The Push

by Claire McGowan

My heart began to hammer. Dimly, I told myself, you should be sitting down, this is bad for the baby. ‘What? You mean like it bounced up from the road, or . . . ?’

  ‘Nah, nah. That can’t happen. Someone put it there, didn’t they? You know anyone got a grudge against you, Mrs Cole?’

  Alison

  Diana was in the pub when she went in after work, and waved over from a table she’d managed to get, despite the crush at the bar. Alison moved towards her, aware that she had a fixed smile on her face, that this was awkward somehow, like a date almost. ‘Well done on getting a table.’

  ‘Oh, I just flashed my badge at them.’ Alison knew she was joking. Diana was not the type to break rules, she could already tell. So why then were they meeting out of school?

  ‘You’re OK for drinks?’

  Diana indicated a bottle of white wine in a cooler. ‘I got you a glass. Unless you want something else?’

  ‘Oh no, this is great.’ Even though she wasn’t supposed to be drinking because of fertility bollocks. Alison worried she didn’t have the strength of character to be someone with dietary needs, who didn’t drink or eat meat or gluten or anything like that. Even if she had a severe allergy she’d probably just mumble, oh, it’s fine, lovely thanks, as her mother had taught her, and eat whatever it was, then suffer the consequences. At least if you were pregnant people respected your boundaries.

  ‘Cheers.’ Diana had poured her out a glass of wine, and now lifted her own. Alison clinked awkwardly, then let the cold liquid slip down her throat. Ahh. How could she give this up, on top of not having a baby? ‘Anything from Jax Culville?’

  ‘Nope. But she’s jumpy, that’s for sure.’ This case was like a hall of mirrors – she’d been excited when they’d uncovered that little nugget about Jax, that she’d been the one to whistle-blow on Mark Jarvis, and she’d testified against him. His wife, who’d had a miscarriage before the verdict, had shown up in court shouting and screaming that it was all Jax’s fault, that she’d planted the material because Mark had dumped her after a squalid affair. And sure enough, Jax had been rattled by Alison’s knowledge. But not enough to tell her anything she didn’t know already. She hadn’t seen Jarvis in fifteen years, she claimed, had no intention of contacting him. Why would she? A good point, Alison had to concede. Then there was that thing with the baby at the barbecue.

  Was it true? Alison had asked Jax, watching her face. Had she left the baby unattended?

  Yes, Jax had admitted. She had perhaps been longer in the kitchen than she realised. What was wrong with these women? Alison had wondered. They went to such lengths to have babies, and then they barely looked after them. She caught herself – she didn’t know what it was like. Jax clearly wasn’t doing so well, perhaps she even had postnatal depression. And after all, no harm had come to the baby. Just a misunderstanding, poor Kelly deeply upset by it all.

  ‘So what did you want to chat about?’ she asked Diana, enjoying the cool feel of the glass in her hand.

  Diana sipped for a moment before answering. ‘I’ll be honest, Alison, I wanted an alliance. Like an old-boys’ one. But for women.’

  ‘Hmm?’ Alison was puzzled for a moment, because their boss was a woman too, and one you did not want to cross.

  ‘A non-mums one, that is.’ Diana flushed slightly, as if embarrassed. She was so young and pretty, with her clear olive skin and dark braided hair. Alison felt old just looking at her. Haggard. ‘You know, I’m having a lot of push-back from Colette on this. Like, a lot. She seems to think the women from the group are . . . I don’t know, like a new mother could never do anything bad to anyone? Are you getting that?’

  Alison thought about it, trying to suppress her conflicted feelings about being lumped into the non-mum group. ‘I suppose. She did chew me out for upsetting Monica Dunwood.’

  ‘Exactly! I just don’t see why squeezing a kid out of you makes you, I don’t know, morally better in some way. I mean, you don’t think it’s an accident, right?’

  ‘No. But I wasn’t sure you agreed.’

  ‘I didn’t to start with. But they’re all lying, right? About something, at least.’

  Alison felt a wave of relief that someone else could see it. ‘I think so. But how do we prove it? I feel like they’ve closed ranks, almost. The mums.’

  ‘Oh, there’s always cracks,’ said Diana, lifting her glass and narrowing her eyes. ‘They’re hiding something. Don’t you think?’

