Listening to her husband giving the details, Zenobia is aware of the same sense of connection that Mrs Iveson has experienced in the drawing-room, and it feels like mockery to her that there should be this second cruelty, drifting out of the summer blue, as the first did. Maidment’s thoughts are similar, then are invaded by a famous episode in the past – the taking of the Lindbergh baby. It was before his time; what he recalls is hearsay, supplied to him by an elderly butler of the old school who enjoyed such titbits. If that’s what this is there’ll be a message in the morning, the words cut out of a newspaper and pasted up: used banknotes to be secreted in a rubbish bin or a telephone-box or the cistern of a public lavatory, a specified place, a specified time.
‘If contact is made after we’re gone,’ the policeman says, ‘I’ve told Mr Davenant and the lady we’ll need to know at once. While we’re still here don’t answer the phone until we’re in a position to monitor the call.’
‘You think they’re after money?’ Zenobia inquires, and hears that at this stage it’s important to keep an open mind.
‘It’s equally possible we could be looking for a local woman. Is there anyone at all you can think of, a woman who got to know the routine of the house through observation? A frustrated would-be mother, an older woman it often is, though by no means always. Someone who saw the opportunity and took her chance?’
There’s no one they can think of, but for Zenobia the
thought of a woman taking her chance is preferable to brutish men. Years ago at Oakham Manor a gang got in. They silenced the alarm and poked a kitchen grab through a fanlight, drawing back the bolts with it, even lifting the key from the lock. Every scrap of silver gone, and never established how it was they knew where to look for it. Zenobia still shivers with apprehension at the thought of men with shaved heads roaming about a house at night. It was she who found the back door swinging the next morning, she confides to the bulky policeman, and had to break the news on the telephone to the Hadleighs, in Austria at the time.
‘Yes, it’s unpleasant, Mrs Maidment. But I’m afraid what we have here is more unpleasant still, no matter who’s responsible. So no local person comes to mind?’
‘No one at all.’
‘I’d hardly say it was local,’ Maidment contributes. ‘I’d lay my bones down there’s money in this somewhere.’
Zenobia notices a moment of surprise in the policeman’s features, occasioned by the expression used, but when he speaks he is impassive again.
‘As I say, sir, we have to keep an open mind. But of recent times it’s been women who’ve been helping themselves to babies.’ A while back, they may remember, a baby born only a few hours was taken from a hospital ward. Another time, a baby-minder who ran off in Camden came to light in County Limerick. In this day and age, if a woman has a fancy for a baby she takes what’s going.
‘Even so,’ Maidment persists, ‘I’d say we’re talking ransom money.’
‘That’s not discounted, sir.’
‘We had those phone calls,’ Zenobia says, suddenly remembering.
‘And what were they, Mrs Maidment?’
‘Someone ringing up and not saying anything.’
‘When was this?’
‘They began a couple of weeks back. You’d answer and the receiver’d be put down.’
‘I see.’
WPC Denise Flynn and her colleague return. The door in the wall was open, Denise Flynn reports, not wide, but a little. The ground’s too hard to carry footprints, her colleague says.
‘Usually open, that door, Mr Maidment?’
‘Never.’
‘Most likely that’s the way they came and went. A couple it could be.’
*
The rooks swirl above the oaks and the house. Climbing or diving, they caw and screech, observed by two silent buzzards, motionless in the air. Below them, another police car arrives.
The garden is searched for a sign left behind by an intruder or intruders, but there is nothing. Local houses are visited. Increasingly favoured is the theory that a motherless baby has become the prey of a woman with an obsession about her own maternal needs. In low voices the likelihood is repeated in the police cars as evening settles over lanes and fields, and the inmates of farmhouses and cottages are disturbed.
‘Yes, it may be that,’ Thaddeus agrees when the notion about a woman of the neighbourhood is put to him. There is nothing he can add. He has known the women of the
neighbourhood all his life. Some he has known as children, seen them becoming girls, those same girls marrying and having children of their own. When asked about the peculiar or the unusual among them, he mentions Mrs Parch, who claims to possess the power of healing, who has been making a profit from the exercise of her skill for sixty years. Visitors still come to her cottage to receive the benefit of her gifted hands and to hear her daughter, Hilda, read a report in a local paper when the phenomenon was contemporaneously recorded. Hilda herself has chalked up a success or two with herbal remedies: a decoction of grasses and the juice extracted from comfrey for gastric ailments and arthritic joints. But neither Mrs Parch nor her daughter interests WPC Denise Flynn, who has been assigned the task of gathering information about the women of the locality.
