by Linda Huber
The main door was open as Julie rushed up the path, and she could see Dee standing motionless just inside.
‘Dee, sorry I’m – oh no!’
Dismayed, Julie stood in the narrow hallway and stared through the glass doors into the library. Books lay everywhere, pulled from shelves and scattered across the floor, pages torn out and discarded, papers and pamphlets from the stand near the desk adding to the chaos. Paper and books were covering the entire floor – the place was an absolute wreck.
For a brief moment neither woman spoke, then Dee came to life, ushering Julie back outside and pulling out her phone.
‘Vandals,’ she said grimly. ‘What an absolute bugger. I’ll phone the police.’
Julie stared back into the building, glad it was Amy looking around with big eyes, and not Sam. ‘Oh, no, Dee – who would do such a senseless thing?’
Dee was punching out nine-nine-nine. Julie peered through to the reception desk. The computer screen was shattered and lying on its side, which didn’t bode well for the PC corner at the back of the main room. Thank goodness two of the machines were away being repaired at the moment.
Her legs shaking, Julie sat down on the edge of a stone tub of begonias. It was a wonder it had survived the attack, but the little pink and red flowers were bobbing in the breeze as they always did.
Dee finished her call and sat down beside her. ‘Are you okay, Julie? You look a bit pale. And what’s with Amy?’
‘Rona’s kids are all sick,’ said Julie. ‘And Sam wasn’t great this morning either. He had a bad nightmare, poor thing – he was up half the night.’
‘And poor you were up with him,’ said Dee, patting Julie’s clasped hands. ‘We’ll see what the police say when they come. The library won’t be open today, that’s for sure, so you can probably go home and rest.’
A police car swung into the parking bay at the side of the building. Two uniformed officers emerged and strode towards them. Julie and Eve stood up.
The taller man spoke. ‘Morning. I’m PC David Spiers, and this is PC Steven Banks.’ He listened as Dee told them about discovering the break-in. ‘Okay. If you’ll just wait here.’ Both men vanished into the library.
A couple of minutes later a yell came from within, and Julie seized the buggy and ran inside after Dee. The two officers were bent over something on the upstairs gallery where the study section was.
‘It’s a kid, he’s unconscious,’ shouted PC Spiers, dropping to his knees.
The other officer was on his radio, calling for an ambulance and back-up. A chill of horror swept through Julie. Someone was up there, hurt, and she and Dee hadn’t noticed.
‘Can we do anything? What’s wrong with him?’ Dee started to pick her way over books to the gallery stairs.
‘It could be a drugs overdose – he’s vomited. I’m not sure he’s breathing.’
PC Spiers started chest compressions, his face pale. Dee stood at the bottom of the stairs, and Julie parked Amy by the desk and went to join her.
The other officer stared down through the wooden bannisters. ‘Can you open the doors to let the ambulance crew in, please? Then wait outside.’ His colleague was still thudding up and down on the boy’s chest, grunting as he did so, and Julie felt sick. She and Dee did as he asked, then went back outside with Amy. It was good to be away from those dreadful noises up in the gallery.
The next half hour passed like some kind of bad dream. The ambulance arrived and two green-clad paramedics dashed in, followed by a couple of more senior policemen. Julie and Dee sat on the flower tub, turning away the handful of people who arrived to use the library and wondering what was going on upstairs. Who was it, fighting for his life on the gallery floor? Had he vandalised the library, or had that been his friends – or his enemies, maybe? How had he got in? Was he going to live?
It seemed to take forever before they heard the sound of feet clattering down the wooden gallery staircase. The paramedics manoeuvred their trolley out while a new, older officer was reporting developments into the radio attached to his uniform jacket.
Fighting back tears, Julie looked at the face on the trolley. It was just a boy; he couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen. He was a terrible colour under the oxygen mask, but he was breathing. Thank goodness, she couldn’t have borne it if someone – a kid – had died like that in the library.
The paramedics loaded the trolley into the ambulance and drove off, sirens howling and blue lights flashing.
The older officer turned to Julie and Dee. ‘He’s alive, but they said he’s not very stable. We’ll need to go over the whole place now and see if we can find out exactly what happened. We’ve had some trouble with local gangs recently and this might be part of it. I take it you didn’t recognise that kid, or know anything that might help us? Anything out of the ordinary happen in the last few days?’
Dee shook her head. ‘It’s all been perfectly normal.’
The officer looked inquiringly at Julie.
She shook her head. ‘Nothing. It seems so – so pointless.’ Oh, help, she was crying now, her tiredness and the shock were catching up with her.
‘We’ll find out what happened, don’t worry.’ He took their details quickly, writing in a small black notebook. ‘Okay, we’ll need one of you to stay here.’
‘I’ll do that,’ said Dee, turning to Julie. ‘You can go home, Julie. Could you let Head Office know we’re closed today? An email would be best, then they’ve got it in black and white. I’ll start phoning round the rest of the staff.’
‘Sure,’ said Julie. ‘I’ll do it on the laptop at home. Let me know what happens.’
Dee gave her a rueful grin and nodded. Julie turned the buggy and trailed back down the path, her cheeks tight where the tears had dried. It was definitely one of those days.
