awake, so she gave her another feed, but after it the baby wouldn’t go to sleep. She didn’t cry, just lay there waving her hands around and looking at them as if she’d never seen hands before. Maureen supposed that she hadn’t, at any rate not as often as people who were grown up like Maureen, Who’d had time to get used to having hands and doing things with them, so that she never really looked at them and wondered where they came from or why they were that shape. Presently Linda went to sleep, sucking her thumb, and after what seemed a long time, Skinner came back with a bit of cold pie for Maureen and a tin of coke. He lay down on the bunk and went to sleep at once, and Maureen had another long afternoon trying to keep Linda quiet. That wasn’t too bad. She found that she could talk to her very soft and Linda liked that. It was almost like the way Mrs. Plum had talked to her, and the funny thing was that when Maureen cuddled her and spoke silly baby language to her, it was comforting for Maureen too.

  Before it had begun to get dark, Skinner woke up and went off again. To the pub, Maureen supposed, though he didn’t say. He came back almost at once, angry. She could tell by the way he looked as he climbed into the van, even before he hit her, hard, on the face. She cried out and said, “What you hitting me for, Skinner?” and he said, “You been talking.”

  “I haven’t! How can I talk to anyone, shut up like this in the van?” Maureen said, but then she remembered she had been talking to Linda and perhaps Skinner hadn’t really been asleep, perhaps he’d heard.

  “Don’t ask me how! If you haven’t been talking, how do the fuzz know where we are?” Skinner said, looking as if he might hit her again any minute.

  Maureen supposed that the police must have somehow over-heard that soft, silly talk she’d given Linda that afternoon. She said, “I’m sorry, Skinner, I didn’t know.”

  “Who was it? Who’d you tell? Did you say any names?”

  “I didn’t, Skinner. Not any names. Only just to keep her quiet, so she wouldn’t wake you, Skinner, that’s all.”

  “Who was it?” Skinner said, and she saw his hand go to the knife he always carried in his belt.

  “It was only her. Linda. When you were asleep and she wouldn’t. . . .”

  She didn’t understand why he swore again. He said, “For Chrissake I picked a winner when I got you.” Then he went out to the driver’s seat and started driving away from the street they’d been in for so long. They seemed to drive for quite a time. Once, just as it was getting dark, she looked out and saw that they were still in streets with a lot of houses and a great big building with funny bulging tops to it, all lit up with lights, rather pretty. Quite different from anything she’d ever seen. She wondered if perhaps it was a circus. She’d have liked to see that. But later the lights disappeared and they drove ever such a long way through roads without any lights at all. Before they stopped for the night Maureen was too sleepy to notice where they were, except they seemed to be back in a town, parked where there were a lot of cars and caravans. There was a toilet here too, and Skinner let her out to visit it. That made Maureen’s day.

  Thirty Four

  Monday morning and afternoon

  The ransom note fell through the letter-box with the rest of the post. It came in a long commercial envelope and was written on an electric typewriter on a sheet of plain white paper. Andrew Wilmington found it by his breakfast plate and read it.

  “This is your last chance of seeing your daughter again alive.

  Bring £200,000 in used notes to Bank tube station at five thirty tonight, Monday April 25th. Stand by the top of the Central Line escalators. You will be contacted there. If you follow these instructions exactly you will be told where you can find your daughter 24 hours after the money has been handed over.

  If we find that you have informed the police, handed over marked notes or taken any other steps to trace us, your baby will be the first one to suffer.”

  He had his instructions from Price. The first were easy to follow. He picked up the paper and the envelope in his napkin, went into his study and put them into a large envelope. “Not much hope of any prints, but we ought to try for them,” Price had said.

  The next step was more difficult. He had to decide whether or not he was going to play along with Price at all. Or was he going to agree to the conditions laid down by the letter? Was he going to tell Sally? If he did and she pleaded with him to do as they said, to trust that Caroline Ann would be returned, could he refuse? Suppose he stood out against it and they never saw Caroline Ann again, what would Sally feel towards him? Wouldn’t it be the end of their marriage? Even if he didn’t tell her and the baby was not returned because he’d stepped out of the line these bastards wanted to impose, wouldn’t he always feel
guilty? Wouldn’t he have for the rest of their lives together to hug this horrible secret that he hadn’t done everything he could to save their child?

  He couldn’t eat any breakfast. It was a good thing that Sally was having hers in bed or she’d have noticed something wrong. After half an hour of agonized indecision, he went up and kissed her good-bye, got out of the house’ without any questions and drove to the office. He would telephone from there. Price would have to decide how to handle this, he couldn’t tackle it alone.

  Price rang Stephen.

  “Anything for me?”

  “No. But I’m meeting Vicky in half an hour. We’ll try.”

  “If you could get a look at the outside of the van. Its number for instance.”

  “Trouble is we don’t seem to be able to choose what we get.”

  “I know. Try. Anything might help.”

  He rang off and considered. The van had been in Brighton yesterday up to tea time on Mr. Mackenzie’s showing. If the Vicky girl was right in thinking that what she’d seen was what the couple with the baby might have been looking at, they’d still been there after dark. Evening, she’d said, but she thought not yet night. That put it somewhere between eight and nine. God, why hadn’t the Brighton force been able to get it? He must have got through to them by eight at latest, they’d had over thirty minutes with the bloody thing there in the middle of the town and no one seemed to have noticed it. And they’d drawn a blank in Messenger Street, where nearly every house let lodgings. Not a single baby anywhere near the Mackenzies’ house. No one had seen a baby. But a neighbour volunteered that he’d heard a baby crying too. If that was the right van the old chap had noticed, they must have slept in it. That was the tiny dark room Stephen had seen.

  Price groaned. He wondered again if he was right to trust these stories. But he had nothing else to go on, he had to take help wherever he could find it. There’d been another appeal to the public on the eight o’clock news this morning. Perhaps someone would come up with something that would help. It was at this point that he was told that Andrew Wilmington was op the telephone, asking for him.