Stolen Child (8 page)

This morning we christened you Joy Ainé Dowling. In Maoltrán’s small Catholic church, where David and I were married six years ago, we renounced Satan, with all his works and pomps. We lit candles to let the light of love shine on you. Fr Davis anointed you with chrism. You did not cry when he poured water over your head. ‘Such a sweet placid baby,’ he said. ‘Such a miracle, born to be loved.’

Phyllis has remained the heroine of the hour. Towards the end of the service Fr Davis mentioned her in his homily: two women sharing the ultimate experience of bringing new life into the world. The art of public relations is about perception. It’s not the story that’s important but how you tell it.

Carla Kelly had told her story badly. She wore a stretch top, skinny jeans and a fitted jacket, slim as a whippet after giving birth only five days previously. And she smiled for the cameras, such a silly thing to do. She lost the public sympathy with that smile. How could she, a mother so recently bereft, look as if she was enjoying her fifteen minutes of fame?

It gives me courage, that smile. The journalists use it every
time they run with the story. The lingerie shots have also been dusted off and the tabloids are having a field day reproducing them. So too is Alyssa Faye. She writes about the woman who stole Isobel Gardner. Clichés and stereotypes, that’s all she writes. What does she know about anything? She milked my misery for all it was worth and now she milks Carla Kelly. Each weekend, she picks her bones clean, analyses her need for publicity, and how, by flaunting her pregnancy, she stirred a deep, dark well of longing. As for Josh Baker…he was a tabloid hack when I worked for Carter & Kay and now, five nights a week, he brings that same mentality to
The Week on the Street.
He’s convinced there’s a stalker involvement, which gives him an excuse to use the lingerie shots, and we see her in lacy briefs, her breasts plunging in the cups of a bra, hands upraised to her tousled hair.

Theories and analyses, speculation and investigation. When are they going to stop? Let the story die a natural death. Concentrate on the IRA, Clinton, Princess Di, Yasser Arafat, earthquakes, famines, war; the world still spins yet all they want to do is write about her. But they do not write about me. No one has looked at you and voiced suspicion. And if they did – if, for an instant, a seed of suspicion fluttered to the ground – Phyllis Lyons would crush it under her large, no-nonsense feet. She is determined that
her
story will not die.

I wasn’t frightened at first. At least, I don’t remember fear. Looking back, I realise I never believed it would happen. Never believed I could pull it off. Was I insane during those months? Living in a fantasy of my own creation?

I constantly surprise myself by remaining calm in the dangerous moments. Like when the district nurse finally drove her car down the lane and met you for the first time. She weighed you, jabbed your heel, dangled you like a monkey,
and you clung to her fingers, danced in space, did nothing to betray me. I drove to St Anne’s Clinic and sat in the coffee bar with you asleep in the pram beside me. I met Gemma O’Neill who used to go to school with David. She is expecting her second baby and had just emerged from her appointment with Professor Langley. I told her I was there for my postnatal checkup. We talked about Phyllis, how well she’d coped on the night.

‘Imagine her having the nerve to cut the cord,’ said Gemma. ‘Were you terrified to let her do it?’

It seems that Phyllis’s version has grown wings. Let it fly. I’m not going to contradict her story.

‘I trusted her,’ I told Gemma. ‘What else could I do?’

‘Rather you than me,’ she replied, and shuddered at the horror of it all.

‘Forget natural birth,’ she said. ‘I yell for my epidural as soon as the first twinge kicks in.’

David had dinner ready when we arrived home from the clinic. Everything is in order, I assured him. You curled your fingers around his thumb and kicked your tiny feet against his large brown hands.

I write in the small hours when I cannot sleep. I need that space. Afterwards, I feel lighter, as if the weight of words has drained the memory from me. ‘No sense in two of us suffering sleepless nights,’ I tell David, when he demands the right to lie beside me, the right to rise at night and feed you, the right to be involved.

The dream is reality now. I must live with Carla Kelly on my shoulder. I can banish her during daylight hours but at night she is free to roam through my dreams. I see her bending over your cot or standing at the foot of my bed. Sometimes she cannot get in and then she rages outside my
window, her blood-red nails clawing the glass. These are the hours I fear most. What if I call out her name in my sleep, beg her to leave me alone, beg her forgiveness from the mist of my dreams? What if David hears? That is why he must sleep alone.

