by Emily Gunnis
‘You always have a choice. My baby’s not even born yet and I already know I could never give her up.’ Jessie spoke quietly, her head down, playing with the tissue in her hands.
‘It’s a girl?’ said Rebecca gently, a glow of happiness infiltrating the pain of their discussion.
Jessie nodded.
‘That’s wonderful.’ Rebecca edged towards her daughter and put an arm around her. ‘I can’t wait to meet her.’
‘I feel so worried about her all the time. Like I’m going to do something that’s going to hurt her, or . . .’
‘Hurt her?’ Rebecca frowned.
‘I don’t know. Did you feel worried all the time? When you were pregnant with me? Is that how it started?’
‘To be honest, I can’t remember how it started.’
‘Can you at least try?’
Rebecca looked into her daughter’s deep emerald eyes. They pierced through her now, staring at her expectantly, as if Rebecca had all the answers to her burning questions. Just as they had on the day she was born.
She could still hear the deafening sound of babies crying on the ward, the overwhelming lights that had scorched down on her as they stitched her up, the crashing hospital trolleys, a voice in her head which she had started to hear during Jessie’s birth.
As Harvey had fussed around her, taking photographs of Jessie, the male voice got louder, terrifying her, until she had felt the strangest sensation of something snapping in her head.
And then suddenly he was there.
Detective Inspector Gibbs, the man who had questioned her over and over until dawn on the night her parents died, who wouldn’t believe her, and haunted her dreams ever since, had appeared in the corner of her hospital room, arms folded, watching her silently as she held her newborn baby in her arms.
And despite her terror and her tears, and him being as real to her as Harvey was, nobody but her could see him.
Chapter Sixteen
Iris
2:30 p.m. Wednesday, 19 November
Iris sat in the corner of the small café off Chichester High Street anxiously watching the door. She looked down at her watch, then at her phone, then back at the door. Mark Hathaway was half an hour late and hadn’t responded to her text.
The first issue of the paper went to print at 4 p.m., and Miles was having a stroke about the fact that she hadn’t come up with anything yet. She had taken a huge gamble in not telling Miles that the only reason she’d heard about this story was because the missing girl was her half-sister. She’d had no idea when she’d first called the newsdesk that this would turn into such a huge story.
All she did know was that time was running out for baby Elizabeth and she cared a great deal more about Jessie’s welfare than she did about filing a story. The fact was, her only chance of holding it all together and not losing her job was if Mark gave her something to get Miles off her back.
But for now, all she could do was sit and wait. Her eyes fell on a woman in the corner of the café feeding her baby and she found it hard to tear her gaze away. It had started to rain and she pictured Jessie out there somewhere with her newborn and suddenly felt a wave of anger. She knew what was happening to Jessie was not her fault, that she needed help, but as she watched the doting mother stroking her baby’s flushed cheek, she couldn’t help but feel the cruel irony that Jessie had the one thing she wanted more than anything in the world, and yet was putting that precious gift at risk. She looked at her watch again.
Iris felt a cold blast of air as the door opened and she looked up to see her old friend walking through the door, with little droplets of rain on his flushed cheeks and a long black coat over his tall, slim frame. His blue eyes scanned the room and settled on Iris. She smiled gently, trying not to show the overwhelming relief she felt that he had turned up.
‘Hi, Iris,’ said Mark, kissing her slightly awkwardly on one cheek before pulling off his coat and setting it on the back of a chair. Drops of water trickled on to the floor underneath it.
‘Hi, Mark. Thank you so much for coming,’ she said, smiling in spite of the butterflies in her stomach.
‘No problem,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I’ve only got twenty minutes, we’re really short-staffed today.’
‘Of course. Can I get you a tea or anything?’ she said, surprised at how good it felt to see him.
