by Mark Morris
‘We heard,’ said Clover. ‘Hope talks about him all the time. And also about you. Thank you for being so kind to her.’
Jackie smiled, and this time it was less hesitant, more genuine. It turned her from an attractive woman into a beautiful one.
‘It’s no effort at all. Hope makes it easy for me. She’s a model patient.’
‘But?’ I said.
Her smile slipped. ‘Pardon?’
‘There must be a but. I’m sure you haven’t asked to see us just to tell us how lovely she is.’
Clover flashed me the briefest of frowns, as if to let me know I was being too aggressive, too confrontational.
‘No,’ Jackie said, ‘I haven’t.’ She picked up her mug, then put it down again. ‘It’s just… well, do you mind… can I ask… what’s the situation with Hope?’
‘The situation?’ Clover said.
Jackie’s cheeks were reddening. ‘I don’t want to cause offence. And I don’t want you to think I’m being nosy. But… well, Hope tells me you’re not her parents. She says you’re not even married… though you pretend to people that you are.’
‘Is that a problem?’ I said, making an effort not to sound confrontational.
‘Of course not,’ said Jackie, a little too shrilly, then she glanced around to check she wasn’t attracting attention. Unless they were being terribly polite, the customers sitting at the only other two occupied tables seemed embroiled in their own conversations. In a quieter voice she said, ‘If what Hope says is true, then of course your reasons are entirely your own affair—’
‘But you’re concerned for her welfare?’ said Clover.
‘Well, yes. But not because I think you’ve been mistreating her, or anything. It’s obvious that Hope loves and trusts both of you, and that you’ve treated her well…’
‘But her “situation”, as you called it, still makes you uncomfortable?’
‘Well… not uncomfortable as such…’
‘Curious then?’
Despite what she had said, Jackie did look uncomfortable. ‘I’m sorry, it’s just… there seem to be so many loose threads. And Hope herself is… well, it’s as if she’s been kept in isolation all her life. The gaps in her knowledge are… startling. As I say, I know it’s none of my business, but the thing is, I do care about Hope. I’ve grown to care about her a lot. And I thought…’
‘You thought you owed it to her to find out if she’s safe?’ said Clover gently.
‘Well, partly that.’
‘She is,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to worry about that. We care about her as much as you do. All we want is for her to be happy and healthy, to have a good life.’
‘Oh, I don’t doubt it,’ said Jackie. ‘And I really do mean that. You can call me naive if you want, but… well, you get a feel for people, don’t you? And often you can tell, by how children behave, whether they’re being mistreated, and I know that Hope isn’t. Despite all she’s been through, with her arm, I mean, she’s a happy little girl. Happy and bright and… loved.’
Clover was nodding. ‘She is,’ she said. ‘She is loved.’ Then she paused and looked at me. ‘Should we tell her?’
I frowned, playing my part. ‘They’d have our guts for garters if we did.’
‘Only if they find out,’ said Clover, ‘and I’m not going to tell them. Are you?’
I snorted. ‘Course not.’
Jackie was staring at us, wide-eyed, her fingers gripping the edge of the table, as if she was anticipating a bumpy ride. Her lips were pursed as if she dare not speak, or even breathe.
‘Jackie, can we trust you?’ Clover asked earnestly.
Jackie nodded, and hesitantly said, ‘Y-yes, of course.’
Clover looked at me. ‘What do you think, Alex?’
I stared at Jackie until her eyes flickered away from me, as if I was evaluating both her and the situation. I shrugged. ‘On your head be it.’
Clover leaned in, as though to take Jackie into her confidence, and almost unconsciously Jackie leaned in too.
‘What I’m going to tell you must not be repeated,’ Clover said. ‘This is a delicate situation, and we’re only taking you into our confidence in order to impress upon you the importance of discretion in this matter. Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ Jackie whispered.
‘Good. We’re very grateful to you for lavishing so much care and attention on Hope – aren’t we, Alex?’
I nodded.
