Lullaby

by Claire Seeber

  I knew I should go back to see Mickey now, but the thought made me feel rather sick. When I spoke to the nurse on duty she said he was asleep, and so I sat down with Shirl and a bottle of wine but the drink just made me feel ill. I switched on the computer and started to surf the net. I was looking for something reassuring about how much time could go by and stolen babies would still be found safe and sound, but the only statistics I came across were sparse and scary. Eighty per cent of babies were found within three days, and if they weren’t—well. Over and over again I read how crucial the first forty-eight hours were in the investigation-the most crucial. It was another slap in the face. Fear mounted in my chest until I had to log off.

  I was knackered but I knew I wouldn’t sleep, so I tried to watch some silly soap that Shirl had on. I couldn’t concentrate. The 100,000 British kids who went missing every year whirled round my mind like fairground waltzers. Where were all those poor lost children? Hidden in cupboards, stashed in cellars, bedsits, existing under the arches in Waterloo and Vauxhall, round Liverpool’s cathedrals and Birmingham’s Rag Market? Images of the Austrian teenager locked in a stranger’s cellar for her entire childhood, the American boys absorbed into a new family not far from their real homes floated back to me. The horrifying fact that these poor stolen kids had seemed to almost love their captors. I flicked channels dispiritedly, looking for something to distract me.

  ‘Shall I see if I can find one of those travel shows you like?’ Shirl prised the remote control from my hand.

  ‘No, don’t worry about it. Sorry. Am I annoying you?’

  Mickey was so scathing about television—it was so trite and vacuous, he’d scoff, for the entirely brain-dead, that I rarely watched it any more.

  The soap was back. I stared blankly at the screen as some blowsy blonde ran off with her stepfather, leaving her kids behind. Heartless cow. I bit the skin around my thumb—and then I had a thought.

  ‘I’m going to make some posters of Louis. Some missing posters.’ The word ‘missing’ bounced painfully round my brain like the pinball in a pub machine. I jumped up, trying to slam it away.

  ‘You mean like people put up for their cats on lampposts?’ Shirl looked bemused. ‘Surely the police are doing all that kind of thing, aren’t they, babe?’

  ‘Louis is hardly a cat, Shirl.’ I rushed over to the chest where we kept our photo albums, and dragged the doors wide open.

  ‘I didn’t mean that, silly. I’ll give you a hand, shall I? I’ll find a pen.’

  An expensive blue album fell onto the floor, ‘BOY’ emblazoned across the front in gold. I’d bought it just after my second scan, when they told me and Mickey I was expecting a boy. I’d watched my baby’s foot flying through the unearthly air on that ultrasound machine and I’d felt the first flickers of the most profound love. I’d said goodbye to Mickey, who’d gone back to work, and then I’d wandered round the shops in a haze. I’d spent a fortune on tiny babygros and jumpers and clothes, and then I’d hidden them all away, waiting with growing excitement for the birth of my son: before the cosh of postnatal hormones whacked me over the head and left me reeling.

  I picked up the album. I hadn’t stuck a single photo of Louis in yet—I never seemed to have a spare second any more. Piles of pictures of the baby were stacked haphazardly on the shelves, and I felt another surge of guilt. For not bothering to officially record my son’s short life. For failing him as a mother, yet again. I gritted my teeth and picked a recent photo; I drank in his serious little stare; the next one where he’d begun to blow a raspberry with excitement at the camera—a trick he was so proud of.

  And then Maxine arrived home. Her swarthy new boyfriend dropped her on the doorstep and they had the gall to have a long smooch right there, not minding who could see, and then I watched him saunter down the path to his car. A foreign flag I didn’t recognise fluttered from the back window. Anger flooded my veins. I hadn’t seen Maxine since I’d found the photos of Louis in her grubby little room.

  I shot into the hall as she opened the front door. Key in hand, Maxine stared at me as if I was some odd animal she’d never seen before. Was I imagining it or did she actually seem nervous now?

  ‘Why did you take those photos, Maxine?’ I demanded.

  ‘Photos? What photos?’ she shrugged.