‘There’s Abbie Mates,’ Thaddeus remembers also. A younger woman, a fortune-teller at summer fetes, reader of the Tarot cards. And there’s Melanie, who lives alone by an old railway crossing and regularly bears the children of a man who visits her. But they, too, fail to arouse the policewoman’s suspicions.
Further questioning reveals that among the house’s usual visitors two charity women came recently for Letitia’s clothes, and Jehovah’s Witnesses have been, and a girl to search for a ring she dropped. Hoping to get rid of a load of tar, a man called in, offering to resurface the drive at a bargain price. Burly, black-haired, a stutter coming on when his sales pitch became excited: every detail remembered is of interest and is recorded. ‘They showed you literature and that?’ WPC Denise Flynn prompts. ‘The Witnesses?’ And bleakly Thaddeus nods.
The white police cars go eventually, with fresh instructions left about a possible telephone communication. ‘Someone knew,’ Zenobia concludes in the kitchen. ‘Someone knew we have an afternoon rest ourselves, and saw the car drive off.’ She blames herself, as Mrs Iveson does, but Maidment is dismissive of any misdemeanour on his wife’s part or on his. Half an hour only they lie down for, he reminds Zenobia, and in the half-hour today he didn’t close an eyelid. The newspaper dropped to the floor, he grants her that, but he did not sleep. Anything untoward he would have heard.
It is dark in the bathroom that once was Mr and Mrs Hoates’s. The window is boarded; outside it is almost night. She has fed Georgina Belle and Georgina Belle is now asleep. It is quiet except, somewhere and occasionally, there is a scrabbling of mice.
Pettie herself will not sleep tonight, although she is tired and feels she wouldn’t mind a whole week of sleeping, just lying there. It wasn’t like the taking of the ballpoint, the stool pulled out for the man to stand on, the reaching down of the chocolate box. It wasn’t like the taking of the make-up tubes the time she almost dropped one, or the little black clocks, or taking the scarf with the horses’ heads on it, or the earrings and the brooch a week ago. Excitement made her shiver when she crossed the grass and could be seen from the windows, when she lifted Georgina Belle and the woman didn’t move, when Georgina Belle didn’t wake up either. And when she hurried on the way through the fields, and by the houses and there was still no one about, her breath was heavy with relief. But then the children were there, playing some kind of game on the towpath, and when she tried to put the dummy in it was too late.
She wonders what’s happening now in the house where she has so longed to be with him. No way he won’t be remembering what she said about a grandmother, no way
he won’t be regretting he didn’t listen at the time. All that is perfectly as she planned, and taking things into her possession has always been what she can do, what she is good at and still was today, her skill, as the man she sells stuff to says. If the children hadn’t stopped and stared when their noise woke up Georgina Belle she’d have gone by and they wouldn’t have known. Never before were there children playing on the towpath.
She should have taken her glasses off, she should have kept her head turned away She should have put the dummy in before ever there was a need for it. The children would be asked. No way they wouldn’t say they heard a whimpering.
In the car park where the towpath came out she walked by the phone-box from which she’d planned to dial 999, every syllable of what she had to say practised and perfect: a woman acting underhand with a baby, a grey-haired, thin-faced woman with a lazy eye, who put the baby by the basins in the car-park toilets, who hurried off when she realized she was followed by someone who’d been suspicious. ‘I come back to look for my finger-ring in the lane. I was by the pillars either side of the drive and saw her. I followed her because it was a baby she was trying to hide. I knew it was Georgina Belle.’ But the children would say there never was a woman with a lazy eye.
In the dark Pettie tries to repair the reality she is left with. She could go out now and phone him up, not bothering with 999 because it’s too late for that. She could ask to speak to him if someone else answered, and then explain – how she ran away in a panic from the car park when she saw the woman still hanging about. ‘All I thought to do was take
Georgina Belle to a place of safety, Mr Davenant.’ She could trust to luck that they wouldn’t bother with the children, now that they knew.
