Authors: Catherine Storr
Stephen sat down beside her rubbing his ankle. “I was an idiot. I ought to have known.”
“How could you? I don't think he meant to tell them or let us in or anything even if you'd kept your foot in the door all night.”
“Anyway, if we sit here long enough someone's sure to notice,” Chris said.
They sat in a row on the top step but one, leaning back against the top step, with their feet on the one below. Kensington Walk was a very secluded, very select little backwater. So far there were no passers by.
“I do feel a fool,” Chris said. She had recovered her usual good humour during the journey from her home.
“You really think someone will see us here? From the house?” Vicky asked Stephen.
“They've only got to look put of one of those windows and they can't help it.”
“But people don't much, do they? Go right up to the window and look out, I mean. Mostly when you're in a room you just go on doing whatever there is to do, and when you look out you see things opposite. Or sky.”
“Someone might look out if we made a noise,” Chris said.
“What sort of noise?”
“Well, if we were singing or something. I know we can't. Not sing.”
Vicky absolutely saw this. You can't sit and sing outside a house that has lost a baby.
“We could talk,” Stephen said.
“Loudly enough? Go on, then. You start,” Chris said.
Silence.
“You can't just talk when there's nothing to say,” Vicky said.
“You could say rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, like we did when we were in the crowd in Julius Caesar”
No one said anything. Presently Stephen said, “We can't really stay here all night.”
“We could stay for another two hours, though,” Vicky said.
“One of us'd have to let Mum know we're going to be late if it takes longer than that,” Chris said.
There was a sound of footsteps on the pavement. A young woman came along the street; she must, Stephen noticed, have been quite pretty in the ordinary way, with light, curling hair and a neat-featured face, but just now any pretence to good looks the girl might have had were ruined by her distress. She had obviously been crying and, from the look of her red-rimmed eyes, crying for quite a long time. She walked quickly but uncertainly, stumbling a little on the smooth paved surface. She turned in at the entrance to the house, then hesitated when she saw Stephen and the two girls sitting on the steps.
“Are you Mrs. Wilmington?” Chris asked.
“What are you doing here?” the young woman said, and her voice, too, indicated how recently she'd been in tears; it came out choked and rough. She swallowed, and said, “You ought to go away.”
“We've got something we want to tell them, but the man, the foreign one, won't let us in. He won't even tell them we're here.”
“You ought to go away. They're in terrible trouble, they aren't seeing anyone.”
“We might be able to help,” Stephen said.
The young woman shook her head and went up the last steps to the front door, taking out a latchkey from her handbag.
“Won't you please tell them we're here? Please!” Chris said.
She said, “I'm sorry. . .” and choked. She let herself into the house and shut the door after her quickly. Perhaps she was afraid they might try to rush in behind her. Stephen did think of it, but dismissed the idea as impossible, a bad beginning to any meeting they might have with the Wilmingtons.
“If she isn't Mrs. Wilmington, who is she?” Chris said.
“She isn't. I saw Mrs. Wilmington when I had the first flash about the baby. She's quite different.”
“Who then? She looked really upset.”
“Perhaps she's the nurse,” Vicky said.
“She looked awful. As if she'd been crying all day.”
“Do you think she will tell them about us?” Chris asked.
“No, I don't.”
There was another longish pause. Although it was mid-April and the sun was still well up in the sky, it was chilly. Vicky shivered. Stephen said, “I think this is silly. Vicky's right, we might never be noticed.” He got up.
“What are you going to do?”
“I'm going to keep on ringing that bell until one of the Wilmingtons comes out.” He gave the bell a violent pull which made the bell clatter wildly. He heard steps inside and the letter-box opened again and Paolo's dark eyes looked through it.
“Is no good. No open the door.”
“I'm going to go on ringing until you do. Or tell them about us.”
He pulled the bell again.
“Don't do that.”
“Tell Mr. Wilmington then. . . .”
“He say no tell. . . .”
Stephen rang the bell again, if anything harder.
