Criminals

by Margot Livesey

  “I think,” said Mollie, “I think for now we should take it home. The police here won’t have a clue how to deal with a baby. It’s not even police plural, just Mr. Stevenson, using his parlour as an office. No, we’ll have to drive back to Perth, and I’m not up to that in all this rain. Besides, I left soup on the stove.”

  Her voice was unexpectedly high, as if she hadn’t spoken much recently, but what she said made sense. The baby was asleep, Ewan thought, and he was hungry. They would go home and eat; he would take a bath and change. Then they could return to Perth in a civilised fashion. An hour or two would make no difference. Mollie had described driving as difficult but not impossible, and that in itself seemed a good sign. The black birds were staying in the treetops. They could even have dinner in Perth, or see a film. After all, he was meant to be cheering her up. “Good idea,” he said heartily, rousing himself. “I’m starving.”

  “I’ll need to get one or two things.” Before Ewan could ask what, she had opened her door and was running through the rain towards the row of shops.

  He sat back and watched the pedestrians. Most, like Mollie, hurried to avoid getting wet, but near the war memorial two women dressed in anoraks, skirts, and Wellington boots were engaged in a lengthy conversation, seemingly oblivious to the rain. Only the white cairn belonging to the taller one kept tugging at his lead in an attempt to find shelter.

  Presently Mollie returned with a large shopping bag. She put it in the boot, then came round to open Ewan’s door. “You have to sit in the back,” she said. “It’s safer.”

  The back seat was untidy and covered with long fawn hairs: Sadie’s domain. Ewan hunched over grumpily, the baby cradled on his knee, and waited for the five miles to pass. In the sodden fields were sheep, cattle, birds. He remembered Mollie whizzing down this road at sixty, laughing off his pleas for caution. “How would you know?” she’d said. “You don’t even drive.” Now she drove with irritating sedateness, signalling, changing gears at precisely the right moment.

  At last they turned into the side road, along the track, and between the two stone gateposts. Mill of Fortune was a nineteenth-century farmhouse, a dignified version of the kind of house that children draw—a door and four windows, with a sloping slate roof and tall chimney stacks at either end. It boasted a duck pond, an apple orchard, and several outbuildings. Halfway up the drive, Mollie suddenly braked. “Sorry,” she said. “The ducks.” Over her shoulder Ewan glimpsed four brown ducks waddling towards the pond. During their early years in the house, Mollie and Chae had endlessly quoted Dylan Thomas and revelled in their wonderful crops of lettuces and raspberries. More recently, on the phone, Mollie had invited Ewan to Mill of Misfortune. Wouldn’t it be better for her to come to London? he asked; apart from anything else, he was drowning in faxes. “Ewan,” she said, “don’t make me beg.” Although she was already.

  They pulled up at the back of the house. In the rain, the grey stone had darkened almost to charcoal, and the windows gave back nothing but the gloomy sky. The whole effect, to Ewan’s eyes, was quintessentially Scottish. There was no effort, as on the part of English houses, to be welcoming; this was old-fashioned, uncompromising shelter. He sat waiting in the car while Mollie opened the back door, and noticed she’d left it unlocked. In London he had recently installed a burglar alarm and new window locks, and still he never came home without wondering if he’d been robbed. Finally, the baby in his arms, he climbed out of the car. Sadie, the Shetland collie, rushed to greet him and was intercepted by Mollie. Then they were all inside. Sadie nuzzled Ewan happily as he stood in the middle of the kitchen, looking round for changes.

  They were everywhere. For years the large flagged kitchen had been his favourite room, the place he pictured whenever he needed an image of domestic happiness. He loved the deep windows, the whitewashed walls, the fabulous clutter. Every nook had held something strange and exotic: a tiny skull, a bird’s egg, an antler, a plaster saint. Mollie used one corner for her loom, and hanks of coloured wool hung along the wall, an extended rainbow. Above the big window had dangled four mobiles made of heather roots, feathers, sticks—one each for Mollie, Chae, Daniel, and Rebecca. This morning the walls were empty save for two prints. The mobiles were gone. The skulls and stones. The loom, despite the work stretched on it, looked as if it hadn’t been used for some time. Everything was too orderly. Only the blue budgerigar, Plato, uttered a familiar tweet from his cage to the left of the stove. Mollie was clearing the table, and it took barely a minute to remove the newspaper, the salt and pepper. Gone were the candles, incense, pots of herbs, table toys.

