The Suffering of Strangers

by Caro Ramsay

  Somebody who knew Roberta or James had taken Baby Sholto? And left Little Moses. That woman was not Angelika Kauscher. The blue light of the other pay-as-you-go number was still flashing but it never moved from the Glasgow area.

  Because of his Downs, Moses was not good enough. It made her angry to write it down, but he was … What? Faulty? A baby returned because he was faulty? Foetuses were killed all the time because they were ‘faulty’. It was a little late to be moralistic about it. This was more like a business transaction? Just like Dali had hinted. Was Moses already bought and paid for. Then he had been found imperfect.

  Who might know about that? Who else could she put that tentative theory in front of without being told to piss off?

  She scrolled through her phone for a number she had never, never dialled, but maybe, this time they would be on the same page. Then she changed her mind and phoned Mulholland again asking how big an ask it would be to review that tape.

  So, there must be a connection between Orla and Roberta. The only way that Costello could join those two was through their pregnancies or their babies. Except Orla had kept hers a secret. She needed Wyngate to run a deeper search, where Roberta and Orla crossed paths. Or Orla and James. Or Orla and Andrew.

  They had no idea where Orla had given birth to Polly.

  On the basis that Orla was now teetering on the brink of morphing into a missing person, Costello had sent Wyngate round to gain entry to Orla’s flat before he came to work. He had measured the indents in the back of that card, the one with the picture of the Scotty dog. He had texted back, 165 by 87 mm, the size of a Bank of England fifty-pound note. A lot of them.

  So was this a business transaction, and the baby had a price tag from the moment Orla took the money – the money she had hid behind the picture in the bedroom? Could she be that daft? Of course she could. But the wee bitch was running rings round them at the moment.

  Somewhere in all this was the child abduction. She looked at her watch. The baby seat had gone to the forensic lab, it was primarily clean of baby sick so they were right. The baby, the seat, the blanket had all been ringers, and somewhere Baby Sholto was out there in his own seat and wrapped in his own blanket.

  But it was organized and then … And then she remembered Anthony Laphan, the fertility consultant she had come across in the Grace Wilson case. His happy little clinic at Inchgarten had turned out to be no more than plenty of sex, relaxation and cannabis. The genesis of that had come, surely, from a need Laphan had seen in childless women in his NHS fertility clinics. Circumstances, tragic circumstances, had closed his private little enterprise down. She couldn’t help the cold shiver that snaked its way up her spine, the memories were too close, too raw, but putting the horrors of Inchgarten to one side, had the cessation of that operation left a gap for something more sophisticated, more calculating and lethal?

  She flicked through her phone for the number of that tumbledown wee cottage sitting on the side of Loch Lomond. But first of all she phoned Anderson, she owed him that. Any mention of Anthony Laphan would bring up old memories too traumatic for Anderson, and Costello didn’t want him stumbling across it by accident in some banal report a few weeks down the line. Her boss’s mental health was better, but he was not that much better.

  Anderson’s phone rang out for a long time.

  ‘Yip Costello? Make it quick I have a hangover.’

  ‘I was thinking about interviewing Daisy and Anthony Laphan, about infertility. What do you think?’

  ‘You don’t need to ask my permission. Phone them, see what they have to say.’

  ‘Will you be happy with that?’

  ‘They are not witnesses, you are just gathering background information. And I am busy.’

  ‘Doing what? Nursing your hangover? Reigniting old flames?’

  ‘Trying to establish a link between the rapes of Sally Logan and Gillian Witherspoon.’

  Costello’s tone changed immediately. ‘You onto anything?’

  ‘Nothing much apart from the obvious. The victims were alone. It seems opportunist but both mention a noise they heard just before. I need to get Sally to remember that, tell me what kind of noise it was. Might be something or nothing. But it would be good to run it through a database.’

  ‘Let me know if you come up with anything. You might need more than one pair of eyes.’ She heard him mutter thanks and the phone cut off.

  Anderson closed his phone and took another sip of water, waiting for the headache tablet to kick in. Infertility. Not something he had given much thought to until he had met the Laphans and then he had realized how devastating it must be to some people, not to be able to have children. He had always taken family for granted. And that was one area where Sally might be considered a non-achiever, her life had stalled. If the attack had brought Sally and Andrew together, maybe the lack of family would pull them apart.

  And was he hoping for that? He hoped he was not.

  He felt guilty that he had talked in omissions, not wanting Braithwaite to see that there was a chink in his marriage. Why? In case Braithwaite thought he was going to rekindle something with Sally. Was he in danger of rekindling something with Sally? He had dreamt about that one night, that night with the drink in the park.

  And now he was thinking of Andrew Braithwaite and the way he had shown him the photos of his lovely wife. Sally on the top of Kilimanjaro, framed in silver, freckled, suntanned, big floppy hat and her long brown legs, lithe with muscles, descending into rolled up socks and walking boots. She held two walking poles; one sticking in the ground, the other held high, pointing to the top of the mountain. It was a lovely picture, and he was aware that Braithwaite was bragging to him. I got her, you didn’t.

  It was all a shrine to her, nothing about him, about Andrew.

  Nothing at all.

