by Jane Shemilt
“After consensual sex there is often blood, small amounts, but it can be detected microscopically.”
Is that why he said she went willingly? Michael has followed the same logic that I have; he has worked out that they made love and so afterward she would want to be with him.
“The cervix is more vascular in pregnancy.” I’m talking mostly to myself. “She would bleed even more easily.” The very next day, she had slept with James, trying to lose the pregnancy, but that hadn’t worked.
Infections can make women bleed more easily too. Maybe there had been someone else as well; she could have picked up an infection before she got pregnant.
You must have been changing for a long time. Quietly becoming someone else quite different. How could I have known, when you hid so carefully behind the child we thought you were? How could I have kept you safe?
“It won’t be long now before we get him.” Michael’s eyes, looking out of the window, are focused on the distance; they glitter as they reflect the white January sky. “We’ve traced the family to a Gypsy camp in Mid Wales.” He lowers his voice instinctively, as though someone might be listening who would warn them off. “There’s an illegal site in a field on a derelict farm.”
As he tells me this, I remember the Welsh hills over the River Severn, close enough to touch from the copse where the van had been found. There had been boats lying on the bank. Once they had burned the van, it would have taken only a couple of hours to cross the river if the tide had been right. He would have known how to handle a boat. He had capable hands. I could see them steering a boat, pulling it above the tide line on the other side. I could imagine them reaching out for Naomi, carefully helping her out, keeping her safe.
“We are going into the camp at night,” Michael continues.
“When? How do you know they are there?”
He looks down; he’s not going to tell me when they are planning to go. Does he think that I would go ahead, run into the camp calling her name? Would I?
“We’ve been watching the site,” he says after a little pause. “He’s been seen, as I said.” He looks at me briefly. “I don’t want to raise your hopes, Jenny, but there was an adolescent girl with fair hair who briefly left a caravan yesterday and got into another. She was seen from a distance; nothing else identified her as Naomi. I shouldn’t even be telling you this . . .”
I find myself standing, unable to breathe or move. These are the words I have waited fourteen months to hear. It might not be her, it isn’t necessarily Naomi, but my heart is beating so loudly it is almost drowning out the words he is saying.
“There could be trouble.” His lips tighten. “We’ll take dogs. Firearms.”
I look at his determined face and I begin to feel frightened.
“He might be hiding, but we’ll search each trailer and horse trailer, every pile of rubbish.” It’s as though he is talking to himself.
They are together. Right now.
“We might have to arrest everyone.”
“Everyone?”
In the dark children would start to cry, figures in nightclothes would emerge confused, blinking in the harsh light of powerful flashlights. Under the barking of police dogs, pulling at their tight leashes, might come, piercingly, the thin wail of a baby. These thoughts are spinning like black-and-white reels of film. The Gestapo rounding up their victims at night.
As Michael pulls his eyes back to mine, the pupils constrict rapidly. It makes him look angry.
“Yes.” His voice sounds very hard. “The whole lot.”
The sun coming through the windows picks out the gray in his hair. The frown lines between his eyebrows are sharp, as though the skin has been scored with a knife. I hadn’t noticed that before. The morning light is unforgiving.
Naomi is there; she and the baby will be part of his family now. Travelers believe in family. She was pregnant; her relationship with Yoska would have offered her the chance to keep her child, with people who made time for children. They were there for the little girl in Ted’s outpatient clinic; they stayed in the ward when other children would have been left on their own. Other children, whose mothers worked as much as their fathers did, as much as I used to. Children of parents who were so busy no one talked about the things that really mattered, or noticed that their children were changing.
“The women will have helped her when the baby was born.” I try to speak calmly, but I want to shout and sing and dance. She’s alive. Alive. He didn’t kill her. They are lovers. He might have sought her out for revenge initially, and then something unexpected must have happened. He fell in love, despite his plan. She’s beautiful, bright, exciting to be with. During the months of secret meetings he must have crossed some invisible line from using her for revenge to loving her; maybe even after his visit to me. He offered her a different world, he made her smile; she would have loved him back. He didn’t abduct her; she went with him. He gave her a ring, he loves her, and she’s all right. My tears are streaming. I walk quickly around the room, smiling, pushing my hands into my mouth to stop myself laughing; I can be glad later. Right now Michael must understand that Yoska is important.
“Naomi, the baby, and Yoska. They could be a family of three now.”
It’s Michael’s turn to stand up. He puts his mug down.
“He’s committed crimes. Sex with a minor, abduction, imprisonment. Anyone who knew will be complicit.”
“He may not have known her age. She looks so different with makeup on. She might have lied about how old she was.” I hold out my hand to him, make him sit down again next to me. “If she’s there, it could be because she wants to be.”
He is silent, watching me.
“Don’t . . . romanticize this, Jenny,” he says after a while. “He’s a criminal. He belongs in prison.”
