‘Gus, please will you —’
‘Concentrate on matters detective,’ he said briskly, getting to his feet and brushing down his trousers before sitting beside her on the sofa. ‘I might as well. It’s the only bit of concentration I’m likely to get out of you tonight. OK. You want to advertise for would-be adopting parents.’
‘Yes.’
‘Because you reckon the people on that list will apply.’
‘Yes.’
‘And that’ll lead you to the murderer.’
‘Yes.’
‘Sounds like going to Marble Arch via Beachy Head, if you ask me.’ He spoke judiciously, his head on one side as he looked at her.
‘Pardon me?’
‘A long way round. A trot all round the houses instead of a direct route.’
‘D’you know of a direct route?’ she demanded.
‘Sure. Like I said when you first showed me this list. We can go and see them all. We’ve got their addresses, so it’ll be easy enough. Then we can ask them.’
‘But that won’t find us Oberlander, will it?’ she said as patiently as she could. ‘It’s Oberlander we want. They’re not on the list — but they’re the ones we know will have the most information! But it’s possible that one of those is the Oberlanders with a false name, the way we originally thought. If they are, then going to see them will alert them. I want the Oberlanders to come to us, ideally using the false name again. Don’t you see?’
He looked at her thoughtfully for a long moment. ‘And suppose Oberlander, whoever he is, murdered his own child? Or hers, of course. Will he — she still contact you?’
‘It’s worth a try,’ she said, with a return of her original stubbornness. ‘Anyway, it’s a way to get moving, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose so. I can’t think of a better one at the moment.’
‘Well then?’ She was triumphant.
‘But that doesn’t mean that your idea has to be a good one, just because I don’t have a better. You don’t always need a yard stick to know something don’t measure up.’
‘Oh, you’re full of wise saws and precepts tonight!’ she said crossly. ‘A regular Polonius! What possible harm can it do, Gus? It mightn’t work, I grant you, but on the other hand it’ll only cost a few quid. I’ll pay for it myself if that’s what’s bothering you, though I would have thought the police budget —’
‘Don’t use such filthy language in my presence,’ he said, sounding as shocked as a Victorian Miss. ‘Budget is a very dirty word in my office! Anyway, it isn’t that. It just seems …’ He shrugged. ‘But I suppose you’ve got a point. It can’t do any harm.’
‘And it might do some good.’
‘Or — hang about a bit. It might warn the murderer, whoever it is, that we’re on to him or her.’ He seemed genuinely interested in the discourse for the first time. ‘Now will that be a good thing or a bad thing? Let me think.’ He pondered for a while. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at length. ‘I really don’t.’
‘I don’t see how it can tip our hand. I shan’t sign it with my name or anything! Look, suppose it’s something like this.’ She jumped to her feet, went over to her little desk and began to scribble on some scrap paper. He sat and watched her, seeming happy just to look at her bent head. For all his complaints about her lack of co-operation with his original plans for the evening, he seemed content enough, and she was well aware of that fact even though she was concentrating on her scribbling. It was an awareness that pleased her.
‘Look,’ she said eventually, and pushed the piece of paper at him. ‘Try that.’
He read aloud: ‘“Childless? Do you have a good home to offer to orphaned or abandoned children? All support given to those seeking children from overseas. Contact Box Number blah.”‘
‘It’s mysterious enough,’ he said as he gave back the sheet of paper. ‘I’m not sure you won’t have trouble placing it.’
‘Why?’
‘There are laws about baby farming in the UK,’ he said. ‘About selling babies for profit. A newspaper might think this contravenes that law and refuse it.’
‘But there’s no mention of money there,’ she pointed out. ‘Just an offer of support to caring people who can offer children a home. There can’t be anything illegal in that. Let me try, Gus.’
He looked at his watch and then stood up. ‘OK, ducks. Like I say, I can’t see any harm in it. Where’ll you put it?’
