‘I didn’t care by then. I wouldn’t have cared if they’d said chop your finger off, we’ll grow it into a baby for you.’ He sounded more weary than determined now. It was as though in telling the story he was reliving the long exhausting years. ‘But that didn’t work either. They told us they couldn’t help us, to go away and forget about it, to make the best of nephews and nieces and godchildren and so forth.’ He went pink suddenly and sat very straight. ‘Those bastards knew it all, telling us that! Like that’d be any use to us! Like it’d be any use to anyone! When it’s your own home you want your own babies in it, not to borrow someone else’s for an afternoon. Bloody patronizing bastards!’
There was a silence for a while and George let it stretch as much as it wanted to. She would put no more pressure on them.
It was Sylvia who spoke first. ‘Then I met this woman at a charity thing. She said she’d met another woman who’d adopted a baby from Romania. No questions asked, beautiful child, she said. So I looked into it. I — er — I didn’t tell David at first.’
‘We’d gone away on a holiday, one we’d planned to do when our children grew up,’ David said. ‘Round the world, you know? Over the Pole and everything. We were away four weeks. Stayed in all the best hotels, saw lots, but it made no difference. I know that. We said to each other that from now on we’d live for ourselves and forget all about babies, but I knew she wouldn’t rest that easy.’
‘He’s wonderful, isn’t he?’ Sylvia said and looked appealingly at George. ‘Isn’t he the best husband a woman could have?’
‘Yes,’ George said and smiled at her. She meant it.
‘So when Sylvie told me she knew someone who’d get us a baby from Romania, I said all right, go for it. But she said it’d cost.’
‘I felt bad about that,’ Sylvia said. ‘Afterwards. This — The business hasn’t been all that wonderful lately. He doesn’t tell me, but I know.’
David went pink now. ‘I don’t bother you with business things,’ he said gruffly. ‘I never have and I never will. You want to spend, you go ahead, it’s your money as much as mine.’
‘I know,’ Sylvia said. ‘When you’ve got it. But it’s tighter than it was, you can’t deny, and here was I wanting twenty thousand pounds to —’
‘Twenty how much?’ George said.
‘It didn’t sound such a lot to me. I thought … Well, to have our own child after so many years, a thousand a year, really, that was what I thought, not a lot, and anyway I thought that’d be all there was. It wasn’t, of course.’
‘What happened?’ George ventured, for now they were both silent, looking down at their laps, clearly lost in memory.
‘Mmm?’ It was David who went on. ‘Oh yes. Well, it went on and on. This woman kept phoning, saying next week, next week. I thought we’d been conned, to tell you the truth, but there it was. The cheque had been paid. It was for cash to bearer so I never could find out who it was. There wasn’t anything I could do.’
He seemed to rouse himself suddenly, to become aware of how much he was saying, and he looked at her sharply, his round eyes shining like ice crystals behind his glasses. ‘Look, I’m — we’re telling you all this, but how do we know you aren’t the same people? That you don’t know anyway and are up to some trick or other? We’ve only got your word for it that you’re not.’
‘I showed you that letter to me,’ George said. ‘And my credit cards and so forth. It’s the only ID I have with me. Please, do believe me. I’m involved only as the police pathologist. No more. Do please go on. Then maybe we can — Well, maybe we can track down these horrible people who treated you so badly and deal with them. Maybe even get some money back. Though I can’t promise that, of course,’ she ended hastily, suddenly hearing Gus expostulating at her for making impossible-to-keep promises.
‘Money back?’ David said. He laughed, an oddly mirthless little bark of sound. ‘That’ll be the bloody day.’
There was another pause, and then George spoke, carefully, needing to move them on but not alarm them. ‘So then what happened?’
David looked at her. His eyes were still sharp but he seemed to reach a decision. He put up both hands in a helpless gesture. ‘Then one day she phoned and said he was here.’
Sylvia was sitting very upright now and had taken her hand out of David’s and was holding it to her cheek as she stared at George.
‘Here?’ George said.
‘In London,’ Sylvia said. ‘It was ever so late. About half past nine, it must have been. David was at the office.’
‘We were up to our eyes in an MBO,’ David said, as though it explained everything.
‘A what?’ George was mystified.
‘A management buy-out. It worked, too. We’re better off now we’ve done it, though we’re still tight for money. Cash flow problems. But it was worth it, we’re a bit safer than we were, which these days is something to be grateful for. But it was a hairy few days, believe me.’ He shook his head. ‘A very hairy few days. I never thought I’d manage it.’
