The Child

by Fiona Barton

  “Think these must be them,” she said quickly.

  “Let me help you down,” he said and moved towards her, but Kate stepped smartly off the chair, keeping it between her and the eager Soames.

  “No, all sorted,” she said. “Here, you carry this and I’ll bring the rest so we can go and look at them in the other room. There’s better light in there.”

  Al Soames turned, disappointed, and shambled back to his seat. Kate quickly got back on the chair and felt around for anything she might have missed. Her hand brushed something papery and she pulled it out. It was an old manila envelope that had become wedged between the wardrobe and the wall. It was dusty but not sealed and “Parties” was written carelessly across the front. She took a quick look inside and saw a bundle of Polaroid photographs.

  “What are you doing in there?” Soames called.

  “Nothing. Coming. Just dusting myself off a bit,” she called back.

  As she emerged, Joe rang the doorbell, making them both jump. Kate put the envelope down by her handbag and let him in, then got involved in the flurry of activity as he unpacked their picnic.

  “Come on, let’s spread the pictures from your albums on your table,” she said. “Then you can see them all.”

  She cleared the surface, heaping the detritus on the floor and placing the photos like tarot cards.

  “There we are,” Soames said, now standing at her elbow. He was pointing to an image of himself and another man with two girls. The men were laughing into the camera. The girls weren’t.

  “The lady-killers,” he said and smirked. “We ran up quite a tally.”

  “Who is the other bloke?” Joe asked.

  “Friend from the old days. He lived in Howard Street, actually. Good old Will. But I lost touch with him. Oh, look at this one . . .”

  The fashions changed and hair got longer then shorter as the pictures progressed through the decades.

  Kate was scrutinizing every picture, looking at each face for anything that might help the story.

  “Tenant?” she asked, and when Al Soames nodded, she put the picture in a separate pile. He wasn’t good at names, but he promised to get his old rent documents back from his accountant.

  “That would be wonderful,” she said to Soames. “Could I borrow a few photos in the meantime?”

  “Of course, Kate, if it would help,” he said. She’d got him wrapped round her little finger.

  She piled the photos up and slipped them into the envelope by her bag.

  “That way, you’ll have to come back. To return them,” he giggled.

  Joe caught Kate’s eye and raised a sympathetic eyebrow.

  “So when did you sell up, Mr. Soames?” he asked, picking up the baton.

  Soames stopped giggling and thought. “Must be fifteen, maybe twenty years ago now.”

  “Gosh, a long time.”

  “Yes, sold at the wrong time and got shafted by a property developer. He made a mint. And, as you can see”—he and Joe looked round the room—“the wife took most of what was left.”

  Joe nodded and leaned forwards to show Soames he had his full attention.

  “Oh dear,” he said.

  “I became PNG after that,” he said, then noticing Joe’s blank look, added: “Persona non grata. No longer welcome. The party invites dried up and then time just passed . . .”

  Soames grinned at Joe.

  “I liked to party. And the girls were only too willing.”

  “You must have had a great time,” Joe said and smiled. Boys together, Kate thought.

  “Yes. Great. We had all the chat-up lines.” He leaned closer to Joe so Kate had to strain to hear. “And if they didn’t work, there were always our little helpers.” And he laughed. A coarse, nasty laugh.

  “Little helpers?” Joe asked and Kate held her breath. A question too far.

  “Just a turn of phrase,” Soames said quickly. But he winked at Joe.

  FORTY-NINE

  Kate

  FRIDAY, APRIL 13, 2012

  When they finally emerged from Soames’s flat, Kate and Joe stood on the pavement like competitors at the end of a race and caught their breath.

  “Oh my God. That was horrible,” Joe said.

  “Welcome to my world,” Kate said. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  In the car, she sat for ten minutes, scribbling notes of the conversation. She hadn’t wanted to get her notebook out in the flat—she knew Soames would clam up if he realized his words were being written down.

  She’d turned her recorder on in her handbag as soon as they went through the door but she wasn’t sure what would be on the tape. Everyone was moving around, in and out of rooms. Still, she might’ve got something. She’d check later.

  Kate didn’t rely on recorders in the normal run of things. They were temperamental creatures, buttons got stuck, batteries ran out. On one excruciating occasion, she’d taped a whole interview and, playing it back, found she had an hour of hissing static.

  She preferred the ancient art of shorthand—a skill regarded as laughingly analog by the online newbies. Kate had learned it, as a junior reporter, from a former Japanese POW. He was a tiny, chirpy man whose party trick was to walk into a room and do a flying kick to switch on the light. Isaac Pitman would’ve had a fit, but the ninja had got her through her hundred words a minute.

  She and Joe had been in the flat for two and a half hours, but her memory had become trained to recall whole conversations. It was essential for the job but was also particularly useful at home during arguments with her sons. “You never forget anything, Mum,” Jake had said during one of their recent rows over his future. “You never let anything go.”

  He was right, but Kate could remember things people said as if they were lit up in neon in her head.

  And Soames had used some wonderful phrases, and in the margins of her notebook, she drew stars beside names and places dropped into the conversation.