If you should ever read this diary, I will be dead. All my worldly longings eased. Please do not think of me as an evil woman. Evil is a holocaust of bones, a bullet in the head, a knife in the belly. Fate is evil, smiling from the side of her bitchy mouth as she randomly kicks us about the place. For once in my life, I fought back and took what was lightly left lying around.

The streets of Maoltrán are slung with fairy lights. Carol singers rattle collection boxes and sing about joyful tidings. Miriam buys Christmas presents that ding and ping, and play tinkling lullabies. My father and Tessa arrived yesterday with a teddy bear three times your size, and a caseload of baby clothes. Your eyes widen when I switch on the Christmas tree lights. Your hands move with wondering curiosity to touch the green needles. Christmas suddenly has meaning and magic, says David, and puts his arm around me. We stand together and welcome the season of joy; a family at last.

You stir, wave your fists in the air. You drink us into your gaze then look beyond our shoulders, as if searching for someone we cannot see.

‘Angels,’ says Miriam. ‘Joy is following the flight of angels.’

Christmas was an obscenity wrapped in glitter paper. Carla wanted to go to a hotel and hide in an anonymous room until the festivities died down. The countryside drew her as it never had in the past and she was possessed by a longing to walk along a cliff or gaze at a meadow. But normality had to co-exist with abnormality and the Christmas dinner must be cooked and eaten. Her mother had invited her and Robert to dinner. She wept when Carla hesitated. Now that the sky had fallen, Janet found it an even heavier burden than she had anticipated.

‘My grandchild stolen,’ she cried. ‘I can’t endure it. I simply can’t endure it. You must spend Christmas with us. Your father will be heartbroken if you don’t. We have to support each other through this tragedy.’

On Christmas morning Carla awoke to the sound of bells. Robert was already standing by the window. He leaned his head forward until it touched the glass and Carla knew, before he turned, that he was weeping. They never wept together. An unspoken arrangement kept one of them strong whenever the other fell apart.

Downstairs, they exchanged gifts. She had spent an afternoon with Raine trying to decide what to buy for him.
Everything they looked at was unsuitable, too festive or romantic, too flippant or meaningless. But what did she expect? A gift designed for loss? A cracked heart wrapped in tinsel, crystal teardrops? In the end she bought a cashmere sweater for him. The wool would be soft and kind on his skin, and the sea-blue shade reflected his eyes. He had bought her a painting. Carefully, she unwrapped it from its bubble wrapping and held it before her. She recognised the glacial mountains, the intense blue waters, the white belfry of a lakeside church. They had cruised on Lake Garda during their honeymoon, drifting through a lilac haze of hill and valley, drunk on love and the spreading length of their future together. Then it was her turn to cry. He held her to his chest and allowed her to vent her grief into his new sweater.

At noon they collected Raine and Gillian who had agreed to join Carla’s parents for Christmas dinner. Janet, labouring in the kitchen to produce the perfect meal, waved aside all offers of assistance.

‘Too many cooks bring on a panic attack,’ she warned and poured another glass of sherry. Shortly afterwards, Leo arrived with his wife. Gina’s baby was due in early January. She and Carla had talked many times about their pregnancies, comparing symptoms, weight gain and how the two cousins, so close in age, would grow up as friends. From the very early stages, Gina had gained weight and now, with only three weeks to go, her stomach was impossible to ignore. No one made any comment as she settled heavily into an armchair. Music played on the stereo, a little too loud, but it prevented strained silences when conversation died.

Gerard carved the turkey. Janet, unable to break with tradition and serve vegetables everyone could enjoy, passed around the bowl of Brussels sprouts. As usual, everyone took a few to please her. Throughout the meal she drank too
much wine. Carla caught Leo’s eye. Christmas Day, under normal circumstances, was always difficult when Janet drank too much and they recognised the signs, her flushed face growing more belligerent, her harried movements as she played with her food, her slurred voice insisting on everyone having second helpings. Unable any longer to control her fury, she glared at Robert.

‘Who is she?’ she demanded. ‘Who is the evil bitch who stole my grandchild?’

‘Janet…please let’s finish our dinner in peace.’ Gerard’s voice was already laden with resignation.

‘Peace! How can there be peace in this house?’ She pointed her index finger at the remains of the turkey and curled it back. ‘God help me, I want to shoot her. I want to shoot her right between her evil eyes.’

Gina, unable to cope with the naked emotion on everyone’s face, moved awkwardly around the table and cleared the dishes. Gerard and Leo skilfully guided Janet from the dining room and up the stairs where she took a sleeping tablet and drifted into a peaceful sphere where the sky was secure and eternally blue.

