The Chinese Egg

by Catherine Storr

  Mr. Wilmington took a step backward and looked at the two girls and then again at Stephen. Suddenly, instead of looking furious, he looked immensely tired. He said, “What’s all this about? What do you know?”

  It was Stephen who now stammered, and Chris who said, “They’ve seen the people who took your baby.”

  Mr. Wilmington took this calmly. “How on earth do you know?”

  “They see things. Vicky and Steve. They see what’s going to happen. They saw. . . .”

  Mr. Wilmington said, “Oh god, no, not that!” To Stephen and Chris he said, not angrily, but with a frightening coldness, “Now you two, stop play-acting and get out. At once. There’s a policeman at the corner. If you aren’t out in one minute from now, I shall call him and give you in charge. Understand?”

  “We’re not acting. It’s serious. They saw your baby being stolen before it ever happened. . .” Chris said, angry again. Mr. Wilmington took no notice. He had his watch in his hand and he was counting. “Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five” Stephen was standing undecided on the step below him, Chris next to him, Vicky was standing silent and trembling on the next step down. Mr. Wilmington continued to count out loud, the other three didn’t move, when someone came quickly along the dark hall inside the house and said, “Andrew? Andrew? What is it? Did someone say they knew something?” Sally Wilmington came to the open door. She saw a boy and two girls, all distressed and anxious, and her husband counting out seconds. She caught the hand which held the watch and said, “Andrew? Who said they knew about Caroline Ann?”

  Stephen and Vicky and Chris saw the girl of the photograph. Chris saw the mother of a little stolen baby and her warm heart swelled in sympathetic horror. Stephen recognized the brown hair and the face that had been so chalky white and the lips, red then, pale now, that had whispered, “It wasn’t more than a minute,” and he knew, with a sinking heart, that he was inextricably mixed up in this affair, however much he didn’t want to be. And Vicky? Vicky saw a mother who had lost a baby. A girl not very much older than she was. And at that moment she saw that the loss of someone you’d known, for whom you were totally responsible, whose thoughts you had thought, whose feelings you had felt, who was contained within your grown-up conscious self, was even worse than to lose an unknown mother whose place was so completely and lovingly taken by another mother who’d happened to be in the next hospital bed. But seeing this didn’t make Vicky less strong, it rather gave her more courage. So, to Chris’s astonishment, it was Vicky who spoke to Sally Wilmington. She said, “Stephen and me, we’ve seen things we can’t explain. We saw about your baby being stolen before it happened. And this afternoon. . .”

  “Will you please ask your two girl-friends to shut up and go away?” Mr. Wilmington said in a dangerously quiet voice to Stephen.

  “We’re not!” Chris burst out, at the same time as Sally Wilmington had caught her husband’s arm and was saying, “Don’t, Andrew. Let me hear what they’re saying.”

  He took her hand in both of his and said, “Sally, darling, don’t. They’re just cashing in on our misery. It’s horrible, especially with. . .” he hesitated, “. . . children. But I’m afraid. . . . In a moment they’ll be asking how much we’ll pay for their ‘news’. Or selling the story to the gutter press. Come back into the house, dearest. . . .”

  He was interrupted by a furious Stephen. “We’re not asking for money. We’re nothing to do with newspapers. We’ve come in case what we’ve seen might be useful. I wish to god we hadn’t. I didn’t want to, I said you’d never believe us. I wouldn’t if it were me.” He was shaking with anger, and this seemed to have some effect on Mr. Wilmington, who looked at him more carefully.

  “Andrew. Please let them tell us. Nora’s been questioned by the police ever since lunch. She’s sure they think she’s had something to do with it. Perhaps they really do know something that would find. . . .” Sally Wilmington didn’t finish the sentence. And at that moment a uniformed policeman strolling with elaborate casualness past the end of the front garden, hesitated and called out to Mr. Wilmington, “Anything I can do, sir? Any trouble there?”

  Stephen and Vicky and Chris held their breath. Then Mr. Wilmington called back, “No thanks, Officer. No trouble,” and the policeman moved on and Andrew Wilmington said, unwillingly, “I suppose you’d better come into the house.”

