Sacrifice

by Sharon Bolton

  ‘Well . . . she’s bright, healthy, good-looking,’ answered the voice I knew better than any other in the whole world. ‘Seems like . . . like a bit of a waste,’ he continued, and I didn’t know whether I was going to scream or be sick.

  ‘Exactly,’ said the voice of Detective Inspector Andrew Dunn. ‘Why the hell go to the risk of getting another one?’

  I sat in the shower cubicle, shivering so violently it hurt and thinking, Why . . . why did I come here?

  ‘This was an unforgivable risk,’ came another voice, one that sounded vaguely familiar but that I couldn’t quite place. ‘You were told to get rid of her, not bring her here.’

  ‘Yeah, well, sorry about the reality check,’ snapped Dunn, ‘but even I can’t hypnotize someone into slashing their own wrists. And haven’t we learned by now that if we rush an accident we mess it up?’

  ‘She’s half-Indian,’ said the man whose voice I couldn’t put my finger on. ‘We don’t pollute the bloodstream.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ spat Dunn. ‘What is this – the Middle Ages?’

  ‘Robert is right,’ said my father-in-law. ‘She isn’t suitable.’

  Robert? Did I know a Robert? Oh God, I did. I’d met him just over a week ago. Robert Tully and his wife Sarah had come to see me about their inability to conceive a child. The bastard had sat in my office, pretending to need my help, knowing his wife wanted a baby so much that she was close to breaking point. Was she, then, intended to be the adopting mother of one of the latest batch of Trow babies?

  ‘All right,’ my husband was saying. ‘What do we do with Ms Tulloch then?’

  ‘We’ll take her in the boat with the other two,’ answered Richard. ‘When we’re far enough out, I’ll give her another dose and slip her over the side. She won’t know anything about it.’

  ‘I need a leak,’ said Duncan. ‘Won’t be a sec.’

  The bathroom door opened and Duncan came into the room. He was still wearing the charcoal-grey business suit I’d watched him put on that morning. He walked to the basin and leaned over it.

  ‘And what do we tell the girlfriend?’ asked Dunn.

  ‘We send her a coffin,’ said Richard. ‘Leave it till the last minute, day of the funeral if we can. Someone goes with it in case she wants to view the body. No big deal, we’ve done it before.’

  ‘OK then, settled. Now, what else do we have to do?’

  Duncan turned on one of the taps and splashed water over his face. He sighed deeply and straightened up. In the mirror above the basin I had time to notice the tie that I’d given him at Christmas, tiny pink elephants on navy-blue silk. A second later we made eye contact.

  ‘Patients in one and two we don’t have to worry about,’ replied Richard. ‘Standard adoptions, both likely to deliver in the next couple of weeks. The Rowley woman spoke to both of them today, shouldn’t think she’ll want to bother again.’

  ‘What about Emma Lennard? Aren’t you due to deliver her tomorrow?’

  Duncan had turned to face me. I braced myself for him to shout out, alert the others or, even worse, to laugh. I wondered what they were going to do to me, how much it would hurt, whether it would be quick. Whether Duncan would be the one who . . .

  ‘We’re going ahead,’ said Richard. ‘Once the operation’s over, I’ll keep her sedated. We can’t risk her talking.’

  I tried to get up. I didn’t want to be caught crouched, damp-assed, in a shower cubicle. But I couldn’t move. All I could do was stare at Duncan. All he did was stare back.

  ‘Isn’t Emma safer on the boat?’ In the outer room they were still talking, oblivious to the silent drama being played out in the bathroom.

  ‘She would be, if we could be sure the police will only be here one more day. We can’t hold on to her much longer, she’s getting very edgy. Better to get it over with and get her out of here.’

  ‘And the woman in room six?’

  ‘I think we’ll be OK. She’s only twenty-six weeks anyway, plus she’s insisting to everyone who’ll listen that all the scans are wrong and she’s just twenty weeks. I’ve already changed her notes.’

  ‘It’s risky.’

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

  One of us had to break the deadlock, one of us had to move, say something, shout out loud. I would do it. Anything was better than this unbearable tension. Then Duncan put one finger to his mouth. He glared at me as he left the room, pulling the door firmly closed behind him.

