The Chinese Egg (30 page)

“I know. Only I keep thinking of its mother. What must she be feeling?”

Vicky said, with difficulty, “Mum! Did my Mum—you know. Did she. . . Did she feel like that when she knew she wasn't going to go on living? About me?”

“I don't think she knew she was going, love. Thing was, she got so weak she didn't hardly know anything.”

“Did she know you'd be taking me home?”

Mrs. Stanford knew when a whole truth was not called for. She said, “She knew if anything happened to her I'd look out for you.”

Vicky said, “I don't think anyone ought to take babies away from their Mums and Dads. I think it's cruel. I think it's the worst thing anyone can do.”

“She's only young. She could have another one,” Mrs. Stanford said, seeing the picture of young Mrs. Wilmington in the paper.

“But it wouldn't be the same, would it? She'd always want that one. Wouldn't she?” Vicky said.

“‘Course she would. I shouldn't have said that. When I think how it would be if you or Chris had got taken and I'd thought I'd never see you again. . . . Knowing I could have twenty more wouldn't make me feel any better,” Mrs. Stanford said.

Vicky dared to ask the question she'd often thought, never said. “Mum! Do you feel different about us? Because Chris is yours and I'm not? Would you. . .?” She couldn't finish. But Mrs. Stanford understood, and knew that only the truth would do here.

“I've often asked myself the same. Do I feel different about Chris being mine? I don't know, Vicky, and that's the truth. Thing is, I'm so used to having the two of you, I can't tell what it'd be, not to have you both. ‘Course it isn't the same. Not for me any more than it is for you. I'm like you, sometimes I wonder about what your father was and how it all came about. But it doesn't worry me now. It used to, right at the beginning. I'd think, Suppose I don't do the right thing by the child, when she wasn't mine to start with? And then—I don't know. It seemed so sort of natural to have the two of you, and I'd have felt so bad if I'd had only the one, I stopped feeling like that. I just felt pleased. And Chris wouldn't have been so happy as she is if she hadn't had a sister. I've seen it with onlies. It isn't right.”

“Chris'd have been all right anyway.”

“I don't know about that.”

Vicky yawned.

“You ought to go to bed, my lass. You're tired out.”

Vicky realized, astonished, that this was true. She got up off her Mum's comfortable lap and stretched.

“I will. ‘Night, Mum.”

“‘Night, love.”

So much you didn't say. Stephen's father would have wanted to have it all spelled out or he wouldn't know it was there. Vicky felt drained. Better for all that crying, guilty because it hadn't
helped to find the baby. But she had to sleep. She'd meet Stephen again tomorrow. Tomorrow. Would the baby see tomorrow? If she hadn't been so tired she'd have lain awake worrying, but as it was she was asleep five minutes after getting into bed.

Sunday

Skinner slept late that Sunday morning. Maureen had crept around the van, getting feeds ready and looking for something to eat herself. She was starving. If she didn't eat something soon, her inside rumblings might wake Skinner, and then, where'd she be? She made herself tea and put in some of the baby's dried milk. It was ever so nasty, but it did make her feel a bit better. She badly needed to go to the toilet, but although Skinner was so fast asleep she didn't think he'd have woken if she'd been able to open the back doors and slip out, she couldn't risk disturbing him by searching for the key which was in his pocket, and he'd gone to sleep in his clothes. She had to make do with the bucket, which she knew wasn't nice, but she couldn't choose. Then she must have dozed off again, because the next thing she knew, Skinner was saying he was going out for a bite of lunch, she was to stay there and he'd bring her back something. She didn't like that, she'd begun to say, “Why can't I come too, Skinner?” but he'd gone and shut the door very quietly behind him. She heard the key turn in the lock. She sat there then, with Linda, crying a bit and feeling really bad, stuck here in this nasty van, and hungry again. Linda was awake, so she gave her another feed, but after it the baby wouldn't go to sleep. She didn't cry, just lay there waving her hands around and looking at them as if she'd never seen hands before. Maureen supposed that she hadn't, at any rate not as often as people who were grown up like Maureen, Who'd had time to get used to having hands and doing things with them, so that she never really looked at them and wondered where they came from or why they were that shape. Presently Linda went to sleep, sucking her thumb, and after what seemed a long time, Skinner came back with a bit of cold pie for Maureen and a tin of coke. He lay down on the bunk and went to sleep at once, and Maureen had another long afternoon trying to keep Linda quiet. That wasn't too bad. She found that she could talk to her very
soft and Linda liked that. It was almost like the way Mrs. Plum had talked to her, and the funny thing was that when Maureen cuddled her and spoke silly baby language to her, it was comforting for Maureen too.

