Baby Drop

by Jennie Melville

  She thought about this conversation almost every time she went into the library. Although she had countered Army’s words, her friend had put her finger on a worry that Charmian felt herself. She loved Humphrey, he loved her, it was a real emotion for them both, but he moved in a world she did not know. ‘I’m a police officer, a detective, that’s what I am, after all, while he, what was he?’

  What he was in the world, she was never quite sure, a kind of diplomat who dealt in security matters. Yes, he touched her world there, but she never wanted to get too close to that subtle, two-faced, sinister world, her villains were more straightforward in what they did, like arson and murder.

  She got through her morning work quickly, most of it today was routine, and let herself into the library, usually kept locked, with her own key.

  The room was quiet, dark, and smelt pleasantly of polish. Books lined the wall from top to bottom. The bottom row was made of bound volumes of The Times of London, going back some twenty years. For anything earlier, a trip to London was necessary. The row above contained similar volumes of The Windsor Gazetteer, and here the coverage went back thirty years or more. All these volumes had been acquired by Charmian at auction and in some cases, she had spent her own money.

  While she was waiting for Rewley, she decided to refresh her memory on the case of Peter Loomis. She pulled out the volume she wanted and spread the heavy book on the table.

  The London Times was the best, first source for the case, later she would look in the local paper (the Loomis family had a house near the Castle as well as a small estate in Oxfordshire, or they had then, she had an idea it had since been sold, so the case would be covered), and then she might ask around, pick up the local gossip if people would agree to talk to her, they could be close sometimes.

  It was as Feather had said: Edith Loomis, aged only twenty-four, had been found dead, her skull broken by one savage blow to the back of the head, she might have been bending down when she was hit. She had died in the family house, Chantrey House, on a hill overlooking the river at Windsor. She had been dressing for a dinner she was to have attended in a house in the Castle precincts.

  She wore a silk slip and one shoe was on and one off, she might have been leaning down to put it on when attacked.

  The prosecution had said that this meant she had known and trusted her attacker.

  The defence said she was attacked by someone who crept up on her from behind and who was probably someone who had broken into the house.

  There were no signs of a break-in but someone had left several windows unlocked, two of which were open.

  It was possible since some jewellery had gone, family stuff of no great value.

  The evidence against her husband was: first, motive, they had quarrelled badly; secondly, opportunity; and thirdly, there was blood of Edith Loomis’ type on a tweed jacket of her husband’s which was rolled up in a cupboard.

  Peter Loomis had a good defence barrister, Sir Aldred Muir, who was able to prove that the blood was old blood, the flow coming from a wound when Mrs Loomis had cut herself badly when gardening.

  He also produced Peter Loomis’ mother, Lady Grahamden (she had married more than once, indeed, been widowed several times and divorced once, not a lucky family with marriage, Charmian thought), who asserted that her son had been with her most of the time when the murder had taken place.

  Charmian raised her head from the pages. Well, she would, wouldn’t she?

  But Sir Aldred had in reserve a second witness, a family servant, who said she had seen Peter leave his mother’s house.

  All in all, just enough to unsettle the jury, and Peter Loomis had walked out of the court a free man, but one with a good deal of suspicion hanging over his head.

  Charmian had had nothing to do with the case, and on the whole she was glad because it was one of those affairs that sinks reputations.

  What would I have done?

  Gone more deeply into that quarrel?

  She flipped over the pages, reading again bits of the report with comment.

  There was anecdotal evidence that Mrs Loomis either could not or would not have a child.

  Charmian considered the dates: seven years ago. Sarah had already been in the world for some months.

  So the child had been in the case from the beginning. In a way. If you saw it that way.

  I wonder exactly where Biddy herself comes into that murder. Her name had not been mentioned, which was an interesting omission. She had married shortly afterwards. Where was her husband? I hate muddled families, they produce muddled crimes.

  She was deep in the story when Rewley walked in.

  ‘Oh, hello.’

