The Night Ferry (45 page)

Forbes has been concentrating on couples who succeeded in obtaining a child by using a genetic surrogate. They cannot give evidence against Shawcroft without incriminating themselves. Why would they? Science supports them. Nobody can prove they’re not the birth parents.

But whoever has the twins doesn’t have a genetic safety net. DNA tests wil expose rather than sustain them. They haven’t had time to fake a pregnancy or set up an elaborate deceit.

Right now they must be feeling vulnerable.

At this hour of the morning it isn’t difficult to find a parking spot in Kennington, close to Forbes’s office. Most of the detectives start work at nine, which means the incident room is deserted except for a detective constable who has been working the graveyard shift. He’s about my age and quite handsome in a sulky sort of way. Perhaps I woke him up.

“Forbes asked me to come.” I lie.

He looks at me doubtful y. “The boss has a meeting at the Home Office this morning. He won’t be in the office until later.”

“He wants me to fol ow up a lead.”

“What sort of lead?”

“Just an idea, that’s al .”

He doesn’t believe me. I cal Forbes to get approval.

“This better be fucking important,” he grumbles.

“Good morning, sir.”

“Who’s this?”

“DC Barba.”

“Don’t good morning me.”

“Sorry, sir.”

I can hear Mrs. Forbes in the background tel ing him to be quiet. Pil ow talk.

“I need access to Shawcroft’s phone records.”

“It’s six in the morning.”

“Yes, sir.”

He’s about to say no. He doesn’t trust me. I’m bad news or bad luck. Everything I’ve touched has turned to shit. I sense another reason. A nervousness. Ever since he released Shawcroft, the DI has backtracked and made excuses. He must have copped some heat, but that goes with the territory.

“I want you to go home, DC Barba.”

“I have a lead.”

“Give it to the night detective. You’re not part of this investigation.” His voice softens. “Look after Samira.” Why is he being so negative? And why the briefing at the Home Office? It must be about Shawcroft.

“How is your wife, sir?” I ask.

Forbes hesitates. She’s lying next to him. What can he say?

There is a long pause. I whisper, “We’re on the same side, sir. You didn’t screw me that night so don’t screw me now.”

“Fine. Yes, I can’t see a problem,” he answers. I hand the phone over to the night detective and listen to their yes-sir, no-sir exchange. The phone is handed back to me. Forbes wants a final word.

“Anything you find, you give to me.”

“Yes, sir.”

The cal ends. The night detective looks at me and we smile in unison. Waking up a senior officer is one of life’s smal pleasures.

The DC’s name is Rod Beckley but everyone cal s him Becks. “On account of me being crap at footbal ,” he jokes.

After clearing a desk and finding me a chair, he delivers a dozen ring-bound folders. Every incoming and outgoing cal from the New Life Adoption Center is listed, including the numbers, the duration of each cal , the time and the date they were made. There are six voice lines and two fax lines, as wel as a direct-dial number into Shawcroft’s office.

Further folders cover his mobile phone and home line. Text messages and e-mails have been printed out and stapled together in chronological order.

Taking a marker pen, I begin to group the cal s.

Rather than concentrate on the phone numbers, I look at the times. The ferry arrived in Harwich at 3:36 a.m. on Sunday morning. We know that Pearl walked off the ferry just after four.

At 10:25 a.m. he bought nappies and baby formula from a motorway service station on the M25 before stealing a car.

I look down the list of cal s to Shawcroft’s mobile. There was an incoming cal at 10:18 a.m. that lasted less than thirty seconds. I check the number. It appears only once. It could be a wrong number.

DC Beckley is flicking at a keyboard across the office, trying to look busy. I sit on the edge of his desk until he looks up.

“Can we find out who this number belongs to?”

He accesses the Police National Computer and types in the digits. A map of Hertfordshire appears. The details are listed on a separate window. The phone number belongs to a public phone box at Potter’s Bar—a motorway service area near junction 24 on the M25. It’s the same service area where Brendan Pearl was last sighted. He must have phoned Shawcroft for instructions about where to deliver the twins. It is the closest I’ve come to linking the two men, although it’s not conclusive.