Before it had begun to get dark, Skinner woke up and went off again. To the pub, Maureen supposed, though he didn't say. He came back almost at once, angry. She could tell by the way he looked as he climbed into the van, even before he hit her, hard, on the face. She cried out and said, “What you hitting me for, Skinner?” and he said, “You been talking.”

“I haven't! How can I talk to anyone, shut up like this in the van?” Maureen said, but then she remembered she had been talking to Linda and perhaps Skinner hadn't really been asleep, perhaps he'd heard.

“Don't ask me how! If you haven't been talking, how do the fuzz know where we are?” Skinner said, looking as if he might hit her again any minute.

Maureen supposed that the police must have somehow over-heard that soft, silly talk she'd given Linda that afternoon. She said, “I'm sorry, Skinner, I didn't know.”

“Who was it? Who'd you tell? Did you say any names?”

“I didn't, Skinner. Not any names. Only just to keep her quiet, so she wouldn't wake you, Skinner, that's all.”

“Who was it?” Skinner said, and she saw his hand go to the knife he always carried in his belt.

“It was only her. Linda. When you were asleep and she wouldn't. . . .”

She didn't understand why he swore again. He said, “For Chrissake I picked a winner when I got you.” Then he went out to the driver's seat and started driving away from the street they'd been in for so long. They seemed to drive for quite a time. Once, just as it was getting dark, she looked out and saw that they were still in streets with a lot of houses and a great big building with funny bulging tops to it, all lit up with lights, rather pretty. Quite different from anything she'd ever seen. She wondered if perhaps it was a circus. She'd have liked to see that. But later the lights disappeared and they drove ever such a long way through roads without any lights at all. Before they stopped for the night
Maureen was too sleepy to notice where they were, except they seemed to be back in a town, parked where there were a lot of cars and caravans. There was a toilet here too, and Skinner let her out to visit it. That made Maureen's day.

Monday morning and afternoon

The ransom note fell through the letter-box with the rest of the post. It came in a long commercial envelope and was written on an electric typewriter on a sheet of plain white paper. Andrew Wilmington found it by his breakfast plate and read it.

“This is your last chance of seeing your daughter again alive.

Bring £200,000 in used notes to Bank tube station at five thirty tonight, Monday April 25th. Stand by the top of the Central Line escalators. You will be contacted there. If you follow these instructions exactly you will be told where you can find your daughter 24 hours after the money has been handed over.

If we find that you have informed the police, handed over marked notes or taken any other steps to trace us, your baby will be the first one to suffer.”

He had his instructions from Price. The first were easy to follow. He picked up the paper and the envelope in his napkin, went into his study and put them into a large envelope. “Not much hope of any prints, but we ought to try for them,” Price had said.

The next step was more difficult. He had to decide whether or not he was going to play along with Price at all. Or was he going to agree to the conditions laid down by the letter? Was he going to tell Sally? If he did and she pleaded with him to do as they said, to trust that Caroline Ann would be returned, could he refuse? Suppose he stood out against it and they never saw Caroline Ann again, what would Sally feel towards him? Wouldn't it be the end of their marriage? Even if he didn't tell her and the
baby was not returned because he'd stepped out of the line these bastards wanted to impose, wouldn't he always feel guilty? Wouldn't he have for the rest of their lives together to hug this horrible secret that he hadn't done everything he could to save their child?