‘That little girl has been through a lot,’ Clover said. ‘And it’s our job to protect her.’
‘Job?’
Clover nodded. ‘Alex and I are undercover police officers. We rescued Hope after a raid on a people-trafficking ring in East London four months ago.’
Jackie’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘Oh my God.’
‘We don’t know anything about Hope’s background. We don’t know where she came from, who her parents are or were, or how and when she lost her arm. When we found her she was filthy, malnourished and all but feral. Her captors had been keeping her in a cage so small she couldn’t even stand up.’
‘Oh God,’ Jackie breathed again, her eyes now glittering with tears. ‘That’s… horrific.’
‘What we do know, and thank God for it,’ Clover continued, ‘is that she hadn’t been sexually abused. And aside from the obvious neglect and the injury to her arm, there were no signs she had been physically abused either. For the past few months she’s been living in a safe house with Alex and I, and together with a number of household staff we’ve been carefully rehabilitating her. The state of her arm has been a major worry, particularly with regard to infection, but the medical team who’ve been monitoring her round-the-clock initially made the decision to delay the added trauma of an operation until it was thought she’d be psychologically able to cope with it.
‘Happily, though, as you can see for yourself, she’s come on in leaps and bounds in a very short time – in fact, her progress has been remarkable. And now that her arm has been repaired there’s no reason why she can’t go on to live a happy and healthy life.’
Tears had spilled from Jackie’s eyes and formed glittering lines down her cheeks. Looking shell-shocked, she wiped them delicately away with the tips of her fingers.
‘So… what’ll happen now?’ she asked, her voice throaty with tears. ‘Will Hope be taken into care?’
I shook my head. ‘She’ll live with me.’
‘With you?’ It was clear from Jackie’s tone that she had already decided I was a forbidding and unapproachable presence. ‘With your family, you mean?’
I hesitated. ‘I don’t… I have a daughter, but my wife doesn’t live with us. I have two daughters, in fact.’
I realised straight away that that sounded neither convincing nor reassuring, and sure enough Jackie looked troubled.
‘You don’t sound very sure.’
I cleared my throat. ‘I am sure. It’s just… it’s a complicated situation.’
Clover reached across the table and rested a hand on Jackie’s forearm. ‘Believe me, Jackie, Hope’s future welfare is our main priority. That little girl will get the best of everything.’
I nodded in agreement, but even I was wondering how Hope would fit into my present lifestyle and how I – or we, if Clover continued to be part of my somewhat uncertain household – would be able to provide her with security and protection, given our current circumstances.
Jackie took a deep breath, and then, speaking quickly as though to get it out before either we could stop her or she could change her mind, she said, ‘Why don’t I take her?’
I blinked. ‘You?’
‘Yes.’ She sat up straighter in her chair and drew back her shoulders, as if gathering her courage. ‘Why not? It’s not such a crazy idea, is it?’
Clover glanced at me, then said slowly, ‘When you say take her…’
‘I mean adopt her. Legally. She and Ed get on so well it would be lovely if they could be together all the time. An
d I always wanted more children, but after Ed, well… I couldn’t. And Steve, my husband, and I, we’ve got plenty of room – we live in a big old farmhouse in a lovely village about five miles from here. There’s a lovely village school, which Ed and Hope could go to together. And Ed would look after her – not that he’d need to, of course. Hope is such a lovely girl that she would soon make friends. It would be…’
‘Lovely?’ said Clover with a smile.
Jackie had become flushed with the enthusiasm of her idea, but now she smiled wryly.
‘Well, yes, but I was going to say “ideal”.’ She looked at us eagerly. ‘It would be, though, wouldn’t it? She’d have a settled family environment – not that I’m saying yours isn’t settled. And you could both visit her any time you wanted to.’
She brought a hand up to her mouth in an almost child-like gesture, which I found oddly charming.
‘Sorry. I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s probably an impossible idea, isn’t it? A pipe dream?’
‘Actually…’ Clover looked at me. ‘Maybe it isn’t. What do you think, Alex?’
