Death in the Family

by Jill McGown

  The park had something for everyone; Judy turned back to Charlotte. “Do you think you need a garden, Charlotte?”

  Charlotte blinked at her solemnly.

  “Your dada does. He says children should have gardens—he says his father had a strawberry patch in his garden and you should have one, too, so you can pick them and eat them while they’re warm from the sun, he says. I don’t think he knows the first thing about growing strawberries, though. And I know I don’t.”

  Charlotte gave a little contented sigh.

  “I think you’d like having this park to play in. If you want to pick strawberries, we could go to one of these pick-your-own places, couldn’t we? You’d like that. He says it wouldn’t be the same, but I think it means that at least you’ll be guaranteed some strawberries to pick. Of course, I’m not romantic, not like him. You’ll find that out.”

  She carried on chatting as she strolled in the sunshine, stopping as another park user, a solitary woman, approached. Talking to Charlotte was all very well, but until she was a little older it could be regarded as eccentric by a passerby. Judy smiled and issued the standard park greeting, which varied only with the weather: “Lovely day!”

  But the woman, lost in her own thoughts, just looked at Judy vaguely and passed on.

  Once she was out of earshot, Judy carried on. “There’s a toddlers’ playground somewhere—shall we go and look at it? It might give me an idea of what to expect.” She wheeled Charlotte along to the fingerpost to find out which way she should be heading and spent some time examining its many fingers before finding it. “This way,” she said, maneuvering the pram with the same lack of expertise as that with which she maneuvered a car.

  Charlotte smiled at her—laughed at her? Judy smiled back, but the smile froze on her lips as she heard the scream. It seemed to come from the direction in which she had just walked, and Judy, moving as quickly as she could with the pram, retraced her steps and saw the girl she had seen earlier, standing under the willow tree, by the pram, her hands to her mouth. The old couple were making their way toward her, but the ladies in the garden were too far away to have heard the scream, and the artist had apparently left, because he was nowhere to be seen now. Judy got there first.

  “She’s gone!” the girl said. “The baby’s gone!”

  “Did you see anyone near the pram?” Judy automatically checked the time, and it was seven minutes past eleven; she had seen the girl with the baby not five minutes ago, so it had to have happened very recently. The woman who had passed her—where was she? Judy looked round, but there was no sign of her now.

  Judy showed her ID and asked the couple if they had seen the woman, but they hadn’t, and neither had the girl, who stood there, clutching a mobile phone, saying she had only left the baby for a moment. The man went up the steps to the bridge to see if he could see anyone on Bridge Street answering the woman’s description but came back, shaking his head.

  Judy stared at the empty pram, and the thought that it might have been Charlotte jolted her system; she didn’t know if it was her maternal instinct kicking in at last or just the reaction of anyone who had care and control of someone helpless and trusting to the thought that a moment’s inattention could lead to this, but she felt physically sick and had to get herself under control, marshal her thoughts.

  “Have you rung the police?”

  “No—I . . .” The girl looked at the phone in her hand. “I was just getting the phone for—” She broke off. “No.”

  Judy took out her own mobile phone. “What’s your name?”

  “Andrea Merry.”

  “And you’re the baby’s mother?” Judy was dialling 999 as she spoke.

  “No, I’m just the nanny. The baby’s name is Emma. Emma Jane Crawford.”

  For the second time in as many moments, Judy was stunned into noncomprehension. Emma Jane Crawford? That was Charlotte’s twin; it must be. She and Lloyd talked about her often; he always used her full name like that. Judy had got to know Emma’s mother in the maternity unit, and Lloyd had met her father; she felt as though they were personal friends.

  “How old is she?” Judy asked, hoping, irrationally, that the answer would prove that it was some other baby of the same name, some baby who didn’t share her birthday with Charlotte, whose parents she and Lloyd didn’t know.

  “Just over five months.”

  It was Charlotte’s twin. Judy had to work hard to be professional about the whole thing as she told the emergency operator she wanted the police.

  “And what was Emma wearing?” she asked the girl.

  “A Winnie-the-Pooh all-in-one.”

  Judy reported the incident, then set about getting details, which would at least save some time.

  “You didn’t see anything, Andrea? Someone running off?”

  “No—nothing.”

  “Where were you when it happened?”

  “I realized I’d left my mobile phone in the car, so I went back to get it. I left Emma in the shade, under the tree.”

  “Where’s your car?”

  “On the Bridge Street car park. I went shopping with her, so I just left the car there and walked here.”

  The Bridge Street car park was a few hundred yards along from the footbridge; most Riverside Park users left their cars in the grassed area marked off in the park itself.

  Judy looked at her in frank dismay. “You went back to the car park and left the baby on her own?”

  “Yes—well, it was quicker without the pram. I didn’t want to take it apart again, and I didn’t want to bump Emma all the way up the steps and back down the other side twice. I was only gone a couple of minutes.”

  Judy had to remind herself that it wasn’t her job to apportion blame, just to find out as much as she could. And even that wasn’t her job, strictly speaking. She was a witness, not an investigating officer.

  “How long were you back at the car?”

  “Just long enough to pick up the phone. I came straight back.”