  Was that adoration? Or control?

  Costello hoped Anthony Laphan didn’t hold any grudges. Anderson and the team had only been there to solve a murder, it wasn’t them who had brought the flames and the death with them. Those evil little imposters had already been there, in full sight, hiding under the banal cover of normality.

  Daisy answered the phone, her voice as cheery as ever. She greeted Costello like a long-lost friend, leaving Costello feeling guilty and a little fraudulent.

  ‘How are you, pet?’

  ‘I am fine, I am doing fine. It’s Anthony I need to speak to.’

  ‘He’s in his caravan up at the new site. We are rebuilding you know after … well after everything.’

  Costello knew better than to ask for a mobile number, there was no chance of getting a signal up there.

  Daisy said, ‘Give me your number I’ll get him to call you.’

  Anthony called back ten minutes later and when she realized she had scribbled four pages of notes, she decided to record the rest of the conversation. Now she was listening to it again, adding bits in, jotting his words down in between lines, getting as much detail as possible so she could type it coherently later.

  Anthony Laphan had qualified in medicine at university, and his speciality eventually, had been infertility. He understood the difficulties that childless couples found themselves in and he explained the way the family as a unit is reinforced in the media, and the unbearable stress that could bring to bear to those who found themselves unable to reproduce. She already knew that the adoption process took a long time but according to Laphan it could take four years to adopt a young child due to the lack of supply of babies. Costello underlined that. Laphan had added that according to the law, even if the baby has been fostered, by the state, the natural mother was always allowed another chance. And who would take on a baby, with a full heart and with all that emotional turmoil, just to have the child taken away.

  Then Costello thought of Bernadette Kissel and snorted.

  And it was babies, young babies, who were in demand. People didn’t want older kids already damaged through years in the system, or the children of substance abusers. P
eople didn’t want that amount of hassle.

  She pressed play, ready to scribble the next bit, something she hadn’t thought of. ‘They want a blank page they can mould, they don’t want somebody else’s problems. They want a baby they can mould to their lifestyle, they want a DNA profile of intelligence or physicality that matches theirs so the child will grow in their image. People do want to leave something of their own. And there is a huge shortage of babies due to the laws of surrogacy and sperm donation. Even a kid born because of sperm donation now has a right to know its father. So what happens when it all goes wrong, when the kid grows up and has no money and then decides to come after the donor for support? Or the marriage breaks up and Mum goes after the donor for maintenance?’

  According to Laphan, the students who used to wank into a tube for a bit of beer money have gone to work in Tesco’s instead.

  ‘The market has tumbled. Much of the sperm now is imported from Denmark, but its parentage, if you like, is still unknown. The legal means of gaining a child are becoming more and more limited and surrogacy, that is expenses paid and nothing more, is perfectly legal. Babies do sell well round the world, so forty or fifty grand in Glasgow would not be surprising. It would be a lucrative enterprise.’ He then sketched out what he called the typical customer: a woman who delays starting a family due to the progression of her career, then she realizes too late that there might be fertility issues. She works until her early thirties then has two years of trying and failing, another two or three years trying a few IVF cycles and by then she’s forty. She’s probably got money. She’s got everything in life except the one thing she really wants. But she will have the money to pay for that.

  By now Costello was scribbling furiously. Transgender people do not qualify for IVF, men in a new childless relationship do not qualify for IVF if he has had a child in his first relationship. ‘So the pool of people who want a baby – a baby not a child – is growing and the amount of babies coming onto the market is shrinking. When you have demand and a limited supply, the price goes up.’

  Costello pressed rewind and listened to that again.

  Dali phoned from a break in her course, from the sound of running water and the roar of hand dryers in the background, she was phoning from the toilets. ‘Hitler wasn’t wrong,’ said Dali after Costello had given her the gist of Laphan’s conversation.

  ‘Oh I think he was.’

  ‘I’m a persecuted minority so I am allowed to say that.’

  She heard a door open and close, it was quiet now on the end of the phone. ‘Babies to order. Say I was fair-haired and tall, blue-eyed, and slim. And white. Yeah, I know, but imagine I was infertile. My bloke looks like … an Aryan god.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘Well, genetics are what they are. And I want a bright child from healthy parents. I’d look at somebody like you and Anderson to produce a child because you echo my fair-haired, tall, intelligent requirements.’

  ‘That’s a horrible thought,’ said Costello with such ferocity that she heard Dali give her belly laugh at the other end.

  ‘No, that is genetics.’ Dali thought for a little bit. ‘Say you know a student or an actress, somebody bright but skint, somebody who wants to earn money while getting on with something else, then they find out they are pregnant. They might want to think about selling the baby, and somewhere is a list of parents who are waiting. It’s like playing Happy Families, you just need to get a match. A bright, healthy baby that will have some semblance to his new parents because the parents resemble the natural parents. It’s not rocket science.’

  ‘But you can’t suddenly appear with a baby? Surely folk know they take a few months to cook.’

  Costello heard Dali’s earrings clink against the phone. ‘Think it through a wee bit more. They might know the baby was coming from about two months, even one month in to the pregnancy. They have seven or eight months to set the story. Or let it be known that they are pursuing adoption.’