As soon as Leo reappeared, he handed Gina her coat and helped her into it.

‘We promised my parents…’ She glanced apologetically at Carla and hugged her. ‘We’re already late.’

Gina’s parents would plump cushions behind her back, place a footrest under her feet. They would fuss over her and talk about baby names and ask about the last scan and whether she was still suffering from heartburn. Carla sucked in her breath. If she was to continue to stand upright she must acknowledge her sister-in-law’s reality. She slipped her hand under Gina’s coat and pressed her palm against her taut stomach. The baby kicked. A heart thud, same beat.

‘You’ll find her, Carla.’ Gina struggled not to cry. ‘You have to keep believing. Promise me you’ll keep believing.’

Gina’s baby was born in the second week in January. A baby girl, Jessica, eight pounds, six ounces; one pound four ounces heavier than Isobel. Robert grasped Carla’s arm as they walked along the hospital corridor. His grip hurt but she welcomed the discomfort. It kept her walking in a straight line towards the ward where balloons with congratulatory messages bobbed above the beds and bouquets of flowers scented the air. Gina’s family were already in the ward. They fell silent when Carla and Robert entered. The weight of all the unspoken thoughts gathered together in the small ward was almost too much to bear. Carla was acutely aware of the discomfort of Gina’s family, the sympathy they longed to express if they could only find the right words. Tragedy had turned her and Robert into pariahs, doom-laden victims of an unsolved mystery. The visitors began to talk again but their voices were hushed, as if an inadvertent word would break the brittle calm. Carla bent and stroked her niece’s cheek. Jessica rested in her mother’s arms, cocooned in a pink sheet, a tiny, red-faced chrysalis with a shock of black hair. ‘We’re meeting friends so we can’t stay,’ Robert said and Gina nodded, accepted the excuse along with the baby present in bright wrapping paper. She did not order Carla to have hope. The time for platitudes had passed. Words were no longer an adequate response for people consigned to limbo.

By the end of January, the decision was made to wind down the Garda search. Isobel’s file would remain open but the team was being disbanded and assigned to other, more pressing cases. Another unsolved mystery. There were so many of them. The great void where the ‘missing’ existed.
Isobel would become past history, someone who would feature sporadically in the media when she was tagged to a similar tragedy. Not that Carla could imagine anything remotely similar but children disappeared all the time. She had read about such disappearances, tug-of-love children, kidnapped children, slave children, and, sometimes, disappearing mothers who abandoned or killed their babies. She no longer wanted to hear such stories, nor read comparisons. Any extra strain would send her over the edge. She felt herself stepping nearer to it every day; the smooth perimeter of a deep black hole.

Detective Superintendent Murphy broke the news as gently as possible. He had been in regular contact with them throughout the search, his reassurances ringing with less conviction each time. On this occasion, Carla watched his eyebrows moving as he detailed all the avenues that had been explored, the leads followed and abandoned. How strange his face would look if they were shaved off. Like a moon without a shadow.

That night Robert sat in the kitchen with a bottle of whiskey at his elbow. It was after two o’clock in the small hours when he entered the bedroom.

‘Carla…’ His voice shook as he leaned against the doorway. ‘Carla…’ His voice thickened when he repeated her name. He slumped to the floor, his back arched as he encircled his knees. ‘I know you’re blaming me. But I couldn’t prevent the decision…I couldn’t even do that much for her…’ He began to cry, an ugly sound, brutal, bare.

‘I don’t blame you.’ Carla helped him to their bed. ‘But it’s up to us now. We must do everything possible to keep her name in front of the public.’

Once he fell asleep, she entered the nursery. Isobel’s photograph was pinned above the cradle. It was
so
out of date.
She was almost three months old now, the colour of her eyes clearly defined. Carla hoped they were brown but they could just as surely be the same intense blue as her father’s searching eyes. She was smiling and gaining weight, standing sturdily on the lap of some strange woman. Two little ramrod legs determined to stay upright.

The light struck the seahorses. She had forgotten how delicately they moved. The slightest sway of air set them in motion. She remembered the day she and Gillian had bought them. The glass artist had admired the cradle and held the seahorses over it, rainbow colours glancing off the white gauze.

‘It’s for my first grandchild,’ Gillian had confided to the artist, who smiled as she bubble-wrapped the seahorses and told them she would soon also become a grandmother. She was probably enjoying her grandchild now, whereas Gillian could only live with the longing.