‘I’ll get it, would you like one?’ he said. She shook her head and he walked over to the counter and ordered. Iris felt her cheeks flush self-consciously as Mark looked back at her and smiled. ‘It’s so bloody cold,’ he said as he collapsed back into his seat. ‘I can’t stop thinking about that girl being out there with her baby. Senior management are really freaking out at the hospital about this one. I’ve never seen a group of journalists outside the hospital before. It’s making St Dunstan’s look bad that she managed to get out. They’ve called all the senior staff in to work out whose head is going to roll.’
Iris could still feel the cold radiating from Mark. His nose was slightly pink and he clutched his mug to warm his hands.
‘What I don’t understand is how it was possible for her to leave the hospital without being noticed? Isn’t there any security?’ said Iris.
‘Yes, there are security measures in place, but no one has any idea what it’s like being a midwife on a busy postnatal ward,’ said Mark, shaking his head. ‘It can be horrendous, exhausting and, quite frankly, bloody dangerous when it’s short-staffed – which is the case most of the time because they’ve made so many cuts. They keep playing that image on television of the poor woman walking out of the hospital with her baby. They’re clearly just waiting for the news that she’s jumped off a bridge or under a train.’
‘Listen, Mark, there’s something I should tell you,’ Iris said, her voice shaking slightly. ‘I didn’t want to say anything on the phone, but Jessie is my half-sister.’
Mark stared at her wide-eyed. ‘Well, now I feel like a complete shit. I’m so sorry, Iris.’ Mark put his hand over hers.
Iris felt herself welling up. ‘I’m sorry, Mark, you don’t need this. I’m just so worried about Jessie and I’ve dug myself into a hole not telling my boss that me and Jessie are related. I had no idea the story would end up being so big. I just wanted try and get the inside story for my mum.’
The woman with the baby pushed past them with her buggy, interrupting them. Iris stood to move out of her way and suddenly felt dizzy as the heat from the steamed-up café became claustrophobic. It was so good to see a friendly face after the day she’d had, but it was throwing her off guard. She had missed Mark more than she had admitted to herself, but knowing him well she could tell that he wasn’t his usual self around her.
‘Presumably the police are telling you more than they’re telling us?’ said Mark, frowning.
‘Not really, she seems to have just vanished. They’ve received hundreds of calls to the incident number but that all takes time to follow up I suppose,’ Iris added. ‘And they’ve got to trawl through hours of CCTV footage. They said at the press conference the last images of her show her walking towards Chichester train station. But she wasn’t seen on any of the train platforms. Nobody’s seen her since. None of her bank cards have been used, so if she and the baby are still alive, they must have been taken in by someone. There’s no other explanation, they can’t survive out in this weather.’
‘And you’re having to report on this for work? Isn’t that a bit much?’ said Mark, taking a gulp of his tea.
‘I haven’t said that she’s my sister. It was my idea to come here and try to find her. But I’m not sure it was a good one.’ Iris took another sip of hot tea and added a sugar. She hadn’t eaten all day, but watching people eating in the café turned her stomach. ‘My mother phoned this morning to tell me Jessie had gone missing and to ask if I could find out anything. It’s a long story, but things aren’t good between her and Harvey, Jessie’s dad.’
‘The man who spoke at the press conference? I wondered where her
mum was. So the great Doctor Rebecca Waterhouse is also Jessie’s mother?’
‘Yes, and she was asked by Harvey not to attend the press conference, so she’s at home with a police liaison officer, tearing her hair out. Things were never great between her and Jessie. Our family’s always been a bit screwed up.’
‘Every family is a bit screwed up.’ Iris understood Mark was referring to his own messy divorce and his ex-wife making it as difficult as she could for him to see his twelve-year-old son.
‘She had Jessie when she first qualified, and it was all quite a struggle, I think,’ said Iris.
‘Yes, well, your mother was one of the first female paediatric consultants in the country, wasn’t she? You don’t get to be a trailblazer like that without making some personal sacrifices.’
‘Well, my dad was a hundred per cent behind her, they were a good team.’
‘And what’s your relationship with Jessie like?’
