The Night Ferry (47 page)

“Do you mind if I stay for a while?” he asks, directing the question as much to me as to the ward manager. Every other patient in the unit has someone sitting alongside them. Claudia is alone. It doesn’t seem right to him.

Retracing our steps, I fol ow the manager to her office.

“I cal ed Social Services this morning,” she says. “I didn’t expect the police.”

“What made you cal ?”

“I wasn’t happy with some of the answers we were getting. Claudia arrived just after midnight. At first the woman said she was the baby’s nanny. She gave the mother’s name as Cate Beaumont. Then she changed her story and said that Claudia had been adopted, but she couldn’t give me any details of the adoption agency.” She hands me the admission form. Claudia’s date of birth is listed as Sunday, October 29. The mother’s name is written down as Cate Elizabeth Beaumont. The address is Cate’s fire-damaged house.

Why give Cate’s name? How did she even know about her?

“Where is this woman now?”

“One of our consultants wanted to talk to her. I guess she panicked.”

“She ran?”

“She made a phone cal . Then she walked out.”

“What time was that?”

“About 6:00 a.m.”

“Do you know who she cal ed?”

“No, but she used my phone.”

She points to her desk. The phone console is a command unit, with a memory of the most recently dialed numbers. A smal LCD screen displays the cal register. The ward manager identifies the number and I hit the redial button.

A woman answers.

“Hel o?”

“This is Queen Charlotte’s Hospital,” I say. “Someone cal ed your home from this number early this morning.” She doesn’t answer but in the silence I recognize a sound. I’ve heard it before—the squeak of wheels on parquetry floor.

I don’t have Ruiz’s photographic memory or his mother’s gifts for tel ing fortunes. I don’t even know if I have a particular methodology. I put facts together randomly. Sometimes leaping ahead or trying things out for size. It’s not very efficient and it can’t be taught but it works for me.

The woman speaks again. Nervously. “You must have the wrong number.”

It’s an officious voice, precise, not quite public school. I have heard it often enough, albeit a decade ago, berating her husband for coming home late smel ing of shampoo and shower gel.

The line has gone dead. Ruth El iot has hung up. Simultaneously, there is a knock on the door. A nurse smiles apologetical y and whispers something to the ward manager, who looks at me.

“You asked about the woman who brought in Claudia. She didn’t run away. She’s downstairs in the cafeteria.” A pressure pad opens the doors automatical y. The cafeteria is smal and bright with white-flecked tables to hide the crumbs. Trays are stacked near the doors. Steam rises from the warming pans.

A handful of nurses are picking up sandwiches and cups of tea—healthy options in a menu where everything else comes with chips.

Yvonne is squeezed into a booth, with her head resting on her forearms. For a moment I think she might be asleep, but her head lifts and she blinks at me wetly. A low moan escapes and she lowers her head. The pale brown of her scalp is visible where her gray hair has started to thin.

“What happened?”

“I did a foolish, foolish thing, cookie,” she says, talking into the crook of her arm. “I thought I could make her better, but she kept getting sicker and sicker.” A shuddering breath vibrates through her frame. “I should have taken her to a doctor but Mr. and Mrs. El iot said that nobody could ever know about Cate’s baby. They said people wanted to take Claudia away and give her to someone she don’t belong to. I don’t know why people would do something like that. Mr. and Mrs. El iot didn’t explain it so good, not sufficient for me to understand, you know.”

She draws back, hoping I might comprehend. Her eyes are wet and crumbs have stuck to her cheek.

“I knew Cate weren’t having no baby,” she explains. “She didn’t have no baby inside her. I know when a woman is with child. I can see it in her eyes and on her skin. I can smel it.

Sometimes I can even tel when a woman’s having another man’s baby, on account of the skin around her eyes, which is darker ’cos she’s frightened her husband might find out.

“I tried to say something to Mrs. El iot but she cal ed me crazy and laughed. She must have told young Cate ’cos she avoided me after that. She wouldn’t come to the house if I was working.”

Details shiver and shift, finding their places. Events are no longer figments or mysteries, no longer part of my imagining. Barnaby
knew
I was in Amsterdam. And even before I mentioned Samira he
knew
she was having twins. He read Cate’s e-mails and began covering her tracks.

