Dangerfield’s face did not crack. ‘Right then, you and the Reverend are her official carers. I asked him and he was happy to be named. As such, it’s procedure to run a police check. It looks likely your responsibility will only carry over until tomorrow, but we are endeavouring to have her in the hands of professionals at the earliest opportunity.’ He looked up at the window. ‘Things are bad out there now; no idea what the damage will be, especially now it’s dark. But I’m glad she’s in good hands. It means I can get back out there.’
‘She shouldn’t be in the hands of a professional though, should she?’ Tamsyn asked, stopping him for a moment. ‘Well, she should as a last resort, but really she should be in the hands of her mother. I mean, what are you doing to find her? She’s probably a young girl, probably terrified, and who knows what sort of physical state she might be in … and in this weather. Has anyone searched the churchyard, or the church? What are you doing to find her?’
Sergeant Dangerfield pressed his lips into a thin line.
‘It won’t have escaped your notice that we have been dealing with something of a crisis here,’ he said. ‘We don’t have a station in Poldore. It was pure good luck that me and two of my men were here, and it’s been down to your brother and the other lifeboat volunteers that we’ve managed to bring so many of the elderly and vulnerable and sick up to Castle House …’
‘I’m sure Tamsyn understands that, Jeff,’ Jed said as he entered the room, which made Tamsyn feel sure he’d been standing outside listening through the crack in the door. ‘She just has a very real concern for the child’s mother. And she’s right to. Things move quickly in these situations, you know that. In many ways, the storm, the flood, the delay in being able to get Mo to the hospital or social services, it’s a blessing in disguise. It allows some time to try and bring her and her mother back together again. No one is saying that you aren’t doing everything for the community; we know you are. But Tamsyn wouldn’t be doing her job as Mo’s carer if she wasn’t concerned about reuniting her with her mother.’
‘Maybe she is already here,’ Tamsyn said, as Mo stirred in her arms. ‘I mean, if so many people have arrived, maybe her mother is here and we might be able to work out who she is. Where is everyone?’
‘Sue’s filled up her guest rooms, but a lot of the younger ones are in the great hall,’ the sergeant said. ‘Sue seems to have a number of camp beds and sleeping bags left over from her days as Brown Owl. Bit of a festival atmosphere, if anything; you know what teenagers are like.’
‘The chances are she is a teenager, or at least someone young and with no one to turn to.’
‘Well, there’s not much we can do at the moment,’ the sergeant told her, not unkindly. ‘We’ll see what the situation is like at dawn, when hopefully the roads will be clear, and we might be able to get a call through to the local media, the radio stations. We will do our best to find her, Miss Thorne, I promise you.’
‘OK,’ Tamsyn said, smiling politely. ‘Well, my sisters and mother are waiting for us in our allocated room. It’s going to be quite the family reunion!’
Tamsyn got to her feet, realising that she had managed to stand while holding Mo and felt quite proud of herself. ‘I’ll look forward to getting an update from you in the morning.’
Sergeant Dangerfield nodded.
Jed waited for the door of the snug to close before turning to Tamsyn.
‘What are you up to?’
‘Who says I am up to anything?’ Tamsyn asked him, offended, although as it turned out, she did have a plan.
‘Your face,’ Jed smiled as he looked at her. ‘Your face has a textbook “I’m up to something” expression.’
‘And that’s why I always lose at poker,’ Tamsyn said. ‘I’m an open book.’
‘Although I do like to think you don’t get to do my job for the number of years I’ve done it and not learn to read people,’ Jed said. ‘Tell me, what’s your plan?’
‘My plan? Well, really,’ Tamsyn said. ‘I bid a goodnight to you, kind sir.’
‘“Kind Reverend”, if you are going to go all Jane Austen on me,’ Jed reminded her. ‘And you seem to have forgotten that we are both responsible for Mo. If you have some sort of crazy idea to go out there and look for her mother yourself, then you need to tell me about it.’
‘I wouldn’t take her out in this!’ Tamsyn said. ‘That’s not what I was planning. I was just thinking of taking her for a walk around Castle House, where there are people. In the great hall, the kitchen. I might not have lived in Poldore for a few years, but I know this town. Every single person here will have heard about Mo by now. They will know that I’m the one caring for her; they will know who she is. I just want to see if there is anyone here who reacts to her in a certain way, who could be … you know … her mum.’