‘I’ll work that out tomorrow,’ she said, elated at the thought of doing something positive at last. It seemed suddenly even more important to her to get the case moving faster than it had been. ‘I suppose there are some specialist magazines for the childless? There’s usually one for everything, isn’t there? And I could try the local papers in all the areas where people on the list live.’
He nodded approvingly at that. ‘Now that is sensible thinking. Forget the magazines. It takes ages for their ads to appear, I imagine. And take a tip and make them display ads. Otherwise they might miss ‘em. And make me a promise right now.’
He was beside the door that led into her little hallway, pulling on his coat.
‘Depends on the promise.’
‘No rushing off to interview people on your own if you do get an answer that gives a lead.’
She considered for a while and then nodded. ‘That sounds fair enough. I’ll let you know, word of honour, if I do flush anyone out.’
‘Make sure you don’t forget.’ He stood there a moment longer looking at her and then sketched a deep elaborate sigh. ‘Ah me, the pains suffered by lovers! When, oh when will my beloved surrender unto me? ‘Night, ducks. See you around.’ And he was gone, closing the front door quietly behind him, clearly considerate of the old ladies sleeping in the bedroom. She laughed, but perversely became aware of a stab of regret mixed with a faint rekindling of desire. Damn it all to hell and back, would she never get her hormones sorted out?
The advertisements were accepted without demur by local papers in Hatfield (which also covered Bishop’s Stortford), in Hertfordshire, Blackheath, Kensington and Denham to the west of London, as well as the local one that covered the hospital and therefore Wapping too. None of the ad sales people made any comment about the content of the advertisement and she was pleased with herself about that. Gus’s doubts about the legality of such adoption offers had alarmed her; but she had the impression that each paper was fighting for every bit of advertising revenue it could find and was unlikely therefore to scrutinize anything too closely.
And then she settled down to wait. The papers were all weeklies and appeared on different days; she did calculations on the backs of old envelopes working out how soon she might be likely to get responses, remembering that any letters had to reach her via the newspapers. Each of them assured her that there would be no delay in sending box-number mail, but she had her doubts, and almost despaired of finding a way of containing her impatience as the next week crept by. She tidied every inch of her own office, caught up with every piece of laboratory work she could, drove her staff almost demented with demands for year’s end organizing and generally had a miserable time of it, including going to bed early on New Year’s Eve, because there was nowhere she wanted to go to celebrate. Anyway, she told herself gloomily as she pulled the duvet up at eleven p.m. and switched off her light, I’d rather ignore the way time is going by.
It wasn’t even as though her private life offered any direction. Vanny and Bridget, due to return home to Buffalo in just two weeks’ time, worked themselves into a frenzy of activity, sightseeing with enormous verve and energy. They wanted to cover all the ground they could, ‘Not least,’ as Bridget told George privately, ‘because I’m not sure when if ever we’ll get back to Europe. Your Ma’s coping better than I’d hoped, but she still wanders in her memory a bit, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
George had noticed and tried not to. There were more moments when her mother looked at her blankly when she said something commonplace, and needed explanations; mo
re occasions when she lost her way to the bathroom of the tiny flat and was puzzled; more times when she drifted off into a private world of her own in the middle of a conversation and seemed unaware that she had done so. But she was coping well enough, as Bridget repeated over and over again, and having a great time.
‘I don’t think she knew how much fun it would be coming to Europe,’ Bridget said. ‘All she thought about was seeing you, but now she’s here she’s eaten up with it all. Wants to go to Amsterdam, now —’
‘Amsterdam?’ George said blankly.
‘We thought a longish weekend. You wouldn’t mind? We could see the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh exhibition and all that. No bulbs, I guess, not in January, but all the same, we could ride the canals and see Anne Frank’s house and so forth. If you don’t want us to go though, honey, you just say the word.’