He could hear a new voice behind the letter-box. Steps in the hall. A voice said, “Paolo? What the hell are you doing there? What's the matter with the bell? Who's there?”
Stephen bent down to the letter-box level and shouted. “Mr. Wilmington! Please. It's important. I've got something to tell you.”
There was a confused noise inside the house, then the door was quickly opened, and Stephen saw a youngish man, obviously very angry.
“Get out or I'll call the police!”
“Please listen. . .” Stephen began desperately.
“I have nothing to say, and there's nothing I want to hear from you. Now, will you go or do I have to use force?”
“I'm not going,” Stephen said, again surprising himself.
“Haven't you any decent feelings at all? What can you possibly
hope to get out of this. . . this battening on other people's misery?”
“I'm not. . .” Stephen began, when Vicky called out from the step, “We're not. We know something.”
Mr. Wilmington took a step backward and looked at the two girls and then again at Stephen. Suddenly, instead of looking furious, he looked immensely tired. He said, “What's all this about? What do you know?”
It was Stephen who now stammered, and Chris who said, “They've seen the people who took your baby.”
Mr. Wilmington took this calmly. “How on earth do you know?”
“They see things. Vicky and Steve. They see what's going to happen. They saw. . . .”
Mr. Wilmington said, “Oh god, no, not that!” To Stephen and Chris he said, not angrily, but with a frightening coldness, “Now you two, stop play-acting and get out. At once. There's a policeman at the corner. If you aren't out in one minute from now, I shall call him and give you in charge. Understand?”
“We're not acting. It's serious. They saw your baby being stolen before it ever happened. . .” Chris said, angry again. Mr. Wilmington took no notice. He had his watch in his hand and he was counting. “Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five” Stephen was standing undecided on the step below him, Chris next to him, Vicky was standing silent and trembling on the next step down. Mr. Wilmington continued to count out loud, the other three didn't move, when someone came quickly along the dark hall inside the house and said, “Andrew? Andrew? What is it? Did someone say they knew something?” Sally Wilmington came to the open door. She saw a boy and two girls, all distressed and anxious, and her husband counting out seconds. She caught the hand which held the watch and said, “Andrew? Who said they knew about Caroline Ann?”
Stephen and Vicky and Chris saw the girl of the photograph. Chris saw the mother of a little stolen baby and her warm heart swelled in sympathetic horror. Stephen recognized the brown hair and the face that had been so chalky white and the lips, red then, pale now, that had whispered, “It wasn't more than a minute,”
and he knew, with a sinking heart, that he was inextricably mixed up in this affair, however much he didn't want to be. And Vicky? Vicky saw a mother who had lost a baby. A girl not very much older than she was. And at that moment she saw that the loss of someone you'd known, for whom you were totally responsible, whose thoughts you had thought, whose feelings you had felt, who was contained within your grown-up conscious self, was even worse than to lose an unknown mother whose place was so completely and lovingly taken by another mother who'd happened to be in the next hospital bed. But seeing this didn't make Vicky less strong, it rather gave her more courage. So, to Chris's astonishment, it was Vicky who spoke to Sally Wilmington. She said, “Stephen and me, we've seen things we can't explain. We saw about your baby being stolen before it happened. And this afternoon. . .”
“Will you please ask your two girl-friends to shut up and go away?” Mr. Wilmington said in a dangerously quiet voice to Stephen.
“We're not!” Chris burst out, at the same time as Sally Wilmington had caught her husband's arm and was saying, “Don't, Andrew. Let me hear what they're saying.”
He took her hand in both of his and said, “Sally, darling, don't. They're just cashing in on our misery. It's horrible, especially with. . .” he hesitated, “. . . children. But I'm afraid. . . . In a moment they'll be asking how much we'll pay for their ânews'. Or selling the story to the gutter press. Come back into the house, dearest. . . .”