‘Not actually a bad idea,’ Jed said, looking mildly surprised. Tamsyn wondered what it was about the first few hours of their meeting that had obviously led him to think of her as mostly bonkers: whether it was the hair, the weeping, or the inability to know how baby clothes work. Or perhaps he’d heard tales of her dissolute youth. But in any event, he seemed genuinely surprised that she had a good plan, which rankled with her a little, although she kept this to herself.
‘That’s what I thought,’ she said, pulling Lucy’s baggy jeans up around her hips, and wishing to God that Lucy hadn’t found her a pink and fluffy top to wear with it. Smart women with good plans rarely wore pink fluffy tops, in her experience.
‘Well, they’ve brought a lot of people in. The odds are still slim that she is here, but it’s possible. God has a strange way of bringing together the people who need to be together, when it really matters.’
‘Right,’ Tamsyn said, suddenly feeling rather awkward. ‘That’s nice.’
‘That makes you uncomfortable,’ Jed noticed, tipping his head to one side as he appraised her sudden shift in body language. ‘Me talking about God. Even given that I am a vicar and do my job in a church. It’s probably the equivalent of getting freaked out when you start telling everyone that purple is the new black.’
‘Purple will never be the new black,’ Tamsyn assured him. ‘And no, it doesn’t make me uncomfortable, honestly.’ Although secretly she had to admit that she found him easier to talk to when she was noticing his beautifully shaped upper lip, and the way his skin had a slightly golden hue to it. It had been a very long time since she had been so instantly attracted to a man. How typical of her life that when it did happen it would have to be a man who was so … well, just so different from her in every single way. ‘It’s just that … well, I don’t think I believe in God.’
‘Don’t think you do?’ Jed asked her. ‘So there’s room for doubt?’
‘I don’t know, maybe not, actually. I’m sorry. Do you have to attempt to convert me, or something? Is that in the handbook?’
‘No,’ Jed smiled. ‘But I am not going to pretend that I don’t have faith, or stop talking about it, or expressing my love for God. Is that OK?’
‘Seems fair enough,’ she said. ‘Now, let’s go out on operation Mo.’
Just as Sergeant Dangerfield had predicted, it seemed to be the younger dispossessed people of Poldore that had collected in Sue’s great hall, some on Sue’s strange collection of camp beds that she had had stowed away in one of the many old outbuildings, stables and sheds that made up the maze that was Castle House. Some had grabbed a duvet or a sleeping bag on their way out, while others were huddled under one of the many rough-looking pink and grey blankets that Sue had also produced. Unlike the older generations who were engaged in muted conversation in the kitchen, speculating on what bad news the dawn might bring, anxious about the damage that was being wrought right now on their own houses, and hoping for the best for the people they hadn’t been able to contact, the teenagers were thoroughly enjoying the whole impromptu sleepover.
They’d grouped themselves in little circles, and there were a couple of guitars playing laboured covers of numbers that Tamsyn thought she might recognise as being by the latest rock band. There were some furtive-looking couples who jumped apart the moment Tamsyn and Jed entered the room, clearly up to a little more than holding hands under those prickly blankets, and that particular scent of hormones hung in the air, signalling that youth was present and very much incorrect.
‘Looks like you’re making the most of the circumstances,’ Jed said cheerfully to a group of long-haired boys, who scowled at him from under their fringes, which made Tamsyn smile. He might be a handsome vicar, and popular within the town, but talking to teens was not his forte. Not like her; she worked in fashion. It was her job to be down with the kids.
‘Great playing,’ she told a girl with a guitar. ‘Coldplay?’
‘No,’ the girl said, shaking her head and looking at her friend in disgust. ‘They suck.’
‘Oh, well …’ Tamsyn shifted Mo from one arm to the other. ‘Very derivative of Coldplay, if you ask me.’
‘I didn’t,’ the girl said. ‘I wrote it myself, actually. It’s had thirty-seven views on YouTube.’
‘Wow! Thirty-seven thousand?’ Tamsyn asked.
‘No. Thirty-seven.’ The girl scowled and blushed, and Tamsyn remembered that when she was about the same age she would move heaven and earth not to have to exchange words with someone more than a couple of years older than her. There was no playing it cool with these girls, so she might as well stop trying.
‘Is that the baby?’ Another girl from another group spoke up. This one looked less frightening than the last, with lovely wavy blonde hair and the sort of complexion you only have when you are that young. ‘The one that someone left at the church?’