‘Of course you must go if you want to!’ George said warmly. ‘It sounds like a great idea!’ She helped them make arrangements, borrowed Hattie’s car again to take them to the airport to catch their plane, and returned to the empty flat not as gratefully as she had expected, but actually missing them and their untidiness about the place. It was a lonely business being there.
And there wasn’t much sign of Gus either and that was the loneliest part. He had called her briefly the day after she had persuaded him of the value of her plan to tell her a major robbery on the patch was going to absorb a good deal of his time for the next few days, though he had good leads on it, and of course was still using some of his lads to continue the Oberlander and Rajabani investigations.
‘But I won’t have much time myself to come around, oh misery me. But if there’s anything important, you call me and call me fast, you hear? If you get a response from these ads —’
‘I’ll call you!’ she said. ‘Stop mother-henning again.’
‘I shouldn’t have agreed to such an idea,’ he said fretfully. ‘No need for it. We’ve got enough to get on with the list of addresses and names we’ve got. I suppose the ads are in already?’
‘Of course.’
‘Yeah, I should have known you wouldn’t waste time. Well, be careful. And remember your promise. Nothing stupid.’
‘I won’t forget,’ she said. ‘Now go catch robbers. Goodbye.’ She’d hung up the phone almost pettishly. No chance of seeing him when her Ma and Bridget went away; wasted opportunities there. And she was so angry with her own perversity, considering how she’d been the other evening, that she refused to think about Gus at all for the rest of the week.
She failed, of course.
Her calculations turned out to be right. On the third day after the first two ads appeared, one in Denham and the other in Blackheath, two fat envelopes were delivered to the flat by a complaining postman who had to wait for her to answer the doorbell as they wouldn’t go through her letterbox. Denham had produced seventeen responses and Blackheath twenty-three. None of them were from Oberlander, and none of them were from the people listed on the coded sheet as living there.
Two days later another flurry arrived; sixteen from Kensington, thirty-two from Hatfield and Bishop’s Stortford and, to her surprise, fifteen from Wapping. Surprise, because somehow she had assumed that the local poverty-struck area wouldn’t support that many people with the resources to consider private adoption, and even though her advertisement had said nothing about cost, she knew perfectly well from the other letters she’d received that many people realized that money would have to change hands if they were to get their desires. And then she remembered the well-off who had colonized and gentrified swathes of Docklands, and stopped being surprised.
She was moved by the letters, for they were powerful and eloquent. As she ploughed her way through one after another her mood drooped and finally descended into a deep despondency. The desperate hunger for parenthood that jumped off page after page was very affecting and it stirred anxieties in her, too. A woman in her thirties, she thought with some pain, shouldn’t expose herself to this sort of stuff if she didn’t have definite plans to get herself pregnant. And I haven’t, have I? But that was not to be thought of, and she plunged back into the letters, reading every one even though none of them offered her any clues to the whereabouts of the Oberlanders, and surprisingly to her, none of them came from people whose names appeared on the decoded list.
She stopped to think then. Perhaps the people on that list were successful adopters? Perhaps they were there because they had somehow been supplied with babies? Such people wouldn’t try again, would they? They’d have their own avenues to explore anyway if they wanted more babies, and wouldn’t need any such service as the one she’d advertised. All she had done by her efforts was flush out a lot more distress and perhaps — guilt rose as she thought about it — created hopes for a family in people who would gain nothing from their responses to her lure. She felt worse and worse as she read the letters, wanting to write to them all to apologize for encouraging them to display their sores to a total stranger.
Until she reached a letter signed David Hillman. It was one of the batch from Kensington and she started to read it with no great hope. The handwriting was ordinary, not particularly crabbed and not particularly elegant. There was little to be gleaned about the personality of the writer from it; the address was a block of flats in Sloane Street; rather rich then, she registered. Her sensitivity to the subtleties of class and money in this country was not well honed but she’d lived here long enough to know that anyone who had the word ‘Sloane’ in his address was someone with a high regard for himself, who enjoyed that of others, too.
