Collected Short Stories

by Ruth Rendell

  Slowly Wexford got up. He came round the desk and looked narrowly at Polly.

  ‘Constable Davies, you have to be pulling my leg.’

  ‘No, sir, you know I wouldn’t. She’s a Mrs Bond and she says that when she went downstairs to fetch in her pram, her baby had gone and another one been put there.’

  Wexford followed Polly down to the ground floor. In one of the interview rooms a girl was sitting at the bleak, rectangular, plastic-topped table, drinking tea and crying. She looked about nineteen. She had long straw-coloured hair and a small childish face, naive and innocent and frightened, and she was wearing blue denims and a tee-shirt with apples and oranges and cherries printed all over the front. From her appearance one would not have supposed her to be a mother. But also in the room was a baby. The baby, in short white frock and woolly coat and napkin and cotton socks, slept in the uneasy arms of Detective Constable Loring.

  It had occurred to Wexford on the way down that women who have recently had babies are, or are said to be, prone to various kinds of mental disturbance, and his first thought was that Mrs Bond might only think or only be saying that this child was not hers.

  ‘Now, Mrs Bond,’ he began, ‘this is a strange business. Do you feel like telling me about it?’

  ‘I’ve told it all,’ she said.

  ‘Well, yes, but not to me. Why not start by telling me where you live and where your baby was?’

  She gulped. She pushed the teacup away. ‘Greenhill Court. We’re on the fifth floor. We haven’t got a balcony or anything. I have to go all the way down in the lift to put Karen out in her pram. She’s got to have fresh air. And when she’s there I can’t watch her all the time. I can’t even see her from my lounge on account of it looks out over the car park.’

  ‘So you put her out in the pram this afternoon,’ said Wexford. ‘What time would that have been?’

  ‘It was just on two. I put the pram on the grass with the cat net on it, and when I went to fetch it in at half-past four the cat net was still on it and the baby was asleep but it – it wasn’t Karen!’ She made little whimpering noises that exploded in a sob. ‘It wasn’t Karen, it was that baby he’s holding!’

  The baby woke up and also began to cry. Loring wrinkled up his nose and shifted his left hand from under its buttocks. His eyes appealed to Polly who nodded and left the room.

  ‘So what did you do?’ said Wexford.

  ‘I didn’t even go back upstairs. I got hold of the pram and I pushed it and I started to run and I ran all the way down here to you.’

  He was touched by her childish faith. In real or imaginary trouble, at time of fear, she ran to those whom her sheltered small-town upbringing had taught her to trust, the kindly helmeted man in blue, the strong arm of the law. Not for her the grosser cynical image her city-bred contemporaries held of brutal and bribable policemen.

  ‘Mrs Bond,’ he said, and then, ‘What’s your first name?’

  ‘Philippa. I’m called Pippa.’

  ‘Then I’ll call you that if you don’t mind. Describe your baby to me, will you, Pippa? Is she dark or fair? How old is she?’

  ‘She’s two months old – well, nine weeks. She’s got blue eyes, she’s wearing a white frock.’ The voice broke and trembled again. ‘And she’s got the most beautiful red-gold hair you’ve ever seen!’

  Inevitably, Wexford’s eyes went to the child in Loring’s arms whom this description seemed perfectly to fit. He said gently to Pippa Bond, ‘Now you’re quite sure you aren’t imagining all this? No one-will be angry if you are, we shall understand. Perhaps you worried or felt a bit guilty about leaving Karen out of your sight for so long, and then when you came down you got a feeling she looked rather different from usual and . . .’

  A wail of indignation and misery cut across the rest of what he had to say. The girl began to cry with long tearing sobs. Polly Davies came back, carrying a small square hand towel from the women’s lavatory. She took the baby from Loring, laid it on its back on the table and undid the big safety pin above its navel. Pippa Bond flinched away from the baby as if it were carrying a disease.

  ‘I’m not imagining it,’ she shouted at Wexford. ‘I’m not! D’you think I wouldn’t know my own baby? D’you think I wouldn’t know my Karen from that?’

  Polly had folded the towel cornerwise. She moved a little so that Wexford could see the baby’s waving legs and bare crotch. ‘Whoever this baby is, sir, it isn’t Karen. Look for yourself – it’s a boy.’

