Nobody's Baby

by Penny Kline

  Nobody’s Baby

  Penny Kline

  In the middle of the night Izzy Lomas finds an abandoned baby on her doorstep. It could have been left by any desperate person … except that the baby’s name, pinned in a note to its carrycot, brings back a striking memory from her childhood. If you had a baby what would you call it …

  If Izzy’s suspicions are correct and she tells the police, it could end in tragedy. Allowing herself some time to investigate, she frantically tries to trace the baby’s mother, but every twist and turn in her search seems to lead to a dead end. And the longer she stays silent, how many people is she putting in terrible danger?

  Nobody’s Baby is an engaging and eerie thriller about loss, control, and the desperate edge of human emotions.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter One

  One small high-pitched sound, like the ping of the phone that suddenly stops, leaving you in suspense. A wrong number, or had the caller changed his mind? At five in the morning the news could only be bad.

  Later, much later, when the full horror of what had happened had sunk in, Izzy would look back on that moment and remember how sorry for herself she had felt. Tragedy puts your own problems into perspective, but that cold autumn day she had no inkling of what was to come.

  She was sleeping alone. How can you be both glad and sorry someone is not there? Glad that the person who caused you so much pain is no longer around to inflict another wound. Sorry because your creation, the man you wanted him to be, has gone from your life, leaving an empty aching space.

  Three weekends had passed since she told Josh to pack. At first he had refused to believe she was serious. When he realised she meant it his jokes had turned to anger. Piling his belongings into four cardboard boxes and a zip-up bag, she had refused to cover the same ground again: the arguments over bills and the lies, some of them so elaborate, so pointless, like those of a small boy who wants to get one over on his mother.

  When challenged he had looked crestfallen, an expression he had perfected. Yes, she was right, his mother had been strict as hell, so pushy, so ambitious for him that he had never felt he could live up to her expectations. Now she, Izzy, was forcing him to face the same feelings all over again.

  Except I’m not your mother, she thought.

  Since his departure, weekends had been the toughest. Weekdays, work days, were more or less bearable. Kath and Harry to talk to, a drink at the pub, more drinks at home, then crashing out around eleven.

  When the sound woke her, she had thought Josh was lying next to her. She missed the feel of him, the warmth of his hard, smooth back, and the smell of his hair. At least the house was hers. Two up, two down, with a tiny kitchen tacked on the back and a garden the agent had described as ‘a useful barbecue area’. Thinking about it reminded her how she and Josh had brought Blanche home as an eight-week-old kitten, let her out through the back door, then watched her investigate every nook and cranny as if she had been released into a garden ten times the size. Who did Josh miss the most, her or Blanche – or were they both just ancient history?

  Now wide awake, Izzy listened. The sound could have come from next door, through the thin dividing wall – except next door’s house was for sale and the occupants had moved out five weeks ago. To her knowledge the estate agent had only shown a handful of potential buyers around, and the ‘For Sale’ notice was still firmly attached to the ground-floor window.

  There it was again, another high-pitched cry, and this time she was sure it was in the street. Swinging her legs over Josh’s side of the bed, Izzy crossed to the window and held back the curtain, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. Everything looked the same as usual – pedestrianized road, stone container with a single standard rose that should have been pruned a month ago. Orange light from the street lamp, twenty yards up in Palmerstone Road, picked up dappled raindrops on the parked car. No one was about. Everything was silent. The sound must have come from a cat, the black and white tom from opposite, out on the prowl searching for a mate. Not Blanche; she was safely asleep on the basket chair.

  Returning to bed, Izzy lay on her stomach, wondering if Josh was sleeping alone. The living-room floor of Dave’s poky flat was not the ideal place to take a new conquest, but knowing Josh he could well have ousted Dave from his king-size bed. Come on mate, I’ll owe you one. Was there anyone Josh had ever come across who was not owed one?

  The wail that interrupted her thoughts bore no resemblance to the night call of a cat. In an instant she was out of bed and running down the stairs, missing a step and almost falling headlong. The cold, damp weather had made the door stick and as she wrenched it open she stubbed her toe and cursed, then almost tripped over the dark shape in front of her.

  The carrycot had been pushed up close, probably to make sure it was covered by the slight overhang of what had once been a porch, and the baby inside it had stopped crying and was lying very still.

  Izzy crouched down and touched the pale forehead, then jumped as the eyes opened and the wailing began all over again. Lifting the cot, she carried it into the house and placed it on the sofa, clicking on a lamp then moving it when the light shone too fiercely on the tiny, blinking face. The room was cold – it was too early for the central heating to have come on – but the baby was wrapped tightly, swaddled, so that only the head was visible. Pulling back the blue blanket Izzy put her hands round the warm little body and lifted it out, holding it awkwardly against her shoulder, patting its back, pressing her cheek against its woollen hat.

  For some reason it seemed important to establish if it was a girl or a boy. The hat was blue and white so that probably meant a boy. Dragging at the poppers on its yellow sleep suit, that were harder to free than she expected, she caught sight of a slip of paper next to a baby’s bottle, half full of milk, and a disposable nappy that had been wedged between the blanket and the side of the cot.