Going back to the folders, I strike a dead end. Shawcroft didn’t use his mobile for the next three hours. Surely if his plan was coming apart, he would have cal ed someone.

I try to picture last Sunday morning. Shawcroft was on the golf course. His foursome teed off at 10:05. One of his playing partners said something when Samira interrupted their game and Shawcroft tried to drag her off the course: “Not again.”

It had happened before—a week earlier. After the phone cal from Pearl, Shawcroft must have abandoned his round. Where did he go? He needed to let the buyer or buyers know that the twins had arrived. He had to bring the pickup forward. It was too risky using his own mobile so he looked for another phone—one that he thought couldn’t be traced.

I go back to Becks. “Is it possible to find out if there is a public phone located at a golf club in Surrey?”

“Maybe. You got a name?”

“Yes. Twin Bridges Country Club. It could be in a locker room or lounge. Somewhere quiet. I’m interested in outgoing cal s timed between 9:20 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. on Sunday, October 29.”

“Is that al ?” he asks facetiously.

“No. Then we have to cross-check them with the adoption waiting list at the New Life Adoption Center.”

He doesn’t understand, but he begins the search anyway. “You think we’l find a match.”

“If we’re lucky.”

10

“New Boy” Dave hears my voice on the intercom and pauses for a moment before pressing the buzzer to unlock the front door. When I reach his flat the door is propped open. He is in the kitchen stirring paint.

“So you’re definitely sel ing.”

“Yep.”

“Any offers?”

“Not yet.”

There are two cups in the drainer and two cold tea bags solidifying in the sink, alongside a paint rol er and a couple of brushes. The ceilings are to be a stowe white. I helped him choose the color. The wal s are a misty green, cut back by 50 percent and the skirting boards and frames are ful strength.

I fol ow Dave into the living room. His few pieces of furniture have been pushed to the center and covered in old sheets.

“How is Samira?” he asks.

The question is unexpected. Dave has never met her, but he wil have seen the TV bul etins and read the papers.

“I’m worried about her. I’m worried about the twins.”

He fil s the rol er from the tray.

“Wil you help me?”

“It’s not our case.”

“I might have found them. Please help me.”

Climbing the ladder he runs the rol er across the ceiling creating long ribbons of paint.

“What does it matter, Dave? You’ve resigned. You’re leaving. My career is finished. It doesn’t matter what toes we tread on or who we piss off. There’s something wrong with this case. People are tiptoeing around it, playing softly softly, while the real culprits are shredding files and covering their tracks.” The rol er is gliding across the ceiling. I know he’s listening.

“You’re acting like these kids belong to
you
.”

I have to catch myself before my head snaps up. He looks down at me from the top of the ladder. Why do people keep questioning my motives? Eduardo de Souza, Barnaby, now Dave. Is it me who can’t see the truth? No, they’re wrong. I don’t want the twins for myself.

“I’m doing this because a friend of mine—my best friend—entrusted to me what she loved most, the most precious thing she had. I couldn’t save Cate and I couldn’t save Zala, but I
can
save the twins.”

There is a long silence. Only one of us feels uncomfortable. “New Boy” has always been defined more by what he dislikes than by what he likes. He doesn’t like cats, for instance, or hypocrites. He also loathes reality TV shows, Welsh rugby fans and tattooed women who scream at their kids in supermarkets. I can live with a man like that. His silences are another matter. He seems comfortable with them but I want to know what he’s thinking. Is he angry that I didn’t leave Amsterdam with him? Is he upset at how we left things? We both have questions. I want to know who answered the intercom last night, fresh from his shower.

I turn toward his bedroom. The door is open. I notice a suitcase against the wal and a blouse hanging on the back of the open door. I don’t realize I’m staring and I don’t notice Dave climb down the ladder and take the rol er to the kitchen. He wraps it careful y in cling film, leaving it on the sink. Peeling off his shirt, he tosses it in a corner.

