Her Sister's Child

by Alison James

  ‘I imagine they spoke to plenty of people, not just me.’

  ‘But they asked you if you knew what might have happened to Lizzie’s baby. Because they had evidence from the post-mortem that she’d given birth just before she died.’

  There’s a long silence.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘I would have told them the truth: that I hadn’t seen Lizzie in years, so knew nothing about it.’

  Paula grips the steering wheel. ‘When I tried asking you about it back then, when I was at school, you told me I was just imagining that Lizzie was pregnant.’

  ‘Well, how do we know you weren’t? The police never found any baby, so it was safest to assume there was no baby in the first place.’ There’s a forced bravado in Wendy’s voice, making her sound harsh. It’s as though she is trying to convince herself – as much as her daughter – that she believes this.

  ‘But, Mum—’

  ‘Sorry, love, I’ve got to go, there’s someone at the door.’

  There’s only silence at the end of the line.

  Paula looks down at Lizzie’s grave, before placing the potted poinsettia on the ground in front of it.

  In our hearts always

  She always reads the headstone when she comes. She could never forget what it says, but it’s part of the ritual, part of communing with her sister’s spirit. Not that Lizzie would have approved of the carved message. She would have preferred it to say something along the lines of: She was great fun, for an alkie

  It’s a bitterly cold Saturday afternoon, but the glow of the autumn foliage has not quite given way to winter. Dry leaves cover the cemetery paths, but the trees are still partially clothed in crimson and amber. Paula felt a strong urge to come today, to try and spur herself on. Find some inspiration to carry on with the search even though they’ve hit a dead end. Predictably her mother had been no help.

  Safest to assume there was no baby…

  She looks at the surrounding graves, studies the size and proportions of the burial plots. Some of them, she knows, have more than one person buried in them. Would Lizzie’s baby be permitted burial here, with her mother’s ashes, if it were to turn out that she had died? The possibility that this small human, all that is left of her sister, could also be gone fills her with sorrow. Even worse is the idea that they will never know for sure either way.

  However things turn out, she’s going to move heaven and earth to bring her mother here eventually. She knows that, deep down, Wendy did love Lizzie, and that she needs, finally, to mourn. And Paula loved her sister too, even though at times she was hard to love. She has happy memories from before the drinking started: Lizzie playing dress-up with her, reading to her, teaching her to roller skate.

  ‘If only you could have stayed sober, Lizzie,’ she tells the empty air. ‘You would have made a great mum.’

  As she turns and walks back to her car, her phones rings.

  ‘Is that Paula Donnelly?’

  ‘Speaking.’ She recognises the voice, but can’t place it.

  ‘It’s Alice. Alice Evershott.’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Since you were here, I’ve been thinking and thinking about… what might be in the garden and I just can’t get it out of my head. I don’t think I’ll be able to rest until I know. So, I was going to ask…’ She trails off.

  ‘It’s okay, go on.’

  ‘Do you think there’s any chance you could get the people with that equipment here at short notice? Only Adrian’s away this weekend, so I thought it might be a good time to have a go… at looking. And if there’s nothing there, well, he doesn’t ever need to know, does he?’

  Three hours later, Paula and Johnny are in the back garden at number twenty-one, Ranmoor Road.

  As soon as Alice Evershott had hung up, Paula phoned Johnny, and within a couple of hours, his friend arranged to send one of his employees to the site. The technician, Lee, has just arrived with the GPR equipment and Alice joins Paula to watch from the kitchen window as he sets it up. Like Paula, she is probably feeling a little underwhelmed both by Lee, who looks about fifteen, and his scanner. It resembles a small yellow lawnmower with a digital screen fixed to the handle.

  His breath forming clouds in the frosty air, Lee trundles the scanner in a grid pattern across the lawn, first moving longitudinally, then turning the scanner through ninety degrees and going across it. He pushes the equipment over the patio, into the corners and under the foliage that fringes the lawn.

  ‘To be honest, I was expecting something a bit more dramatic,’ Paula whispers to Alice. ‘You know, some bleeps or flashes, or an alarm going off.’ The radar remains eerily quiet.