  Alison leaned in. She had missed this, dissecting her cases with someone out of the office, now that she didn’t work with Tom any more. ‘Yeah. But tell me your thoughts.’ Diana had been on her own visits to the couples, thorough and meticulous.

  ‘Cathy, she’s afraid of her partner, I think. Not in the usual way. But she’s definitely afraid, she defers to her in a weird way. I think she’d tell us more if we pushed. Aisha, her and the husband aren’t getting on, they don’t seem to talk at all. She told me they’d only known each other three months before the wedding. Monica Dunwood is jumpy as hell, and not just because of us, Anita’s a basket case, poor woman, and Jax . . .’

  ‘She’s interesting.’ Alison had not yet got to the bottom of Jax.

  ‘Yeah. Not coping very well, I suspect. Not to mention poor Kelly Anderson. Imagine those women rubbing their babies in her face like that. It’d be easy to snap.’

  Alison noted Diana’s identification with Kelly, who after all was near her age. She herself identified most with Jax Culville, she thought, in terms of age and background. But the woman was hiding something for sure. As Diana said, they all were. They just had to find out what, if it had any bearing on this murder. Assuming it was a murder.

  ‘Your partner, he’s in the job, too?’ Diana asked, pouring out more wine. They were getting down the bottle quickly.

  ‘Yeah. Used to be my work partner, but then. You know. He’s at Sevenoaks, gutted to be missing out on this.’

  ‘Even more yummy mummies down there.’ Diana shuddered. ‘So you and him, you didn’t want kids?’

  It felt like a slap in the face. The sudden question, the past tense of it. Alison floundered for a minute. ‘I mean, it’s not . . . we still . . . I’m only thirty-six.’

  ‘Oh yeah, yeah, I know that, I just . . . sorry. That was a rude question.’

  ‘No.’ It was, kind of, but it was one that people felt perfectly entitled to ask, and it did have a bearing on the case. ‘We’re trying.’ She hated that term; you might as well say, we’re shagging! A lot! ‘But so far . . . it’s not happening.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Did Diana’s expression shift, knowing that Alison was only reluctantly in her camp, not willingly a non-mum? ‘I just kind of assumed, the way you talked about babies . . .’

  ‘Yeah. It’s true, I’m not the biggest fan of other people’s kids. I thought it’d be different if it was my own.’ But would it? What if all this fertility stuff worked and she didn’t even like the baby in the end? ‘What about you, you don’t want them?’ She deflected the question back.

  Diana shook her head. ‘God no. Actually, I’ve had my tubes tied.’

  Alison was shocked. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. It’d ruin my career, ruin my body, my sleep . . . plus, not having kids is the single best thing you can do for climate change . . .’ She stopped, realising what she had implied. She bit her lip. ‘I’m sorry. You should totally have one if you want, of course.’

  ‘I’m trying,’ said Alison, a little tartly. She was slightly reeling from Diana’s words. There was truth in them, for sure. But to say it out loud like that . . . Alison had not really thought through the downsides of it, so fixated on the fact that it wasn’t happening.

  Diana laughed. ‘It’s so awkward, isn’t it? Like you can’t make your own choice without seeming like you’re judging other people. I’m not, you know. This is just my own.’

  ‘It’s OK.’ Alison felt a wave of camaraderie with the younger woman. ‘You’re right, it’s a trap, either way.’ She drained h
er glass. ‘Since I’m not pregnant, I can at least get smashed. Another bottle?’

  Jax – five weeks earlier

  It was pretty humiliating to be pushed into the next antenatal group in a wheelchair, but needs must. I’d paid for it, and I didn’t want to miss it. After the fiasco with failing to save the fake baby from choking, I felt I needed all the information I could get. And I didn’t want Nina and Monica disapproving behind my back. At least we had the car back, though what the mechanic had said about the stone had unsettled me even more. Who would do that? Surely it must have just got wedged in there, a freak accident. The messages had stopped. Things were alright. Weren’t they? Aaron, ever the optimist, leaned towards an accident, or the local kids just messing about.

  All eyes swivelled round as I was pushed in. Anita gasped. ‘Jax! What have you done?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing, it’s fine, just a precaution.’

  ‘She has placenta previa,’ said Aaron darkly. He didn’t think I should move at all. ‘It’s not nothing.’