I search for words that will make him understand. “She met him in the hospital in July two summers ago. She left in November. Four months. Long enough to work out what she wanted. She left James in that time; she chose a man, not a boy. She might have thought leaving with him meant she could have her baby.”
Michael gives a short impatient sigh. “She might well have had her baby, but it wouldn’t have been in the best of circumstances. The kind of people who live like this, well, they’re not like us.”
Is this what he thought when he was policing townships in South Africa? I haven’t heard him speak like this before.
“Meaning?”
“They live in a different way.”
I thought that was the point. I look around me at my books and paintings, the antique rugs my father loved. Echoes of life, not life. “She gave her necklace away. Perhaps she wanted something different.” And all the while I am talking, my heart is beating faster and faster; I can let myself think of her face, I can let myself think of her child.
His voice gets louder and slower as if that might make me understand better. “They live in squalor, on land they don’t own. They steal everything.”
I look at his familiar face; perhaps after all I hardly know him.
In my heart I am speaking to her.
I feel sure you have a little girl. She will be six months by now; soon you will tell me her name.
“If she’s there, it will be because she will be useful in some way. Remember that he deals in drugs. Naomi was stealing ketamine for him. There are drug gangs in Cardiff, and other rackets he’s mixed up in.” He doesn’t say prostitution but the word is somewhere between us.
When Yoska had smiled at me in my office, he hadn’t looked like a dangerous criminal. Perhaps the dangerous people are the ones you think you can trust, like Michael. Men who make judgments, men who need power. Could Ted have been right about him? That he has attached himself to me because I have been vulnerable? I don’t care if he has exploited the situation, or if he wanted power over me. It only matters that he br
ing her back safely.
“I have to go.” He drains his mug, stands up. “It goes without saying that it’s all completely confidential, but even so it might find its way into the news. I wanted you to know before that happened.”
He shrugs into his thick black coat and says quietly, “Ted should know, I’ll phone him.”
“Let me,” I say quickly. “Better if I do.”
His expression softens and he cups my face in his hands.
“Of course, Jenny. Tell him soon, though. As her father, he needs to know now.”
“Thank you,” I remember to say. “For coming to tell me. Be careful of . . . her.”
“I’ll let you know. Jenny, don’t—”
“What?”
“Don’t do anything.”
I sit looking at my hands as the sound of his car gets fainter down the lane. I haven’t done anything for a long time. I won’t tell Ted yet. I’ll wait till she’s safely here. Michael will bring her back with him. I open the window to let the fresh air inside the hot room. She will run toward me. The tears start again, cold on my cheeks as the wind washes over me. I will hold her. My face will be against hers and her skin will smell the same. Her hair may be longer. She will be taller. She will bring me her little girl.
I have waited fourteen months; I can wait a few more days.
BUT IT ISN’T a few days. It’s just a few hours.
I wake gradually to insistent knocking, confused by the cold and dark, my neck aching from where I have been lying awkwardly on the sofa. The flames have gone, the grate is ashy. The porch light has switched itself on outside and I see Michael through the glass. He must have left something behind and has had to come all the way back. I open the door. He looks down at me, and though I always thought I would know immediately, I don’t. He looks exhausted. His mouth moves and I watch it closely because he is saying words that don’t make sense. He is saying the same thing over and over, and the words come closer and closer until I understand.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
He catches me as the room tilts and he puts me down carefully on the edge of the stairs.
“. . . months ago,” he is saying.
If I don’t listen she might still be there in the dark beyond the open door. She might be standing outside, uncertain of her welcome, waiting with her baby in her arms. I stand up and try to push past him, but he stops me and holds me still.
“It was after the baby.” He is dark against the light, and I can’t see his face. “She had an infection.”
“But you said she was there.” I am screaming the words in his face. “A girl with fair hair, you said . . .”
“I shouldn’t have told you that. It turned out to be a mother of two in her twenties. I spoke to her. I’m sorry, Jenny.”
“Get him. He will have run away. You must find him.” It was Yoska’s fault. He let her die.
“Yoska’s dead, Jenny. He was shot. He died just after midnight.”
Michael holds me and he starts to talk. The words fly about my head like black crows.
“He came out of a van, shooting. We don’t know why; he may have thought the camp was being attacked by a drug gang. There have been gunfights over drugs at the site before. He didn’t give us a chance to negotiate. He kept firing at us; we gave him warnings.” He shakes his head. “He just walked toward us, firing. It was as though he was asking to be shot. We had no choice.” He pauses. “He was hit in the chest and died instantly.”
Yoska killed. Naomi dead months before.
Michael lifts me as my legs weaken, and carries me through to the sofa in the sitting room. It’s dark, but it doesn’t matter.
“The baby, Michael.” I grip his jacket. “Where’s the baby?”
He holds me tightly so I am crushed into his chest. I feel his words through the bones of my face.
“The baby died with Naomi. They had the same infection.”
The words have lost their power; they don’t even make much sense. His voice reminds me of the way he used to talk to us in the kitchen in Bristol when we first met him. Slow and careful, he pauses often.
