by LK Fox
You don’t deserve my baby, I thought. I pulled the laminated card free from my sweater and held up the chain. It was good enough to pass a fleeting inspection, but there was nothing on the back so I couldn’t let her hold it. ‘My name is Sarah Flynn, I work for the Adoption Contact Register. I understand you have recently adopted a son?’
She folded her arms. ‘That’s right.’
‘Is he at home now?’
‘Yes, he’s asleep in the kitchen.’ That explained why I hadn’t seen him. It was probably the warmest room in the house, and she’d be able to keep an eye on him there. ‘What is this about?’
‘I wonder if it would be possible to see him for a minute?’
‘I think you’d have to tell me why first.’ Mrs Summerton wasn’t about to move an inch.
‘We recently upgraded the agency’s computer operating system and had a problem with your adoption file. Some of the details were lost.’
‘This is the first I’ve heard. Surely it could have been sorted out on the phone? Nobody has contacted me about this.’
‘Really? That’s odd.’
‘I find it even odder that they would send you out on a night like this without contacting either myself or my husband first.’
I had practised my response. ‘Somebody was supposed to call you last week to confirm the appointment. It will only take a minute or so. I simply need to check a few details about your son.’ I tried to see over Mrs Summerton’s shoulder, but she wouldn’t budge.
‘I don’t understand. Why couldn’t you do this over the phone?’
‘Because the agency requires one of its representatives to confirm the identity of your child in person, and you have to sign a simple form saying that I’ve performed the survey to your satisfaction.’
Mrs Summerton was frowning sceptically. ‘I’ve never heard of such a thing. It sounds highly irregular.’
Either she’ll let me enter in the next few seconds or she’ll shut the door, I thought, giving Mrs Summerton my most professional look.
‘You can call my office and check with them if you like. I can wait here,’ I added, hoping that Uncle Ron would still be at the other end of the line, as we’d arranged.
‘Well – I suppose it’s all right, but you can only stay for a minute. I have to get my husband’s dinner ready.’ She stepped back to let me enter.
She had been cleaning. The hall reeked of polish and bleach. There’s not much for a baby here, I thought, peering into the lounge, not in a house this clean, with no ashtrays and only coffee-table books. She wouldn’t allow a child to mark the furnishings. Gabriel wouldn’t be at all happy here.
Mrs Summerton walked slowly back towards the kitchen, where Classic FM burbled on the radio and the smells of cooking were probably limited to black plastic trays in the microwave. There were sheaves of dried lavender pinned along the pelmets. Saucepans were arranged like a dismantled suit of armour behind the sink, improbably clean. It looked like the set of a TV commercial, not a real kitchen.
‘You said you have a number I can call. I think perhaps that would be best,’ said Mrs Summerton, heading towards the phone on the kitchen counter.
All I had to do was check his left hand and see if there was a scar. I spotted the cot set beside the dining table and knew at once that I had made a mistake. The sleeping boy had soft dark skin and wispy black hair. He was Indian.
It wasn’t my Gabriel.
‘I think there may have been an administrative error . . .’ I began. ‘I, er, have your son listed as Caucasian.’ I patted my shoulder bag to suggest a notebook.
‘Show me,’ said Mrs Summerton, moving closer. There was no notebook in my bag; I had intended to bring one but had forgotten it.
The baby released a bubble of sound, woke up and began to cry.
At the same time, I heard a car pull into the driveway. Mrs Summerton suddenly appeared more comfortable as she looked up. ‘Good. That will be my husband. Perhaps he can sort this out.’
‘No, it’s fine. I think I know where the mistake has been made,’ I said, backtracking into the hall.
‘Sorry, but I can’t allow you to leave.’ Mrs Summerton advanced.
‘I can see myself out,’ I insisted, starting to panic.
