by Delaney, JP
“She was definitely around before I was—she told me she’d had a natural birth, rather than a C-section like me. So it seems likely she’d have arrived pretty soon after the babies did.”
“But whatever we might think about Miles, Lucy definitely isn’t a psychopath,” Pete says. “And she of all people had no reason to swap a premature but reasonably healthy baby for one with a high likelihood of disability.”
“True. But we can’t altogether rule her out.”
“All right. And next? You said five possibilities in all.”
“Bronagh,” I say slowly. “I think it’s possible that it was Bronagh who swapped them.”
76
MADDIE
“NO.” PETE SHAKES HIS head. “No way. No.”
“Hear me out,” I insist. “It was that article in the Mail that got me thinking—that so-called expert saying this might be a case of hero syndrome? I looked it up. It’s a bullshit phrase—it’s not even officially recognized by psychiatrists. But what is true is that, in the caregiving professions, there are a small but significant number of people who deliberately cause crises, either because they enjoy the feeling of power over life and death it gives them, or because they feed on the admiration they get when they sort the crisis out.”
“That sounds like some terrible late-night documentary,” he scoffs. “Nurses Who Kill.”
“That’s because some nurses do kill. Statistically, they’re the most prolific serial killers there are. There was one in Germany who killed ninety-nine people, for God’s sake. Another in Italy was accused of murdering over eighty. And an unusually high proportion of killer nurses work in pediatrics. There’s even a case going through the courts right now—a neonatal nurse who was regarded as brilliant, dedicated, devoted to her job, and who helped organize the fundraising appeal for a new five-million-pound baby unit. Does that sound familiar?”
Pete stares at me.
“Often, they only come under suspicion because someone spots a pattern of abnormally high death rates,” I add. “St. Alexander’s has been downgraded from a Level Three to a Level Two for exactly that reason, yes?”
“Yes,” he says. He sounds stunned. “But not Bronagh. She saved Theo’s life on a daily basis, Mads. She got his heart going when it stopped—”
“And didn’t we all admire her for it?”
He grimaces. “But why swap them? It’s one thing to say a nurse might do something for attention, but none of the ones you mentioned swapped babies around, did they?”
“True,” I admit. “But maybe Bronagh liked having a certain sort of baby in her care. After all, Theo was relatively easy to look after.” I hesitate. “And Theo had you.”
“That is ridiculous.” He doesn’t meet my eye. “For that matter, it could just as easily have been that other nurse—the grumpy one. What was her name? Paula.”
“Also true. And in fact, there was a strange incident with her, when I pointed out that David’s arterial line was loose. Which is why Paula is number four on my list.”
“And five? Who’s number five?”
“Number five is you, Pete,” I say softly. “You’re my final suspect.”
He sighs despairingly. “Not this—”
“Because I can’t rule you out, can I?” I continue. “I don’t believe you’d want someone else’s baby just because it was healthier than ours. But you knew what I was thinking that day—that our baby was going to die. You knew how badly I was taking it. And you knew I’d had mental health issues in the past. I think you might be capable of doing something like that to protect me.” I hesitate. “And, for that matter, to protect us. Because our lives would have been very different if we’d had David instead of Theo, wouldn’t they? We wouldn’t have had Miles and Lucy’s resources to cushion the blow of his disability. And the brutal truth is, relationships do often break down in circumstances like those. So let’s face facts. However unthinkable it is, however unlike you it may seem, you did have a motive to take Theo that day.”
There’s a long silence. Pete closes his eyes, as if in pain.
I add, “And that’s why I need to ask you, before we spend a lot of time and money investigating these other possibilities: Did you have anything, anything at all, to do with the swapping of those babies?”
He looks me in the eye. Those kind, gentle brown eyes of his that I’ve stared into so many times—across the kitchen table as we eat, when we share a knowing glance at parties, when we make love—lock intently onto mine.
“I did not,” he says quietly.
But really, what can you tell from someone’s eyes? Presumably every one of those nurses I listed had gazes as clear and untroubled as his.
And I still can’t shake off the sense that there’s something he’s not telling me.
“Do you believe me?” he adds.
“Of course,” I say, although I don’t suppose either of us really thinks I mean it.
77
PETE
I FOUND MURDO MCALLISTER through LinkedIn. I simply set my profile to incognito and browsed Miles’s contacts. About a dozen were ex-Hardings. I chose Murdo because his dates showed he’d left the bank around the same time as Miles, and also because under INTERESTS he’d listed “Mayfair Mayflies,” the rugby team Lucy said Miles used to play for.
Contacting him was a risk, of course. Murdo might simply forward my email to Miles. But I was betting that Maddie was right, and that what Miles was doing to us was part of a consistent pattern of behavior.
And besides, Maddie was definitely right in saying we had to do something. If nothing else, I had to show her that I was just as committed as she was to clearing my name.