I looked at Clover, and then at Jackie. Aside from the emotional wrench of letting Hope go, of effectively giving away the little girl I’d rescued from certain death in Tallarian’s laboratory, I was actually thinking it was a wonderful idea. With Jackie and her family, Hope would have love and stability, and she would be far from the danger and uncertainty that Clover and I were likely to have to contend with in the foreseeable future. Plus it would solve any potential problems that might have arisen if – when – I eventually managed to get Kate back.
I nodded slowly. ‘It might work,’ I said. ‘In fact, it might be the ideal solution for Hope – if she’s agreeable to it, of course.’
As we were to find out a short time later, she was agreeable. In fact, she was more than agreeable; she was ecstatic.
‘Yay!’ she yelled, bouncing up and down on her bed, her eyes blazing with joy. ‘Yay!’
‘Are you really so desperate to see the back of us?’ I asked, but I was grinning.
Hope scrambled down off her bed and gave me a clumsy clout with her artificial arm. ‘Course not, silly! You’ll come and see me every week. You will come and see me, won’t you?’
‘You just try and stop us,’ I said.
‘And we’ll FaceTime too,’ said Clover. ‘You’ll be sick of the sight of us.’
‘No I won’t,’ Hope protested.
It was wonderful to see Hope looking so happy and lively. Although in this timeline it was only a few days since our last meeting, in the eighteen months that had passed for me between then and now she seemed to have become an entirely different girl to the one who, a few weeks earlier, had left Victorian London and accompanied Clover and me to the twenty-first century.
Jackie had left it to the two of us to propose her adoption idea to Hope, saying it would be unfair on Hope if Jackie were there to see her reaction and hear her verdict. Instead of accompanying us, Jackie elected to wait in the café, and it was there I found her fifteen minutes after leaving her, looking like a patient anxiously awaiting crucial test results. The fearful anticipation in her eyes when she looked at me as I walked in convinced me that Hope would be going to the best home Clover and I could have wished for.
‘She loves the idea,’ I said. ‘It’s a yes.’
‘Oh!’ said Jackie, as if shocked, and then, with genuine delight, ‘Oh!’
Then she burst into tears. I crossed the room and enfolded her in a hug, which might have surprised her, but which she seemed grateful for.
‘I’m so happy,’ she said, her shoulders shaking and her voice muffled against my chest. She was so tiny that hugging her wasn’t all that different from hugging Hope. ‘I’ll look after her, I promise.’
‘I know you will,’ I said.
The four of us celebrated with chocolate cake bought from the café (Jackie getting teary-eyed again, but laughing, when Hope asked, ‘When I come to live with you, am I to call you Jackie or Mum, like Ed does?’) and then Clover and I gave the two of them hugs and left, promising we’d be back soon.
Crunching across the gravel forecourt towards the car, Clover asked, ‘How do you feel? About the prospect of Hope going to live with Jackie, I mean?’
‘Grateful that at least one of our stories will have a happy ending,’ I said. ‘Hope’ll have a wonderful life with Jackie and her family.’
Clover nodded. ‘I think so too.’
As I was folding my long legs into the passenger seat of the car, my mobile rang. I twisted myself awkwardly to prise it from my jeans and prodded the ‘Answer’ button. ‘Hello?’
‘Alex,’ a voice said bluntly, ‘it’s Benny Magee.’
‘Benny,’ I said, earning a raised-eyebrow look from Clover in the driver’s seat. ‘How are things?’
Ignoring the question, Benny said, ‘I’m not promising anything, but it looks as if one of my contacts might have come up trumps.’
It was so long since I’d seen him that I was momentarily thrown.
‘What do you mean?’
‘What do you think I mean? I’ve got a lead on your missing daughter. My bloke reckons he knows where she is.’
TWELVE
BIG MOMENT
‘I don’t like this,’ I said.
Clover, who was driving, shot a scowl in my direction. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Alex, we’ve already been through this a million times. Read my lips: It’s not a trap.’