The significant part of his letter almost slid by her at first. There was the usual colourless start, ‘We are interested in your advertisement of last week in our local paper …’ but then he went on: ‘Our reason for wishing to adopt as soon as possible is one I hope will be regarded with sympathy by your organization. We have adopted once and, we thought, with great success, but to our great grief our baby did not thrive. My wife is, as you can imagine, in a state of deep bereavement. I know no baby can replace another, but if we could be considered as a priority because of the pain of the loss we have already suffered, it would be much appreciated. There would be no problems about being ready for a child; we have all the equipment and clothes any little boy would need …’
She sat and thought for a long time, staring at the letter. The story was the nearest of any to the Oberlander one that she had seen. Other letters spoke of years of seeking a pregnancy of their own via IVF and GIFT and other forms of fertility treatment; of long waits on lists of official adoption agencies, of the despair of watching the calendar move on and knowing that they were rapidly approaching the age at which they would no longer be regarded as eligible to adopt; only this one said anything about having adopted before. And the baby, he had written, did not thrive. An odd way of putting it, she thought; most nonmedical people might say a child had passed on, or been lost, or some other euphemism, or might despise the use of soft language and say bluntly it had died. But this man had written ‘did not thrive’ which rang strangely in her ears; it was a phrase used by paediatric experts for a child who stopped growing and seemed to be ailing for an unknown reason. Yet this man was not medical. At the start of his letter he’d described himself as a businessman. Why should he use such a phrase? And then he’d made such a point about having all the equipment a little boy would need, so the child who had not thrived for them had been a boy …
It happened yet again. She sat there and stared at the page; blinked and stared again; and then lifted her chin and laughed aloud. The cogs of her mind, that absurd mind of hers that juggled with cut-out bits of information and then slotted them neatly into place like a jigsaw had done the trick again.
‘Hillman,’ she said aloud. ‘That means the man from the high ground. Oberlander, in German, surely?’
31
She seemed to spend the entire day trying to reach him. She called the police station first of course, only to be told he was
out. She left a message asking him to contact her. An hour later and then an hour after that she phoned again and was assured the message had been passed on, they could do no more, and she could hear the faint amusement in the voice of the person at the other end of the phone, which made her blush and slam the phone down angrily, feeling she couldn’t ring the police station again. So she called his flat, and all she got was the buzz of an ansaphone and his voice blandly inviting her to leave a message. Again she banged down the receiver; almost taking his absence as a deliberate personal insult.
She sat and glowered at her grimy office window and tried to decide what to do. She’d made him promises, hadn’t she, not to go off on her own, not to keep secrets from him? Well, she amended, not precisely promises, more undertakings to try not to behave so. Well, hadn’t she tried? She’d tried damned hard. Here she was sitting with a direct lead to the man they had been looking for all this time and just because she couldn’t reach Gus, he had to be left alone? Why, he could do anything in the time that might elapse before Gus was available! Run off, kill another baby maybe, who could say what he might not do? And she stifled the awareness that this was nonsense. Hillman-cum-Oberlander (and she was completely convinced this was the case) could have no such intent, for if he had he would hardly have responded to a newspaper advertisement.
She jumped to her feet. Half-promise or no half-promise, she wasn’t going to sit about here waiting like a dutiful puppy dog for the master to come home. She would go and see Hillman. It could do no harm, surely, and if she came back with the case solved, ready to put in his hands, Gus could hardly object.
She was elated as she arranged with Sheila to hold the fort in her absence. Her gargantuan efforts at tidying over the past few days hadn’t been wasted. Now there was no reason whatsoever why she should not be off about police business, and so she told Sheila, who sniffed and grudgingly agreed to keep an eye out and to bleep her if anything urgent came up. The fact that she fervently hoped it would was not lost on George, who had a lively awareness of her staff’s views, but she only smiled cheerfully at her and went.
Second Opinion Page 32
