by Sam Hayes
Taking a chance, I run out of the room, calling my daughter’s name.
I knew he’d forget his umbrella. It took him two hours to realise. I’d had a few customers since him but not many. The doorbell jangled and there he was again although not so wet because the rain had finally let up.
‘I forgot my umbrella.’ He was wiping his feet again.
‘I know.’ I reached down behind the counter and retrieved it. I’d curled it up neatly with the strap.
‘Actually,’ he said. ‘I want some more flowers.’
‘Wow,’ I said back and I passed his umbrella across the counter. ‘OK.’ We smiled at each other and I shuffled some bills around. He went to look in all the different buckets.
‘What do you recommend?’ He was half hidden behind my new display of lilies. I stepped out from behind the counter. He was taller than me.
‘What’s the occasion?’ My hands were on my hips.
‘What are your favourites?’
I didn’t have to think. ‘Just freesias. It’s their scent.’ I pointed at the bucket containing the out-of-season blooms. I didn’t have many left but he scooped them all out. They dripped on the floor. I went and wrapped them and told him the price. This time he paid cash and held the bunch against his coat.
‘For you,’ he said and passed them back.
‘Me?’ I took them. My hands shook. This was it.
‘Dinner?’
And it was.
Ruby has brought a boy home. Too bad she’s never going to get the chance to see him again. He looks interesting. She’s playing her new song to him and he stands, enraptured, leaning against the piano. I make them pizza and drinks, to get them out of my way, and Robert slams his way out of the house. I wonder if it’s the last time I will ever see him. I swallow it all down, everything that’s rising up my throat. That shell is beginning to coat my body again. It’s thickening all around me just when, over the last few months, it had finally melted away.
When Ruby and her friend Art go to her room to study, I gather up a bunch of her sheet music and a handful of the CDs she recorded with Robert. I know she couldn’t bear to leave those behind. Upstairs, I pull two large holdalls out of the cupboard on the landing, quietly so Ruby doesn’t hear, and dump them on my bed. I stop still and think that it won’t be my bed any more; the quilt set I chose, the matching lampshades and the fur rug for Robert to step onto in the morning. I fight it all back down.
I’m not seeing straight as I stuff clothes into one of the bags. Each time I run away, I manage to rescue more of my existence. Perhaps one day I’ll hire a removals van.
In the bathroom, I scoop up my toiletries and I pick out some make-up from my dressing table along with my entire jewellery box. Some of it’s valuable and could be sold. The wardrobe’s a mess. Clothes have fallen to the floor but I don’t care. I take the stairs to the top floor and get the key to my cash box. I remove the box from the secret compartment in my desk and, back in the bedroom, I jam both key and box into the holdall. The other bag I leave empty for Ruby’s stuff.
I sit on the bed unable to cry and then tell Art it’s time to leave. There’s a fuss of course when I tell Ruby that we’re going away.
‘It’s just a holiday, only a few days.’ Although I know it will be forever. She stamps her feet and pulls her belongings out of her bag as quickly as I put them in. ‘We have to,’ I tell her. ‘We’ll go and see Baxter. It’s been so long.’ I don’t know where the thought came from but Ruby’s face relaxes and she finally allows me to pack her clothes. I instruct her to gather anything else important and when she is done, I click the front door shut and take one last look at my house as the taxi driver helps us haul our luggage into the boot.
‘Victoria Station,’ I tell him.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Robert and Louisa left Northampton after a fruitless search at the register office. The motorway was choked and for three hours they crawled south along the M1. It gave them time to talk and Robert too much time to think.
‘If you could prove conclusively that Ruby was Erin’s daughter, would you let this go?’ Louisa craned her neck out of the window to see if she could spot an accident up ahead. ‘Nothing. Just miles of cars.’
‘Then I’d only have to be concerned about my wife’s secret life as a prostitute.’
‘But if you could get round that, by talking, by understanding, would you get off this ridiculous train if I could prove to you that Ruby belongs to Erin?’
‘You’re assuming that Erin’s coming back and—’
‘Rob, just answer the question!’
‘Yes.’