  We liked to party . . . We had all the chat-up lines. And if they didn’t work, there were always our little helpers, she wrote, adding, Drink? Drugs? Rohypnol?

  Joe had also got his notebook out and was writing in it but with the same look of pained concentration as Kate’s sons when they used to do homework at the kitchen table. Steve did the maths and science duty, she did the spellings and essays. Teamwork.

  “Get down everything you remember, Joe,” she said. “We’ll compare notes later.”

  • • •

  At the office, she opened the envelope and pulled out a handful of pictures. Included were the Polaroids she’d found wedged on top of the wardrobe.

  The images were slightly faded, the photographic paper losing its definition over the decades, but the content suddenly came into focus. Naked limbs, scattered clothing, slack, unconscious faces.

  She scooped them up quickly and took them into the ladies’ where she could look at them uninterrupted.

  She went through them carefully, her hands trembling, scrutinizing the faces of the women and girls. They were all someone’s daughters, she thought. I’m glad I only have boys. How can you protect girls from harm? she thought.

  They definitely look drugged, Kate thought as she examined the half-open, dead eyes in the photos.

  “You look so young, you’re just a child,” she told one of the girls.

  And there were glimpses of the perpetrator—a shoulder, a hand, the side of Soames’s face, recognizable. These were trophy photos. The kill recorded by the hunter.

  Kate tried to see more, straining her eyes to see something in the picture that would tell the whole story, but there was just what was there. A small square of evidence, like a tile from a mosaic. She spread all the photos out on the marble floor.

  Nina, the news desk secretary, found her, kneeling on the floor surrounded by the images, w
hen she swept in for a quick pee.

  “Bloody hell, Kate, I nearly fell over you. What are you doing? Is it the call to prayer or something?”

  Nina delighted in being the least PC person in the office.

  “Sorry, Nina. Wanted to look at these pictures without anyone rubbernecking. They’re a bit sensitive,” Kate said.

  Nina crouched down beside her. “Bloody hell, my knees. What’s going on here?”

  “You may well ask,” Kate said. “I think someone drugged and raped these women.”

  “No. What an animal,” Nina spat. “And he took his own personal photographer?”

  Kate looked at her. She was right. She’d been so busy looking at the images, she hadn’t clocked the obvious fact that there had to be two people involved. The photographer and the man in the pictures. This wasn’t a selfie. It was posed and framed.

  “Nina,” she said. “You are a constant marvel.”

  Nina looked confused but pleased. “I help when I can. Now get me back on my feet.”

  FIFTY

  Emma

  FRIDAY, APRIL 13, 2012

  I woke crying last night. Not dream crying. My face was wet with real tears and I lay curled in on myself. Fighting to silence my breathing so I didn’t wake Paul next to me.

  Fighting not to think about my dream. But it’s hard not to. It invades my every cell. It’s the same dream I’ve had for years.

  It started when I was fifteen. I remember I used to wake up then, unable to move or breathe, it felt like. Night terrors I suppose they’d be labeled now. But no one could imagine what it was like. In the dream, a baby was talking to me, angry with me, following me on its little legs like a grotesque doll. It was banging on the door to get in. And I was holding the door closed and sobbing. I woke, as I always did, when the door began to crack open.

  I can see myself then, transfixed. My chest tight and my throat thick with distress. It took what felt like ages for me to be able to move again. I had to work out where I was and convince myself that it had just been a dream and I could nail the door shut again. I remember I used to bury my face in my pillow when I heard Jude moving about in her room below mine because she’d heard me. I used to slow my breathing to pretend I was still asleep.

  Sometimes it worked, but other nights, Jude’s bedroom door creaked to alert me and I heard her pad in bare feet to the bathroom.

  “Go back to bed, Mum,” I whispered to myself, willing her to stay away. But, inevitably, the bare feet padded up the attic stairs and stopped outside my room.

  “Are you all right, Emma?” Jude said softly as she opened the door. “I heard you crying again.”

  I remember lying there with my back to her, in silence. I didn’t know what to say, what to tell. Sometimes Jude stroked my head and went away when I ignored her, but that night, she sat down on the bed.

  In the end, the pressure of my mum’s presence in the dark forced me to speak.

  “It was just a dream. I think I ate too much dinner. That’s all.”

  “You hardly ate anything. You’re getting thin and I’m worried about you. Will and I both are. I know things have been difficult, but you’re just growing up. I wish I knew what’s going on in your head. Tell me, please.”

  “Nothing’s wrong, Jude,” I said quickly. I hadn’t realized she’d noticed so much. I thought I’d made myself invisible. “I’m just a bit fed up with school.”

  “Oh, Emma, what’s happening to you? You were doing so well. It’s like you don’t care about anything anymore.”

  • • •

  I roll onto my back and put my hand out to touch Paul’s face. To know he is there. He puts an arm across my chest, squeezing me as he sleeps. I’d wanted to hug my mum that night, but I was afraid to.

  Afraid that my body would give me away.

  • • •

  Paul is so worried about me he’s rung in to cancel a lecture this morning.