  ‘The passport photos of Louis. The ones that were hidden in your room. What have you done with him?’ And I began to shout. I shouted incoherently, shouted for all the times she’d made me feel inadequate, for every time she’d taken the baby from me and he’d stopped crying and smiled happily up at her, for every deliberate flash of her long legs in front of my husband. I shouted for all the guilt and all the pain and all the times I’d not known what to do with Louis—and she, she just kept looking at me now like I was mad. And finally I ran out of steam, ground to a halt, and she said, quite calmly, ‘I don’t know what you talk about. Why should I not take photographs? We go shopping; I see the photograph place. I want a picture of me and le bebe. It’s just something for me. You know, because I love him.’

  And I stared at Maxine, just like she had stared at me when she’d come in, and I knew that it was true. She did love him; I’d seen it and I’d smarted with jealousy and fear, but it was why I’d let her stay, why I hadn’t fought Mickey to get rid of her. I’d needed her expertise; her unruffled knowledge. The truth was, I’d thought Louis had needed her as I recovered from my early depression, recovered both my brain and my courage.

  ‘I just get the photos for myself. For—how you say—for my wallet?’

  I thought of Silver’s words when I’d found them in the first place, and finally I surrendered. ‘Yeah, all right, Maxine.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Sorry.’

  She shrugged again. ‘It’s okay. I am sorry for you, really. I will help you if I can.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I went back into the sitting room and slumped on the sofa holding the photo of Louis that I’d chosen; holding it to my heart, feeling foolish, feeling utterly empty. I kept glancing at the picture of his beaming face.

  ‘In the morning, I’ll go to Blackheath and get it photocopied,’ I told Shirl carefully, and she smiled and offered me an éclair she’d nicked from my stash in the freezer. Normally I loved them, but the image of Mickey’s chocolate cake in the Tate haunted me and I couldn’t face it now. Shirl put something quiet and ambient on the stereo and offered to give my shoulders a rub, but I didn’t fancy it. I knew I’d never relax. I half-listened as Maxine skulked around the kitchen, then went up to her room with the inevitable can of cold baked beans (her peasant roots were embedded deep, Mickey had always said, whatever her aspirations to climb the social ladder) and a copy of Hello! that I’d sneaked past Mickey a while ago.

  In the night I woke and couldn’t sleep again, thought longingly of pills, but I’d flushed the remainder down the loo. I supposed that was for the best. And then, as I finally slid towards the dreams that went some small way to protect me, I remembered something I hadn’t checked. My eyes snapped open as fear sidled back into the room and my heart began to race. I put the bedside light on; forced myself out of bed and half-crawled to the cupboard where I kept my things. I cursed my own stupidity as I slid my hand down beside the shoe-rack, past the plastic folder, to my dad’s old boot-bag where I kept Louis’s precious things. I drew it out and with trembling hands scurried through the contents. The first photos, the wrist-band from the hospital, his birth certificate…and then, thank God, the passport I’d only just received back for him. I flipped it open and studied his tiny little image, barely visible in the half-light. Then I buried the bag back into the cupboard, deeper than before, and carried the passport to bed, slipping it carefully beneath my pillow.

  As I finally fell towards sleep again, Mickey’s own passport flickered through my brain. I hadn’t asked him why he’d had it yet…Then darkness overtook me and chucked me back into oblivion.

  Someone woke me by shaking me so roughly that I thought I was being attacked.
Still deep in sleep I lashed out, until I finally connected the voice repeating my name over and over with that smell of lemon, not quite so pungent this time. I sat up all confused, peered through the gloom at Silver standing by the bed.

  ‘What is it?’ Oh God. I pulled the duvet round me, felt my skin itching with pure fear.

  ‘Get up,’ he said urgently, ‘I’ve got some news—some good news.’

  I hurtled out of bed but he was already gone. I pulled back the curtain to let the streaky dawn light in, tugged my old dressing-gown on, tripping over my own feet in my rush to get downstairs. In the kitchen, the copper with the little belly, DC Kelly, was drinking coffee from a cardboard cup, eating something toasted from a greasy bag. He nodded politely and kept munching.