Iris just shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s complicated.’
‘Does your sister have a history of depression?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me.’ Iris ran her finger round the edge of her mug, lost in thought. ‘I don’t know much about it, but my mother had very bad postnatal psychosis when she had her.’
Mark nodded. ‘Well, postnatal psychosis is familial. And the fact that Jessie chose to leave is making me think she is psychotic rather than depressed. Obviously it’s not my area of expertise but she must have been convinced that her baby’s life was in danger if she stayed. And she would have had to wait for the right moment, when the doors were open for a second and the midwives were distracted. It wouldn’t have been easy.’
‘They think the baby’s got Strep B, she needs to be on antibiotics, it’s not good,’ said Iris quietly. ‘I wish she’d come to me. I’ve been thinking all day about how I wish I’d been a better sister to her. My mum always pandered to her when she came to stay, and it made me really jealous, but of course I know now that it must have been really hard for Jessie – having an annoying younger sister to look after.’
Mark smiled cheekily. ‘Did you follow her around when she came to stay?’
Iris nodded. ‘Yup, everywhere. I even made her a mix tape once with all the songs I could find with the word sister in them.’
‘Oh dear, did she like it?’
Iris shook her head. ‘Nope, she gave it back to me and said it wasn’t really her thing.’
‘Harsh,’ said Mark, taking a sip of tea. ‘Come on, she’s your sister, you must have one happy memory of her.’
‘I do remember this one time that we got lost in the woods. It was a rare weekend that we had together and we took the dog for a walk. I suppose I was about twelve and she was seventeen. It started to get dark and really cold and I remember I was panicking. Every path we took seemed to take us deeper and it started to rain and I began to cry.’ Iris paused, frowning at the memory. ‘She’d been snapping at me to keep up until that point, and suddenly she changed completely. She held my hand and we sat under a tree, and she put her coat over our heads to make a shelter, and then she told me a story. It was all about this little girl called Iris, who was the apple of her parents’ eye, who played the piano, and made the best apple crumble and loved ghost stories and would give anyone her last Rolo. I thought she didn’t know me at all, and she didn’t care, and I suddenly realized she was just sad, because she thought my mum loved me more than her. And the sad thing is, my mum doesn’t love me more. She really doesn’t.’
‘You have to find her, Iris,’ he said, matter-of-factly, as if he was the first person that day to have thought it.
‘I know I do, but how?’ said Iris, wiping away a tear with a crackly café napkin.
‘I’d like to help more, Iris, but all I can do is give you the name of the midwife who was assigned to your sister,’ he said, scribbling on a napkin. ‘I can’t give you an address, but presumably you can find that. She won’t talk to you as press, but she might talk to you as Jessie’s sister.’
Iris looked across the table at Mark. It was so typical of him to stick his neck out for her. She felt the overwhelming urge to throw her arms around him, but the noisy, stuffy café didn’t seem the right place and somehow she didn’t feel he would welcome it.
‘Thank you,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘And Mark, I’m really sorry about what happened last time I saw you.’
‘You’ve got nothing to be sorry for. Good luck with it, Iris. I really should get going now, before I’m missed.’ He pulled his coat from the back of the chair.
Mark left the café, leaving Iris alone with a napkin bearing the scribbled name of the last person to speak to her sister before she disappeared: Jane Trellis.
Chapter Seventeen
Harvey
3:30 p.m. Wednesday, 19 November
Harvey Roberts sat in the back of the police car, waiting for two police officers to push back the dozens of locals who had gathered at the gate of his house so the car could drive through.
DC Galt turned to him. ‘Your liaison officer is here already, waiting for us. He’s one of the best. I think you’ll like him.’
Harvey said nothing, slightly irritated by her cheerful tone.
‘He’ll hopefully be able to bridge the gap between you and the investigation and answer any questions you have. As I mentioned at the station, the search team is still inside your house now, but hopefully they’ll be finishing up soon.’