‘And I knew I mustn’t bother him at the office. He’d said that and I knew when it was really important and Olive had gone home and so I’ — she lit up as she remembered the excitement of it all — ‘so I got my coat and went down and I took a taxi. And all the way there I thought, what will it be like? I didn’t even know if it was a boy or girl then, not even that! I don’t think I’ve ever had such a long journey. The traffic wasn’t bad, but still …’ She shook her head, still lost in reminiscence. ‘I gave the cab driver a fiver for a tip. He thought I was mad but I was so grateful to be there. I ran in and across that huge space and at first I couldn’t find it …’
‘Couldn’t find what?’ George said gently, afraid to break the spell the woman was weaving as she sat there, her head up and her eyes huge in her thin face, watching herself in the past.
‘The right ladies,’ Sylvia sounded impatient. ‘She’d said the ladies room, but there are so many there! How could I know which one? But I found it at last and there she was.’
‘Where?’ George said, still not wanting to stem the flow but needing the details. ‘Whereabouts?’
‘In the ladies,’ Sylvia insisted, flicking a glance at George. ‘In the — Oh! I see what you mean. It was Heathrow. The airport.’
‘Ah!’ George’s face cleared. Of course. The point at which the babies entered the country. She’d been right; the whole thing indeed was an adoption scam, and the babies for adoption were smuggled in from abroad. Romania? So Sylvia had been told. But who could say? Yet smuggled in they were; this was the evidence Gus had wanted. She could have cheered at her own perspicacity but somehow managed to control her excitement.
‘And then what?’ she said as carefully as she could.
‘She told me they needed more money. I was to put cash in an envelope — they’d told me that on the phone. So I opened the safe.’
David looked sideways at George then, a sly little glance. ‘I usually have some spare liquidity here at home,’ he murmured.
‘I’d done all she said on the phone, so all I had to do was give the envelope to the woman in the ladies and she pushed this bundle at me and I took it and I looked …’ She was trembling now, her eyes wide, the pupils greatly enlarged, ‘I looked and I’d never seen — he looked so — I didn’t know it was a boy then. I sat down on the loo, right away I did, and I undressed him — such awful clothes he had, awful — and looked and I thought, David will be pleased, a boy.’
Her face puckered then. ‘He was dreadfully thin though, and he lay there not looking right at all, and so thin. He didn’t cry or anything, just lay there, his eyes half open. So I wrapped him up again and fetched him home in a taxi and the next day when David found out, it was all right.’ She threw a glance at him that was shining, glittering, brilliant with gratitude. ‘Even about giving her all that extra money, and then we went out and bought half the babies’ department at Harrods. Oh, it was the best day of my life. And we looked after hi
m and I fed him, though it took ages and he had such trouble sucking and I thought it was because of being breast fed and not used to bottles —’
‘How did you know he’d been breast fed?’ George said quickly, and Sylvia looked at her blankly, halted in full flood of memory.
‘Eh? Oh, the woman in the ladies, she said so. Told me he was eight months old, he’d been breast fed and to give him SMA, not ordinary milk.’
‘She was English, then?’
‘What? Oh, yes, I mean, she talked just like — Of course she was.’
‘What did she look like?’
Sylvia’s forehead creased. ‘I’m not sure. Ordinary, you know. Just ordinary. Not very tall — not very big. Just ordinary.’
‘What colour eyes? Hair?’
Sylvia shook her head. ‘She was wearing a woolly cap,’ she said. ‘I never saw her hair. And glasses, yes glasses. Dark ones. Well, tinted, you know? Half tinted at the top. I’d never seen her before so …’ She shrugged. ‘I knew nothing about her. I wasn’t interested, you see. Only in the baby. I was only interested in him.’
‘Yes,’ George said. ‘I see. What happened next?’
‘Well, we tried ever so hard. I loved him so much, I really did. Right from the start. They say you fall in love and I did! But he was so thin and sad and so — He never cried, or hardly at all, and when he did it was so sweet. Like a kitten mewing.’ She smiled fondly at the recollection and George felt her spine go cold. Babies who cried like mewing kittens were very ill babies. This poor woman had had the care of a very sick baby and hadn’t even realized it.
‘I called him Theodore,’ Sylvia said then, unexpectedly. ‘The gift of God, Theodore.’
‘Teddy,’ said George.
Sylvia smiled fondly again. Her tears had vanished, leaving only stains behind on her cheeks. In talking about the baby she had lost she seemed to find comfort. ‘That was David’s name for him. Our little Teddy.’
‘He wasn’t well. I could see that and I was worried. I told Sylvia we ought to get a doctor to see him, but she wouldn’t.’