  Nina looked me over. ‘I hope you’re being careful, Jax. It can be very serious. Are you on bed-rest?’

  ‘Yeah. So boring.’ I’d already binge-watched all of The Crown, and wished I had a team of private doctors like the Queen, so I could give birth in my own stateroom.

  ‘Should you be here, hon?’ That was Monica, of course, looking as healthy as an ox herself, in another maternity smock. ‘Is it worth the risk?’

  ‘There’s not much risk when I’m pushed from door to door,’ I said, trying to sound cheerful. All the same I was scared. Everyone looked so worried for me. Perhaps I should have stayed at home after all. But bed-rest couldn’t mean absolute bed-rest, could it? They didn’t really expect me to lie flat on my back for weeks? I’d go mad.

  Nina’s eyes rested on me all the same, and I wondered again why they felt so unsettlingly familiar. ‘If you’re sure, Jax. Please do take the utmost care of yourself. Just watch, don’t join in any exercises.’

  I nodded meekly. Never mind The Crown, I felt like Olivia Colman in The Favourite. Old and feeble and pathetic. Acutely aware of the healthy young man beside me, the way his T-shirt rode up to show his flat muscled stomach. Aaron and I had seen that film on a date at the Curzon in Soho, and I’d wondered why he was so quiet after, not realising he’d been horrified at the prices, and hadn’t fully understood what period of history he was watching. So many things I took for granted.

  ‘Goodness!’ Monica laughed. ‘I don’t know what it is about this group, we’re dropping like flies.’ Did she really say this? Yes, she did.

  ‘What do you mean?’ At the same time I looked around the room, noticing averted gazes, counting heads. ‘Where’s Kelly?’

  And that’s when I heard the terrible news, Kelly’s baby lost in the night, that she wouldn’t be coming back. ‘Oh my God.’ Tears pricked my eyes. ‘That’s terrible. We should send her something. Flowers, or . . .’ What could you say when something like this had happened? I almost couldn’t get at my sympathy for her, when I was so afraid for myself. Monica’s careless comment had made me wonder. Was I next? It didn’t work like that, I told myself. But clearly, it could and did happen.

  In the break, Nina approached us. Since I couldn’t stand up, Aaron had brought me over tea and this week’s baked offering, high-protein flapjacks made by Hazel, which had the consistency of lead. ‘I wanted a word, if you don’t mind.’

  I was sure I was going to be told off for something yet again. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I heard Aaron was training in accountancy. Well, I could really use someone to help get my taxes in order – you know, being freelance, nightmare – would you be up for that? I’d pay of course.’ She named a sum that was far, far too high for a bit of bookkeeping. Aaron blinked.

  ‘I work in the day, though, in the office.’

  ‘No problem. Evenings are better for me. It should take three or four nights, maybe. What do you reckon?’ She was asking him but looking at me. I thought about being alone night after night as well as day after day. I thought how much the money would mean to Aaron, that he could buy the baby a crib or a high chair.

  I put on a cheerful tone. ‘I think that’s a great offer, love, if you’re up for it. Go for it.’

  Nina nodded, and I couldn’t help but feel she looked somehow triumphant, although really it was her doing us a favour.

  The day of – Jax

  2.21 p.m.

  Kelly was gone. The baby was gone. I read something once that said people often die in disaster situations when they could in fact survive, because they don’t react fast enough. They don’t accept that the plane is on fire or the ship is going down or that they’ve been shot by a madman. Panic, and denial, those are the things that kill you. It took me several seconds to accept that the baby was gone, standing on Monica’s lawn, very aware of my bare feet on the grass. Monica had made us take our shoes off at the door, of course. Aaron was gesturing wildly at me. ‘Jax! Where is she?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ I tried to say, but I wasn’t sure if words came out or not.

  Voices were overlapping all around me. Anita, Hazel. ‘Should we call the police?’

  ‘Let’s look first, they can’t be far . . .’

  ‘Are we sure she’s not upstairs? Anita, go and look.’ Hazel, taking charge.