  ‘A cargo of three then, Richard. Sure you’ll be OK on your own? Don’t want to leave it till dawn?’

  ‘No, I want to be well away before there’s any chance of the police coming back. Right, I’m going downstairs to get that TV switched off. There’s work to do.’

  Footsteps faded away down the corridor. Had they all gone? Could I risk moving? What the hell was Duncan going to do? Dana’s room was silent. I started to push myself up—

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ said Duncan, as though commiserating a friend on losing a tennis match. ‘It really doesn’t do to get involved.’

  ‘Oh, and you didn’t with Tora?’ shot back Dunn, his voice thick with bitterness. Did he actually care for Dana? Was that why’d he’d saved her life against orders, why he’d been arguing to keep her alive for a few months longer?

  ‘You look like shit. Been here all day?’

  ‘In the basement,’ replied Dunn. ‘With three sedated women. Felt like the house of horrors. Police nearly found the door at one point. Probably will tomorrow.’

  ‘We’ll sort it. Have it looking like a dusty old storeroom by morning. Right, we need a trolley. Can you get one from downstairs? There’s something—’

  A furious, terrified yell broke through the night, just as the door of the bathroom started to move inwards.

  ‘Next door,’ sighed Dunn. Footsteps ran from Dana’s room and I heard a struggle in the next room along. There was banging and then a low, terrified whimpering, a noise I might have thought came from an animal; except I knew it wasn’t an animal they were keeping chained up in there. Then the bathroom door opened and Duncan reappeared.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he hissed at me. ‘Jesus, you idiot, you fucking idiot!’ He opened the door of the cubicle, reached in and pulled me up. ‘How the hell did you get here?’

  I couldn’t reply. Couldn’t do anything but stare at him. He waited a split second before shaking me. ‘Boat?’ he said. ‘Did you come by boat?’

  I was able to nod.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Beach,’ I managed. What did it matter if they found the boat? There was no way I was going to get away now.

  ‘We need to get you back to it. Now.’ He took my arm and started to drag me out of the room. I found the strength to pull back. No, not that easy, Duncan; I wasn’t going to be that easy. Then Duncan grasped me close, wrapped both arms around me and put one hand over my mouth.

  I could hear something. A clanging, whirring sound. Then footsteps returning along the corridor. They were coming back. Creaking, sliding noises told me they were bringing trolleys with them. I wanted to struggle against Duncan but he pressed his mouth against my ear and whispered, ‘Ssshhh.’ The door to Dana’s room slammed open. A trolley was wheeled inside. I heard footsteps moving around the room, the sound of covers being pulled back. A voice I didn’t know muttered a countdown, ‘Three, two, one, lift . . .’ and there was a soft thud.

  ‘Strip the bed, bring the chains,’ said another voice. Then I heard the trolley being pushed out of the room. Beside me Duncan let out a noisy breath.

  From the next room along the corridor came similar, if fainter, sounds. I thought I heard someone cry out, but couldn’t be sure. For a few seconds the corridor outside was as noisy as that of any normal hospital. Then the footsteps and the sound of the wheels faded. I heard the clanging noise of the lift’s mechanism and then nothing. Silence.

  Duncan spun me round to face him. He was white, except for red blotches around h
is eyes. I’d never seen him so angry. Except it wasn’t anger. He was afraid.

  ‘Tora, you have got to get a hold of yourself or you are going to die. Do you understand what I’m . . . no, don’t you dare cry.’ He pulled me close again. ‘Listen, baby, listen,’ he whispered, as he swayed gently, the way a mother might rock a child. ‘I can get you out of the clinic but then you have to get back to the boat. Can you do that?’ He didn’t wait for a reply. ‘Head for Uyeasound. Get as far from the island as possible then get on the radio to your policewoman friend. Can you do that?’

  I didn’t know. But I think I nodded. Duncan opened the bathroom door and we slipped out. Dana’s room was empty. The bed had been stripped back to the mattress and her pyjamas were gone. If I’d been fifteen minutes later I’d never even have seen her. Duncan walked to the door and looked out. Then he beckoned me forward, grabbed my hand and pulled me into the deserted corridor. I wasn’t sure my legs would carry me but they worked fine. We rounded a corner, ran down a short, fourth corridor and made it to the stairs. Duncan paused at the top. We could hear nothing below so risked running down to the mid section. A camera fastened high on the wall glared down at us.