  The baby was making noises in its throat. Izzy laid it on top of the blanket, hoping that would not produce another bout of crying, and held the slip of paper under the light. It was written in block capitals and the ink had smudged a little, although the letters were still clear enough. HER NAME IS CRESSY, she read, TAKE CARE OF HER.

  ‘Cressy.’ Izzy removed the baby’s hat and smoothed the tufts of hair, apologizing for the coldness of her hands on its skin. Not “it”, a girl baby and so small she could only be a few weeks old, possibly only a few days.

  A dribble of milk had dried into a crust at the corner of her mouth. Izzy touched it with a finger and the baby’s head turned, searching for food. Stretching out to reach the bottle, she offered it to the open mouth but the baby jerked her head away and started to yell, her face quickly turning red, her eyes screwed up in frustration.

  Perhaps the milk needed to be heated. With the baby balanced against her left shoulder, she hurried to the kitchen, found a pan, half-filled it with water, and switched on the ring. Outside, the engine of a car sprang to life and Izzy paused, listening. The sound came closer and she hurried back to the other room, peering through the window, thinking, irrationally, that it could be the mother who had changed her mi
nd and was returning to reclaim her child.

  The car had moved out of sight, but looking out into the street reminded her that her first response should have been to call the police. What was she doing, warming milk, jogging the baby on her shoulder, breathing in the smell of her skin and holding her up so she could see through the window? For a split second, she thought she smiled, but it was only an involuntary pursing of the lips. Babies were incapable of smiling until they were five or six weeks old and even then, according to the books, they responded just as enthusiastically to three blobs on a sheet of white card as they did to an actual face.

  As she watched, the round blue eyes struggled to focus then relaxed into a squint.

  ‘Cressy,’ Izzy said again, speaking as you might to a stray dog with a disc on its collar. The baby smacked its lips, searching, and Izzy found herself moved to tears by the knowledge it had no idea what had happened to it, that its only aim was to find something its mouth could latch onto.

  Not it, her. Holding her steady with one hand, Izzy lifted the phone with the other and rehearsed what she was going to say. My name is Izzy Lomas. A baby has been left outside my house. I think she’s only three or four weeks old.

  How bad would someone have to feel before they wrapped their baby in a blanket and left it on a stranger’s doorstep? Surely these days, however desperate your situation, there was always social services – or a hospital. She had read about a teenage girl who left her baby in a hospital foyer. What happened to abandoned babies? Had anyone ever found a baby and decided to keep it, moving to a different area, pretending it was her own, that she had given birth at home, that the father was unknown, that she had not received any antenatal care?

  ‘Police, fire, or ambulance?’ asked a flat voice with a strong West Country accent, and Izzy returned to reality.

  Harry was out of the office, but Kath greeted Izzy with the news that the psycho contract, as she called it, had to be completed by the end of the week so they would need to work flat out.

  ‘Right.’ Izzy’s brain felt muzzy from lack of sleep.

  ‘Hey, are you OK?’ Kath pushed her thick mane of hair behind her ears, revealing large shiny hoops, and came up close to Izzy, examining her face. ‘No, of course you’re not. Time heals, but not that fast. If only there was some way we could speed things up, tablets you could take, I dunno.’

  ‘If you invented one you’d make a fortune.’ Izzy sat down at her computer and closed her eyes. ‘Anyway, it’s not Josh.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Outside my front door. A baby. Someone left it there in the middle of the night.’

  ‘Oh no!’ Kath’s voice was high-pitched with emotion. ‘Was it dead?’

  ‘As far as I could tell it was fine, it was a little girl, only a few weeks old.’

  ‘How could you tell? No, silly question. Oh, you poor thing. What kind of a person could do a thing like that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Kath would want to know every detail, what the baby had looked like, how it was dressed, how big it was, what Izzy had done with it.

  ‘She’s been taken into care,’ Izzy told her, ‘the police are going to let me know when they find the mother.’

  ‘If they find the mother. And why your house? I once heard about a child that was found in a wheelie bin at the back of the supermarket. You called the police, did you, then what happened?’

  ‘They got in touch with social services and a social worker came and took her away.’

  Kath pushed back her chair, almost knocking it over, and crossed to Izzy’s desk to give her a hug. ‘Oh, Izzy, you sound so sad. Is it because of the baby or because of Josh?’

  ‘I’m all right. Just a bit tired. I imagine the mother chose my house because of the overhanging piece of roof where Josh never finished taking down the broken porch.’

  ‘Could be I that, I suppose.’ Kath looked doubtful. She was wearing a scoop neck leopard-skin top over a lime-green T-shirt, and it made her skin look sallow. An American, brought up in Ohio, she was a few years older than Izzy, and very different than her, but in spite of this they had hit it off at once. Maybe they complemented one another: one quiet, self-contained, the other noisy, outgoing, with a tendency to cry at the drop of a hat.

  Izzy’s thoughts returned to the slip of paper pushed down the side of the carrycot. The scrawled message. HER NAME IS CRESSY. TAKE CARE OF HER. Somewhere, a long time ago, almost as though it was a dream, she had come across that name before. In a book was it, a film? Cressy. Cressida. Her befuddled brain struggled to remember, but it was no good.