“Yoska’s sister, Saskia, told us what happened. His parents are in police custody now.”
The buttons on his jacket are hurting my cheek, but I stay completely still.
“The baby was born in the trailer. You were right; the women in the family helped.”
Naomi would have gathered up the slimy little body in her slim child’s hands and held her, the pain fading already, love sluicing through her. Would she have thought of me? Would she have understood in that moment how I must have felt about her?
“It was a girl, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.” He sounds surprised. “Yes. It was.”
Naomi’s world would have become the small sleeping face, the little sucking mouth, the tiny perfect toes curling and uncurling in her hands.
Michael is still talking. “. . . and after five days she felt unwell, restless and tearful. They thought it was emotional.”
“She never cries.” It sounds like an echo from a long time ago.
“The baby got hot,” he carries on. “That’s when they realized Naomi was also burning hot.”
I always knew when she had a raised temperature, laying my lips on her forehead, I knew to within half a degree. It could have been postpuerperal fever. Streptococcal, deadly without rapid treatment.
Michael shifts on the sofa. “Do you want me to tell you all this now?”
Outside there are streaks of light already. I stand and hold the arm of the chair.
“Of course.”
“When she began vomiting, Yoska called the doctor. They waited for three hours and in that time she became unconscious.”
There must have been a lot of people in that trailer; it would have been stuffy. The fan they kept for summer nights would thump around and around like the beat of a nightmare. Naomi would be lying motionless in a sodden bed, the mottled baby sticking to her skin.
“Yoska was beside himself. He decided to take them to the hospital himself. When his uncle said someone would recognize her in the emergency room, Yoska smashed his nose. Just as he picked her up, Naomi stopped breathing. The baby died minutes afterward; they’d left it too late.”
Too late. The words hang between us like the click of a door shutting.
Michael gets up to stand next to me, puts his arm around me. “Saskia said Yoska wrapped them in the sheet and very carefully laid them in the backseat of the car.”
He pauses. “Then he took everything out of the trailer, all her stuff, all the baby’s things, the bed, the table, everything. He piled it up outside, doused it in gasoline and left.”
A funeral pyre. The roaring flames would have leaped high into the air. No one could have gone near. There would be nothing left. No hairbrush with long golden hairs tangled in it, no bracelets or scrunchies. There could have been a diary or the start of a letter to me. She might have gathered autumn leaves again, and put them behind a mirror. There will be no photos of the baby, no baby clothes.
“Where did he take them?” I ask Michael.
“It’s a tradition among Travelers to bury their people secretly. No one admits to knowing where he took them.”
Their people? Naomi was mine.
It’s still quite dark in the room, but as I watch the streaks of light getting wider, a little flare of hope hisses into the silence in my head. “How do you know this is true? Why do you believe everything his sister said? Maybe she wasn’t even there . . .”
He doesn’t reply but reaches into his jacket and pulls something from a pocket; he puts it into my hand, cupping my fingers around its curved surface.
“Saskia said you should have this.”
I feel the handles and though I can’t see it in the dark, I know there is a pattern of leap
ing frogs around the rim. At the very bottom, on the inside of the cup, there is a raised, painted, smiling frog.
“Drink up, sweetheart.” Naomi’s eyes were so blue as she watched me over the rim of the cup. “The little frog is waiting . . .”
Her baby cup for her own baby. I didn’t even notice it was gone. I wonder what she did with all the buttons I kept in it.
Michael has his arm tight around me now; his breath moves my hair as he speaks.
“Even the children could tell us how she had died. Everyone said the same thing. They showed us the scorched grass and the empty trailer . . .”
His voice continues. I hear him more faintly, talking about fingerprints and swabs, keeping a high level of suspicion, digging at the site to start tomorrow. The trailers have been searched already. Some of the key Travelers are in custody; others can go, providing they stay in the locality. They will have to keep investigating.
“We need to find her body. Sooner or later someone will let slip the burial site.”
I tune his words out.
So that was her home. Theirs. Just an empty box now. The moonlight will slant through the windows onto a bare floor. Perhaps it’s shining on a little toy that has rolled away into a corner.
Michael’s voice gets louder. “Yoska was away for two weeks and silent when he came back. He sat in his sister’s trailer for hours every day staring into space—”
I interrupt him quickly. “I want to go to the camp, Michael.”
Yoska’s sister told the police she wasn’t sure where he had buried them; but she might tell me.
“I’ll take you over there soon, Jenny, when we’ve finished our investigation. I promise. We need to cross-examine all witnesses, dig up the site, and search every vehicle again.”
Michael goes into the kitchen, pulling a flask from his pocket. I hear the kettle bubble, the clink and clash of cutlery. He comes back and watches me while I drink the coffee laced with whiskey. This morning, when he made me hot chocolate, she was still alive. Or was that yesterday? No, how stupid. She died months ago.