“Give me five minutes. I need to shower.” He scratches his unshaven chin. “Better make it ten.”

Two addresses: one just across the river in Barnes and the other in Finsbury Park, North London. The first address belongs to a couple whose names also appear on a waiting list at the New Life Adoption Center. The Finsbury Park address doesn’t appear on the files.

Sunday week ago—just after ten o’clock—both addresses received a cal from a public phone in the locker room of the Twin Bridges Country Club in Surrey. Shawcroft was there when those cal s were made.

It’s a hunch. It’s too many things happening at the same time to be coincidental. It’s worth a look.

Dave is dressed in light cords, a shirt and a leather jacket. “What do you want to do?”

“Check them out.”

“What about Forbes?”

“He won’t make this sort of leap. He might get there in the end by ticking off the boxes, methodical y, mechanical y, but what if we don’t have time for that?” I picture the smal est twin, struggling to breathe. My own throat closes. She should be in hospital. We should have found her by now.

“OK, so you have two addresses. I stil don’t know what you expect to do,” says Dave.

“Maybe I’m just going to knock on the front door and say, ‘Do you have twins that don’t belong to you?’ I can tel you what I
won’t
do. I won’t sit back and wait for them to disappear.” Brown leaves swirl from a park onto the pavement and back to the grass, as if unwil ing to cross the road. The temperature hasn’t strayed above single figures and the wind is driving it lower.

We’re parked in a typical street in Barnes: flanked by tal , gabled houses and plane trees that have been so savagely pruned they look almost deformed.

This is a stockbroker suburb, ful of affluent middle-class families who move here for the schools and the parks and the proximity to the city. Despite the cold, half a dozen mothers or nannies are in the playground, watching over preschoolers who are dressed in so many clothes they look like junior Michelin Men.

Dave watches the yummy mummies, while I watch the house, No. 85. Robert and Noelene Gal agher drive a Volvo Estate, pay their TV license fee on time and vote Liberal Democrat.

I’m guessing, of course, but it strikes me as that sort of area, that sort of house.

Dave rakes his fingers through his lopsided bramble of hair. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Have you ever loved me?”

I didn’t see this coming.

“What makes you think I don’t love you now?”

“You’ve never said.”

“What do you mean?”

“You might have used the word, but not in a sentence with my name in it. You’ve never said, ‘I love you, Dave.’” I think back, wanting to deny it, but he seems so sure. The nights we lay together with his arms around me, I felt so safe, so happy. Didn’t I ever tel him? I remember my philosophical debates and arguments about the nature of love and how debilitating it can be. Were they al internal? I was trying to talk myself
out
of loving him. I lost, but he had no way of knowing that.

I should tel him now. How? It’s going to sound contrived or forced. It’s too late. I can try to make excuses; I can blame my inability to have children but the truth is that I’m driving him away. There’s another woman living in his flat.

He’s doing it again—not saying anything. Waiting.

“You’re seeing someone,” I blurt out, making it sound like an accusation.

“What makes you say that?”

“I met her.”

He turns his whole body in the driver’s seat to face me, looking surprised rather than guilty.

“I came to see you yesterday. You weren’t home. She answered the intercom.”

“Jacquie?”

“I didn’t take down her name.”
I sound so bloody jealous.

“My sister.”

“You don’t have a sister.”

“My sister-in-law. My brother’s wife, Jacquie.”

“They’re in San Diego.”

“They’re staying with me. Simon is my new business partner. I told you.”

Could this get any worse? “You must think I’m such an idiot,” I say. “I’m sorry. I mean, I’m not the jealous type, not usual y. It’s just that after what happened in Amsterdam, when you didn’t cal me and I didn’t cal you, I just thought—it’s so stupid—that you’d found someone else who wasn’t so crippled, or troublesome or such hard work. Please don’t laugh at me.”