He was interrupted by a furious Stephen. “We're not asking for money. We're nothing to do with newspapers. We've come in case what we've seen might be useful. I wish to god we hadn't. I didn't want to, I said you'd never believe us. I wouldn't if it were me.” He was shaking with anger, and this seemed to have some effect on Mr. Wilmington, who looked at him more carefully.
“Andrew. Please let them tell us. Nora's been questioned by the police ever since lunch. She's sure they think she's had something to do with it. Perhaps they really do know something that would find. . . .” Sally Wilmington didn't finish the sentence. And at that moment a uniformed policeman strolling with
elaborate casualness past the end of the front garden, hesitated and called out to Mr. Wilmington, “Anything I can do, sir? Any trouble there?”
Stephen and Vicky and Chris held their breath. Then Mr. Wilmington called back, “No thanks, Officer. No trouble,” and the policeman moved on and Andrew Wilmington said, unwillingly, “I suppose you'd better come into the house.”
Inside a room with more books on its walls than a library, and looking somehow cluttered, but richly, with little dark pictures and dark shiny chairs and tables, and carpets patterned with soft dark colours, and heavy, deep red curtains, the two Wilmingtons sat side by side on a velvet-covered couch and faced Stephen and the two girls, who perched nervously on the edge of cane-backed chairs with oak knobs and twists on their arms and legs. They felt as if they were in a witness box, being interrogated by a hostile lawyer for the prosecution. Stephen looked, and felt, hideously nervous, but still angry enough to be defiant. Chris was interested, observant, confident that in the end they'd be able to prove their case. Vicky felt. . . . There isn't room to say all that Vicky felt.
“Come on then. Let's hear your story,” Andrew Wilmington said.
Chris looked at the other two. Vicky said, “You start,” to Stephen. He took a deep breath.
Once he'd started it wasn't so bad. He didn't attempt to explain, he simply told how he'd thought he'd seen an accident in the High Street near his home and how it had actually happened a quarter of an hour later. How he'd tried to dismiss it as impossible. How two weeks later he'd had a flash picture of the empty pram and Sally's face. Then, a week afterwards, he'd read about the kidnapping in the paper. He paused.
“I saw it too. Not exactly the same. But nearly,” Vicky said.
“Come on. Aren't we going to have your version?” Mr. Wilmington said to Chris. She could see he wasn't believing a word.
“It doesn't happen to me.”
“I see. Only to the others. You've just come along for the ride,” he said.
“Andrew!” Sally Wilmington said.
“It's no good, darling. There's not a shred of evidence that they haven't made up the whole thing in the last twenty-four hours. There's been enough publicity. . . .”
“We didn't make it up. It happened. . . .”
“And even if they're young enough to believe in this sort of crystal-ball, fortune-telling racket, which I'm not convinced of, how is any of this rigmarole going to help us? Everything they've seen is very conveniently in the past tense anyhow.”
“You don't listen. We had another flash today.”
“We saw a man and a girl. . . .”
“They had the baby. . . .”
“They said. . . .” Vicky stopped abruptly.
“Go on.”
“She was looking after it. She didn't seem so. . . bad,” Vicky said. She couldn't possibly tell the baby's mother the words the girl had said.
“How do you know it was our baby?”
Stephen knew this was the weak part of their story. “We don't. Only why should we see anything about a baby if it isn't yours?”
“You saw her properly? And the man?”
“Vicky saw him.”
“Could you describe him?”
Vicky said, miserably, “Not really.”
“And what do you suggest I should do, now you've given me this valuable piece of information?”
“I don't know.”
Stephen said, “Don't you see, if we're really somehow tuned in. Like on a radio, wavelengths. If we're on the right frequency for the people who've taken your baby, we might get more flashes. They might tell us something useful, something the police could work on. Like where they are. . . .”
“If your descriptions of places are as accurate and detailed as your descriptions of the people you say you've seen, I think you can spare yourselves the trouble of communicating with the police,” Andrew Wilmington said, very coldly indeed.
Sally Wilmington said to Vicky, “Did you see the baby?”
“I saw she was holding it. That's all. I'm sorry.”