Changelings

by Jo Bannister

  11

  Lunch at The Flower Mill was a pile of sandwiches and a pot of soup kept simmering for people to help themselves as the opportunity arose. Simon Turner ate on the run, without taking his boots off; so, fifteen minutes later, did Jim Vickery the foreman. Each of them nodded a greeting to Donovan, then ignored him. There was no attempt at conversation with Sarah either. It was in-flight refuelling: as soon as the tanks were full they disengaged and returned to their duties.

  The phone went on not working. Donovan asked if anyone had a mobile: they looked at him blankly and shook their heads.

  Elphie did not reappear. Returning to his room, Donovan heard a sound like puppies mewling and found her sitting on her bed, bare arms hugging her bare knees, sobbing rebelliously.

  ‘Elphie? What’s wrong?’

  But she buried her face in her arms, hidden beneath the floss of ash-fair hair.

  ‘Elphie. What’s happened?’

  The thin high voice was reedier than ever, disconsolate, issuing from a gap between her elbow and her knee. ‘I’m not allowed to talk to you.’

  Donovan was genuinely astonished. ‘Me? What have I done?’

  Without looking up Elphie shook her head again. ‘Nana was cross about her picture. She said I shouldn’t have taken it.’

  Before he had the words out, Donovan knew the answer. ‘What picture?’

  ‘The one with Mummy in. I was only looking. I put it back afterwards.’

  Donovan had always thought of children as an alien species, disruptive and unpredictable; if the cost of perpetuating his genes was raising one he thought he could let the Donovan line die out without much regret. But something about this particular child touched him in unexpected ways. Her unhappiness troubled him.

  He shoved his hands deep into his pockets, rounding his shoulders. ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll go see what I can sort out.’

  He found Sarah in the kitchen, as usual. It seemed to be from choice: nobody sent her there when she was bad, the way they sent Elphie to her room. He pulled out a chair, sat awkwardly sideways on it. He wasn’t sure how to broach the subject. When the woman looked at him, oddly, with a half-fearful expectancy, he just shrugged and came out with it. ‘Elphie says you’re angry at her for showing me your wedding photo.’

  Sarah snapped back to the sink as if he’d struck her. Donovan unfolded quickly from his chair and came up behind her. A more confident man would have put his hands about her shoulders. Donovan, though he sensed her misery and wanted to help, found it hard to touch people. He always expected to be rebuffed.

  ‘Sarah, what is it?’ His voice veered between impatience and compassion. ‘What’s troubling you? It can’t just be that Elphie borrowed your picture. It came to no harm – I saw it in the sitting room an hour ago. So what is it? Why’s everyone. here so – twitchy?’

  She wouldn’t face him. ‘Cal, stay out of it. These are family matters and none of your business. Don’t get involved.’

  ‘But I am involved, aren’t I?’ Though he trusted his instincts, this wasn’t really intuition: it was the only way to interpret how they looked at him. ‘This isn’t something I’ve wandered into – it happened because I came. Why – because I’m a policeman? Is there something going on that you reckon you can handle as long as the police don’t get to know about it?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she insisted. But her voice lacked the conviction to persuade a much less suspicious man than Detective Sergeant Donovan. ‘There’s nothing going on. Just – get well and go home. Forget about us. There’s nothing here to concern you.’

  ‘I’ve been trying to get home since I woke up!’ he exclaimed. ‘Nobody thought it was a good idea, you included. Tara’s been moved, the phone’s dead, I can’t raise my office, I can’t even check if my dog’s all right, and now Elphie’s been told not to talk to me. And I don’t know what the hell’s going on but something is! Tell me what. Maybe I can help.’

  Finally Sarah looked at him, and it was in her face that she wanted to – perhaps, wanted desperately. But she was afraid. ‘Please,’ she murmured. ‘Please, Cal – leave it alone. It’s ancient history: don’t start digging it up.’

  She was talking to the wrong person. Donovan hadn’t the right to walk away. There was something wrong and he felt a duty to find out what.