The High Street was quiet as Julie strode along, barely noticing the warm May sunshine on her shoulders. What a ghastly thing to happen. A break-in was bad enough, but to have someone hurt, maybe even dying, then just lying there on the gallery floor where she worked every day – it left a sour taste in her mouth. They could only hope the doctors would be able to do something for that poor boy. What had happened in his short life to make him end up like this – and how could she be sure that something similar wouldn’t happen to her own children one day? Julie shivered at the thought.
Sam’s school was down the next street, and Julie’s steps slowed. He must be almost as shattered as she was, even if he had youth on his side. Four-year-olds often had more energy than their mums, she’d noticed that before. But she would pop in and see how he was.
Sam’s classroom was on the ground floor, a big, sunny room with windows down one side. Julie stood in the corridor, peering through the narrow glass strip in the door. The children were milling around, it seemed to be one of the free-play sessions Sam was so enthusiastic about. But today he was sitting on a floor-cushion by the bookshelf, leafing through a picture book, his face pale.
Miss Cairns, who was younger than Julie and always seemed terribly efficient, spotted her and came to the door. ‘Hello, Mrs Mayhew, I was wondering if I should call you. Sam’s not his usual bouncy self this morning.’ She gestured towards the little boy.
A lump came into Julie’s throat. ‘He didn’t sleep well. I’ll take him home for a nap now, if that’s all right.’
‘That’s exactly what he needs. Sam! Look who’s come to collect you!’
‘Mummy!’ Sam dropped his book and scrambled to his feet. ‘Are we going home? Why aren’t you at the library?’
Julie knew she would never get him to sleep if she started talking about break-ins and policemen. ‘Change of shift,’ she said briskly. ‘Get your things and let’s go.’
They left the building, Sam trotting beside the buggy, relief making Julie feel almost light-headed. She should never have sent him to school this morning, but oh, thank goodness he hadn’t come to the library with her. And at least Miss Cairns had been tactful enough no
t to make her feel like the world’s worst mother.
Approaching the traffic lights, Julie spotted the internet café on the other side of the road. Maybe she should just scoot in there to send her email. The Wi-Fi at her flat had been unreliable lately, and it would be awful if it was uncooperative today, when she had an important email to send. Julie sighed. One of these days she’d be able to afford a mobile phone package that included internet.
Gripping Sam’s hand on the buggy handle, she crossed the road and went into the internet café. It was a pleasant, spacious room, computers set out at regular intervals on long tables along cream painted walls. A small group of women at the back of the room were listening to a young man explaining something.
Another man was at the desk, clicking around on the keyboard there. ‘Hi, can I help you?’
‘I need to send an email,’ said Julie, looking in her bag for the card with the important work email addresses.
He indicated a computer at the end of the table. ‘Sure. You pay per fifteen minutes – give me a shout when you’ve finished. I’m Davie.’
‘Oh, um, hi. I’m Julie. Come on, Sam.’
She left a drowsy Amy by the desk and sat Sam on a stool beside her computer before giving him an envelope and a pencil from her bag to draw something. Sam could read a few words; she didn’t want him peering over her shoulder and noticing things like ‘police’ and ‘ambulance’. It only took a few minutes to write her email, and she clicked ‘send’ with a sigh of relief. Time to go home and sleep.
Replacing the address card in her bag, she looked round for Davie. He was crouched on the floor in a corner doing something with a cable, and Julie had taken two steps towards him before her stomach cramped in fear as she realised what was wrong. No – no! She stared wildly round the room, then ran outside, where High Street shoppers were meandering around as usual. Nothing. No, no no no no. Julie stood in the shop doorway and screamed, her voice ringing across the street, making Sam scream in terror too.
Amy and the buggy were gone.
Sharon
Sharon unplugged the iron and sank down on the sofa. The silence was deafening. Quite possibly she was the only person in the entire block right now – it was a place where young professionals lived, ambitious people on their way up the corporate ladder. Like she’d been.
Sharon clasped her hands over her bump. She’d done some thinking while the baby was turning somersaults in the night. Here she was, the world’s most reluctant mother-to-be, married to a guy who’d once been the perfect partner but had now turned into the prospective father from hell. Living in a great place was no compensation for that. A wave of homesickness for her old life washed through Sharon and she reached for a tissue.
They couldn’t go on like this. She and Craig were about to become parents, mainly because termination had been a non-issue from the start. And she wasn’t about to leave the baby in a box on the church doorstep either, so this child was going to be a big part of her life for the next eighteen years, or however long it took kids to grow up. So she could either make herself miserable for a couple of decades – or find the good parts to being a mother.
Imagining her child living with them for the foreseeable future was something she hadn’t done before, and Sharon blinked. There would be nursery school, and birthday parties, and Brownies – and then later, arguments about going out, and make up, and boyfriends… with her in the middle of it all, a mum. And it would start the minute the baby was born.