‘Right, then we need to run a DNA test.’ Louisa picked her phone from her bag. Robert thought about the implications then listened as she spoke to someone she obviously knew quite well. ‘No, not that kind of favour.’ She giggled. It was the first time Robert had heard her stoop to such an immature display of need. ‘I need a maternity test like lightning.’ Another giggle and she trailed a finger along the leather trim of the Mercedes door. ‘Ha ha. Very funny. No, not for me and no, I’m already taken. Just tell me how long it’ll take if I get the samples to you this afternoon.’ A pause and then, ‘James, you’re a doll. I owe you big.’ Louisa snapped her phone shut and killed the silly laughter as soon as the call ended. ‘Twenty-four hours if I get samples to him today.’
Robert, still dizzy from Louisa’s obvious flirting, considered the implications. ‘If the test shows negative, that Erin isn’t Ruby’s mother, then what? Are we any further forward?’ He drummed his fingers on the wheel as the car in front began to move. ‘At last.’
‘I can only tell you the scientific answers, not the moral ones.’
Robert removed his seat belt and fumbled in his pocket for cigarettes but realised he’d run out. Up ahead, he saw a service station and pulled off.
‘Promise me you’ll give up when this is all over?’
Robert sat on a low brick wall in the car park and smoked four cigarettes in a row. The fumes from the slow-moving traffic, trapped in the air by the day’s heat, fused with the smoke from his Marlboro.
Jenna hadn’t liked him smoking either. Maybe that’s why he was doing it again, to annoy her, to prevent her voice, her memory, her smell, her pervasive spirit from haunting his thoughts further. Robert hoped the stench of his smoke – his guilt – would repel her enough to allow him to do what he had to do.
Robert ignored Louisa’s plea. ‘So tell me, how do we get DNA from a wife and daughter who have run away?’ He recalled several cases over the years that involved paternity testing but he hadn’t had anything to do with the actual test or sample methods. All he’d ever been interested in, as now, were the results.
‘You’d be surprised what we can find in your home. It’ll take a bit of searching but all we need are, say, hairs from a brush or an envelope Erin’s licked.’
A piece of Erin and a piece of Ruby, Robert thought, to patchwork back together his broken family. Spit and hair, that’s all it would take.
‘If Erin’s not Ruby’s mother, what do I do? Do I go to the police? Do I tell Cheryl that I’ve got her daughter?’ Robert considered that Cheryl might already have notified the police of their strange encounter. But he doubted she’d be able to find him through his name alone.
‘If you report Erin to the police, Robert, not only will you lose your wife, another wife, but Ruby will lose the only mother she has ever known.’
‘I just wanted to tell Cheryl how beautiful Ruby is but I didn’t get the chance. I wanted to let her know that she’s thirteen and talented and a wonderful pianist and that she’s just got her first boyfriend and hasn’t long started her periods and . . .’ He broke off, lit another cigarette and squinted up at Louisa, who was standing over him scowling like the nicotine police. ‘Truth be known, I wanted to tell Cheryl that she couldn’t have her daughter back.’
Robert recalled the look on Cheryl’s face when he had delivered the news. It was somewhere betw
een fear and relief and bore the trademark paleness and shaking of someone who had seen a ghost. Why, Robert wondered, hadn’t she fallen to her knees and hugged him and begged him to take her to her long lost baby? When the shock waves had dissipated, why hadn’t she sat and allowed the many questions Robert was sure she would have stored away to come flooding out?
In reality, when her muscles were able to function, Cheryl had simply run, as best she could in her long skirt, and disappeared through the crowd. Robert simply stood motionless, hoping she’d come back. Before he left he picked up a tarot card and slipped it into his pocket. It was the Justice card. The ruler of truth.
Louisa didn’t waste any time. ‘The university genetics department will be closed if we don’t get a move on. Now, show me the bathroom that Erin used.’
If she hadn’t grabbed him by the arm, Robert would have stood there forever in the hallway of his house staring blankly at the couple of letters that had arrived for Erin that morning. Return to sender, he thought before taking Louisa into his en-suite bathroom.