  ‘You’d forgotten I was coming.’ He sat down in a chair by the fire. His face looked thin.

  ‘No. Just thinking. You seem exhausted: She closed the volume to give him a closer examination. ‘Kate?’

  ‘It’s impossible not to be worried about her. She has no idea how ill she is. Or perhaps she has.’ He shook his head. ‘ I don’t know. I wish we’d never embarked on this business.’

  Charmian didn’t take the easy line: that it would be all right when the child was there, because no one could be sure what state either party would be in. In what she was coming to think of as Baby Drop time, the nineteenth century or earlier, mothers often died in childbirth with their baby. Even now these things could happen: Kate might die, the child might die.

  ‘You have the reports for me to sign?’

  Rewley produced his packet of documents from a briefcase. ‘You’ll want to read them.’

  ‘Of course, give me a minute.’ She moved herself to the other side of the table where the light was better. Although she liked the academic gloom of her library, there were times when a good lamp was needed. She adjusted the lamp so the beam shone directly on to the page. ‘I hope the local Fraud Squad will be grateful.’

  ‘I don’t suppose so. Means more work for them.’

  Charmian read slowly and signed the reports carefully. ‘Yes, you’ve got it all there. I’ll send it on, not to be gratefully received, no doubt. They dislike me in that department, can’t blame them, but they are moral troglodytes. No wonder they have their offices in a basement, underground is their milieu and I keep digging up what they do and finding the roots all wrong.’

  ‘They aren’t lazy,’ said Rewley judiciously of some of his colleagues in Fraud Office, Subdivision B. ‘They just don’t see things as clearly as they could do. And of course, they get very anxious.’

  ‘They ought to act, and if they don’t I’ll put a bomb under them. Good work.’

  She took her spectacles off, she had recently acquired a pair, and gave Rewley all her attention. ‘ I’m as worried about Kate as you are. I won’t say that work takes my mind off it, but I can work. What about you?’

  ‘I’m not working well … not efficiently.’ He looked away as if he didn’t want to meet her eyes. ‘She didn’t want the baby at first, she felt it was something she had to do. I shouldn’t have let her.’

  Charmian shook her head. ‘ You couldn’t. Have you ever stopped Kate when she was set on anything? Has anyone? And now, I suppose, she thinks it’s all her fault. Which it isn’t.’

  ‘No, it’s nothing congenital or built in.’ He sounded wretched. ‘It’s just an accident of fate that happened to Kate.’ He explained: ‘She has very high blood pressure that won’t come down, she’s had one tiny stroke, she could have a brain haemorrhage at any time … In addition, the placenta is so placed that if she gave birth normally she would probably bleed to death … So they will operate as soon as the child is viable …’

  ‘Then I’m going to tell you to take time off. Be with Kate. You won’t worry less, but it’s what you should do.’

  ‘I’m not sure how much she wants me around, she’s drawing more and more into herself.’

  ‘Try it.’

  ‘Yes, I will.’ He was a bit surprised. His boss’s usual line was to put in some hard wor
k.

  ‘And I may have something for you to think about.’

  That’s more like it, Rewley thought, that’s the Charmian Daniels I know. ‘I think I could make a guess.’ His eyes fell on The Times. ‘I saw what you were reading.’

  ‘Sarah Holt— You made the connection?’

  ‘Everyone does. It’s all over town. But I didn’t know you were interested.’

  ‘Mary Erskine.’

  ‘I might have guessed. She does drag you into things.’ Because of his marriage to Kate, he allowed himself a certain ease in his conversation with Charmian when he felt he was off duty.

  His face had lost the drawn look. Charmian was pleased at the reaction she’d got, she’d cheered him up. Good. The only hearing member of his large and talented family, Rewley could lip read, which seemed to give him a special sort of sensitivity, empathy. He picked things up out of the air. Because he was so worried about Kate, Charmian was the more worried. He often seemed to know things about to happen in advance.