  Inside a room with more books on its walls than a library, and looking somehow cluttered, but richly, with little dark pictures and dark shiny chairs and tables, and carpets patterned with soft dark colours, and heavy, deep red curtains, the two Wilmingtons sat side by side on a velvet-covered couch and faced Stephen and the two girls, who perched nervously on the edge of cane-backed chairs with oak knobs and twists on their arms and legs. They felt as if they were in a witness box, being interrogated by a hostile lawyer for the prosecution. Stephen looked, and felt, hideously nervous, but still angry enough to be defiant. Chris was interested, observant, confident that in the end they’d be able to prove their case. Vicky felt. . . . There isn’t room to say all that Vicky felt.

  “Come on then. Let’s hear your story,” Andrew Wilmington said.

  Chris looked at the other two. Vicky said, “You start,” to Stephen. He took a deep breath.

  Once he’d started it wasn’t so bad. He didn’t attempt to explain, he simply told how he’d thought he’d seen an accident in the High Street near his home and how it had actually happened a quarter of an hour later. How he’d tried to dismiss it as impossible. How two weeks later he’d had a flash picture of the empty pram and Sally’s face. Then, a week afterwards, he’d read about the kidnapping in the paper. He paused.

  “I saw it too. Not exactly the same. But nearly,” Vicky said.

  “Come on. Aren’t we going to have your version?” Mr. Wilmington said to Chris. She could see he wasn’t believing a word.

  “It doesn’t happen to me.”

  “I see. Only to the others. You’ve just come along for the ride,” he said.

  “Andrew!” Sally Wilmington said.

  “It’s no good, darling. There’s not a shred of evidence that they haven’t made up the whole thing in the last twenty-four hours. There’s been enough publicity. . . .”

  “We didn’t make it up. It happened. . . .”

  “And even if they’re young enough to believe in this sort of crystal-ball, fortune-telling racket, which I’m not convinced of, how is any of this rigmarole going to help us? Everything they’ve seen is very conveniently in the past tense anyhow.”

  “You don’t listen. We had another flash today.”

  “We saw a man and a girl. . . .”

  “They had the baby. . . .”

  “They said. . . .” Vicky stopped abruptly.

  “Go on.”

  “She was looking after it. She didn’t seem so. . . bad,” Vicky said. She couldn’t possibly tell the baby’s mother the words the girl had said.

  “How do you know it was our baby?”

  Stephen knew this was the weak part of their story. “We don’t. Only why should we see anything about a baby if it isn’t yours?”

  “You saw her properly? And the man?”

  “Vicky saw him.”

  “Could you describe him?”

  Vicky said, miserably, “Not really.”

  “And what do you suggest I should do, now you’ve given me this valuable piece of information?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Stephen said, “Don’t you see, if we’re really somehow tuned in. Like on a radio, wavelengths. If we’re on the right frequency for the people who’ve taken your baby, we might get more flashes. They might tell us something useful, something the police could work on. Like where they are. . . .”

  “If your descriptions of places are as accurate and detailed as your descriptions of the people you say you’ve seen, I think you can spare yourselves the trouble of communicating with the police,” Andrew Wilmington said, very coldly indeed.

/>   Sally Wilmington said to Vicky, “Did you see the baby?”

  “I saw she was holding it. That’s all. I’m sorry.”

  “But you said. . . . You said the girl was looking after it.”

  “Yes. And she seemed. . . .”

  At this moment the telephone bell rang. Sally had flung herself at the instrument and was holding the receiver to her ear before anyone else had moved. The others heard her say, “Yes. Yes. Yes, I’m listening,” and saw her troubled eyes go to her husband’s face in a sort of desperate appeal. He whispered, “Keep them talking,” and ran out of the room.

  “Yes. Yes, I’m here,” Sally said again. “You have?” in a sort of gasp “. . . how is. . .? No.” There was a little pause and then she said, “How much? No, I won’t. But just tell. . . .” They could all hear the vicious little click with which the receiver the other end was jammed down.