Murdo suggested meeting in a pub in Shepherd Market, off Piccadilly. It wasn’t an area I knew—a maze of tiny streets and alleyways where wine merchants and bookshops rubbed shoulders with embassies and pricey antiques dealers. But the traditional Victorian pub he’d chosen could have been in any market town in England. As I walked in he stood up and greeted me, a pleasant, burly man with thinning curly hair and a faint Scottish accent.
He allowed me to buy him a beer, but only a half. “I don’t have long—I’ve got a call at one thirty. You said you wanted to talk about Miles Lambert. You’re not about to offer him a job, are you?”
I shook my head. “It’s a bit more complicated than that.”
I gave him the short version. When I’d finished, he said flatly, “What you describe doesn’t surprise me in the least.”
I pulled out my notebook. “Can you be a bit more specific?”
Just for a moment, Murdo looked anxious. “This is off the record, right?”
“If you like.”
He nodded. “I met Miles when he joined Hardings. He was headed for the top—a golden boy. A few people thought it odd he’d moved jobs every couple of years before coming to us, but since he’d always moved to more senior positions or for a bigger salary, you could read it as smart career planning. This wasn’t long after the crash, and everything was changing—the regulators were insisting on banks setting up internal compliance departments, risk assessment experts were getting seats on the board, that kind of stuff.” Murdo took a pull of his beer. “The traders all hated it, but we could see why it was necessary. Miles’s specialty was spotting gaps in the new regulations and gaming them. Nothing wrong with that, of course—it was what we were paid to do. And ultimately, if Compliance was happy, fine.”
“But Miles went further?”
Murdo nodded. “In that environment, it was all too easy to start thinking, How do I package this so Compliance approves it, even though I know it’s actually against the rules? At the end of the day, they were just another bunch of muppets you had to outsmart. And Miles was good at it. He was a bloody professional banker—focused, driven, with an unbelievable work ethic, but he never got stressed or shouted
at people. And believe me, that’s unusual—trading’s a high-pressure environment. He was put in charge of a team, and although he drove them pretty hard, they all seemed to like him.”
“So what happened?”
“Rogue trading,” Murdo said shortly. “We were both working with complex equity derivatives that most people in the bank couldn’t even spell, let alone understand. But essentially, if you made a bet on a particular asset rising, you had to hedge it by making a bet on another asset that could be counted on to move in the opposite direction. That way, you limited the bank’s risk, so you were allowed to make a bigger initial bet. It’s a bit like taking out an insurance policy against your house burning down—it means you can risk buying a bigger house than you otherwise could. Miles had found a way to make the risky trade without taking out the insurance, by making fictitious hedges. To begin with, he mostly got his bets right, which meant huge profits for his desk. He concealed the source by making more trades, and so on and so on. It was crazy, really—he was bound to get found out eventually. In the event, it was a whistleblower—someone on his team who wasn’t quite as brainwashed as the others.”
“And Miles got fired?”
“In the end, yes. But before that, there was an investigation. That was the first I knew of it—when the audit people started crawling all over him. The sensible thing to do at that point would have been to clear his position, deny everything, and keep his head down. But he didn’t.” Murdo shook his head in disbelief. “He came to me after work one day and casually asked if I’d set up a trading account he could use, now the heat was on him. As a fellow Mayfly, he said, he knew he could trust me. I told him I’d have to be mad to do that—I’d end up getting dragged into it, too. He just laughed and said, ‘Well, why not? This is the most fun I’ve had in ages.’ He was actually enjoying the whole damn thing. It was as if he thought he was invincible.”
“So you refused to help?”
Murdo nodded. “But the bastard told the investigators I’d been part of it anyway. There was absolutely no truth to it, of course. But I knew I was under a shadow after that, so I left.”
“When was all this?”
“Just over two years ago.”
About the same time David and Theo were in hospital. “And what about the Mayflies? He left the team because of a knee injury, I heard?”
Murdo snorted. “Who told you that? He got thrown out because he took it too damn seriously.”
“In what way?”
“Look—we’re a pub team. A bunch of guys who all played at a decent level at university and aren’t quite ready to hang up our boots. Miles became captain because no one else wanted it. And to be fair, because he was the best player. But he hated losing—just hated it. Pretty soon he was giving us prematch pep talks. We even had to chant stuff out loud—‘Desire. Hurt. Dominate. Destroy,’ that kind of thing. That one was actually an England dressing room chant from the 2003 World Cup, but we played in a Sunday league, for Christ’s sake. And then, in one match, when we were losing sixteen to twelve, there was a scrum in our half near the touchline and Miles gouged out the opposing player’s eye with his thumb. The poor guy had to go straight to hospital and have the rest of it removed—he’s got a glass eye now. Miles didn’t even apologize to him. We took a vote after the game and told Miles he was out. He just shrugged. It was weird, really. He went all quiet and still, almost blank, and said, ‘You’re losers anyway. I’m bored of the lot of you.’ It was as if he’d turned into a robot.”
I nodded. “I know that voice.”
“So anyway,” Murdo said, “my advice to anyone, and the reason I agreed to meet you, is to say: Steer clear of Miles Lambert.”
“I wish I could.”