  It could have been the woman Judy saw, but it needn’t have been. Anyone could have been walking along the street or crossing the bridge, seen the pram, and just taken Emma from it. It would have taken only a few seconds to be back on the road, merging with the Friday morning shoppers. It would have taken Andrea two minutes at least to get to the car and back.

  The Bridge Street car park was big and busy, serving the main shopping area and the supermarket. “Did anyone stop and watch you as you got Emma out of your car? Or follow you when you left? Did you see anyone when you went back to your car?”

  The girl shook her head in a blanket answer to all these questions, which didn’t surprise Judy. People would be busy loading and unloading cars, finding money for the ticket machine, unlikely to be taking any notice of Andrea and Emma, and Andrea wouldn’t have taken any notice of them.

  “But it’s only just happened,” she said. “She can’t have got far.”

  “She?” Judy pounced on that. “I thought you didn’t see anything?”

  “I meant Emma.”

  Of course she did. Judy told herself to be rational about this, stop jumping down the girl’s throat, but she didn’t feel rational. She felt scared and sad. Someone was going to have to tell Nina Crawford what had happened, and Judy was deeply thankful that she was not officially in charge. She would gladly leave that to someone else.

  A hope, faint and fleeting, that it had been Nina who had seen Emma, alone and unguarded, and had removed her from the so-called nanny’s so-called care was born in Judy, just to die again. Nina would have wheeled the pram away, not snatched the baby from it. And she would have told Andrea, however angry she was with her, what she was doing. Because no one would wish that suffering on anyone. Though Judy wasn’t convinced that Andrea was suffering.

  And now a nanny was being very firmly crossed off Judy’s range of options, which left just one.

  Dean had pulled the car off the road onto the grass and scrambled out, jumping the brook a
nd missing his footing as he landed, slipping into the shallow water. He had hauled himself out and, dripping wet, had made his way toward the wood, trying to put as much distance between himself and that car as he could, as fast as he could.

  He had seen a handful of kids swinging from the branches of a tree, and they had seen him. Woods were not Dean’s natural habitat; if had had been in London, there would have been crowds of people and he could have lost himself in moments simply by going into a shop or dodging down a side street. All he could do here was plunge off the track and into cover, which was what he had done.

  But it was, he had soon discovered, dense cover; he had felt thin branches whip against his face and arms but had gone deeper and deeper in before glancing behind as he ran, and had been relieved to see nothing but bushes and trees. He had turned back to look where he was going, but it was too late to stop himself pitching headlong to the ground, as something had tripped him up, and he had landed with a bone-jarring thud.

  Now he opened his eyes, unsure of what had happened, and tried to assess the damage. He could smell the moist earth, could feel his heart pounding with the exertion and the fear, could hear birdsong high above. When he opened his eyes, he could see the long-dead leaves, moss, and twigs on which he lay and, when he ran his tongue over numbed lips, could even taste them. He wiped the dirt from his mouth and sat up slowly. All his senses, it seemed, were more or less in working order, but something hurt like hell. His chest, he thought.

  He put out a hand, but the act of putting his weight on it hurt his chest even more, and he lay back down again with a groan. After a few moments, he tried again, this time prepared for the pain, and got himself into a sitting position. His jeans were torn, and his shoe had come off; he looked round, a little hopelessly, for his missing trainer and was surprised, in this alien landscape, to spot it lying almost hidden in a clump of greenery to which he could not put a name, if it had one. And now he could see, spilling out from the base of its tree, the thick, low branch that had brought him down.

  Getting to his feet was difficult and painful but not, he discovered, impossible. He straddled the branch, putting his wet trainer back onto his wet foot again, and leaned back against the tree to recover from the effort. Think, Dean, he told himself. It won’t hurt to think. Where are you going from here?

  Those kids hadn’t followed him, he was sure of that, but he was deep in a part of the wood he didn’t know at all; he had no idea how to get to the path that would take him back to town, no idea even in which direction he had been running. From the elevated position of the bus station he had seen that the wood almost encircled the center of the town, stretching out in all directions, dotted with roads and housing estates; if he found a path and started walking, he could come out miles away from the town center.

  And if he was going to get back to London, the bus station was his only option; hitching a lift was out, unless Stansfield people were given to stopping for wet, bloodstained strangers. He looked down at himself, at his bare arms scratched and cut, and wasn’t sure that anyone would even let him on a bus in this state. He could, he supposed, wait until it was dark, when he would have dried off and the bloodstains—helped by the water—wouldn’t be so noticeable, but that was almost twelve hours away.

  He couldn’t stay in here for twelve hours. And he had a horrible feeling that he would never get out in the dark. He had to start walking in any direction and keep walking until he found a road. There would be something—road signs, something—to tell him how to get back to the bus station. He would have to think of a story that would account for the state he was in, that was all.

  But he’d wait awhile. Until the pain wore off a bit.

  One for sorrow, two for joy, thought Phil as a pair of magpies flew down onto the track, then back up again to the roof of the station building.