  Sally was still standing there with the receiver in her hand when Andrew came back into the room. “Rang off before I got there. What did they say?”

  “They’ve got Caroline Ann.”

  “I suppose they’re demanding money?”

  “So she’s not dead. . . .” She began to sob.

  “Darling. Try to tell me. How much?”

  “Two hundred. . . thousand. . . .”

  “Who was it? Did they say? Did they tell you how they wanted to collect it?”

  “No, nothing. Just how much. . . . And. . . .”

  “And what?”

  “They said. . . he. . . said. . . .”

  “Try to tell me, darling.”

  “He said. . . if you want. . . if you want. . . her safe back. . . .”

  Andrew Wilmington said, “Bloody swine.”

  “Andrew, we will, won’t we? You won’t say no? You wouldn’t let them hurt Caroline Ann?”

  “Darling, you don’t know these chaps. Paying over the money’s no guarantee she’ll be safe.”

  “But if we don’t pay. . . if we say no, then they’ll. . . .”

  “Darling, I know it’s difficult, but you’ve got to try to be reasonable about this. It’s blackmail. It’s impossible to give in to blackmail. They don’t stop at the first demand. If we paid this amount now, they’d only ask for more.”

  Chris, Stephen and Vicky were listening astonished. Two hundred thousand pounds! It was incredible that anyone should demand that much, even more incredible that Mr. Wilmington shouldn’t even comment on the amount, but should talk about paying that and then being asked for more. To the girls it was an unreal sum. No one they knew had even one thousand pounds. Two hundred thousand was the sort of astronomical money other people occasionally won on the pools. When they said to each other, “What would you do if you had..?” it was generally a hundred pounds, sometimes a thousand. Even then they didn’t know where to begin to make a hole in something so enormous. Stephen appreciated more what this meant. He realized that young Mr. Wilmington, whom he didn’t much like, must be really immensely rich. Perhaps a millionaire. He felt sorry for Mrs. Wilmington. He wasn’t sure that her husband really cared about the baby, but she quite obviously couldn’t think of anything else.

  “But Andrew! We can’t risk them doing something terrible. . .” she said now.

  “Sally darling, they’re not going to give up this damnable game until they’ve got every penny they can out of us. We simply mustn’t let them feel they’ve got the upper hand of us. It’s a matter of principle. . . .”

  Sally Wilmington cried out, “It’s a matter of my baby!” and at the same moment Vicky said, loudly, “I can’t think how you can!”

  Mr. Wilmington’s cold blue eyes came round to her. She went on, “It’s a baby! A person! You don’t know what they’re doing, you don’t know where she is. I don’t see how you can talk about principles. That’s just thinking. If it was me, and I had that much money, I wouldn’t bother about anything like that, I’d go straight off and get her. I wouldn’t mind how much it cost!”

  There was a really horrible silence, during which Vicky, red with anger and shame, wished she were anywhere else. Then Chris—blessed Chris—said, “I think Vicky’s right. If it was my baby, that’s what I’d do too.”

  Mr. Wilmington said, even more coldly than before, “I don’t think anyone asked for your opinion.” Stephen stood up.

  “Come on. Let’s go,” he said to the two girls.

  “But we haven’t told them. . .” Chris said.

  “It’s no good. He’s never going to believe us. Don’t you see? We’ve got to have some sort of proof.”

  “Don’t let them go, Andrew,” Mrs. Wilmington said.

  Stephen spoke to her, “I’m sorry. We honestly did come because we thought we might be able to help. But it isn’t any good unless someone believes what we’re saying. I see it’s difficult.”

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  “Let them go, Sally. As if we hadn’t enough, without a gang of kids playing at second sight,” Mr. Wilmington said.

  Stephen ignored him. “If there’s anything at all, we’ll tell you. Come on, Vicky, come on, Chris. There’s no point in staying.”

  He opened the door and went out, followed by Chris. Vicky took a last look back before she joined them. She stepped back for an instant to say softly and urgently to Sally Wilmington, who was sitting by the telephone, the tears running down and splashing on the smooth leather of the table, unchecked, “We shall find your baby. I know we will.” Then she too left the room and they let themselves silently out of the big house which was full of misery.