Harvey looked out of the window at the villagers waiting to be told what they could do to help. He’d known these people his whole life – been to school with them, drunk in the pub with them, worked with them on his farm – and now they stood gazing at him pitifully, as if he were off to be burnt at the stake.
Approaching the house, he overheard a snippet of conversation. An old friend, Fred Samuels, who owned the grocery shop in the next village, was bearing down on one of the police officers who were trying to keep the crowd back. ‘We’ve been here for three hours now, waiting to be told what to do. We want to help!’
‘We don’t need any more people to help with the search for the time being,’ replied the officer. ‘Best if you go home for now as we can’t search in the dark. We’ll let you know if we need any more help tomorrow.’
As he entered the house, he was greeted by a tall, blond man dressed in jeans and brown brogues, his small belly straining out of a light blue shirt. Behind him, in his living room, in his hallway and on the upstairs landing, he could see half a dozen police officers, all dressed in black, ransacking his house. One walked past him with Harvey’s laptop, not even acknowledging him.
Harvey’s eyes fell on a picture on the hall table of Liz and Jessie, a close-up of their smiling faces. He pictured them walking along, arms interlinked, deep in conversation.
‘Harvey, this is DC Rayner, your family liaison officer,’ said DC Galt, smiling gently. ‘DC Rayner has a great deal of experience of working with families in these situations.’
‘I still don’t understand the point of going through my house? Am I suspected of something?’
‘As you know, we’ve searched Jessie’s flat and, as your daughter spent a significant amount of time here, we are just making sure we have done everything we can to understand her state of mind and work out where she might have gone.’
‘Wouldn’t your time be better spent actually looking? There are a lot of locals wanting to help, old friends who seem to have been standing out there for a while, waiting for you to coordinating a search,’ said Harvey, looking at DC Galt. ‘I don’t understand why you are telling dozens of people who want to help that you don’t need them?’
‘I’m sure any offers of help are being managed appropriately,’ said DC Galt.
‘It doesn’t sound to me like they are. I just heard one of your guys telling them all to go home.’
DC Rayner stepped forward. He was in his early fifties, Harvey guessed, and moved more slowly than Galt. He smil
ed gently at Harvey and put his hand out. Harvey shook it.
‘Mr Roberts, shall we take a seat? It’s been a long day, and I’d like to fill you in on what we are doing to find Jessica and her baby. I’ll try to answer any questions you may have.’
‘I’ve got a question for you. How was Jessie just allowed to walk out of hospital with a vulnerable newborn baby and not be stopped? And then just vanish into thin air?’
‘Unfortunately, we don’t know the answer to that yet, but the hospital will be conducting a review of what went wrong. And as for finding them, we’ve got twenty police officers on this, so we are doing everything in our power to try and work out where Jessica and Elizabeth have gone.’
‘And what about the press conference? Has anyone called in? She’s got a newborn for God’s sake, someone must have seen her.’
DC Rayner gently put his hand on Harvey’s elbow to lead him towards the kitchen table. ‘You did a great job at the press conference, and in response to the broadcast we’ve had over a thousand calls to the incident room, and among them are two possible leads which we’re following up now. One, we’re not permitted to share with you at this stage. As for the other, I can tell you that a lady called in to say that she found a baby’s sock on a bus that goes from Chichester bus station, to Dell Quay, Birdham and West Wittering. Unfortunately, she picked it up and handed it to the driver so it’s been contaminated, but it’s with Forensics now and, from the blood tests the hospital did on baby Elizabeth, we have her DNA. We’re doing tests on the sock to see if it matches. We’d also like you to take a look at it to see if you can identify it.’
‘Of course. And what about the driver? Did he remember seeing Jessie?’ Harvey leaned towards DC Rayner.
‘Unfortunately the driver was on nights, the bus which the baby sock was found on this morning was the last route on his shift. We’ve been unable to contact him as yet, but we have a police car on its way to his house now to try and track him down.’