  We listened again. Nothing. We ran to the bottom of the stairs and found ourselves in a short corridor, twin to the one above. One door stood open on our left. I glanced inside. It was an operating suite: a small room where the anaesthetics would be administered, then an open door into theatre. Duncan pulled me onwards.

  We were now in the wing of the building I’d been watching when I’d disturbed the dogs. The rooms had been occupied; I’d seen light and movement behind them; we had to move quickly, someone could appear at any time. We walked forward, reached the first door. The glass window showed only darkness. We moved on. Another door, another window, light beyond. Duncan stopped and I was able to peer through. The room was well lit, about twenty metres long by eight wide. As far as I could make out there was no one inside. At least . . .

  Duncan tugged again but this time I held firm. ‘Come on,’ he mouthed at me, but I shook my head. A sign on the door read: STERILE AREA, STRICTLY NO UNAUTHORIZED ADMITTANCE. Pulling my hand out of Duncan’s grasp, I pushed open the door and went inside.

  I was in a neonatal intensive-care unit. The air temperature was several degrees warmer than that of the corridor and heavy with the continuous humming of electronic equipment. Around me I saw ultrasound scanners, a Retcam, paediatric ventilators, a transcutaneous oxygen monitor. Several of the machines emitted soft beeping sounds every few seconds. Dana had been right. It was state-of-the-art. I’d worked in some very modern, well-equipped facilities in my time, but I’d never seen such a concentration of the very latest equipment.

  ‘Tora, we don’t have time.’ Duncan had followed me into the room, was tugging at my shoulder.

  There were ten incubators. Eight of them were empty. I walked across the room, no longer caring if someone found us. I had to see.

  The infant in the incubator was female. She was about eleven inches long and, I guessed, would weigh around 3lbs. Her skin was red, her eyes tightly closed and her head, tucked inside a knitted pink cap, seemed unnaturally large for her tiny, emaciated body. A thin, transparent tube ran into both nostrils, connected by sticking plaster to her face. Another tube ran into a vein on her wrist.

  I found myself wanting to reach in through the hand access, to touch her softly. I wondered how little human touch she’d known in her short life. The longer I looked, the more I wanted to scoop her up, hold her to me and run, although I knew that to do such a thing would be to kill her.

  I moved on, towards the next cot. Duncan followed, no longer trying to stop me. This baby was male, even smaller than the girl. He looked as though he’d be lucky to make 2lbs, but his skin was the same dark, blotchy red. A ventilator was breathing for him, a monitor by the cot gave a continual reading of his heartbeat and a tiny blue mask covered his eyes to protect them from the light. As I watched, he kicked one of his legs and gave a tiny, mewling cry.

  I felt like someone had stuck a dagger in my heart.

  We stood there, staring down at him, for what felt like a long time. Neonatal units should never be left unattended, it could only be a matter of minutes before someone would return, but I simply couldn’t move, except, every few seconds, to look up and glance across towards the baby girl. I wondered if they too had spent the day in the basement with Andy Dunn and three sedated women. Or maybe the people in charge had taken the risk of leaving them where they were, gambling that Helen and her team wouldn’t insist upon a closer look around a sterile neonatal unit, and that, even if they did, they wouldn’t recognize the significance of what they were seeing.

  I knew now where Stephen Gair had been getting his babies from. I knew why Helen had been able to find no paper trail of the babies that had been adopted overseas.

  George Reynolds, the head of social services, had protested his innocence, claiming that he and his team had been involved in no overseas adoptions, had given no approval, prepared no papers. He could well have been telling the truth. The babies Duncan and I were looking at would need no formal approval, no paperwork to be adopted overseas, because – officially and legally – these babies did not exist.

  Their gestation had been terminated prematurely, some time between twenty-six and twenty-eight weeks. They were aborted foetuses – that were still alive.

  37

  IN RECENT YEARS enormous progress has been made in the care of babies born extremely prematurely. Not so very long ago, a baby born at twenty-four weeks would have been expected to die within minutes of birth or, if it survived at all, to be severely handicapped. Now, such a child has a good chance of survival, and babies born at this stage of development have been known to grow into normal and healthy children. Yet twenty-four-week foetuses are still routinely aborted.