  Trevor Bond was fetched from the Stowerton estate agent’s where he worked. He looked very little older than his wife. Pippa clung to him, crying and inarticulate, and over her bent head he cast despairing eyes at the policemen.

  He had arrived in a car driven by a young woman he said was his sister-in-law, Pippa’s sister, who also lived at Greenhill Court with her husband. She sat stiffly at the wheel, giving Pippa no more than a nod and what seemed like a shrug of exasperation when she came out of the police station with Trevor’s arm round her. Susan Rains, her name was, and a quarter of an hour later it was she who was showing Loring and Sergeant Martin just where the pram had stood on the lawn between the block of flats and the main road from Kingsmarkham to Stowerton. While this thin red-haired girl castigated her sister’s negligence and put forward her own theories as to where Karen might be, Dr Moss arrived with sedation for Pippa, though she had become calmer once she understood no one would expect her to have charge of the changeling boy.

  His fate was removal to a Kingsmarkham Borough nursery for infants in the care of the local authority.

  ‘Poor lamb,’ said the children’s officer Wexford spoke to. ‘I expect Kay will be able to take him in Bystall Lane. There’s no one to fetch him, though, they’ve got ten to bath and get to bed down there.’

  Young Ginger, Wexford had begun to call him. He was a fine-looking baby with large eyes, strong pudgy features, and hair of a curious pale red, the colour of a new raw carrot. To Wexford’s not inexperienced eye, he looked older than the missing Karen, nearer four months than two. His eyes were able to focus firmly, and now they focused on the chief inspector, a scrutiny which moved the baby to yell miserably. Young Ginger buried his face in Polly’s boyish bosom, crying and searching for sustenance.

  ‘You don’t know what they’re thinking, do you, sir?’ Polly said. ‘Just because we can’t remember anything about when we were his age we sort of think babies don’t feel much or notice things. But suppose what they feel is so awful they sort of block it off just so as they won’t be able to remember? Suppose it’s dreadful pain being separated from your mother and not being able to say and – Oh, I don’t know, but does anyone think of these things, sir?’

  ‘Well, psychiatrists do,’ said Wexford, ‘and philosophers, I expect, but not many ordinary people like us. You’ll have to remember it when you have babies of your own. Now take him down to Bystall Lane, will you?’

  A few minutes after she had gone Inspector Burden came in. He had heard the story downstairs but had not entirely believed it. It was the part about putting another baby in Karen’s place that he couldn’t believe, he told Wexford. He hadn’t either, said Wexford, but it was true.

  ‘You can’t think of a reason why anyone would do such a thing,’ said Burden. ‘You can’t think of a single reason why even a mentally disturbed person would do such a thing.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Wexford, ‘that by “you” you mean yourself or “one” because I can think of several reasons for doing it. First of all, you’ve got to take some degree of mental disturbance for granted here. Well-adjusted normal people don’t steal other people’s babies, let alone exchange them. It’s going to be a woman. It’s a woman who’s done it because she wants to be rid of that particular child, yet she must have a child. Agreed?’

  ‘Right,’ said Burden. ‘Why?’

  ‘She has to show it to someone else,’ Wexford said slowly, as if thinking aloud, ‘someone who expects to see a baby nearer in age and appearance
to Karen Bond than to young Ginger, or who expects a baby of Karen’s sex. She may be a woman who has several sons and whose husband was away when the last one was born. She has told him he has a daughter, and to bear this out because she’s afraid of him, she has to have a girl to produce for him. On the other hand, she may not be married. She may have told a boy friend or ex-boy friend the child is younger than it is in order to convince him of his paternity.’

  ‘I’m glad you mentioned mental disturbance,’ said Burden sarcastically.

  ‘She may simply be exhausted by looking after a child who screams incessantly – young Ginger’s got a good pair of lungs – so she exchanges him for a baby she believes won’t scream. Or she may have been told that Ginger has some illness or even hereditary defect which frightened her so she wanted to be rid of him, but she still has to have a baby for her husband or mother or whoever to see.’

  Burden seemed to be considering this inventiveness with reluctant admiration but not much conviction. He said, ‘So what are we going to do about it?’