  ‘What is it please?’ My voice was all taut with stress.

  Silver pulled a chair out and shoved me in it, shoved a fresh stick of gum in his mouth. He had faint scratches across one cheek.

  ‘This one you’re sitting down for, kiddo.’

  ‘What’s going on? Have you found Louis? Is he—’

  He cut across my words. ‘No, sorry, it’s not quite that good. But,’ he looked jubilant, like he wanted to punch the air triumphantly, ‘he is alive! We’ve got definite proof that he’s alive.’

  If I hadn’t been sitting, I would have fallen. ‘Of course he’s alive,’ I whispered. ‘Why wouldn’t he be?’ But still I felt relief crash through me like the sea, sucking all the air from me on its tide.

  ‘So where is—’ but I couldn’t breathe again. I scrabbled around in my pocket for an inhaler but there wasn’t one. I gestured frantically at the drawer. ‘Inhaler, please,’ I wheezed, and Silver delved around until he came up with my lifesaver. He plonked a cup of steaming tea in front of me, ladled sugar into it and ordered me to drink. Deb came into the kitchen with a package she gave to Egg-belly; smiled blearily but encouragingly at me. Egg-belly disappeared into my living room, leaving a sickly smell of melted cheese in his wake. Silver called me through.

  ‘Come in here please, Jess.’

  I sat tentatively on the sofa, desperately tried to stop my hands trembling as I clutched my tea to me. The dawn air was already humid, but I still searched for warmth. Deb, next to me, patted my knee reassuringly, and I resisted the urge to fling my arms around her and sob into her flat bosom. DC Kelly knelt by the video on the floor, leaning so far over that a great expanse of white flesh was exposed above his builder’s bum. He switched the machine on, the sweat rings saucering his underarms. And there, suddenly, almost larger than life on Mickey’s plasma screen, was Louis, blinking, bewildered but alive, absolutely definitely alive. He was lying next to a copy of yesterday’s Daily Mirror that bore our photo on the front.

  My tea scalded my leg, splashing down over the white sofa that scared me each time I sat on it.

  ‘See,’ I said hysterically, never taking my eyes from the screen, from my son’s perfect cherub face, ‘white’s so impractical.’ I was gibbering with joy, clutching at Deb next to me. ‘He’s beautiful, isn’t he? I told you he was.’

  ‘Yes, Jess, he is. Absolutely beautiful.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you,’ I murmured. ‘Beautiful. He looks okay, doesn’t he?’ I gazed at Louis on the screen, at my son, thanking a God I didn’t believe in until now. Then the camera moved away from his little hands that chopped and whisked the air—his helicopter arms, we used to say so fondly—moved from his wispy feather-head, his softly folded double chin, and panned down to a note scrawled in chalky capitals on the flagstone floor beside him.

  ‘NOW YOU’VE SEEN ME, LEAVE ME BE. I AM QUITE SAFE’ was all it said. A ghostly light flickered across the message again and again.

  ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ I snarled. Desperately I looked around, at Silver, at Deb, at Shirl who’d just stumbled into the room rather indecently clad in just a T-shirt, afro akimbo from restless sleep. I was looking for some explanation.

  ‘What do they mean, leave me be? Leave who be? Louis? Why would they think I would do that?’ My words were running out, my chest crackling like an old lady’s. ‘Why would I leave my own son be? Oh God. Where is he? You need to find him now.’

  ‘Breathe, Jess. Just keep calm and breathe.’ Silver stepped towards me as Deb handed me my inhaler again. ‘That’s what we’ve got to work out, kiddo. What these people want.’

  ‘What do they want?’ asked Shirl.

  ‘What people? Who the hell are they?’

  ‘We’re working on it, believe me. They haven’t asked for anything yet. This doesn’t seem to be a traditional kidnap. There’s no ransom demand, not yet. No demand for anything, just this one, to be left alone. It might suggest a more—well, a more psychologically disturbed case than we first thought.’

  ‘Disturbed?’ I whispered.

  ‘Very often young babies are taken by women who are desperate for babies; who have been thwarted somehow.’