  Eventually Lee brings the GPR to a halt. ‘Right, all done,’ he tells Johnny.

  ‘Is that it?’ asks Paula, who has left Alice in the house and headed outside. Her heart sinks like a stone.

  ‘Not quite.’ Lee starts pressing icons on the digital screen. ‘That’s the scanning done. Now we look at the data. Everything the radar’s picked up is recorded on here.’

  The screen displays what looks like an incomprehensible jumble of lines and numbers. Lee studies it intently for a moment, then points to a large ceanothus bush at the far end of the garden. ‘It looks like there’s something buried there.’

  Johnny and Paula exchange a look.

  ‘From the time taken for the signal to bounce back from the object to the receiver, it suggests that whatever’s there is about eighteen inches from the surface.’

  Lee checks the grid on his screen, then strides down to the bush and points to the soil slightly to the right of it. ‘Here.’

  ‘Oh my God, have you found something?’ Alice comes out into the garden, her face pale, her hands clutched to her chest in panic. ‘Oh my goodness, I really didn’t expect them to find anything. What will happen now?’

  ‘Lee here says there’s definitely something.’ Johnny says. ‘Got a spade? The obvious thing is to start digging, surely?’

  But Alice is shaking her head. ‘Adrian would never forgive me. If they’ve found… what you suspect might be there… then I’m afraid I’m going to have to call the police.’

  17

  Charlie

  After two nights in hospital, Charlie and Bonnie return to the family home in Dartmouth Park.

  ‘It’s only temporary,’ Charlie tells her parents, firmly. ‘Then we’re going back to the flat.’

  They exchange an anxious glance. ‘Give it a while,’ her mother urges. ‘Don’t make a decision yet. At least not until you’ve done a few more nights of three a.m. feeds.’

  She glances down at Bonnie, tucking the blanket around her and rearranging Charlie’s faded yellow duckling at the end of her crib. The stuffed creature is a little battered after seventeen years of being fiercely loved by its owner, but it was her oldest and best-loved toy when she was young, the only possession she still has that pre-dates her adoption.

  ‘Mum, I’ll be fine. I’ve got to manage on my own some time.’ Charlie employs more bravado than she’s actually feeling. Already, she’s exhausted. But within a few days, Bonnie – who everyone agrees is a very good baby – has settled into a rudimentary routine. Charlie is adamant that she’s going to return to the flat. She doesn’t want to admit it to her family, but she’s still hopeful that Jake might return. There’s been no word from him, but surely now he will have seen on social media that his daughter has arrived. Surely that will make him want to give things another try?

  ‘How hard can it be?’ she asks, with the optimism of youth.

  ‘Hard,’ her mother replies, drily.

  ‘That’s a load of crap. Look at her now, sleeping peacefully. All I have to do is feed her every few hours, and nap when she naps. It’ll be fine.’

  But it’s not fine.

  Bonnie continues to be the dream baby, even back at the flat, but what no one could have anticipated was the thirty-something professional couple in the flat below moving out and a group of students moving in. Any
and all hours of the day and night are filled with baying laughter, booze-fuelled arguments and thumping drum and bass.

  ‘Shut up, you wankers!’ Charlie screams, thumping the floor, when they’ve woken her for the fourth or fifth time in one night. Unable to get back to sleep, she pulls up Jake’s number and tries calling it, just as she has done over and over since he disappeared.

  ‘The number you have dialled is no longer in service.’

  In desperation, she calls Hannah.

  ‘What?’ she screeches at the other end of the line. In the background are the unmistakable sounds of partying. ‘I’m out. In a bar. You’ll have to speak up.’

  ‘Can you come over?’ Charlie pleads. ‘I can’t sleep, and I don’t want to be on my own.’

  The connection is lost, but Hannah WhatsApps her later.