‘Yes,’ Tamsyn said, eyeing her closely for signs of recently having given birth. ‘We’re very worried about her mother … She must be frightened and lonely and in need of medical attention …’
‘Oh my God, she is
so
cute,’ the girl stood up, and turned out to be wearing nothing more than an outsize t-shirt that was just long enough to cover her behind. Jed turned away at once, and started talking in earnest to a group of boys, who rather hastily hid what it was they had been looking at on their mobile phones under their sleeping bags as he crouched down next to them. ‘I thought she’d be ugly or something, but she’s not even!’
‘Uh-huh,’ Tamsyn blinked, searching the girls’ open faces for any similarities to the baby, but she had to admit that unless Mo’s mother turned out to be a red-faced, thin-haired tubby person who bore a striking resemblance to Buddha, it was very unlikely that she looked much like her daughter did at the moment. Besides, she had read somewhere that babies always looked like their fathers when they were first born, a primeval evolutionary development that stopped the male of the species feeding its young to a sabre-toothed tiger when they became too inconvenient.
‘Poor little thing nearly didn’t make it,’ Tamsyn said to a chorus of oohs from the girls, as they clambered to their feet and crowded around the baby, cooing over Mo, who for the moment was oblivious to their attentions. If any one of these glossy-haired, creamy-skinned young women was her mother, then the baby didn’t have a sixth sense about it, and besides, none of them looked like they had just given birth. They all looked as if they had just arrived from the sea in half a clam shell, every single one of them an Aphrodite in her own way. Tamsyn remembered how Keira had looked after the twins had entered the world. She resembled Wile E. Coyote, just after he’d been run over by a steamroller driven by the Road Runner. These girls, barely more than children themselves, all looked as fresh as daisies, despite the drama of the evening.
‘I don’t suppose you have any ideas, do you?’ Tamsyn asked them, glancing over at Jed, who was resolutely engaging a young man in a deathly tedious conversation about the finer points of Minecraft, without raising his eyes towards the gaggle of half-dressed girls. ‘I mean, anyone you know? Any friends at school, perhaps? Friends of friends, who might have got into trouble? Not known where to turn?’
‘Oh, well,’ the first girl said, cheerfully. ‘Daisy Chambers got pregnant. Her dad said he’d kill her boyfriend. It was
hilarious
!’
‘Did she?’ Tamsyn asked her, looking around. ‘Is she here?’
‘No, they live up top,’ the girl told her, ‘on the other side of the river where the flooding isn’t so bad. But she wouldn’t have left her baby on a church doorstep. For starters he’s, like, six months old, and secondly, she and her boyfriend moved in with her mum and dad, and she still gets to go out every other Friday.’
‘Right,’ Tamsyn said. ‘So you don’t know anyone who you think might have panicked, and abandoned a baby?’
‘
No
!’ Another girl, dark-haired this time, chimed in, incredulous. ‘This isn’t the twentieth century, you know! First of all, we all know how to use contraception, and second of all, there’s no shame in having a baby any more. Why would anyone want to hide it? I don’t know who left that baby, but it wasn’t one of us.’
There was a chorus of agreement from the girls, and Tamsyn had to admit they had a point. The average young person was too clued up and sensible to fall pregnant by mistake, and even if they did, the chances of them leaving their baby somewhere were very small indeed.
Just then, another girl caught her eye, this one sitting on a camp bed on her own, her knees drawn under her chin, staring at a book that she was supposed to be reading but clearly wasn’t. The book was upside down.
‘You’re missing the mark if you think Kirsten could be the baby’s mum.’ One of the pretty girls curled her lip. ‘She’d have had to have sex with someone, and if she had a baby she’d probably sacrifice it to Satan, or something.’
The other girls giggled, and Tamsyn found herself moving Mo out of their grasp, feeling quite considerably less charmed by them than she had. The lone girl looked pale, lost. She certainly didn’t fit in with the others, a state of affairs that Tamsyn had once been used to. There had been nothing about her at the same age that meant girls naturally wanted to befriend her, or boys were drawn to ask her out. She was awkward, gawky, skinny and sharp. It would have been so easy for her to be the girl that was always left out, like this one clearly was. Except that her brother, who was handsome and popular and loved by all, never left her behind. And her best friend, Merryn, the Queen of the May, made sure that Tamsyn was always part of everything. Besides, nobody knew how to half-inch four cans from the Spar like Tamsyn did.