She wasn’t going to let it go easily. ‘We haven’t spoken to the Adoption Contact Agency in nearly a year because their service is outsourced to another company. So I don’t see why you would just turn up without calling—’
There was nothing scarier than a housewife on the attack. And then there was a man in the doorway dropping a briefcase in the hall and keys into a ceramic dish on the radiator, and the pair were talking spouse-speak, that strange abbreviated form of overlapping communication married couples fall into after spending too long in each other’s company.
I pushed away, back along the hall, until I was forced to duck around the husband and run out on to the forecourt of the house. My heart was hammering in my chest.
‘What’s going—?’
‘Who is —?’
‘I don’t think she’s—
‘Do you want to me to—’
‘No, I don’t think it’s— Extraordinary thing,’ said the wife, watching me go.
I ran against the falling rain and didn’t stop until I was three streets away.
Nick
There’s a ghost-city in my head plotted by half-forgotten landmarks, the names of restaurants, bars and train stations, a kind of shorthand reference map.
The city’s liminal spaces were the only parts left with any character. Everything else was like this, a memory of a memory, overbuilt with loft apartments and malls that kept a few of the old names just to add local colour.
Beside a blank row of blocks of flats there was an old ship in dry dock. It was supposed to be a facsimile of a real galleon, but it was smaller than I would have expected. Its sides were banded in fierce reds and yellows and there was a narrow tar-black hull emblazoned with a ‘hind’, the heraldic term for a female deer, just above its quarterdeck. It looked more like a model kit than a vessel for crossing oceans. I had brought Gabriel to visit it on numerous occasions. He loved anything old and historical, even if it wasn’t real.
I could see part of the ship’s hull through my windscreen. It was an odd place to come to. Maybe the guy worked here. There was no sign of the bashed BMW.
The former warehouse next to the galleon smelled of freshly ground coffee and had been stripped to the bare bricks, like everywhere else along the river. Inside it, tourist shops sold tacky art prints, craft jewellery and ugly vases. The place didn’t look busy, but there were alcoves, arches and tunnels running in every direction.
The rain had briefly ceased. A burst of sharp sun illuminated the glass canopy, painting the courtyard in diagonal stripes. A party of schoolchildren in yellow safety jackets was boarding the ship. Once, I would have checked among their uniforms, searching for brown hair that needed cutting.
Seeing something shift out of the corner of my eye, I turned myself around to take in the view across the courtyard. A man in a red cap and an old-fashioned pinstripe business suit, early thirties, walking very quickly towards the street exit, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. Clearly in too much of a hurry. It was too good to be true, of course, but I couldn’t stop myself from breaking into a run. I skirted the schoolchildren, catching one on the shoulder as I ran past, and heard him swear spectacularly. Someone else shouted at me. I covered the courtyard in seconds, but the man had already vanished into a swathe of sightseers outside.
I noted his height, bulk, gait, speed – the recognition habits from my old security days came back without me needing to think. It took a few seconds to locate him again, crossing the road against the sun. I passed between cars and came up hard behind him, grabbing at his arm.
The man had a grey goatee. He spoke to me in Spanish and was surprisingly polite. It was obvious he’d just made a delivery to one of the gift shops; he was still holding an invoice.
<
br /> Heart sinking, I apologized and headed back to the dock, keeping out of sight behind the colonnades. I knew I didn’t have enough information to work with. I tried to consider the problem dispassionately, as if I’d been sent along by the company. It was impossible; by now, the facts were starting to fragment into a migraine.
I paced in a broad circle around the dock, searching in each of the cafés and shops. There was no one in a red baseball cap and a pinstripe suit. I wondered if he had an overcoat because it was cold, but if I’d seen it I couldn’t remember it. By now, he could have changed his clothes and I would never find him. Besides, there was no guarantee he was here in the dock at all. So much for my hot lead.
I was about to set off when I had another idea. If the man in the suit and driving gloves was as antsy as he looked and wanted to get his vehicle repaired as cheaply and quietly as possible, there was a chance he might head to a small local workshop and have the job carried out at the kind of place that didn’t bother with detailed records.