And – happy thought for the day – when the baby wasn’t inside her any more, she’d be able to get a babysitter. She could go back to work after her maternity leave, too. The thought was the one bright spot on Sharon’s career horizon. She’d been so busy trying to come to terms with what was happening to her, she’d almost forgotten the most important part – she could have a life as well as a baby. So right now she was going to cheer up if it killed her, and today it should be easy. She was having lunch with Julie, then tonight she and Craig had the last antenatal class and a table booked at Oscar’s.
They could plan the next few months, make a shopping list of baby equipment and most importantly, start communicating again. As intelligent people, they would manage that, wouldn’t they? If Craig wanted to communicate again. But he would. He must.
Determinedly happier, she took the newly-ironed maternity top through to the bedroom. Twenty-six days to go.
Jeff
It wasn’t something he’d planned in any way.
He arrived at Cybersonics for the late-morning shift, thinking about the queries he’d put out on those forums yesterday and wondering if he’d find something useful in today’s responses. There must be women expecting babies they didn’t want, but there was nothing to say that any of them had seen his posts. Homeless, desperate girls were unlikely to have an internet connection, so he may have to extend his campaign beyond the net. But how on earth would he go about that? He could hardly put a card up in the newsagent’s, or place a ‘wanted’ notice in the small ads section of the local paper.
With this running through his head, Jeff stepped into Cybersonics and saw the baby in the buggy, just sitting there at the front desk with nobody paying any attention to it – and something short-circuited inside his brain. In less than ten seconds he had both buggy and baby outside, and was striding round the corner towards his car. Now if this was his baby he could take it home to Caro and they could live happily ever after, just the three of them. Judging by the outfit it was a girl, too – Caro would love a little girl.
A woman’s scream came before he’d gone twenty metres, and Jeff darted into the entrance of a nearby close, hauling the buggy up the two worn steps and into a warm, smelly dimness. The baby was silent, her eyes staring up at him.
‘Good girl,’ he said, taking the buggy right up to the back of the close. No one would see them now unless they came right inside. He was safe and he had a baby. Not so difficult after all, was it? What a great life they could have, him, Caro and the baby. Amazing how he’d been able to grab the opportunity the moment it presented itself. A baby for Caro.
More screams came from the High Street and Jeff’s brain jerked back to reality.
What the shit was he doing? This was no way to deal with things; he would need a careful plan before the baby – any baby – came home. He thundered down the close, shoving the buggy in front of him, and ran back up the High Street. A young woman was rushing up and down outside Cybersonics, shrieking hysterically and dragging a little boy behind her, and Davie was diving about the middle of the road.
Jeff yelled at the woman as he approached. ‘Is this your baby? I found her round the corner.’
The woman plucked up the child and rocked it in her arms, her face blotchy red and her hands shaking visibly.
‘Thank God,’ said Davie. ‘Come back inside, love. Did you see what happened, Jeff? It could only have been two or three minutes ago.’
Jeff shook his head. ‘It was a bunch of hoodies. I saw them shove the buggy into a close and then run off. Probably took her for a sick joke.’
Anger was welling up in his head. It was disgraceful. This woman didn’t deserve a baby any more than Sharon did. Imagine sitting in an internet café – she was probably faffing around on Facebook or something equally mindless, leaving her baby to be taken by anyone who happened to pass by. She was lucky it hadn’t been hoodies. Caro would never do anything like that. And that poor little boy with tears running down his face – Jeff knew exactly what that felt like. It was heart-breaking; some people just weren’t fit to be parents.
‘Do you want me to phone the police, love?’ said Davie, and the woman shook her head.
‘The police’d never find them now,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘I want to go home and get my children safely into bed for a nap.’
She turned to Jeff, wiping her eyes on a scrunched-up tissue. ‘Thank you more than I can say for bringing her back.’
Jeff nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
She stared at him, her eyes widening. Quick, he had to say something normal here or she might get suspicious. He cleared his throat. ‘I’m Jeff Horne. Davie and I own this place. Don’t worry, your baby was in her buggy all the time – I’m sure she’s not hurt.’
That was true, at least. The baby was now back in her pram, lying there blowing bubbles, oblivious to what was going on. The woman nodded, and Jeff watched as she left the shop and turned towards the east side of town, pushing the buggy with one hand and hugging the little boy to her side with the other.
And now he would go and see what results his queries had brought.
Julie
Her heart was still pounding away as Julie strode towards the flat, Sam whimpering at her side. What a disgusting thing to happen – ghastly yobs, playing a vile trick like that with a defenceless baby. She would never forget the feeling of absolute terror when she’d realised the buggy really was gone. It had been all she could do to remain upright; the world had spun around her and her bowels felt loose. Her baby, her Amy… sickening visions of perverts and paedophiles had stabbed through her brain – and then Jeff Horne rushed up with her little girl. Such blessed relief.
Julie shivered, remembering Jeff’s face as he stood there behind the buggy, watching her cuddling Amy. He’d seemed completely stressed out too. His smile was nowhere near his eyes, and there were lines around his mouth that would have looked more natural on an older man. And when his eyes had moved to Sam he looked suddenly devastated, as if something really tragic had happened to him and Sam was mixed up in it. It was a creepy, disquieting feeling, to see a stranger look at her son with such an intimate expression on his face.