  ‘It’s to do with that photograph, isn’t it? The girl – your bridesmaid – she really is Elphie’s mother.’

  ‘Cal—’

  ‘But that’s not it. She is, but that’s not the problem. What is it you don’t want me to know? That she’s a relative of yours? Big deal. Who is she, your sister?’

  Sarah Turner neither confirmed nor denied it. But a pulse of electricity flickered between them like tiny lightning, making the pots rattle in Sarah’s hands and raising hairs on the back of Donovan’s neck, and he knew then he was on the right track. It didn’t explain much, but he knew now that he hadn’t imagined any of this. There was a mystery, and it centred on a girl in a flowered dress in a twenty-year-old photograph.

  He pressed on. Interviewing someone who isn’t giving you any answers is like building a bridge: you throw out the construction ahead of you in the hope that when you reach the point where it ceases to be self-sustaining there’ll be something waiting out there to connect it to.

  ‘That’s it? Your kid sister and your husband’s son had a child? OK, I can see that might raise a few eyebrows. But it was eight years ago, and she doesn’t even live here any more. Why is it still casting a shadow over all your lives?’

  His voice dropped as the fingers of presentiment stroked his spine. ‘Elphie? This is about Elphie, and what’s wrong with her. What is it? Sarah, tell me.’

  Sarah shook her head. ‘You’ll never have heard of it. Almost no one has. All the same, your ancestors knew about it. They thought children like Elphie were changelings. That they were fairies and goblins left in the place of human children. In your part of the world they called them the Little People. But it’s not supernatural, it’s just a genetic flaw, it could happen anywhere …’

  But it had happened in East Beckham, in a small, isolated community that had hardly changed since the time when people believed in fairies. Donovan knew about small communities, he came from one himself. He knew about the iron fist of local opinion. The smaller the community, the less room there was in it for the individual; and communities didn’t come much smaller than East Beckham.

  But this had gone beyond raised eyebrows and sniggering behind the bulb sheds. A girl had abandoned her baby because of it.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he growled. ‘Why did it matter to people? They were only related by marriage, they were free to marry if they wanted. In London, even in Castlemere, nobody’d give a damn. It was bad luck about the baby, but that was all it was. They’re not the first couple ever to have a damaged child. For obvious reasons, remote villages like this see more than their fair share. Mostly they’re tolerated pretty well. But not here. Here they resented Elphie enough to drive her mother out.

  ‘Didn’t they? They hounded her. They needed Simon to safeguard their jobs, but they wanted her out. Never mind that she had a new baby – a handicapped baby – never mind the anxiety she must have been feeling right then. The people of this village blamed her for bringing a changeling into their midst, and they turned on her. They made her life a torment. And Simon let them, and so did you.’

  Sarah Turner was crying. Hunched over the sink, unable to shield her face for the pots she was too upset to put down, she let the tears flow down her cheeks and drip from her chin. ‘You don’t understand,’ she whispered raggedly; ‘you don’t understand.’

  Donovan shook his head. Scorn dripped from his voice. ‘Yes, I do. Places like East Beckham, like Glencurran, they’re the last stronghold of fascism. People who’d be laughed off their soapbox anywhere else can still manage to grab a little power in a place like this. Who was it, stirring it up? Making damn sure the misgivings turned to outrage and everyo
ne knew where to direct it?’

  But actually he found he knew. ‘It was Chapel, wasn’t it? – the good doctor. Pointing the finger, making sure everyone knew what it meant – what the implications were of a genetic flaw in that particular baby. “What’s the place coming to when some smart little madam with her city clothes and her city morals can come in here and seduce her own sister’s stepson? Is that the sort of person we want to live with – that we want our children to grow up around? When they ask why Elphie’s the way she is, what are we going to tell them? It’s because her mother’s a harlot?” ’

  ‘Please,’ sobbed Sarah. ‘Please—’

  But his compassion was not for her. ‘And you let them. If you’d stood by her, you and Simon, they couldn’t have hurt her. But you disapproved too. You weren’t going to brave the contempt of your friends and neighbours to dignify a relationship you too believed was wrong. You turned your back on her, and they drove her out.