  ‘But they need a history, a birth certificate.’

  ‘If it’s in a private clinic, who is to know. Travelling folk don’t, the Roma don’t – they never have a birth certificate or a national insurance number. But say two women go in to a clinic; one pregnant, one not. Two woman come out; one with a baby, one without. The chances of a normal person needing a transplant or getting their familial DNA checked is not high. And it can be explained, it doesn’t make it illegal. Is it even immoral? And,’ she was on a roll now, ‘nobody ever says anything, do they? Not if there’s been problems, you know, conceiving. People wait to be told and accept the good news. So does this Laphan bloke think we have a mail order business where a central broker takes money organizing the girls? Then the new parents register a birth that never happened or announce the arrival of their adopted baby. So this person would need to be skilled an obstetrician or midwife maybe? But maybe not, young healthy women give birth to healthy babies. Maybe not as difficult as we think. It’s been going on for a thousand years before we invited birthing pools. Probably learn it from You Tube these days.’

  ‘But these kids aren’t borne from mothers who are bright – Orla Sheridan would struggle to fill in the form for Mensa.’

  ‘That might be what the broker tells the prospective parents. The parents don’t know the mothers, do they? They could be told anything. They are not going to try and return the child when it fails to get into Oxbridge.’ Dali nodded her head, her earring rattling again on the handset. ‘Oh, I think he’s right, this Laphan bloke. Do you suspect him of having a hand in this?’

  ‘No, not them. It’s not their style. Do you really think there’s somebody out there and I just need to google Babies R Us.’

  ‘Oh no, I am sure it’s a more subtle process than that. The agency who looks after the unwanted pregnancies needs to talk to the agency that deals with infertility. It could be as sweet as that. I was reading in the paper about the Down’s syndrome child that was left.’ Dali sounded angry.

  ‘Little Moses.’

  ‘Can you find a record of him being born in a hospital?’

  ‘No, we are still looking but no.’

  ‘Well, that’s your answer, isn’t it? And there is a simple blood test for issues of the twenty-third chromosome now, so why didn’t they do that?’

  Mulholland stopped his car at the side of Central Station and turned down towards Brown Street, not a part of the city he knew well. He knew the Barracuda Bar that occupied part of the lower floor of the Blue Neptune from his days before he knew Elvie. Days when he liked, well, when he liked the kind of woman who hung about places like the Barracuda Bar. Expensive. Vacuous. It was the place to be seen, with its celebrity hang out, the giant aquarium. The Admiral, one of Glasgow’s most exclusive restaurants upstairs. He had eaten there once, trying to impress some girl, a model who had a weird name. She had ordered a lot and ate none of it, doing little more than picking at the salad garnish. If he took Elvie there, she would need to stop for a sandwich on the way home. The food there was pretty, but small and expensive. Not like the curry the previous night when he and Wyngate had stuffed their faces and taken home a doggy bag each. Mulholland had eaten a breakfast of cold bhajis dipped in mayonnaise, a treat because Elvie was on an early start and wouldn’t find out. He drove round, pulling the Audi into the lane beyond the Barracuda, stopping suddenly at the bollard. He reversed and bumped the car onto the pavement as close in as he could, the Wrights Insurance was on his left, the Old Edwardian and the Blue Neptune to his right, both five or six stories high, both refurbed all the way through from their original carapace, old tobacco warehouses probably in this part of the city. He looked to the name of the lane, Sevastopol. The Blue Neptune covered the whole block apart from the quarter taken up by the Old Edwardian. In all twenty-seven businesses had registered this address as their legitimate premises.

  ‘What do we do now?’ asked Wyngate.

  ‘We have a copy of the film on the phone, let’s follow that, find out where they
went.’

  They got out the car, leaving a note under the windscreen wiper and began to walk down the lane, pausing where, according to the film, the girls had last been seen. There were two doors in the side wall of the Old Edwardian, both looked iron rusted and graffiteed over. There was only one opening on the side wall of the Blue Neptune and that housed the inshot and the door to the lift up to the gym and the studio, but was too far down the lane.

  Orla and Miss Bluecoat went somewhere. Mulholland looked at the iron bollard; it must have made a hell of clatter when it fell. Had that noise frightened the birds? Did that mean a car had come through but they had not seen it? Not possible.

  Wyngate was already walking ahead, scanning the older parts of the wall, checking the graffiti and the old metal, recessed doors with litter and rat droppings piling up behind them. He was standing in the middle, his bony little head twisting this way and that as he tried to see where else the girls might have gone.

  The lane was narrow enough for a delivery lorry to scrape past if the bollard was down. Solid brick walls on both sides except an empty strip of land between the Blue Neptune and the Old Edwardian not more than twenty feet square. A low wall ran two-feet high from the end of the Edwardian to the start of the Blue Neptune, the wall supported old iron railings, spiked on the top, covered, as Wyngate found out, by anti-vandal grease. As he withdrew his hand and inspected the mess, he heard the noise of two security cameras on the Wrights Insurance building twist on their spindles to catch him with their black see-all lenses.

  ‘If that camera is motion activated …?’