  ‘She has a large circle of rakish friends,’ admitted Charmian. ‘But in herself she’s straightforward and good. If sometimes silly,’ she added reflectively.

  ‘So what do you make of it?’

  ‘Not really informed enough. Yet.’ She could pick things up out of the air too, and what she read now in his face was that he didn’t want to think about it. Too close to the bone. ‘And what about the Loomis connection?’

  ‘Is there one?’ answered Rewley.

  ‘Seems as though there ought to be,’ said Charmian.

  ‘He’s the child’s father, that’s common knowledge. I can’t see him abducting her. Why would he?’

  ‘You never know in families.’ Charmian spoke from her sad knowledge of the murky depths to which family relationships could sink. ‘What do people think of Loomis?’ So often the hidden, secret underground judgement on a man that went around the flower-beds was the true one.

  ‘Everyone thinks he was guilty.’

  ‘Except the jury.’

  ‘The story is they didn’t like the judge. Either time.’

  ‘If he didn’t kill the wife, who did?’ There had been no answer at the time, and none now, but plenty of speculation.

  ‘Biddy Holt? Her name came up.’

  ‘I have been worried about her myself,’ admitted Charmian. ‘She’s not quite what she seems.’ After all, what a story: letting the child go away with a man unknown to her, and then later, thinking that ‘ perhaps’ she did know his face. And the dolls? Was there really a doll left by the house? You could question everything.

  ‘Or it might have been someone who hated all three of them in the past: Loomis’ wife, Edith, she was killed after all, Loomis himself, and Biddy Holt. And who still hates them.’

  Rewley picked up the reports she had signed. ‘I’ll go to see Kate, I promised Anny that I would telephone her. She doesn’t go in much, she says she upsets Kate.’

  ‘She always did.’ Charmian stood up, grasping the file of The Times. ‘Heaven help her grandchild.’

  ‘It’s a boy, by the way, did you know? They did a scan.’

  ‘No.’ Kate hadn’t told her.

  ‘Don’t admit to knowing, then. Kate probably wants to tell you herself.’

  Left alone in the library, she tidied the books and papers she had been studying, but she did not put them away. She wrote a note for her librarian asking her to leave them as they were since she was still using them.

  What a mixed, confused story lay there, only partly told, all hate and violence, hidden in the dark, but what had happened was still working on life now.

  As she walked out of the library back to her office, locking the door behind her, one thought ran round and round in her mind.

  How the past does devour the future.

  She was back in her office for barely five minutes when the telephone rang.

  ‘Feather here, I’m speaking from my car. I am down at Flanders Road.’

  ‘Yes?’ Flanders Road, she recalled, was the road that ran parallel with the Baby Drop land, it was shielded by the trees she had seen from Kate’s window. Benson Road was on the other side.

  ‘We have a body.’ He paused, someone seemed to be interrupting him, then he went on, but she could not hear what was said. ‘I thought you might like to come down.’

  ‘I’m on my way.’

  She felt real pain. The child, the poor child. The past did not only devour the future, it ate it alive.

  Chapter Three

  ‘ “It is time for me to go to that there berryin’ ground, sir,” he returned wildly.’

  Bleak House

  The smell of burning, made up of charred wood and scorched stone, still hung in the rain-laden air of Windsor as Charmian drove towards Baby Drop territory. Not the first time the Castle had burned, she speculated, the original Norman castle had probably been no more than a wooden stockade and they went up as a matter of course. She could see scaffolding already in place of the roof of one of the great halls but there was the building itself, substantial and still whole.

  More than the usual number of tourists climbing up Castle Hill too with their cameras and guide books. St George’s Chapel was open as usual and Changing the Guard was about to take place. The Welsh Guards today in their dark grey winter uniform. She was held up in the traffic as the new Guard marched in, band playing. It would take more than a fire to stop the Guards.

  Inspector Dan Feather was waiting for her and met her by the grass verge. She had parked her car in Bowen Street, just out of sight.