  ‘I’ve taken everyone in the place off what they were doing and put them on to this. We’re getting on to all the hospitals and GPs, the Registrar of births, and the post-natal and baby clinics. I think it has to be someone local, maybe even someone who knew the pram would be there because she’d seen it there before.’

  ‘And seen the baby who was in it before?’ asked Burden, quirking up an eyebrow.

  ‘Not necessarily. A pram with a cat net over and whose occupant can’t be seen implies a very young baby.’ Wexford hesitated. ‘This is a hell of a lot more worrying,’ he said, ‘than a run-of-the-mill baby-snatching.’

  ‘Because Karen Bond’s so young?’ Burden hazarded.

  ‘No, not that. Look, Mike, your typical baby-snatcher loves babies, she yearns for one of her own, and that’s why she takes someone else’s. But this one’s got a baby of her own and one she dislikes enough to hand him over to a stranger. You can pretty well take it for granted the ordinary baby-snatcher will care for a child almost extravagantly well, but will this one? If she doesn’t care for her own child, will she care for a substitute? I say it’s worrying because we can be certain this woman’s taken Karen for a purpose, a use, and what happens when that use is over?’

  The block of flats in which the Bonds lived was not one of those concerning whose vulnerability to break-ins Wexford had been drafting his letter, but a privately owned five-storeyed building standing on what not long ago had been open green meadows. There were three such blocks, Greenhill, Fairlawn and Hillside Courts, interspersed with rows of weatherboarded town houses, and each block was separated from the main road to Stowerton only by a strip of lawn thirty feet deep. On this turf, a little way in from the narrow service road, Karen Bond’s pram had stood.

  Wexford and Burden talked to the porter who had charge of the three blocks. He had been cleaning a car in the car park at the relevant time and had noticed nothing. Wexford, going up in the Greenhill lift, commented to Burden that it was unfortunate children were forbidden to play on the lawns. They would have served as protection for Karen or at least as witnesses. There were a good many children on this new estate which was mainly occupied by young couples. Between two and four-thirty that afternoon the little ones had been cooped up in small rooms or out for walks with their mothers, the older ones at school.

  Mrs Louise Pelham had fetched her son and her next-door neighbour’s two sons home from school, passing within a few feet of Karen’s pram. That was at a quarter to four. She had glanced into the pram, as she always did, and now she said she remembered thinking Karen looked ‘funny’. The baby in the pram had seemed to have a bigger face and redder hair than the one she had looked at when she passed on her way to the children’s school half an hour before. Wexford felt that there was a real lead here, a pinpointing of the time of the substitution, until he learned that Susan Rains had been with Mrs Pelham before him and told her the whole story in detail.

  Susan Rains and her sister Pippa had each been married at the age of eighteen, but Pippa at twenty already had a baby while Susan, seven years older, was childless. She was without a job too, it appeared, and at three years short of thirty was leading the life of a middle-aged houseproud gossip. She seemed very anxious to tell Wexford and Burden that, in her opinion, her sister was far too young to have a child, her brother-in-law too young to be a father, and that they were both too irresponsible to look after a baby. Pippa, she said, was always bringing Karen round for her to mind, and now Wexford, who had been wondering about the two folded napkins, the plastic spoon and bottle of concentrated orange juice on Mrs Rains’s spotless kitchen counter, understood why they were there.

  ‘Are you fond of babies, Mrs Rains?’ Wexford asked, and got an almost frightening response.

  Hard lines bit into Mrs Rains’s face and her redhead’s pale eyes flashed. ‘I’d be an unnatural woman if I wasn’t, wouldn’t I?’ What else she might have said – a defence? An explanation? – was cut off by the arrival of a woman in her late forties whom she introduced in a mutter as her mother. It was left to Wexford to find out that this was Mrs Leighton who had left Pippa in a drugged sleep and Trevor trying to answer Sergeant Martin’s second spate of questions.