I downloaded a list of all the independent garages within a five-mile radius of the school and began ringing around. Forty-five minutes later, I was still calling, without any luck. Every passing minute raised the level of paranoia in me; I wondered what he was doing while I was messing around with addresses.
As I was placed on hold yet again, I tried to talk myself out of what I was doing. I examined the photograph on my phone once more. Thumbing the zoom as far as it would go, I studied the scene pixel by pixel. There was no doubt about it. I had managed to mistake a blue shopping bag full of clothes for a small human being. Even Gabriel would have seen the funny side of that.
But this time I spotted a detail I had missed before. A small yellow rectangle, probably a sticker for a garage, affixed above the licence plate. It was impossible to read, but the logo had a distinctive zigzag pattern. It was the kind of dealer mark lots of drivers never get around to removing, and I’d seen this one on older cars all over my neighbourhood. Swinton’s, a cut-price garage chain everyone used sooner or later.
It took only a few seconds to Google all their locations in the city. Twelve minutes later, I found myself speaking to an unsuspecting mechanic who had just received a call from the owner of an old grey Series 5 BMW with corresponding plates, dented wing, scraped paintwork. The guy was on his way over right now to bring it in for repairs.
I thanked the mechanic, told him that the owner and I worked together and that I needed to catch him at the garage, then told him not to say anything just in case I couldn’t get there in time, then told him to forget I’d called at all. I couldn’t have made myself sound more suspicious if I’d tried.
This particular branch of Swinton’s was on Highgate Road, under a mantle of permanently dripping brick railway arches that curved across the city’s outgoing northern roads. I vaguely knew it because Ben had taken his old Toyota there once, and they’d charged him for a load of electrical stuff they didn’t fix.
I emerged into the street and looked up. The sky was darkening with the threat of more rain. As I returned to the Peugeot and pulled into the traffic, I told myself the sensible thing to do would be to go home and forget any of this ever happened. Gabriel had not ‘gone missing’. He had not been snatched off the streets by a lone killer. He had simply run away and met with an accident. We had picked out his headstone and watched him lowered into the ground, and listened to a vicar talk in the vaguest possible terms about a child he’d never met. There was nothing more anyone could say or do.
I turned the car around and headed for the garage.
Ella
Outsourced agencies. I hadn’t thought of that.
Thinking back to my time at the Dentworth Clinic, I recalled a set of initials that had often been mentioned as a ‘favoured supplier’, but I’d assumed they delivered paper towels or something like that. I googled ‘ADG London’ and got ‘ADG Marketing’, ‘ADG Dental Practice’ and the Adoption Direct Group. It sounded like a mail-order-baby service but turned out to be a privately owned agency based in Wimbledon.
I also kept googling ‘Summerton’, which turned out to be a fairly unusual name. It was old English, and meant ‘summer farm’. There was a town in North Carolina with that name, and just a handful of people in London. I remembered conversations with Marleena and was sure she’d used the term ‘Adoption Direct’, like it was shorthand for any dealings she had with an agency.
And then I stopped.
I was sitting on a bus in my old overcoat, lining up bits of scribbled-on paper all over the seat next to me like a crazy person.
You can walk away from this right now, I reasoned. Go home, leave it alone. Forget your boy. Trust Marleena. Draw a line under the whole thing and live with the pain. Grow up. Start over.
Well, maybe some people could, but I couldn’t. I’d read that mothers form stronger bonds with their babies because they release something called oxytocin. I felt an unbreakable bond with Gabriel that had nothing to do with chemicals.
I gathered up my scraps of paper and took a different bus.
*
ADG was an ugly bay-windowed bungalow set in an overgrown garden, attached to a nursery.
I thanked Aunt Charlie for all her help, moved to a cheap Airbnb in Wimbledon (actually, one room with a window over a breakers’ yard) and began to watch the place. Couples arrived and left, but I saw only one pair leave with a baby. I had no way of gaining access to the building so I stood across the road beneath a navy-blue golf umbrella. I watched. I listened. I missed nothing. The same people arrived in the same order every morning.