  ‘Hello, ma’am, thank you for coming. I think it was right you should.’

  Charmian looked through the belt of trees and across the grass to where she could see the Clinic building, shielded by another fringe of trees, she could make out Kate’s window. No one was standing there, which was what she had hoped, she didn’t want Kate in her present state looking at this scene.

  He looked tired and drawn, as if he hadn’t liked what he had seen. There was earth on his hands with a stain of grass on the sleeve of his raincoat. ‘Mind where you step, ma’am, all the local dogs seem to relieve themselves on the grass here.’ His voice was gloomy. Never a cheerful man, as Charmian knew, he hated cases involving children even more than most police officers. ‘I’ll be glad when we’ve got this bit over.’

  ‘Worse than usual, is it?’

  ‘I can’t say that, they’re all bad, this sort of thing, but I’ve got a nasty feeling about this, and that is worse than usual.’

  ‘Feel much the same way myself.’ Charmian kept her eyes on the window of Kate’s room as she crossed the grass. Feather had to take her arm at one point, with a ‘Careful, ma’am’. She knew what was feeding her disquiet, anxiety over Kate, one misery feeding another, but what was up with him?

  Memory dredged up some story of Feather as a young detective constable, finding a child that had starved to death, left behind by its mother. And there was something else as well, but at this moment she could not remember what it was.

  No man is a cipher, she thought. He is a detective inspector, but behind that formula is a man.

  ‘You’re sure it’s the girl?’

  ‘Not sure of anything yet, haven’t got that far.’ He led her round the screen which had been set up around a hole in the ground. He introduced her to his sergeant and to the police pathologist who was standing by. ‘We had an abortive shot over there’ – he nodded to the patch of ground further away – ‘because the grass had been disturbed, but it was just one of those ruddy dogs, and then we tried here. There were signs of deeper digging.’

  Charmian looked down. The turf had been cut away, and the diggers had gone down a few feet, not far but far enough.

  An arm could be seen, lightly covered with soil. A small, thin arm, the hand curled.

  ‘You waited for me?’

  ‘A pause seemed indicated … Professor Drake wanted it.’

  Drake nodded at Charmian, they knew each other. He came f
rom the University of Middlesex, they had worked together before.

  ‘Photographs,’ said Drake shortly. He walked around the area in a way that Charmian knew to be characteristic of him; he paced round till he came back to her side. ‘Fairly unusual to see the arm sticking up like that.’ He took a few more paces. ‘ Must have been buried like it.’

  ‘Yes.’ Charmian nodded. Her eyes met Feather’s, they were both thinking the same thing.

  ‘And therefore as stiff as board at the time.’

  ‘Not dead long then, when buried.’

  The uncovering went on. The arm had been supported in its position by the earth and stones beneath it.

  ‘Stop here for a moment,’ ordered the Professor. ‘I want to do some measuring.’

  She knew already that it was one of those days that take the skin off you, when even the objects round you, houses, trees, the roads, seem harder, edged with stone, clearer, larger, with a life of their own. Redolent of the past, right back to childhood, reminding you of incidents long past. A hell of a day, a day with teeth.

  The professor was kneeling on the ground examining the arm, the angle of extension, and its relation to the shoulder muscle, a frown formed on his face.

  A painfully thin arm, the muscles more obvious than Charmian had expected. Not clean, it looked worn, travel stained and bruised. She bit her lips. What sort of life had Sarah had to be as thin as that?

  ‘Not long dead,’ said the professor, the frown left his brows but deposited itself more thickly in his eyes.

  ‘How long?’ asked Feather.

  ‘You know I can’t answer that yet: He stood up and nodded to the diggers who were gently and carefully removing the soil. ‘ Take it easy.’

  ‘You can always try,’ said Feather, which was surprisingly pushy for him.

  ‘Just a few days, then.’

  A small figure, wearing blue jeans and a jacket, the face still covered with a shroud of earth. The work on clearing the soil began again, careful, delicate work.