  Ewan laid the baby down, and Mollie unwrapped the blanket. Beneath was a stretchy blue sleeper. “From Mothercare,” she remarked. “Quite good quality.”

  The baby was a girl, about four months old, Mollie judged. At once Ewan saw her features leap into the feminine. A girl, he thought with pleasure, as if that made his picking the baby up off the lavatory floor a far greater accomplishment. He smiled, and briefly she forgot her interest in her own feet and smiled back. “Look,” he said.

  “Oh,” Mollie murmured, setting aside the tin of formula she had been examining. Together they stood smiling down at their small visitor, and she beamed, broadly, at both of them.

  Mollie changed her nappy and prepared a bottle. Ewan, his own hunger temporarily forgotten, watched the baby feed. Whatever her recent adventures, this skill remained intact. She sucked with such ferocity that several times her face darkened and she had to break off, reluctantly, to cough. Then, the bottle almost empty, she fell asleep.

  Mollie wedged her in the armchair near the stove, and she and Ewan sat down at the table to have their own lunch. Over lentil soup, bread, cheese, and fruit, they made a plan. Rather than drive thirty rainy miles, they would phone the police to ask if a baby had been reported missing and find out what they should do.

  Though it was Mollie who suggested the phone, the idea instantly appealed to Ewan. He did most of his business through machines and believed in the virtues of electronic communication. He had a vision of the three of them traipsing from one draughty office to the next, filling out innumerable forms like refugees. Yes, he thought, phoning was best. And it would be easier to explain what had happened. For now, as he reached for the brie, he suddenly understood an explanation would be required. The messenger was never entirely innocent. Mollie got up to make coffee, and the next thing he knew, he had nodded off over his empty soup bowl. She shook his shoulder and sent him to take a nap. “You’re in Daniel’s room,” she said. “We’ll go to Perth when you get up.”

  He climbed the crooked stairs, marvelling as he had before at the horrendous creaking. No wonder they didn’t need a burglar alarm. When he opened the door of Daniel’s room, he found it, like the kitchen, amazingly altered: every trace of the boy was gone. Ewan’s visits to Mill of Fortune had seldom coincided with those of Chae’s children, but such was the impenetrable state of their rooms that he had always slept in the parlour. Mollie had told him Chae regarded chaos as a sign of affection; his son and daughter wanted to leave their mark on his household. Now what remained was almost a parody of a guest room—the bed neatly made, with the counterpane smooth as an ice rink, the bedside light, the box of Kleenex, the radio, the stack of predictable books: Dick Francis, Georgette Heyer, something about Provence. Ewan brushed his teeth, got into bed, and was overwhelmed by the absence of noise. He missed the thunder of lorries, the chugging of taxis, the steady rumble of buses that formed his usual lullaby in London. He lay back between the stiff sheets listening hard, but all he heard was a faint quacking from the pond. A pause. And more, louder quacking.

  He woke in panic, both feet already on the floor. Late for a meeting? Only when he caught sight of his suit draped over the chair did he remember where he was. He slumped on the edge of the bed, trying to follow the thread of alarm back into his dreams. Something to do with the office? Or Mollie? He saw yellow and blue. The baby. Before his apprehension could even
take shape, he was rushing downstairs.

  He burst into the kitchen, and the collie leapt upon him, her paws pressing against his thighs. She let out a volley of excited barks.

  “Down, Sadie,” Mollie snapped, half rising from the chair near the stove, where she was sitting with the baby on her lap. “Ewan, are you all right?”

  He stopped, sleepy and abashed, not knowing how to explain. He came over and knelt beside the two of them. The baby’s eyes were fluttering open and closed. “What,” he asked, “did the police say?”

  Mollie shook her head. “Once you’d gone upstairs, I realised it was pointless to phone. Nobody lost this little girl. They abandoned her.” As she spoke, Ewan saw her arms tighten around the baby. “Abandoned” was the word she had used, over and over, on the phone to describe Chae’s behaviour towards her. Usually it heralded a storm of tears.