  Kath was peeling the foil off a new jar of coffee. ‘You don’t imagine it has anything to do with Josh, do you?’

  ‘Josh? No, of course not, how could it?’

  Kath shrugged. ‘Just seems a bit of a coincidence. He was bound to take it badly, you giving him his marching orders.’

  ‘Marching orders’ was hardly the way Izzy would describe it. For the third time in as many weeks, he had returned home in the early hours of the morning. What was all the fuss about? He and Dave had gone to a club with a man who might put up some cash so they could start their own business. Yes, he knew he should have phoned, but when he noticed the time he was afraid she might be asleep, and in any case his battery was flat.

  ‘Sorry,’ Kath said, ‘that was a stupid choice of words. You know me, smart on the spatial side of the brain, hopeless at anything verbal.’

  It was an in-joke. They were working on a graphics package for a company that marketed psychological tests. Test your personality: take an aptitude test and stop feeling like a square peg in a round hole, choose the right partner for a fulfilling relationship.

  In spite of her interrupted night, or maybe because of it, Izzy had reached the office early and found Harry literally running round in circles, searching for a file and complaining he was going to be late and his car was parked on a double yellow line.

  There was something different about him and it took Izzy a moment to realise what it was. His hair. Instead of falling across his forehead, it had been cut short on top but left sufficiently long at the back that it still curled round the lobes of his ears. It accentuated his slightly debauched look, something Izzy found mildly attractive, perhaps because it reminded her of her father. He was wearing a suit but with a sweater instead of his usual collar and tie, and if Izzy had not known him better she would have suspected some woman had been trying to give him a more up-to-the-minute look. Not his wife, Janet, who appeared to have as little interest in Harry’s appearance as she did in her own. Perhaps it was Harry himself, aware that he was approaching his fiftieth birthday and in need of a new image.

  He was on his way to Bristol, he said, too busy to look at her or he might have noticed something was up, had to meet a client to discuss a possible contract to produce the brochures for a string of health clubs. The whole thing had been arranged in a rush but he would be back by five at the latest to check how they were getting on.

  ‘Yes, all right.’ Izzy had felt upset, as though Harry had deliberately decided to be away from the office just when she needed to talk. Kath was a good listener, the sympathetic one, but telling Harry would have put the whole incident into perspective whereas Kath liked to wallow in sentimentality. Who was it who said sentimentality is only sentiment that rubs you up the wrong way, and why did she feel so tearful? The baby had trusted her – it had no choice, poor thing – and she had handed it over to the police, wrapped up warm in its carrycot, together with its bottle and the spare nappy. Should she have changed its nappy? There was no time. The police had arrived in a flash.

  ‘I need to get a grip on myself.’

  ‘What?’ Kath asked, and Izzy realised that, without meaning to, she had spoken the words out loud.

  ‘Nothing. I was just thinking.’ A baby. It was just a baby. She needed to distance herself from what had happened. It was gone, swept up into the system. She had no claim to it. She was simply the person outside whose ho
use it had been abandoned.

  ‘You say the poor kid had its name pinned to it?’ Kath had left a bright smear of lipstick on her mug and was rubbing at it with a tissue.

  ‘No, there was a note, pushed between the blanket and the side of her carrycot.’ Cressy, her name is Cressy.

  ‘You didn’t recognise the handwriting?’

  ‘It was block capitals.’

  ‘Well-formed or those of a more uneducated person?’

  It was a ridiculous question. Better not to talk about it any more. ‘I’ve no idea, Kath, I expect it was written in a hurry. I imagine the mother was in a pretty bad state.’

  ‘Cressy’s short for Cressida, right? Don’t think I’ve come across anyone with that name – apart from the one who had a thing about Troilus. What about you?’

  Izzy had started work but something about Kath’s voice made her turn round. ‘What are you thinking? You don’t honestly believe there’s something I haven’t told you, some reason my house was singled out specially?’

  ‘Did I say that? No, of course not. Forget it, you’re right, time to put the finishing touches to the publicity material. Harry wouldn’t see having a kid left on your doorstep as any kind of an excuse for falling behind with your work.’

  Shortly after six o’clock a detective knocked on Izzy’s door. The bell was broken. Josh had insisted it was his job to carry out small repairs and she had gone along with his allocation of tasks, even though she could have fixed it herself and Josh never did today what he could put off until tomorrow.

  The woman, who announced herself as Detective Sergeant Linda Fairbrother, had golden skin, large rather beautiful eyes, and a mass of curly dark hair held back by a blue band. She had not been on duty when Izzy put through the call, she explained, but had been assigned to try to trace the baby’s mother.

  Izzy stared at her. ‘You’re a detective? It never occurred to me the CID would be involved.’

  ‘The media’s our best bet.’ She accepted Izzy’s offer of the most comfortable chair. ‘So far we’ve drawn a blank but it’s early days yet. The press have been informed that the baby was found by a woman living in this area, but don’t worry, no name or address so you won’t have your privacy invaded. Not that there’s much you could tell them, is there?’