Pettie goes over that. ‘What I thought was she’ll snatch her from me when I’m getting her back to your house, sir. Like on the towpath or in the fields.’ She hears his sigh of relief, and her own voice saying it was only lucky she came out that afternoon to look for her finger-ring where she hadn’t looked properly before.
But the children heard the whimpering and already they’ll have said. Squatting on the dirty floorboards of the bathroom, again she tries to find a way, but again knows that from the moment the children stopped to stare there never was one.
She lights a match and then a cigarette. ‘Wife and kiddies,’ Joe Minching said; and the rictus began in the fisherman’s face; and they said she was to blame when Eric wasn’t in Ikon Floor Coverings any more, they said she should be taken in. In the brief illumination, pipes hang from the walls where bath and wash-basin have been crudely disconnected before being taken away. A mirror has been shattered, its fragments in a corner. All the whimpering in the world, all the crying and screaming won’t attract attention here, as now and again it did at the Dowlers’ and the Fennertys’.
When the cigarette is finished Pettie lights another and then another, the flare of the match each time flickering on the sleeping face of the baby she has taken. While the last match is still alight she gently places the dummy – once Darren Fennerty’s – between the slightly open lips. In the dark she makes a butterfly and places it where it will
be something for Georgina Belle to look at later, when light comes through the cracks between the window boards.
Then Pettie goes, closing the bathroom door behind her.
In the dining-room the dinner table has been laid, but no food is eaten. Much later, in the drawing-room, not huddled now but straight-backed in an armchair, Mrs Iveson can hardly see her son-in-law when he comes in because she has not turned on the lights. She watched him in the garden before darkness fell – among the birch trees and the plum trees, by the summer-house, pacing slowly around the lawns, stooping now and again to pull a weed out from a flowerbed. He says nothing when he comes in, and she wonders at first if he knows she’s there. Rosie is with him and settles down, pressed against her legs.
‘I’m sorry, Thaddeus.’
He stands still in the gloom. She senses the shaking of his head, but does not see it. Time seems not to be passing, even though the evening has darkened so, even though the clock in the hall has chimed the hours and half-hours.
‘I’m sorry.’
He still says nothing. In the hall the telephone rings and he goes to answer it. ‘Yes,’ she hears him say. ‘Yes.’ He listens and then says thank you, listens again and says good-night. She can tell it isn’t what it might have been.
‘Of course it wasn’t your fault,’ he says, returning. ‘Of course not.’
He doesn’t stay, and a few minutes later she hears his car drive away and wonders what he hopes for. ‘We’ve called
her Georgina,’ Letitia told her father in St Bee’s, and then repeated that, twice or three times. But it never impinged. The last time they visited St Bee’s a shaft of sunlight kept catching the blue stripes of the tie that was always so very tidily knotted. Sharp as a card, the tip of a handkerchief protruded from the outside breast pocket and she thought of a figure in a shop window. How fortunate, she tells herself, he is tonight.
*
Thaddeus struggles against thought while flat suburbs spread about him. Ribbons of development are broken, then begin again; dormitory settlements give way to mouldering warehouses, waterworks stretch for half a mile. Bombsites have not been built on, used-car lots are fenced with high wire mesh. Streets are straight and short, Victorian brick.
A woman with a baby hurries on none of them, no abandoned bundle fills a darkened corner. ‘She asked that you be informed,’ the voice of the hospital sister interrupted his silent plea that the telephone call would bring some other news. ‘A merciful release, we can only say.’ And he thought yes, a merciful release, and hardly knew.
Again, as best he can, he veils the images that have recently brought him solace but are painful now: Georgina just born, Letitia’s smiling tiredness, his own hands reaching out; Georgina when he saw her last, sleeping in her nursery after lunch. Ahead of him, lit up and open, a public house is called the Old Edward, and for a moment he is tempted to enter it, to talk to its landlord or some woman across a grimy bar, to be someone else and have someone else’s thoughts. For an hour or so yet he could drink and in the end be drunk and know oblivion.