  Not much joy here, he thought as he paced the platform. The train back to London wasn’t due until midday, and he would have preferred to have been less conspicuously waiting for it, but the station buffet had apparently closed down and the waiting room was being refurbished. He kept glancing across to the entrance, expecting the police to appear at any minute. Even if the trains were running on time, they had half an hour to work out where he’d be.

  Another magpie swooped down onto the hanging basket suspended from a high station lamp standard and away again. One of the pair he’d just seen? Or a third? Phil looked across at the newly painted ticket office on the other side of the rails and could see the two magpies, still busily darting to and fro, while the third wheeled off into the scaffolding where a bridge over the lines was being built to replace the damp, dingy, uneven tunnel under the tracks that Phil had just used. How did the rhyme go on? One for sorrow, two for joy . . . three for a girl.

  He sat down on a strange metal frame with a hinged plastic shelf on which it was just possible to perch, much like the magpies. Once, he’d imagined his life taking the path that most people’s lives took; courtship, marriage, children. The courtship and marriage had happened, no children. Just an acrimonious divorce, and then a solitary existence for two years until he had met Lesley. And she had come complete with a little girl. Kayleigh, a bright and mischievous five-year-old with whom Phil had had an instant rapport. Suddenly he had a family.

  And everything had been fine until Dean Fletcher came along. Well, Phil amended, perhaps not fine, but at least they had all been together. He frowned a little. Had he really seen Fletcher when he was leaving the cottage? No, he thought, he couldn’t have. Even if Fletcher was out of prison, how could he know where Kayleigh was? Young men with cropped dyed blond hair all looked pretty much alike.

  A flash of black and white, and another magpie made its appearance, its eye caught by the sun glinting off the track; it landed right in front of Phil, strutting along the sleepers before flying off to join the one on the scaffolding. Two pairs made four, Phil thought. Four magpies. Three for a girl, four for a boy, he thought sadly.

  Just over four years ago, he and Lesley had had a little boy, unplanned, but no less welcome for that. Luke, whose short life had brought both joy and sorrow and whose name Phil had spoken this morning for the first time in years, had come and gone within six months, and their lives would never be the same again.

  Three more magpies suddenly flew up from the tall hedgerow that skirted the car park behind the station. His two pairs still chattered to one another on the scaffolding and the roof, so that made seven in all. Five for silver, six for gold, Phil thought.

  Seven for a secret never to be told.

  Judy’s description of the woman who had walked past her in the park had been printed out, and in the park Tom handed it out to his team.

  “We don’t have much to go on,” he began. “DCI Hill will be helping compile a photofit when the photofit guy gets here, and we’re getting a photograph of Emma printed out, but the description will have to do for now. Superintendent McArthur is heading the investigation, and anything you get that may be relevant should be phoned through to the incident room immediately. If anyone saw a woman answering that description anywhere at all, we need a statement.”

  The park had no surveillance cameras; in well-behaved Malworth, very few people wanted to deface its statues or destroy its flower beds. Even pickpockets seemed to go elsewhere, as a rule. Criminal activity in the park had increased, of course, like everywhere else, and CCTV was on the Council agenda, but it had not yet been installed.

  “And if anyone thinks they actually know who she is, do not—repeat: not—go charging off to interview her. If she is the abductor and she has baby Emma, she needs very careful handling—report back and await instructions.”

  Tom thought that his time might be better spent walking round the Riverside area with Judy, trying to spot the woman, and McArthur had agreed. Judy was, after all, the only person who knew exactly who she was looking for, and until the public appeals bore fruit they had nothing concrete to go on. If it had been a spur-of-the-moment a
bduction, the woman might have abandoned the baby and be walking around in a daze. If the baby had been abandoned, they had to find her fast, and this might be the way to do it. Teams of officers would be combing the park for the same reason, and the first team was arriving now, piling out of the van, pulling on the orange jackets that would make them easy to spot if anyone had any information to impart.

  If it hadn’t been Judy who had seen her, Tom would have been skeptical of this lone, preoccupied female whom no one else had even noticed, would have thought the witness was perhaps seeking a moment of glory. But it was Judy, and this woman existed.

  And then there was the artist. Everyone had seen him, but he had been too far away for them to have any real description at all, save that Judy and the female half of the old couple believed that he had a beard. They had established that the child was not the subject of a custody battle, so a male kidnapper was unlikely, but not unheard of. Everyone who was in the park was being asked about both of these people.

  “If anyone thinks they have seen this woman, it’s important to find out if they saw her alone or carrying a baby, and whether or not she was with another person or people. If they saw her with a man, we want a description—and we’d be very interested in what, if anything, he was carrying. The man we want to interview is probably carrying a wooden case with artist’s equipment in it.”

  Tom walked down to where Judy, absently jiggling the pram, was talking to Superintendent McArthur, an unknown quantity, having just arrived in Bartonshire last month to take charge at Malworth. He was big, dark-haired, good-looking, the kind of man who suited the uniform. Tom imagined he worked out. And he wasn’t much older than Tom himself. One of the fast-track lot, he was Scottish, apparently, but he spoke with the accentless tones of one who had been privately educated.

  “Someone’s just found a Winnie-the-Pooh all-in-one stuffed into a rubbish bin outside a shop on Bridge Street,” Judy told him.