  ‘Whatever Elphie’s problem is, it could only be a coincidence. Your stepson and your sister have no genes in common. But to a place like East Beckham, to people like these, it looked like a judgement. They wanted someone to pay. What was her name?’

  He took her by surprise. She’d answered before she knew it. ‘Rosemary.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  His dark brows soared. ‘Your own sister? Elphie’s mother – you don’t know where she is?’

  ‘She went to London. I heard she went to the States. I never heard from her again.’

  ‘Why didn’t she take Elphie with her?’

  ‘It would have been too difficult.’ Sarah’s voice was so low it was barely audible. ‘A woman on her own with no home and a handicapped baby? Elphie was better off here. Rosemary was better off alone.’

  ‘Do you know you’re talking about her in the past tense?’ Donovan waited, but apart from the tears on her cheek Sarah made no response.

  He was getting a bad feeling about all this. He’d thought he was somewhere near the truth. He’d thought it was bad enough, and reason enough for shame, that this poor girl – or woman, rather, these events happened some twelve years after the wedding group posed self-consciously in front of the church – was driven from her home and family, and some of the people he’d met in the last couple of days were responsible and others had stood by and watched.

  But it didn’t explain their reaction to him, to his arrival in their midst. What they had done was monstrous but it probably wasn’t illegal. Even if it was, without a complaint from Rosemary he couldn’t pursue it. Yet they looked at him as if he had the power to pull The Flower Mill down about their ears. ‘Does she visit Elphie?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does she write – birthday cards, Christmas presents?’

  ‘No.’

  He sucked in a deep breath. People do disappear without trace, but only two ways. Some of them vanish from choice – there’s something in their lives that they’re running away from. Was Elphie’s mother the kind of woman to abandon a handicapped baby and never enquire how she was getting on? Or was this the other kind of disappearance?

  ‘Sarah – is your sister still alive?’

  The woman stared at him, appalled. ‘Of course she is!’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I – she—’ She drew breath and started again. ‘She went to London. I heard she went to live in America.’

  The tall policeman with his dark eyes like coals in the illness-pallor of his skin was slowly nodding. ‘Did she? Or was that just the cover story? The people responsible told you she’d gone to London, and it suited you to believe them. She vanished overnight, you never saw or heard from her again, but those who’d taken upon themselves the moral guardianship of this precious little village told you she’d gone to London and it was in everyone’s best interests that you didn’t enquire any further.

  ‘I don’t think she went to London, Sarah, and I don’t think she went to the States. I think she’s still here. I think she died here and was buried out on the fen.’

  Her mouth opened but no sounds came out. Her face was ashen.

  ‘Did they kill her, Sarah? Because she lay with her sister’s stepson and gave birth to a changeling? Because she refused to apologize for that, to genuflect to local opinion – to Dr Chapel’s opinions. He called her — what, Jezebel, the whore of Babylon? She laughed in his face. They accused her and she defied them. She dared them to do their worst.

  ‘And they did. They killed her.’

  III

  1

  Shapiro completed the last flight of stairs one at a time, his face rigid with pain. Mary Wilson followed him anxiously, wanting to help and afraid of hurting his feelings. She wondered what Liz would have done. Probably told him to stay where he was and brought Sheila Crosbie down to see him.

  ‘Sir, why don’t I—?’ she began.

  ‘Tell you what, constable,’ he interrupted through gritted teeth, ‘why don’t you make a note in your pocketbook? Suggested new regulation for consideration by Division: officers of superintendent rank or above should only interview suspects living above the first floor if there’s a reliable lift.’

  ‘It’ll get a lot of support, sir.’

  ‘So it should,’ grunted Shapiro, finally reaching the last landing. ‘It’ll make a lot of fat old men very happy.’

  Wilson took a minute to get out her pocketbook, test her pen, even blow her nose before knocking at Sheila’s door. Shapiro wasn’t fooled for a moment – she was giving him time to get his breath back.