At first he probably intended to protect his precious reputation. Later he and his wife came up with another plan. They would finish what Cate started. Barnaby contacted Shawcroft with a message: “Cate and Felix are dead but the deal isn’t.”

Why would Shawcroft agree? He had to. Barnaby had the e-mails. He could go to the police and expose the il egal adoptions and baby broking. Blackmail is an ugly word. So is kidnapping.

At the funeral Barnaby told me he was going to fight for the twins. “I want
both
of them,” he said. I didn’t realize what he meant. He already had one—Claudia. He wanted the boy. And his tirade at the lawyer’s office and the scene at my house weren’t just for show. He was frightened that he might be denied, if not by Samira, then by me.

The El iots swore Yvonne to secrecy. They charged her with looking after Claudia and hopeful y her brother if they could unite the twins. If the scandal unraveled and Shawcroft was exposed, they could play the grieving parents, trying to protect their daughter’s precious legacy, their grandchildren.

Yvonne accepted the heaviest burden. She couldn’t risk taking Claudia to a doctor. She tried her own remedies: running hot taps, fil ing the bathroom with steam, trying to help her breathe. She dosed her with droplets of paracetamol, rubbed her with warm flannels, lay awake beside her through the night, listening to her lungs fil with fluid.

Barnaby came to see the baby, his thumbs hitched in his belt and his feet splayed. He peered over the cot with a fixed smile, looking vaguely disappointed. Perhaps he wanted the boy—the healthy twin.

Meanwhile, Claudia grew sicker and Yvonne more desperate.

“I couldn’t take it anymore,” she whispers, lifting her gaze to the ceiling. “She was dying. Every time she coughed her body shook until she didn’t have the strength to cough. That’s when I cal ed the ambulance.”

She blinks at me. “She’s going to die, isn’t she?”

“We don’t know that.”

“It’s going to be my fault. Arrest me. Lock me up. I deserve it.”

I want to stop her talking about death. “Who chose the name?”

“It’s Mrs. El iot’s name.”

“Her first name is Ruth.”

“Her middle name. I know you don’t have much time for Mrs. El iot but she’s harder on herself than she is on anyone else.” What I feel most is resentment. Maybe that’s part of the process of grieving. Cate doesn’t feel as though she’s gone. I keep thinking that she’s just walked off in the middle of things and wil come back presently and sort this mess out.

I have spent weeks delving into her life, investigating her movements and motives and I stil don’t understand how she could have risked so much and endangered so many. I keep entertaining the hope that I’l stumble upon the answer in some cache of her papers or a dusty bundle of letters. But I know it’s not going to happen. One half of the truth is lying upstairs, pinned like an insect to a glass display case. The other half is being looked after by Social Services.

It sounds preposterous but I’m stil trying to justify Cate’s actions, trying to conjure up a friendship from the afterlife. She was an inept thief, a childless wife and a foolish dreamer. I don’t want to think about her anymore. She has spoiled her own memory.

“The police are going to need a statement,” I say.

Yvonne nods, wiping her cheeks.

She doesn’t stand as I leave. And although her face is turned to the window, I know she’s watching me.

“New Boy” Dave is stil beside Claudia in the NICU, sitting forward on a chair, peering through the glass. We sit together. He takes my hand. I don’t know for how long. The clock on the wal doesn’t seem to change. Not even for a second. Perhaps that’s what happens in a place like this: time slows down. Every second is made to count.

You are a very lucky little girl, Claudia. Do you know why? You have
two
mothers. One of them you’l never meet but that’s OK, I’l tel you about her. She made some mistakes but I’m sure you won’t judge her too harshly. Your other mother is also very special. Young. Beautiful. Sad. Sometimes life can turn on the length of an eyelash, even one as smal as yours.

The ward manager touches my shoulder. A police officer wants to talk to me on the phone.

Forbes sounds far away. “The Gal aghers have given a statement. I’m on my way to arrest Julian Shawcroft.”

“That’s good. I found the girl. She’s very sick.”

He doesn’t rant this time. “Who should we be talking to?”

“Barnaby El iot and his wife, along with their housekeeper, Yvonne Moncrieffe.”