  In uber on way over

  Good old Hannah, thinks Charlie, as she settles Bonnie in her crib and boils the kettle to make herself a herbal tea. The neighbours downstairs start up the thumping dance music again.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ says Hannah when she arrives. ‘Noisy bastards round here, aren’t they? Never mind, babe, I’m here now.’

  But Hannah has been drinking all evening, and within fifteen minutes she’s fast asleep on the sofa, and snoring, and Bonnie is awake again for a feed. Her mother was right, Charlie thinks miserably, as her tears drip slowly onto her daughter’s fuzzy head, she can’t do this on her own. She needs another adult human being, if only to have someone to talk to. She presses ‘Dial’ once more, even though she knows the outcome.

  ‘The number you have dialled is no longer in service.’

  She sticks it out for two nights, three nights, four nights, still convinced that the door will open and Jake will walk in as though nothing has happened. But eventually the toll on her nerves becomes unsustainable.

  ‘You win,’ Charlie concedes wearily to her mother after a week of disrupted sleep. ‘Not because of the baby, because of the selfish arseholes downstairs. As soon as I can get myself organised, I’ll move home. For good.’

  18

  Paula

  ‘We will need to take a DNA sample from you, Mrs Donnelly, but I imagine you’ll be okay with that?’

  ‘Of course.’ Paula is sitting in an interview room at Wood Green police station. It’s two days since the officers arrived in Ranmoor Road, followed by a specialist crime scene team. Two days since Paula and Johnny watched helplessly from the Evershotts’ kitchen as Adrian Evershott, his weekend away disrupted, paced angrily behind them. Two days since the officers in Tyvek suits and protective booties erected a white cover tent before starting to dig at the end of the garden, while a videographer recorded the process. Two days since a small wooden box was carried out to the back of the forensics van.

  The CID officer, DI Kevin Stratton, pushes a glass of water towards Paula, offers a tissue. He’s a short, stocky man with thinning ginger hair and horn-rimmed glasses. In Paula’s opinion he looks more like an accountant than a policeman. ‘You all right to continue?’

  She nods. She wishes Johnny could have stayed with her, but she understands that their statements have to be taken separately.

  ‘So, you’ve made your statement outlining how and why you came to be looking in the garden of number twenty-one Ranmoor Road for the remains of your late sister’s child.’

  Paula nods again.

  ‘Okay.’ He looks at her over the rims of his glasses. ‘I’m afraid I can now confirm that the skeletal remains of a small male infant were found buried in the garden. Obviously the pathologists are conducting further tests.’

  She takes a sip of water and hugs her arms tightly around herself, feeling suddenly cold. So it was true. She had so wanted it not to be. But a boy. She hadn’t been expecting that. Neither had Lizzie.

  ‘Now, I’m going to show you some pictures…’

  DI Stratton pushes a tablet across the table towards her, displaying a photograph. ‘And I want you to tell me if you recognise this as having belonged to your sister.’

  Paula stares uncomprehendingly at the first picture of what looks like a dirty, bluish-grey rag. The second picture he flicks to is a close-up of one corner of the rag. A clear capital ‘N’. She bends her head so that her face is nearer the image, letting her eyes scan over all of it: top to bottom, side to side. And only then does she realise what she’s looking at. An embroidered letter, exactly like the ‘S’ on the pink blanket she has at home. A blue baby blanket. Blue for a boy.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘that wasn’t my sister’s.’

  ‘You said your sister had some baby things at her flat. But this wasn’t among them?’

  ‘No. Definitely not.’

  ‘So you haven’t seen it before?’

  Paula hesitates. ‘No.’ She wonders whether she should now mention the pink blanket. Perhaps Alice Evershott has already done so, when she gave her own statement. ‘It must have belonged to Marian Glynn.’

  DI Stratton gives a grim little smile. ‘We will certainly be speaking to Mrs Glynn as a matter of urgency. Sussex Police are sending officers to her home to bring her in for questioning.’

  ‘Well, there you are then,’ says Paula. She feels suddenly overwhelmed, unwilling to talk. ‘You’ll soon have her side of the story. Can I go now?’

  Johnny is waiting for her in reception.