  Fourteen

  In the train going back, Stephen said to the girls, “Why don’t you come back to my place?” Chris and Vicky looked at each other. Chris said, “We mustn’t be home later than seven. About. If we’re not, one of us’ll have to go round and tell Mum, or she’ll worry.”

  “It’s only six now. You could come in and have coffee or something.”

  “That’d be nice, wouldn’t it, Vicky?”

  “Mm. I mean, thanks, yes, fine.”

  “You won’t get any cake like the one you gave me. My mother doesn’t make cakes.”

  “Coffee’d do for me. Anyway we don’t eat that cake every day.” Mostly, however, the journey passed in silence. The afternoon had been so beyond expectation awful and upsetting, none of them wanted to talk. Only after they’d left the underground station and were going up the hill to Stephen’s house, Chris said, “Thanks for not rubbing it in.”

  “Not rubbing what in?”

  “You said it wouldn’t be any use going there. That they wouldn’t believe us.”

  Stephen said, “The funny thing is, now I feel as if they ought to have.”

  “He was horrible. If it was just him I wouldn’t mind whether he got the baby back or not.”

  “I think he wouldn’t have been like that if he hadn’t been so worried. And I’m sure it’s true, they must have had all sorts of people bothering them.”

  “Well, I thought he was rotten. I liked her, though. Didn’t you, Vicky?”

  “Mm.”

  “I was pleased you went for him like you did.”

  Vicky said nothing.

  “What’s the matter? You still upset?”

  “Mm.”

  Chris looked at her face, and said no more.

  The girls didn’t know, but it had been a great act of courage on Stephen’s part to ask them home. It was a Saturday, and his father would almost certainly be there. At first Stephen had decided against inviting them for this reason. Then he suddenly felt sick with himself for being such a coward. What sort of life was he going to have if he didn’t do something perfectly reasonable—and in this case an almost necessary courtesy, considering how often he’d sat in the comfortable Stanford kitchen without any return of hospitality? So, without giving himself too much time to think, he’d asked them back. He opened the front door and followed them into the hall, then steered them into the kitchen-dining room. As he’d expected, his mother was standing
by the cooker, looking pre-occupied.

  Stephen said, “Hi, Mum!” and introduced Vicky and Chris. He could see from his mother’s face that she was pleased he’d brought friends home, but couldn’t place these two girls, and that she was worried as well as pleased. Inevitably she at once began apologizing.

  “Oh dear! If only I’d known. . . . Stephen didn’t say he was bringing anyone back. . . . I could have made some biscuits. . . there was a recipe yesterday in the Guardian. . . .”

  “We don’t want biscuits, thanks. Just coffee.”

  “Oh but. . . . They sounded rather good. . . .”

  Stephen said, “Don’t worry, Mum. Chris and Vicky really only want coffee. Shall I get out the mugs?”

  With a little pressure and reassurance, his mother was able to get round to making coffee. Vicky still looked a bit dazed. She obediently ladled sugar out of a packet into a china bowl, but it was Chris who competently found where the Rawlinson spoons were kept, who prevented Mrs. Rawlinson from starting the coffee grinder without screwing the lid on so that all the coffee beans went all over the floor, an accident which was so common in that house that Stephen unconsciously associated the smell of coffee with grovelling about with a dustpan and brush, sweeping up a horrid mixture of grounds, beans and dusty crumbs. When the coffee was finally being poured out of the filter jug, Mrs. Rawlinson’s cheeks were pink with the pleasure of being helped by Chris and with her admiration of the coffee machine. “It’s super coffee, too,” Chris said appreciatively, sipping it out of her blue and green mug.

  “I’m sure it’s not better than your mother makes,” Stephen’s mother said.

  “It is though. Mum makes instant most of the time. Mind you, I like that too. Only this is really good. Like you get in that posh place up the High Street where they charge you twenty p a cup.”

  “It is good, Mum,” Stephen said.

  “I’m so glad. It does taste different. Perhaps it’s because I don’t generally put in quite so much coffee. . . .” She glanced guiltily at Stephen.