Behind me a door opens and I hear the sound of an electronic alarm. Through an observation window I notice curtains being drawn around Claudia’s crib.

The phone is no longer in my hand. Like everyone else I seem to be moving. I push through the curtains. Someone pushes me back and I stumble.

“What’s wrong? What are they doing?”

A doctor is issuing instructions. A hand covers Claudia’s face, holding a mask. A bag is squeezed and squeezed again. The mask is lifted briefly and a tube is slipped into her nose before being slowly fed into her lungs. White tape crosses her cheeks.

Dave has hold of my arm, trying to pul me away.

“What’s happening?”

“We have to wait outside.”

“They’re hurting her.”

“Let them do their job.”

This is my fault. My mistake. If I had been stronger, fitter, faster, I would have saved Claudia from Pearl. She would have gone straight to hospital instead of being smuggled off the ferry. She would never have gone to Yvonne or caught a lung infection.

Thoughts like this plague me as I count down the minutes—fifteen of them, stretched and deformed by my imagination. The door swings open. A young doctor emerges.

“What happened?”

“The blood gas monitor triggered the alarm. Her oxygen levels had fal en too low. She’s too weak to breathe on her own so we’ve put her on a ventilator. We’l help her breathe for a while and see how strong she is tomorrow.”

The sense of relief saps what energy I have left and I feel suddenly dizzy. My eyes are sticky and I can’t get rid of the coppery taste in my mouth. I stil haven’t told Samira and already my heart has been shredded.

13

Sometimes London is a parody of itself. Today is like that. The sky is fat and heavy and the wind is cold, although not cold enough to snow. Ladbrokes is offering 3 to 1 on a white Christmas in London. Al it takes is a single snowflake to fal on the rooftop of the Met Office.

The bail hearing is today. I’m wearing my court clothes: a red pencil skirt, cream blouse and a short jacket that is cut wel enough to have an expensive label but has no label at al .

Shawcroft has been charged with people trafficking, forced pregnancy and offenses under the Child Protection Act. The penalty for trafficking alone is up to fourteen years. More charges are pending, as wel as possible extradition to the Netherlands.

Samira is sitting on the bed watching me apply my makeup. An overcoat lies across her lap. She has been dressed for hours, after waking early and praying. She won’t have to give evidence until the trial, which could be a year away, but she wants to come along for today’s hearing.

“Shawcroft is stil only a suspect,” I say. “Under our legal system a suspect is innocent until
proven
guilty.”

“But we know he
is
guilty.”

“Yes but a jury has to decide that after hearing al the evidence.”

“What is bail?”

“A judge wil sometimes let a defendant out of prison just until the trial if he or she promises not to run away or approach any of the witnesses. As a way of guaranteeing this, the judge wil ask for a large amount of money, which the defendant won’t get back if he breaks the law or doesn’t show up for the trial.” She looks astonished. “He wil pay the judge money?”

“The money is like a security deposit.”

“A bribe.”

“No, not a bribe.”

“So you are saying Brother could pay money and get out of jail.”

“Wel , yes, but it’s not what you think.”

The conversation keeps going round in circles. I’m not explaining it very wel .

“I’m sure it won’t happen,” I reassure her. “He won’t be able to hurt anyone again.”

It has been three weeks since Claudia left hospital. I stil worry about her—she seems so smal compared to her brother—but the infection has gone and she’s putting on weight.

The twins have become tabloid celebrities, Baby X and Baby Y, without first names or surnames. The judge deciding custody has ordered DNA tests on the twins and medical reports from Amsterdam. Samira wil have to prove she is their mother and then decide what she wants to do.

Despite being under investigation, Barnaby has maintained his campaign for custody, hiring and sacking lawyers on a weekly basis. During the first custody hearing, Judge Freyne threatened to jail him for contempt for continual y interjecting and making accusations of bias.

I have had my own hearing to deal with—a disciplinary tribunal in front of three senior officers. I tendered my resignation on the first day. The chairman refused to accept it.

“I thought I was making it easier for them,” I told Ruiz.

“They can’t sack you and they don’t want to let you go,” he explained. “Imagine the headlines.”

“So what do they want?”

“To lock you away in an office somewhere—where you can’t cause any trouble.”