‘She’s taken most of her stuff from in here.’ Robert watched as Louisa scoured the shower cubicle and the sink for traces of his wife. Rather than search for the whole woman, they were picking about for minuscule fragments of what made her whole. He wondered: does DNA show traces of dishonesty? Is a person with a certain genetic sequence liable to develop a propensity to lie, to be unreliable, to steal or murder even?
‘Damn,’ Louisa said, holding a fine blonde hair up to the light. ‘No root. James said a hair must have a root for them to harvest a suitable sample. Where did Erin usually keep her hairbrush?’
Did, Robert noticed. As if she was dead. ‘In here.’ He showed Louisa to Erin’s dressing table and discovered that she’d dropped a lipstick on the floor beneath the stool. When he bent to pick it up, he saw the small waste bin under the dressing table. It had tipped over and spilled its contents on the carpet. ‘No hairbrush but look.’ Robert carefully lifted a clump of woven blonde hairs, like a tiny fragile nest, and handed it over. ‘Any good?’
‘Possibly perfect.’ She grinned, examining the hairs, which had obviously been pulled from Erin’s hairbrush. She extracted a couple from the clump. ‘There are certainly some roots in here. I’ll give the whole lot to James to be on the safe side.’ She eyed Robert cautiously. ‘Are you sure these are definitely Erin’s hairs?’
Robert laughed and ignored the pain it caused. ‘Ruby’s got long dark hair.’ He frowned when he thought how dissimilar it was to Erin’s. ‘And it’s certainly not mine. It couldn’t be anyone else’s.’
A search in Ruby’s small bedroom didn’t reveal a suitable sample. In the kitchen, Louisa was about to telephone her contact in the university’s genetics department when Robert stopped her and pulled a face. ‘I’ve told her a thousand times about this. But now I’m pleased about her disgusting habit.’ He pointed to a piece of gnarled pink bubble gum stuck to the side of an unfinished glass of milk. It was sitting beside the unwashed plates from Erin and Ruby’s last meal. ‘Will gum do?’
‘Fine, except you can’t prove that it’s Ruby’s.’
Robert smiled. ‘Erin wouldn’t be seen dead with this in her mouth. Ruby always had a packet of the stuff in her pocket. It’s hers all right.’
Louisa prised it off the glass with a knife and allowed it to drop into a freezer bag. She collected the other bag containing the hair, said, ‘Keys, please,’ and snatched them from Robert when he held them out.
‘I’ll be back soon. Meantime, sit tight and don’t do anything rash.’ She turned and walked a couple of paces but then stopped. Looking back at Robert, she saw the worry hanging on his features, dripping from his eyes and mouth and jaw. She approached him and kissed his cheek. ‘I won’t be long,’ she whispered and gave his arm a squeeze.
Instead of waiting in the empty house, Robert found the keys to Erin’s car – which had been left in the street since she’d gone – and, after a frenzied solo squash session at the club, he headed for the office.
There was peace and stillness, the hum of the computer network silenced by Tanya and all the harsh lights turned off except for the dim fire exit signs illuminating a path to his desk. It was only ten past six but all the clients were asleep already, tucked neatly inside the filing cabinet, their troubles and battles silenced for the night. At the end of each day, Tanya would put a finger to her lips and say, ‘Sshh, quiet now.’
The leather creaked as Robert dropped into his chair. He saw that one file had been left out on his otherwise clear desk. He liked to keep things organised in his office. It gave him a sense that urgent cases weren’t piling up around him, even though they were. He picked up the file and read the label. As he thought, it was the Bowman case.
He remembered Mary Bowman sitting opposite, her rotten-fruit face begging him to let go even though she confessed she had given up. Robert knew she hadn’t. How could anyone relinquish their children without a fight? What right did he have to persuade the judge that her kids should be taken away? They were pawns in a dirty game. He wanted no part of it. It occurred to him that sometimes, in some cases, the mother had no choice.