Murdo hesitated. “Look, there’s something else. It’s probably nothing, but…”
“What?”
“You know I said it was a whistleblower who first raised concerns about Miles? It’s meant to be a confidential process, but the consensus around the office was that it was a guy called Anand, a young analyst who’d only recently transferred onto the team. About a month after Miles left, Anand was out jogging when he was the victim of a hit-and-run. It was raining and visibility was bad—no one saw anything, least of all Anand. He broke his pelvis in five places—he was lucky not to be killed. There was no evidence it was anything to do with Miles. But put it this way, a few of us Mayflies took to running in pairs for a while after that.”
I thought of Jane Tigman, knocked off her bike after complaining about Theo.
“I don’t think it’s nothing,” I said slowly. “I think it’s what he does.”
Murdo nodded, and finished his drink. “And remember, all this is off the record. The last thing I want is Miles waiting outside my front door.”
78
Case no. 12675/PU78B65, Exhibit 41. Retrieved from Maddie Wilson’s iPad internet history. Peter Riley’s laptop was in police custody at the time.
THE PSYCHOPATH TEST
Do you have psychopathic traits? Take our test to determine whether you share any of the characteristics of a high-functioning psychopath.
People generally take to me straightaway.
❍ True ❍ False
I rarely get tongue-tied.
❍ True ❍ False
I am easily bored.
❍ True ❍ False
I rarely feel guilty.
❍ True ❍ False
When I move jobs, I am unlikely to stay in touch with old colleagues.
❍ True ❍ False
When I move towns, I am unlikely to stay in touch with old neighbors.
❍ True ❍ False
If I fail at something, it is usually because I have been let down by others.
❍ True ❍ False
I enjoy taking risks.
❍ True ❍ False
Most of my exes are a little bit crazy.
❍ True ❍ False
I don’t like to stay too long in one situation.
❍ True ❍ False
When others panic, I keep a clear head.
❍ True ❍ False
I don’t get bothered by the suffering of others.
❍ True ❍ False
If I accidentally walked out of a restaurant without paying, I wouldn’t go back—it’s the waiter’s fault for not realizing.
❍ True ❍ False
Burglars who get shot have only themselves to blame.
❍ True ❍ False
I will take responsibility for something, but I will not express remorse.
❍ True ❍ False
I would probably be unfaithful if I could be sure there would be no repercussions.
❍ True ❍ False
I rarely cry at sad films.
❍ True ❍ False
I would make an excuse to avoid going to a colleague’s funeral.
❍ True ❍ False
Change excites me.
❍ True ❍ False
The best decisions are often made quickly.
❍ True ❍ False
I don’t get mad, I get even.
❍ True ❍ False
SCORING: Count all the TRUE boxes you have checked and deduct the number of FALSE boxes. If you have a score of more than +10, you score highly for psychopathic traits.
79
MADDIE
I INSIST ON BEING the one to talk to Bronagh. It makes sense anyway for Pete, as the journalist, to track down Miles’s ex-colleagues, but it’s more than that. I want to look Bronagh in the eye and ask whether there was ever anything between her and Pete. And while I can tell Pete isn’t happy about us meeting, neither can he object without digging himself any deeper into the hole he’s in.
Do I really think there’s anything to be suspicious of? I’m not sure, any more than I’m sure about the other accusations that hav
e been swirling around him. Of course, if it turns out there was something, on one level it would be hypocritical of me to mind, given that I’ve not been a saint myself. But I would mind, all the same. Pete’s loyalty is so much a part of his character that something like that would be a big deal for him. He isn’t the sort to have a quick fling and put it out of his head. It would be a sign that our relationship is fundamentally flawed.
What was that line from that old TV show? “The innocent have nothing to fear.” And yet here we are, and I do fear. Fear losing my family, fear what the courts might order, fear what Miles Lambert might do in his unstoppable drive to get Theo back.
But most of all, fear what I might find out.
I try to push all that from my mind as I enter the Costa on the ground floor of St. Alexander’s where Bronagh suggested meeting. She’s already there, carrying a smoothie and some kind of cake toward a table, and for a moment I stop and study her. The uniform suits her: The scrubs the neonatal nurses wear, made of thin blue cotton, flatter her lithe frame the way pajamas or a T-shirt would, outlining the shape of her buttocks, the slimness of her shoulders, making her look almost undressed. Today she has her jet-black hair tied in a plait that rests between her shoulder blades. Is she pretty? Yes, I decide, reasonably so. Is she beautiful? Probably not, but then, women don’t need to be beautiful to attract men.
I buy myself a coffee, playing for time, then summon up my resolve and go over. “Bronagh. Hi.”
“Oh—hi.” She raises the cake, which I now see is a chocolate muffin. “Hope you don’t mind. This is breakfast and lunch.” It’s almost three P.M.
“You must be really busy. I won’t keep you long.” I sit down. “You’re probably wondering why I wanted to meet.”
Bronagh’s blue eyes give nothing away. “I guess I was a wee bit surprised when you got in touch.”