  “So what should we do?” he said carefully. He tried to think of anyone he knew who had been in a similar situation, and drew a profound blank. People found gloves and wallets, not babies.

  “It’s getting late,” said Mollie.

  “Late?” He turned from her to the clock above the sink. To his astonishment, it was four-thirty; he would have sworn he had slept no more than half an hour, an hour at most, yet nearly three hours had vanished in befuddled dreams. Outside the window, the overcast sky was already growing dark.

  “I think we should wait until tomorrow,” Mollie continued. “Wait until everyone’s back in their offices. No reason to rush to throw her into the maw of social services. We might as well try to find the best place for her.” She slid one pale finger into the baby’s tiny, grasping hand. “Don’t you think?”

  Of course, Ewan said later, thinking was exactly what neither of us was doing. We were bandits scenting money, moles tunnelling towards light.

  Chapter 2

  That he agreed was the main thing: tomorrow was soon enough to deliver the baby to the authorities. Before Ewan could change his mind, Mollie sent him off to take a bath. Alone in the kitchen, she stood up, still holding the baby, and walked over to draw the curtains, heavy swaths of grey velvet that had come with the house when she and Chae moved in ten years ago and even then had been so old that the fabric was pleated into light and shadow. Looking out across the orchard, she could just distinguish the Youngs’ garage, several hundred yards away; soon the leaves would entirely hide them from each other. During the last month, Mollie had come to dread this isolation. But now, as she pulled the curtains one-handed, she considered how lucky she was not to have to deal with curious neighbours.

  For anyone to bring her a baby would have been amazing, but for her pedantic brother to do so was astounding. She had summoned him only because there was no one else. Bridget, their older sister, was hopelessly far away, in another country, where at this very moment she was probably enjoying a salad for lunch and saying “Gee.” Occasionally, when she couldn’t sleep, Mollie had dialled Bridget’s number and been defeated by the insouciant chirp of her answering machine. She was even starting to sound American. In comparison, Ewan’s greeting—“Hello, Ewan Munro”—was oddly reassuring. A couple of weeks ago she had rung late at night, and he, still half asleep, had answered the phone with that very phrase. “God, Ewan,” she’d said. “Who did you think was going to be phoning at one in the morning?”

  “People in the States sometimes forget,” he replied. “Are you okay?”

  “No,” Mollie had said, and begun to weep.

  She sat down again by the stove, and the baby squirmed and pouted. “Hush,” Mollie said, “you’re safe.” She wanted to add “with me,” but did not yet dare. Her joy must be kept secret a little longer. Instead she described how Mill of Fortune belonged to a family called Craig who had seven sons, each of whom hated farming worse than the last, rather like a fairy story. She remembered her friend Lorraine telling her that children learned to speak because people talked to them, and that the irritating habit of baby talk had a biological imperative in so far as babies were visibly more responsive to high-pitched sounds. As soon as the sons grew up, Mollie went on, one by one they ran away to Glasgow and broke their father’s heart, leaving the house in need of tenants. “And that’s us,” she concluded, tapping first herself, then the baby, on the chest. The baby made a startled noise, as if she might not be quite ready for the responsibilities of paying rent.

  From overhead came the tread of footsteps. Ewan. Oh dear, Mollie thought, if only he could be transported instantly back to London. Then she shook herself. His visit was a mere two days, a scant forty-eight hours; she could navigate that.

  He came in, bringing with him the soapy aura of the bath. She knew, just from the way he opened and closed the door, that his earlier perturbation had passed. “Sorry to be such a sloth,” he said. “What can I do to help?”

  “Play with her while I cook?” Without waiting for an answer, she stood up, handed him the baby, and headed for the sink. As she filled a saucepan, she heard a squawk and a muttered “Bother.” She stole a glance in their direction. Ewan was clutching the baby to his chest, eyeing her dubiously.

  “Do I need to hold her?” he complained. “It makes everything so complicated.”