I soon found better places to hide. I did two shifts a day. In between these, I handled the lunchtime and early-evening rushes as a bar helper at a Harvester Inn just up the road. It was easy work; they catered mainly for seniors who came in for meat and two veg and treated the place as a social club.
The adoption agency had a scraggly hedge running around it. Great for standing behind, and you could hear everything on the other side. At the beginning of the third week, one of the couples I’d seen before turned up again, and this time they were carrying an empty collapsible buggy. I heard the husband speak. He said, ‘Try not to look so nervous.’
She said: ‘Oh, Sausage, I can’t help it.’
Jesus. What kind of wife called her husband Sausage?
She was shaking like a leaf. Sausage reached out to grip her hand, but she wouldn’t allow it to be taken. She appeared to be growing more tense by the second, doing a Get off me thing on the doorstep, anxiously smoothing out her coat and checking her hair. She didn’t look the motherly type. She was done up as if she was going out to dinner. I could tell he thought she was too smartly dressed, but wasn’t about to mention it. We could both see that she was totally desperate to make a good impression.
‘How can I not be nervous?’ She patted herself on the chest as if she was having trouble breathing. ‘Why are they taking so long to answer?’
By this time, I was very familiar with the grounds, and I was pretty sure they’d be taken to one of the offices at the side of the building. I’d stood in the garden and peered through the windows on a number of occasions and, despite the cold, there was normally one propped open – I’d heard the staff complaining about the central heating being set too high.
And I finally had a break. I heard someone call out loudly and clearly, ‘Mrs Summerton? Mrs Kate Summerton?’ My breath caught in my chest.
Once they stepped inside, I snuck around to the waiting room and looked in, keeping my head low. The pastel decor and chandeliers, the horrible reproduction horse paintings and the plasticky coffee tables stranded it halfway between a private clinic and a suburban hotel.
I knew the rules. You were eligible to adopt a child if you were twenty-one or over, so long as you could provide a ‘permanent, caring and stable’ home. There was no upper age limit, but you had to demonstrate the necessary commitment and energy to bringing up a child. You could apply to adopt regardless of ma
rital status, sexuality, race or religion, whether or not you were in work or had a disability. Uncle Ron had warned me that all this was only theoretical, though, and that in practice things often worked out quite differently.
From the sound of it, Kate Summerton knew exactly what to expect. I imagine she’d gone over the details with a magnifying glass. She and her husband would have been assessed for eligibility, and that meant they were required to prove they did not have criminal records, although minor convictions wouldn’t necessarily have ruled them out, unless they’d been cautioned or convicted of an offence against a child. You didn’t need to be wealthy or own your own home to adopt, and you could apply for tax credits and benefits to supplement your income. In many places, there was a two-year waiting list, but from what I was hearing through the window, it sounded as if Mr and Mrs Summerton had somehow managed to jump the queue. Maybe they just knew the right people. I guessed the system favoured those who knew how to manipulate it.
‘What if they find out about—’ I heard his wife ask as they wandered through and seated themselves.
His answer struck me as odd. ‘We’re not breaking the law, it’s not illegal. It’s better this happens sooner rather than later. You’re going to make a wonderful mother. It’s just what you need right now.’
That sounded ominous.
But it had to be them. Summerton, ADG – how could it be anyone else?
Mrs Summerton looked over at her husband and, for a moment I thought she was going to make a bolt for the door. Sausage wasn’t particularly sausage-like, more like a sexy puppy, eager and friendly and happy to share some love. He would probably make a great father but, right now, as he patted his wife’s hand and offered her an assortment of comforting smiles, he was making me nervous.
A few minutes later, the receptionist rose and came over. For one horrible moment, I thought she’d caught sight of me. But – thank God – she’d just come to partially close the window. It was harder to hear them now, so I had to creep closer.