  “I’ll work from home, Em. I can’t leave you like this,” he says. I try to object, but I haven’t got the energy. I go upstairs and try to work but nothing is happening. The words just jumble up and stick, like an old record, juddering in my head until I want to scream. In the end, I go downstairs to make a coffee and turn on the radio for company.

  When the music stops, the lunchtime newsman announces there’s been a new development in the Alice Irving case and I stand and wait, letting the kettle go cold again. I have to listen to three or four stories about the Olympics and politics and wars. And suddenly, the newsreader tells me that the baby was buried in the 1980s. Just like that. And I shout “No!” at him. I want him to take it back. Say he’s made an error. But he carries on, saying the police have “made fresh discoveries that place the burial of Alice Irving at least ten years after her abduction.”

  I don’t know what to think anymore. Everything is wrong. I’ve got everything wrong.

  Paul rushes into the kitchen, making me jump. I’d forgotten he was there and it frightens me when he appears suddenly.

  “What’s the matter?” he says. “What’s happened?”

  “Just something on the news. Just me being silly, that’s all,” I say, trying to be soothing but sounding too loud.

  “What was on the news?” he says.

  I try to lie. But I can’t. There are no other words in my head.

  “About a baby,” I say. “They’ve got it all wrong. They’re making a terrible mistake.”

  “Come and sit down. You are getting yourself all upset again,” he says and takes me by the hand to sit me at the table with him. “Now then, why are you so worried about this baby?”

  I look at him and say, “I think it’s my baby.” And I watch his face collapse.

  “Em, you haven’t got a baby,” he says gently. “We decided not to have one, didn’t we? Because you weren’t ready.”

  I swipe away his words with my hand. “Not your baby, Paul. Mine.”

  “Why are you saying this? You’ve never mentioned this before,” he says, searching for the truth in my eyes. I am frightening him. I know I must sound mad.

  “I didn’t want you to know,” I say. “No one knows.”

  “Not Jude?” he asks.

  “No,” I say, and I can see the disbelief creeping across his face.

  “You’re upset,” he says. “I’ll get your pills.”

  FIFTY-ONE

  Jude

  FRIDAY, APRIL 13, 2012

  She hadn’t recognized his voice when she picked up the phone, and for one wonderful moment, she thought it might be Will. But it was Paul. Emma’s Paul.

  What does he want? she thought crossly.

  “Hello, Jude,” he said. Well, at least he’s dropped the Judith thing, she thought.

  “Hello, Paul. This is a surprise.”

  “Look, I’m sorry to ring out of the blue, but I’m worried about Emma.”

  Jude sat down and gripped the receiver. “What’s happened?”

  Her son-in-law hesitated, searching for the right words. “Em is getting herself upset about the discovery of a baby in Woolwich.”

  “The baby in Howard Street?” Jude said. “Yes, she told me about it. It’s the road where we used to live.”

  “Yes, I know,” Paul said and stopped again.

  “You are obviously trying to tell me something. Just spit it out,” Jude said. She hadn’t meant to be so brusque, but he was unnerving her with these long, ominous silences.

  “Sorry, yes, well. Emma says she thinks it is her baby.”

  Jude gave a bark of astonishment. “Her baby? What a lot of nonsense! It’s been named as Alice Irving.”

  “No, that’s right, but the police have issued new information—saying she was buried in the 1980s—and it seems to have sent Emma into a panic.”

  That stopped Jude dead. But only for a
second.

  “Have they? I hadn’t heard that. But it’s still nonsense. Look, Paul, you haven’t known her as long as I have. My daughter has always had a tenuous relationship with the truth.”

  “You think she is making it up?”

  “Obviously. To be frank, she used to make up a lot of things when she was younger. Silly lies about her dad and my boyfriend. We don’t need to go into that, but perhaps she’s upset at the moment because we talked about the old days—the bad old days, in our case—when she came for lunch the other week.”

  “She didn’t tell me that,” Paul said.

  “Didn’t she? No, well, she probably doesn’t want you to know what a nightmare she was when she was younger. You know we had to ask her to leave home in the end?”

  There was silence at the other end of the line.

  “Paul?” Jude asked.

  “Yes, I’m here. Poor Emma. I didn’t know that. She’s never talked about her childhood, really. But you said ‘we.’ I thought it was just you and Emma. She said she didn’t know who her father was. Who else was there?”

  “My boyfriend. Will. Emma must have mentioned him.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Paul said.

  “How strange. Well, anyway, it wasn’t poor Emma, it was poor us. You can’t imagine what it was like,” Jude said. The case for the defense.

  “Why don’t you get Emma to ring me?” she went on. “I’ll have a chat with her about things. Maybe I can calm her down.”

  “I might suggest it, Judith. Good-bye.”

  • • •

  Jude got up and picked up a photo of Emma from her mantelpiece. She’d been two when it was taken, dressed in a little kilt Jude’s mother had brought home from a holiday in Scotland, and she was beaming up at the camera. That little face.

  When she’d dreamed of having a baby, Jude had never really thought beyond the cradle stage to the impact of having another person in her life. She’d concentrated on the image of herself as Madonna with child until the issue was forced by Emma growing out of her arms and becoming herself.