  “You can put her down if you want, but she’ll probably cry.” Mollie carried the pan to the stove and went to get the pheasant from the fridge. She was sure his efforts to discard the baby would be useless. After only a few hours in her company, Mollie believed absolutely in the baby’s powers to be her own Circe, to transform Ewan not into a swine but into a less rigourous version of himself. Hadn’t she already changed the house Mollie had grown to hate back into a home?

  Mollie was cooking pheasant with roast potatoes, leeks, mushrooms, and rowan jelly. Following Ewan’s phone call on Monday, she’d pulled out her cookbooks and sat at the table reading recipes for beef Wellington, Chateaubriand, oysters Rockefeller—delicacies she had never eaten, let alone prepared. She observed her own behaviour with bewilderment. Ewan wasn’t difficult about food, even though he ate in restaurants all the time. But after six weeks of making nothing more complicated than a cheese sandwich or a bowl of cereal, the activity of cooking for others, once as natural as breathing, seemed part of a language she had forgotten. In the end she bought whatever looked good in the shops. The butcher urged the pheasant upon her. For years she and Chae had boycotted his shop, crossing the road to avoid the display of game dangling in the window; now Mr. Rae, his bald head shining, greeted her as if she’d been buying stewing steak once a week all along. He hefted the frozen bird in one hand and passed on the wisdom of his wife. “More versatile than hare, she always says.”

  As she moved between the stove and the table, Mollie studied her brother. He had changed into what she knew he regarded as casual clothes: grey slacks, a grey pullover, and a white shirt with one button cautiously undone at the neck. He’d dressed like this even at university. Involuntarily she found herself remembering Chae’s reaction on first meeting Ewan—that he was a stuffed shirt and an old fart. And for years afterwards he had proved an irresistible source of humour. Ewan, meanwhile, had remained completely unmoved by Chae’s charm, a fact Mollie had long held against him and which, in present circumstances, rendered him the ideal ally.

  She began to peel onions. The plaits had been hanging up to dry in the garage since last autumn, and the filmy skins rustled like paper. She longed to talk about the baby, to praise her velvety eyes, her shell-like ears, her dimpled smile. But such conversation might be dangerous, leading Ewan toward law-abiding thoughts. No, instead she must lure him away, like the lapwings she and Sadie sometimes encountered in the meadow feigning injury to prevent discovery of their nests. She reached for a second onion and searched desperately for something to say. World events, local news—she could think of neither. When had she become so stupid? She spotted the pheasant in its roasting pan, smaller and more naked without Mr. Rae’s praise. This would do. “I wonder why there isn’t a word for pheasant when we eat it
,” she said. “Like beef and cow.”

  “I think they weren’t common enough at the time names were being given out. Didn’t the French bring them over—William the Conqueror and all that?”

  He had sat down with the baby and was rocking her gently. Then, before Mollie could come up with another innocent topic, he said, “Who do you think her parents are? She looks as if she might be Indian, or Pakistani. It seems so nineteenth-century to leave a baby in the loo. And a bus station, no less—not even the train station or a fancy hotel.”

  “Presumably she was left by a man.”

  “Goodness,” Ewan exclaimed, pausing in his rocking. “That never occurred to me, but of course. So would the mother know? She could’ve been kidnapped, or stolen for revenge.” Bending to the baby, he said, “Perhaps somebody does want you after all.”

  Mollie held on to the edge of the table. She had staked her imagining on the baby’s abandonment, on their need for each other being mutual. Now a mother rose before her—dark eyes, like her daughter’s, arms outstretched in emptiness. A woman whose grief matched Mollie’s own but who knew and had a name for what she lacked.

  False tears saved her from true ones; the smell of onions pinched her nose. She blinked and was able to hustle the dark-eyed woman from the room. No decent mother would let such a small child out of her sight. For whatever reasons, the baby was alone in the world until Ewan stumbled along. She laid out four potatoes, added a fifth, and began to peel them in the extravagant fashion she had learned working in restaurants, lopping off a good quarter inch of skin. “I really appreciate your coming, Ewan. I know how busy you are.”

  “Thank you for asking me,” he said, as if they hadn’t argued for a month about this visit. “It does me good to get north of the border.”