  Mrs Leighton was sprightly and not too concerned. ‘Well, babies that get taken out of prams, they always turn up safe and sound, don’t they?’ Her hair was dyed to a more glorious red than her daughter’s natural shade. She was on her way to babysit for her son and daughter-in-law who had a six-month-old son, and she had just looked in on Pippa to collect the one pound twenty she owed her for dry-cleaning. Imagine what she’d felt, the whole place full of policemen and Karen gone. She really thought Trevor or Susan might have phoned her, and now she was in two minds whether to go and babysit for Mark or not. ‘But she’s bound to turn up OK, isn’t she?’ she said to Wexford.

  Wexford said they must hope so, and then he and Burden left the two women to argue between themselves as to which was the more important, keeping a promise to the son or commiserating with the daughter.

  The world, or this small corner of it, suddenly seemed full of babies. From behind two doors on the ground floor came the whimpers and low peevish grizzlings of infants put unwillingly in their cots for the night. As they left by the glass double doors, they passed on the step an athletic-looking girl in sweater and denims with a very small baby clamped to her chest in a canvas baby carrier. The car park was filling as men returned home from work, some of them commuters from London, and among them, walking from a jaunty red sports car, a couple swinging between them a baby in a shallow rush basket. Wexford wondered just how many children under the age of two lived in those flats and small neat houses. Nearly as many as there were adults, he thought, and he stood aside to let pass a girl pushing twins in a wide push-chair.

  There was very little more that he could do that night beyond embroiling himself in another discussion with Burden as to the reason why. Burden put forward several strange suggestions. Having previously declared that he couldn’t think of a single motive, he now posited that the baby-snatcher was due to have her own baby immunized against whooping cough on the following day. She had read in the newspaper that this could cause brain damage but was too diffident to refuse the immunization, so planned to substitute someone else’s baby for her own.

  ‘The trouble with you unimaginative people,’ said Wexford, ‘is that when you do fantasize you really go crazy. She wants to protect her child from what’s something like a one in a million chance of brain damage, but she doesn’t mind entrusting him to the care of strangers who might do him far more harm.’

  ‘But the point is she knew they wouldn’t do him harm. She’d know that what’s happened is exactly what must happen, that he’d be brought to us and then put in the care of the local authority.’ Burden waited for some show of enthusiasm and when he didn’t get it he went home. For three hours. At eleven that night he was destined to be called out again.

&n
bsp; But not on account of Karen Bond.

  In normal circumstances Sergeant Willoughby, going off duty, wouldn’t have given a second glance at the Ford Transit parked under some overhanging bushes at the foot of Ploughman’s Lane. But the sergeant’s head, like those of most members of the Mid-Sussex Constabulary, was full of thoughts of missing children. He saw the van as a possible caravan substitute, and his mind went vaguely back to old tales of infants stolen by gypsies. He parked his scooter and went over to investigate.

  The young man sitting in the driving seat switched on the ignition, put the van into gear and moved off as fast as he could on a roar of the engine. There was no real danger of his hitting Sergeant Willoughby, nor did that seem to have been his intention, but he passed within a yard or so of him and swung down the lane towards the town.

  The nearest phone was in the sergeant’s own home in Queen Street, and he went quickly to it.

  But the Ford Transit turned out to have had nothing to do with Karen Bond. It was the getaway car for two men who were taking advantage of the absence of a Kingsmarkham stockbroker and his wife to remove a safe from their home.

  Ploughman’s Lane was Kingsmarkham’s millionaire’s row, and Stephen Pollard’s house, pretentiously named Baron’s Keep, by no means the smallest or most modest house in it. It was a nineteen-thirties palace of red brick and leaded lattices and neo-Tudor twisty chimneys. All the windows on the ground floor had stout bars to them, but there were no bars on the french window which led from the largest of the rear bedrooms on to a spacious balcony. When Burden and Loring got there they found signs that two men had climbed up to this balcony, ignored the thief-proof locks on the french window, and cut the glass neatly out of its frame with a glass cutter.

  Where the safe had been in the study on the ground floor was now a gaping cavity. This room was said to be a precise replica of some writing room or den or hidey-hole of Mary Queen of Scots in Holyrood Palace, and the safe had been concealed behind a sliding door in the linenfold panelling. The thieves had chipped it out of its niche with a cold chisel and removed it bodily. Burden thought it must have been immensely heavy, which explained the need for having the van nearby.