  Ms Crosbie answered the door with the baby in her arms. He wasn’t asleep: he looked at Shapiro as if enquiring as to his business.

  Sheila reacted differently. Her face slammed shut. She waited for a warrant card to confirm that the stout man at her door was who he claimed to be, then she nodded brusquely. She didn’t ask them in, remained in the doorway, blocking it with her slight body. ‘Again?’ she said testily.

  Shapiro pretended not to understand. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘This is the third time. I told them at the police station what happened, and I told the woman detective who came here what happened. Why do you think I’ll tell you something different?’

  The superintendent appeared to give that some thought. ‘Because,’ he said at length, judiciously, ‘I’m not sure you were telling the truth.’

  In polite society one doesn’t often call another a liar to his face. Frank Shapiro was clearly a polite man, a decent respectable middle-class man, a husband and father and pillar of his community. Sheila didn’t believe he’d have said that to her without good reason. Something behind her expression shrank and fell inward; she hugged the baby as if for protection. Her lips pursed and her eyes dropped. Then they rose again, defiantly. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ But a thickness in her voice belied the words.

  Wilson offered a sympathetic little smile. ‘Ms Crosbie, why don’t we go inside and sort this out? I don’t expect you’ve done anything too dreadful – just embroidered the truth a little? Really, that’s all we need to know. Then we won’t waste time following up false leads. Put the record straight, then we’ll all know where we stand.’

  At last, still reluctantly, the girl let them inside. Jason continued to watch the encounter with interest.

  ‘Now,’ said Shapiro, ‘about this baby lotion. We know you bought it at Simpson’s; we know that the warning label was already attached. It matches the others we have, we know it was put there by the blackmailer. What I need you to be absolutely honest about is whether there actually was caustic soda in the bottle.’

  His gaze was steady and he waited for her answer without further prompting. The next step she had to take alone, and if need be he’d wait all day.

  She wasn’t intimidated. If she was hiding something, she wasn’t going to give it up just because he asked her. ‘Your doctor saw the state of my hands. What do you think – I did that to myself?’

  ‘People d
o,’ Shapiro assured her.

  ‘Jesus!’ Sheila turned on her heel, into the nursery, and put the baby down. He gurgled and reached towards the wooden animals prancing their slow circle in the airs above his cot.

  Her hands free, Sheila spread the palms under Shapiro’s nose. ‘Look at them! They’re still not right. It hurt like hell at the time, and it still hurts if I forget when I’m cooking or washing up. You think I did that deliberately? Why, for God’s sake? You think I’m some kind of a pain freak?’

  ‘People who do this,’ Shapiro answered carefully, ‘do it because they need attention. They’re depressed, or frightened, or maybe just bored, and even pain is an acceptable price if they can get people to take notice of them. It makes them feel alive. Being ignored is like being dead.’

  Her eyes thought he was mad. She pointed one arm, shaking with anger, at the cot. ‘See that? That’s what we in the trade call a baby. They need your full attention, a hundred per cent, twenty-four hours a day. If they don’t get it they grizzle. Then they cry, and after that they scream. The MOT people fail cars that make as much noise as a ratty baby. Ignored? Mr Shapiro, I’d give my income support for the chance of being ignored for a full hour every day. I don’t need to burn myself in order to get noticed. I just need to take Jason into a busy supermarket and tell him he can’t eat the mothballs.’

  It was only a theory but it had been a good one, he’d had hopes of it. But it was the most basic error in criminal detection: to cling to a theory, even an elegant one, when the evidence starts to contradict it. Listening to Sheila Crosbie rant Shapiro felt his doubts growing. Maybe she was hiding something but it wasn’t that. She wasn’t seeking attention, so she hadn’t applied caustic soda to her own hands. Which left her as a victim after all.

  He gave it one last try. ‘Do you have caustic soda in the flat, Miss Crosbie?’

  She glared at him. ‘No. I don’t use it; I’ve never used it. I like my household cleaners in handy sprays.’