  He opens his mouth to speak but she cuts him off. ‘Let’s get out of here. I need a bloody drink.’

  They go to the Prince on Finsbury Road. Johnny fetches a pint for himself and a glass of red wine for Paula, who finds a table in a corner.

  ‘They told me the baby they found at the bottom of the garden is a little boy. And here’s the thing that will blow your mind: he was buried with an initialled blanket identical to the one Alice Evershott gave us. Only it was blue. And it had the letter “N” on it.’

  Johnny’s eyes widen over the rim of his pint glass. He sets it down slowly on the table. ‘So if the baby we’ve found is “N”, then who is “S”? And more to the point… where is she?’

  PART TWO

  2003

  19

  Marian

  ‘They’re going to have to run some tests.’

  ‘Uh huh.’ Her husband’s voice is muted slightly by a poor phone connection, but Marian Glynn can tell that he’s subdued. ‘What kind of tests?’

  ‘On both of us. It’s standard procedure; I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about. I’m sure they’ll all be fine. And if the results are okay, they’ll accept us for treatment.’

  There’s a beat of silence. ‘Okay, well… let’s talk about it this evening when I get home.’

  ‘What time will you be back?’

  ‘Normal sort of time. About seven.’

  ‘I’ll make dinner for us, shall I?’

  ‘Sure, if you can be bothered. Otherwise, we can grab takeout.’

  ‘Okay… bye, darling.’

  But Marian is speaking into dead air. Tom has already hung up.

  She goes back to her desk in the always busy, always over-stretched social services department in the North London borough where she lives and works. After making a cup of instant coffee and grabbing a biscuit from the tin on the filing cabinet, she fields a call about a child that a neighbour suspects is being abused, and another from a school where a pupil hasn’t attended for several weeks.

  ‘Any news on the Taylor court case?’ she calls over to her colleague and friend, Angela Dixon. A hearing is due for a couple whose three children have been taken away and put into care because of the couple’s inability to care for them adequately. The same old story: family breakdown due to drink, drugs, petty crime, poverty.

  ‘Not yet. We’ll be able to hear Darren Taylor kicking off from here when it happens.’ Angela grins. She’s a sturdy woman, both physically and emotionally; her cheerful mood is rarely knocked off course. ‘Christ knows why he’s so keen to get the kids back.’

  ‘Probably so he can spend the benefits on
cannabis,’ Marian says with a sigh. She thinks of her job as a leaky boat. All she can do is bail out water as fast as possible to stop it from sinking, but the thing will never be an invincible whole. The excessive caseload, fuelled by a slashed budget and increasing social need, means doing several things at once and rarely doing anything well. It’s simply a matter of trying to stay afloat.

  ‘It’s Terry’s birthday,’ Angela observes now. ‘I think there’s going to be cake in the meeting room in a bit.’

  ‘I’ve got to go out on a call,’ Marian says, standing up and shouldering her bag. ‘Lizzie Armitage.’

  ‘Ah.’ Angela raises her eyebrows to indicate that no further explanation is needed. ‘Good luck.’

  As soon as she sees Lizzie’s eyes, Marian knows that she’s drinking again.

  It’s no big surprise. Lizzie Armitage is her longest-standing client, an alcoholic who has been in and out of prison for theft and fraud a few times, and occasionally sober for brief periods. She’s not as thin and gaunt as she usually is, having gained some weight during a recent stint in rehab. But as soon as Marian sees the flushed face and dazed expression, she knows. She knows that when she gets closer, she’ll be able to smell the booze. She’s seen it enough times before.

  Lizzie is beyond speech, staring blankly at her social worker with an unfocussed gaze, wiping her nose with the cuff of her long-sleeved T-shirt. Marian picks her way through the empty takeaway boxes, discarded clothes, empty lager cans and plastic bags and sits on the edge of the grimy sofa, on a brown patch that looks suspiciously like excrement. An underfed cat darts from beneath the sofa and leaps onto the windowsill. Marian makes a note on her clipboard to alert the local RSPCA.