  Every day that a foetus remains inside its mother’s uterus, it is growing stronger and more viable. At twenty-six weeks, the possibilities of its survival are considerably better than at twenty-four. By twenty-eight weeks, its chances are getting quite good.

  The next day, Emma’s twenty-eight-week foetus would be delivered and rushed into one of these incubators. Emma would go back to her stage career, relieved and thankful, believing a termination had taken place. The infant would remain here, receiving a high level of care, for several months. If its brain, lungs and other essential organs remained healthy and normal it would, no doubt, command a high price at an Internet auction. Emma’s ‘termination’ had been delayed by five days. I guessed that was standard practice with all the women who came here seeking late terminations. It would allow a little more time for the foetus to grow and develop; it would also enable the team to administer steroid drugs to encourage foetal lung development.

  Twenty-four hours ago, I’d have said it was the most vile thing I’d ever heard of. Now, knowing what these guys had planned for Dana and the others, what they’d done to so many women already, I couldn’t say I was exactly surprised.

  I turned to Duncan. ‘How long have you known?’

  His eyes held mine steadily, without so much as a flicker. ‘About this? The premature babies? Only a few weeks.’

  ‘And the rest?’

  ‘Since I was sixteen,’ he said. ‘We get told on our sixteenth birthdays.’ He swept his hand up through his hair. ‘But I didn’t believe it, Tora.’ He stopped, looked away, then back again. ‘Or maybe I just told myself I didn’t believe it. That’s why I left Shetland. I went away to university and not once, in all those years, did I ever come back, not even for a weekend. I’ve never set foot on this island before tonight, I swear.’

  Duncan was a good liar. I’d learned that in the last few days. But somehow, I didn’t think he was lying now.

  ‘But we did come back. You wanted to come back. Why?’

  ‘I did not want to come back,’ he spat back at me. ‘They threatened to kill you if I didn’t come back. To kill any child you and I had. I
had to take those fucking pills. If I’d got you pregnant they’d have c—’

  He couldn’t finish. But he didn’t have to. ‘Cut out my heart?’ I asked.

  He nodded. I could see the bones beneath his face, the huge purple shadows under his eyes. For the first time, I understood what Duncan had been going through during the past few months. What he’d had to deal with for most of his life.

  ‘Your mother didn’t have MS?’

  ‘My mother was perfectly healthy. Until they got their hands on her.’

  I reached out for his hand, afraid at how cold it was. ‘What the hell are we going to do?’

  He glanced round at the door, as though even now someone could be watching us. ‘You are going to get back on your boat, just as I told you.’

  ‘You too. Come with me.’

  For a second I thought he was going to agree. Then he shook his head. ‘If I come with you, those women are going to die. As soon as we raise the alarm Richard will drop them all over the side. He’ll claim he was out on an all-night fishing trip, and who’s going to prove otherwise?’

  ‘We will. We’ve seen everything.’ I’m not proud to admit it, but I think I was too scared at that moment to really care about Dana and the other two women. All I wanted was Duncan and me off the island.

  ‘Tor, you have no idea what we’re dealing with. These people have influence you can’t imagine. Even if we’re allowed to live, no one will believe us. We need Dana and the others alive.’

  He was right, of course. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going down to the harbour to get on that boat. Richard is taking it out alone. I can deal with him. I’ll wait until we’re out at sea and whack him on the back of the head. Then I’ll drive the boat back to Uyeasound. With a bit of luck, your friend Helen will be there to meet me.’

  ‘I love you so much,’ I said.

  Somehow, he managed to smile. Then he pulled me across the room and through a door at the far end. The room beyond lay in shadow. We slipped inside and closed the door behind us. We were in a nursery. Six white-painted, wooden cots stood around the edges of the room. Cartoon characters had been painted on to the whitewashed walls, mobiles swayed gently as they hung from the ceiling, soft toys – overstuffed teddy bears and floppy-eared rabbits – stared down at us from shelves. There were changing tables, sterilizing equipment, a baby bath. It was all so creepily, terrifyingly normal.