  People were scattering, looking for my child. I saw Monica, an irritated look on her face, and Ed, vaguely ashamed. Why? I saw Jeremy, quietly combing through the bushes. I thought how small she was, how easy it would be to hide her. I saw Cathy and Aisha at the kitchen door, their own babies safely in slings. Maybe if I’d had a sling, this wouldn’t have happened. Strangely, it was Rahul who came to me, grasped my elbow, spoke in a low and calm voice I had not heard him use before. ‘It’s OK. She won’t have hurt her. They don’t, in this kind of case. She’ll be fine. She can’t have got far.’

  This kind of case. It only occurred to me afterwards how quickly we’d all assumed we knew what kind of case this was. That Kelly, who’d lost her child, had taken mine, as if that was something women did all the time. The conclusions we’d leaped to. I had to do something. I began to beat at the bushes with my hands, getting scratched. I lifted up the rug her chair had been on, as if she had somehow crawled under it, when she couldn’t even turn over yet by herself. She was simply gone, as if I’d blinked and her tiny body had vaporised. A voice in my head, my mother’s voice perhaps, said that I deserved this, that I hadn’t loved her enough. That I had complained about this gift, this child at thirty-eight when I’d thought I’d have none. I don’t know how long Hadley was even missing. But in those seconds that stretched forever, I had given her up entirely, and accepted a future where I’d had a baby for only two weeks, and then lost her, through my own failure.

  It couldn’t have been very long. A shout went up from the back of the garden, ‘She’s here!’ Monica’s and Ed’s house had an unusually large garden, of course, with a gate that backed on to the park behind. That part of the lawn had been allowed to grow slightly wild, in what Monica described as a ‘bee meadow’, to help ‘our little buzzing friends’. Aaron came through the park gate then, Hadley tight in his arms, held like a bag of shopping. Kelly followed, her face red and tear-stained.

  She said, ‘I took her to see the park! She loved it!’

  Everyone stood around gawping, not sure what had really just occurred. Had she taken the baby? Was it just a misunderstanding? Kelly’s sobs were harsh and rasping. She wrapped her arms around herself, as if trying to hold her own child, who was gone. ‘No one was looking after her,’ she cried. ‘She was all by herself. She was scared. I just . . . I just took her to see the flowers.’

  How quickly it turned. From blaming Kelly, poor unstable Kelly, everyone now turned to look at me. Blaming me, the bad mother. And unlike Kelly, I had no excuse.

  Alison

  Alison barged into the station with perhaps unnecessary force. She’d rolled in at almost 1 a.m. the night before
, half-cut, and had a vague memory of Tom smoothing the duvet over her, placing a pint of water on the nightstand. When she woke up the glass was still full and her head was pounding. This bloody case. Were they all lying, was that it? She couldn’t seem to get it straight in her head, who’d been where and when that day, who had seen what. What if it was just an accident, and she’d put these new mums through an interrogation for nothing? Wasted time, budget, energy?

  Even the incident of the missing baby appeared to have been resolved easily, all a misunderstanding. Poor Kelly had gone home, weeping. Jeremy had driven her, so he was also off the hook for what had happened next. Which was still not exactly clear.

  Everyone had a different story. Anita – that she’d been waiting for her husband in the side garden. Was there any way to prove that? Kelly Anderson had cracked under the pressure of being around all those babies – might Anita have been feeling similarly unbalanced? Then there was Aisha, and the mysterious husband they still had to track down, the tension there which both she and Diana had sensed. Aisha and Rahul had been down at the barbecue with Hazel, which both seemed to corroborate, but there was a strange vagueness in their account all the same, a gap that Alison could sense the edges of. Cathy’s story was even vaguer still, and she’d admitted to being in the house, as had Jax. Then there was Aaron, Jax’s young partner, who Alison also still needed to interview, and Monica’s other daughter, who the group hadn’t even known existed, as well as her ex-husband. As for Monica and Ed, there was a lot of tension there, but whether it related to the case or not, who could tell? Several people had vouched for them being in the kitchen at the time of the fall, dealing with some kind of dessert emergency.

  Forensics might shed some light, but it was taking ages. If they could match the hairs in the victim’s bracelet to anyone at the party, that would help. But she’d have to wait for the results. So she was no closer to knowing the truth. And yet around forty minutes after baby Hadley had been found safe, Nina da Souza had plunged from Monica’s glass balcony, hitting the rockery below and dying instantly. In a group with so many secrets and lies, was it possible it really was an accident?