I slumped further into my seat, arms crossed tightly over my churning stomach.
‘Yeah, but how do you know? He’s done the dirty on me before. Who’s to say he won’t again?’
We were following Benny’s grey Jag through increasingly wild countryside. For the past half-hour the roads had been getting narrower and hillier, the hedges flanking us higher and more unkempt, and the sight of buildings and people increasingly scarce. As if to compound my mood of foreboding the skies had been growing darker too, the previously wispy white clouds now multiplying into a gloomy mass above us, squeezing out the light and throwing the surrounding fields and hills into shadow.
As Clover sighed, the first drops of rain began to fall, splatting on the windscreen like transparent bugs. She switched on the wipers and said with exaggerated patience, ‘Let’s break this down, shall we? Let’s look at the facts. Again. Number one, Benny’s motivated by money, and you’ve already said you’ll pay more than whoever else might approach him to do the dirty on you. Number two, he’s shit-scared of the Wolves of London. Facing them took him way out of his comfort zone, and I personally don’t think he’d go near them again even if they offered him ten times what you could pay – which, before you say anything, I know contradicts my first point, but fuck it. Number three, despite the fact that he’s a cold-hearted bastard, I genuinely believe he has proper father-daughter-type feelings for me, and would never knowingly put me in danger. And number four, you’ve seen the photographic evidence.’
I was silent for a few moments. I looked out of the window so I didn’t have to meet her exasperated gaze. The way the tree trunks and the crumbling stone walls had turned black and gleaming in the rain reminded me of the obsidian heart – my heart, that was, not the dull and brittle version I was currently carrying around in my pocket.
Wearily I said, ‘Photographs can be faked. And how do we know Benny himself isn’t being taken for a ride? How do we know that wasn’t the shape-shifter on that picture we saw? How do we know we’re not all being lured into a trap?’
‘Because… what would be the point?’ Clover said. ‘The Dark Man has the heart – your heart. So why would he need to do that?’
I shrugged. ‘To kill us. To stop us hunting him down.’
‘But why expend the time and energy to drag us all the way out here? Presumably, with your heart he can go anywhere, do anything. If he wanted to kill us, he could do it any time, any place. He wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of luring us into an elaborate trap.’
‘Maybe, maybe, maybe,’ Clover muttered. ‘Why can’t you just be optimistic for once? Don’t you want to believe?’
I could have responded angrily to that – of course I wanted to believe that my missing daughter was waiting for me at the end of this journey; there was nothing I wanted to believe more – but I knew Clover was only asking the question out of frustration at my cynicism. Or was it pessimism? Maybe both.
‘Who are you? Fox Mulder?’ I said, aiming for jokey and ending up closer to snide.
She glanced at me again, I guess because she was unable to gauge my mood from my voice, and her expression softened a little. ‘If I am, that makes you Dana Scully.’
I snorted a laugh. ‘I just… don’t want to get my hopes up, that’s all. After everything we’ve been through, it’s hard to believe my search might end at a little Welsh farmhouse in the back of beyond. It all seems too abrupt, too…’
‘Anti-climactic?’
‘I suppose. Does that sound stupid?’
‘No, not stupid. But I think you expect this whole thing, this quest of yours, to culminate in some great showdown, some final battle. But things don’t always work out that way. Real life is far less dramatic and more predictable.’
‘Maybe.’
‘There’s no maybe about it. It’s true.’
‘Okay, okay,’ I said, raising my hands as if to ward off an attack.
‘So let’s just go with the flow for now, shall we? Let’s keep an open mind and see how things work out.’
‘Yes, boss,’ I said.
The rain abruptly increased, dashing against the car with a light, clattering hiss that made me think of spilled paperclips, and instantly transforming the windscreen into a writhing mass of colourless jelly. The brake lights of Benny’s car were twin smears of glowing red ahead of us. Clover coolly flicked a lever and with a rapid and repeated creaking the wipers doubled their speed, sweeping away arcs of rainwater before they could properly form on the glass.