He couldn't eat any breakfast. It was a good thing that Sally was having hers in bed or she'd have noticed something wrong. After half an hour of agonized indecision, he went up and kissed her good-bye, got out of the house' without any questions and drove to the office. He would telephone from there. Price would have to decide how to handle this, he couldn't tackle it alone.

Price rang Stephen.

“Anything for me?”

“No. But I'm meeting Vicky in half an hour. We'll try.”

“If you could get a look at the outside of the van. Its number for instance.”

“Trouble is we don't seem to be able to choose what we get.”

“I know. Try. Anything might help.”

He rang off and considered. The van had been in Brighton yesterday up to tea time on Mr. Mackenzie's showing. If the Vicky girl was right in thinking that what she'd seen was what the couple with the baby might have been looking at, they'd still been there after dark. Evening, she'd said, but she thought not yet night. That put it somewhere between eight and nine. God, why hadn't the Brighton force been able to get it? He must have got through to them by eight at latest, they'd had over thirty minutes with the bloody thing there in the middle of the town and no one seemed to have noticed it. And they'd drawn a blank in Messenger Street, where nearly every house let lodgings. Not a single baby anywhere near the Mackenzies' house. No one had seen a baby. But a neighbour volunteered that he'd heard a baby crying too. If that was the right van the old chap had noticed, they must have slept in it. That was the tiny dark room Stephen had seen.

Price groaned. He wondered again if he was right to trust these stories. But he had nothing else to go on, he had to take help wherever he could find it. There'd been another appeal to the
public on the eight o'clock news this morning. Perhaps someone would come up with something that would help. It was at this point that he was told that Andrew Wilmington was op the telephone, asking for him.

“How's it going to work?” Jakey asked.

“Supposed to be getting the cash tonight,” Fred said.

“Who's collecting?”

“Me. Bank tube in the rush hour.”

“What's your getaway if he's split?”

“Change of gear in the Ladies.”

“You in the Ladies? That's rich!”

“I went in on the way back just to see. 'ts dead easy.”

“It's the jeans and the hair. Suppose you could easily be a bird.”

“No one looked twice.”

“What's the gear you got to put on?”

“Blonde wig. Long dress. He'd got them all ready. Timed me. Took twenty seconds.”

“Clever! Then you flush and walk out?”

“That's right. There's two exits, see? I come out of the other.”

“Smithy's got brains,” Jakey said, appreciating the joke.

“I'll say so if he pulls this one off.”

“What about the kid?”

“That's nothing to do with me.”

“Is he going to hand it over?”

“He's going to make bloody sure we're clear first. If there's anything goes wrong, the kid's had it.”

“What about if things don't go wrong? Does Daddy get his precious back?”

Fred looked at Jakey and Jakey looked at Fred. Then Jakey smiled. Not an agreeable smile.

“You know Smithy. He does like to keep his hands clean,” Fred said.

“But he doesn't like taking chances either.”

“That's why I was careful not to ask,” Fred said.

“What did you see?” Stephen asked.

“I saw him. In a shop. Buying bottles of fizzy drink.”

“I saw the van.”

“Inside? Was the baby there?”

“No. Outside.”

“Is it green?”

“No, it's blue. And it had a great dent and all the paint taken off the rear wing.”

“Doesn't that mean they'll find them quickly now?”

“I should think so. I'll ring up the Superintendent straight away.”

“I don't think my flash is going to be any use at all. He won't want to know about them buying bottles of lemon or whatever it was.”

“Didn't you see anything that would say where it was?” “Don't think so.”

“No names or anything?”

“No. Honestly, I can't think of anything.”

“Was he taking the bottles off a shelf?”

“Out of a sort of wire basket. There was a big notice over it said Special Offer This Week. You know how those shops do. Mum always tries to get those special offers if it's something she buys anyway.”

“I'll tell him. I suppose it might help.”

“Not unless he asks, he'll think it's silly. Your seeing the van's what he'll want to know.”