  Deb clocked my face. ‘They nearly always care for the child impeccably.’ She squeezed my arm.

  ‘Nearly always?’

  ‘Always.’ Her vein flickered.

  ‘They’ve got to be kidding. They’ve got my son and they think I’m going to leave them alone? Just leave him there? They’re fucking mad.’

  The video suddenly ran out, the rattling white noise at the end made us all jump. I clutched Silver’s arm.

  ‘Can you rewind that please? To the bit—to where Louis is again.’

  Tears streamed down my face, my nose was running, dripping down my chest, mingling with the tea on my kimono. Shirl tried to thrust tissues into my hand but I was crawling towards the TV screen where I traced my son’s face with my fingers. I saw him smile. He smiled! My heart snapped in two. He was happy enough to smile—but he was happy without me. All my guilt compounded to thump me in the gut: this was my punishment.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ I croaked.

  Silver was standing behind me now. ‘It was sent to Scotland Yard on a bike,’ he said.

  ‘On a bike?’ Shirl repeated, incredulous.

  ‘A courier’s bike. It was dropped off in the early hours. This is a clone, the original’s with forensics. We’re tracing the courier company now; the package was signed for at the Yard. We’re going to find him, Jessica.’ He was so near I could feel the heat from his body on my back. ‘I promise you we’ll find Louis.’

  ‘Please,’ I whispered, ‘can you just give me a minute on my own.’

  ‘Sure,’ Shirl said. She herded them all out. I fumbled for the remote control and when I found the pause button, I stopped it on Louis’s smile. I sat and stared at him. Numb with shock, I just stared at him.

  Some time later, Silver made me jump again as he trod silently back into the room.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked quietly, sitting on the sofa behind me. ‘I know it’s a shock. But it’s good to see him, kiddo, isn’t it? It must be a relief.’

  I tore my eyes from my son’s image that juddered on the screen, turned to Silver, who was followed by an anxious Shirl. ‘There’s something, DI Silver, that I should have mentioned earlier.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘When I got back from the hospital yesterday, from, you know—’

  ‘You know what?’

  I cleared my throat nervously. ‘From, you know, my accident.’

  ‘Ah yes. Your accident.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure someone had been in my room. Going through my things.’

  I had his attention now. ‘Really? Like what things?’

  ‘Well, the folder where I keep my papers for one. I’ve checked for Louis’s passport, and it’s still there, but all the papers—they were out of order.’

  ‘Right.’ He frowned. ‘You should have told me straight away, you know.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s my fault,’ Shirl chipped in, embarrassed. ‘I told her she was imagining it.’

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Well, next time, come to us, okay, Jessica? That’s w
hat we’re here for.’

  ‘Of course. I will. I should have told you anyway, I realise that now. It’s my fault, not Shirl’s.’

  ‘Yep, well, it’s got to be your responsibility to keep us informed. I’ll get the fingerprint lads up here again.’

  I flushed. ‘Right.’ Standing, I found myself at eye-level with the welts on his cheek. ‘Been partying?’ I said without thinking.

  ‘That’s right,’ he muttered back, so only I could hear. ‘With a little wildcat. She whacked me this morning when I woke her.’

  I flushed redder still, and turned quickly away—but not before I caught Shirl’s raised eyebrows, the makings of a grin on Silver’s tanned face. And as I couldn’t think of an apt response, I went upstairs and got dressed instead.

  As soon as I knew Louis was alive, every vestige of anger with Mickey finally fizzled out. I rang the hospital to break the news, but he was still sleeping and they didn’t want to wake him. Sister Kwame was back on duty and she was polite and pleased to hear the news, though she seemed a bit distracted. Then I rang Leigh, just back from the gym. She was still cross with me about Robbie.

  ‘I don’t understand why you let him in.’ I heard her light a fag.

  ‘I didn’t. Deb did.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ she took a deep drag, ‘he’s bloody lucky he didn’t get arrested right there and then.’

  ‘Oh Leigh,’ I said, ‘you don’t even know if he’s in trouble now. Give him a break.’

  ‘Jessica, Robbie’s always in trouble. You’re such an easy touch when it comes to that boy.’