Robert went into Den’s office and poured himself a drink. He looked around the senior partner’s office. The original paintings, the antique furniture, the shelves of leather-bound books all made a statement: I’m wealthy and I will win your case. Den took the important clients, not that they had many of those, and he was left with the trash. The Jed Bowmans of the world.
It would be easy, he thought as he took the glass of whisky back to his office, to pick up the file and leave it lying on Den’s desk with a note saying, ‘Over to you.’ But to do that would be to guarantee a victory for Jed. Without doubt, Den would destroy Mary’s case and Jed would receive custody of the children. Mary Bowman was an unfit mother. She was a drug addict and had been unfaithful. She was also without a job and without courage. Jed on the other hand had been the strong arm of the family and saw it as his duty to remove his offspring from danger. He had a job now, determination, and a will so strong he would stop at nothing to see his wife left in the gutter. Jed Bowman was fuelled by revenge.
Robert took a red marker pen and scrawled ‘Case Closed’ across the front of the file. Mason & Knight wouldn’t be dealing with the man any more. As for Mary, he would see to it that she received the best legal representation in London.
Kicking back in his leather chair, feet up on his desk, Robert wondered what had driven Erin to steal baby Ruby from Cheryl’s car. He’d read the newspaper article a thousand times. The baby’s mother had been in the supermarket for such a short time. Then he wondered about Cheryl, how she must have felt when she discovered her baby was gone. He remembered her eyes, the way she scoured his palm.
If Erin met Cheryl, would she say sorry?
After an hour of thought, Robert picked up the phone. He didn’t believe Erin would show regret; didn’t really believe she should. How could anyone regret thirteen years bringing up a child? As he looked up the number on the internet and then dialled, he wondered if Detective Inspector George Lumley was still in the force. He could have retired, moved to another area, died.
It rang only twice before he put the receiver back on its base. He couldn’t do it. He saw Erin being taken away. He pictured Ruby watching. He tried to imagine Ruby’s new life with Cheryl but it simply wasn’t there.
Cheryl didn’t know that Ruby liked to eat Coco Pops in front of Saturday morning TV. She had no idea that she was prone to leaving her homework until the last minute and needed to be badgered to get it done. How would she know what to do if Ruby had a nightmare or wept for Erin?
Strangely, out of everyone, he felt the most qualified to offer Ruby the stability she needed but as far as the courts were concerned, he had little right to her future. Robert picked up the telephone three more times before finally leaving the office and returning home.
Robert couldn’t sleep. Louisa had returned to her hotel.
He had rather hoped, after the Chinese takeaway and bottle of wine she had returned with from the university, that she would feel like occupying the guest room for the night. He hadn’t much wanted to be alone and he might have taken the chance, before the pressure that he felt morphing into a storm, to talk openly with her. To finally tell her how he had once felt about her. What he should have said years ago but never did. And he wanted to make it clear that it was Erin he loved now, even though she seemed as unreachable as anything in his life ever had. Even though he was losing his grip on her hand because of unfathomable forces pulling her from him.
But Louisa had left. She’d hovered, true, on the top step, perhaps hoping for more than the see-through kiss on her cheek as the taxi ticked, waiting to take her back to the hotel.
‘I’ll call you when I get the results. James said twenty-four hours is the best case. It could even be the day after tomorrow.’ A pause, then a look – a safety rope being dropped down a cliff to a stranded climber – before she finally left.
Robert watched until the taxi was out of sight and then went back inside, dialled Erin’s mobile number then Ruby’s mobile number before going to bed and staring at the ceiling. He imagined that all the hairline cracks in the plaster were the mistakes he had made in his life. He knew, too, that despite its creaky boards and sticky sash windows the old house had been standing for well over a century. He predicted a couple more.
Robert rolled and shifted beneath a single sheet draped loosely around his waist. He was naked but still hot. The humidity of the day was trapped in the bedroom even with a window open and although his skin prickled as if cold, his mind seared with feverish thoughts. He turned again and placed a hand on Erin’s pillow. He knew it was over. He had been prepared to forgive her for lying about the way she’d fought to survive, by selling her body – he could eventually come to terms with that – but what he couldn’t obliterate, ever, was that she had stolen Ruby.