‘It was too soon,’ Sylvia said with sudden passion. ‘Too soon, don’t you see? I was scared they’d ask where he’d come from and — well, I was scared. Another few weeks, I thought, then we can find the right doctor and have all the right checks done but I was scared they’d try to take him away from us if they knew we’d done such a thing. It’s not legal, is it, to buy a baby? And we’d spent thirty thousand.’ She caught George’s eye and looked shamefaced. ‘Yes. That was how much I had to give her from the safe. Another ten thousand. But it was worth it, it was, it was. Wasn’t it, David?’ she looked up at him appealingly.
He patted her hand, but didn’t look at her. ‘I got more and more worried. I thought, she doesn’t realize how ill he is. I must get him to a doctor and then, thank God, the woman phoned.’
George sharpened. ‘Which woman?’
‘The one who’d done it all. The one who’d phoned first. Sylvia’s friend, you see, had passed on our names to this person — no one was to have the woman’s phone number, it was all very cloak and dagger — and she phoned us to start it all. After we’d got the baby I thought, she’ll never call again, and I was worried, I can tell you. I didn’t know what our situation was, you see. No birth certificate, nothing legal. It was a mess! Sylvia was happy, happier than I had ever seen her, but I was worried sick.’ He patted Sylvia’s hand for she was weeping again, but didn’t look at her. ‘I sent her a letter — the woman — I asked Sylvia’s friend to see she got it, but I couldn’t be sure she had.’
‘But then the woman phoned again,’ George prompted softly, for he had seemed to fall into another little brown study.
‘Mmm?’ He blinked. ‘Yes, she rang and I said he was ill and that I wanted to take him to a doctor, and she said on no account was I to do that, they’d take him away. I said but he’s ill, he doesn’t look right. She said take him to the hospital. He was just failing to thrive, that’s what she said, and to take him to hospital. Old East she said it was. Told me the way and everything. I didn’t know it was really the Royal Eastern until I got there. Anyway, she said go there and use a false name and address, to prevent anyone from taking him away from us, and take him to Dr Kydd’s ward. So we did and this doctor — a red-headed one she was — very young —’
‘Yes,’ George said. ‘I know. She’s a very good doctor.’
‘Is she? Well, she didn’t make me feel all that good, I can tell you. I’d asked for Dr Kydd, of course, but she said Dr Kydd was away and she was in charge, and I was so glad he was being seen by a doctor, I thought even this one’ll be better than no one, and then — then —’
‘Yes?’ George spoke softly.
‘She said we had to leave him behind, he was very ill and needed tests. I wasn’t keen, but I thought, well, if he’s ill — and the woman on the phone had said Old East was the place to take him so …’ Again he patted his wife’s hand. ‘Sylvia wasn’t happy but the doctor insisted we leave him there for tests. So I took Sylvia away and left him. But the next few hours I couldn’t take it,’ he said simply. ‘Sylvia nearly went mad without him. I had to take her back. And this time it was a different doctor, a black one, and he said to leave Teddy but I wouldn’t — ill as he was, if he was being seen by all different doctors and not this Dr Kydd …’ He shook his head miserably. ‘Well, we just took him home.’
‘I thought: he’ll get better, I don’t care what they say. What do these young doctors know, so young as they are?’ Sylvia said, passionate again. ‘I knew I could get him well. I would have, if they’d let me.’ She began to weep again. There seemed no stopping her.
‘So then what?’ George felt the banality of her repeated prompting, but David seemed oblivious of it.
‘We fetched him home.’ He moved uneasily in his place on the sofa. The memories were getting more painful for him too, clearly. ‘And the woman phoned again. Said why had we taken him home and I told her, loud and strong, I told her that I wasn’t satisfied, that I wanted him to be seen by a specialist, not all these different young doctors, and I was going to one and taking my chances on being asked awkward questions. So she said, all right, she’d help us.’
George blinked. ‘She said what?’
‘That’s what I thought.’ David sounded grim. ‘I felt a bit better though. She told us to take him — the baby, you know — to an address she gave us in Harley Street. Here it is.’ He reached into his pocket for his wallet and pulled out a piece of paper. ‘See? Harley Street. Said she’d meet us there and introduce us to the doctor. So we took him there and — and —’
‘Well?’ George said, gently but needing to push the man a little harder for he was balking now. ‘Well?’
‘It was a sort of clinic. Not a private house like a lot of those Harley Street places. And she was there in the hallway when we arrived and said she’d take Teddy to the specialist. She had the birth certificate and all the papers, she said and she’d give them to us later and to wait there for her. She said the doctor’d be suspicious if he saw us, but that she’d be OK because he knew her agency, so we said all right. It sort of made sense. She went up the stairs with Teddy. And never came down.’
Sylvia was rocking in her seat now, sodden with her tears again, and George reached out and touched her hand gently. It was hot and dry.
‘She just went away somewhere?’
He nodded. ‘I found out afterwards there was a different way out of the building. I went to look, of course, after half an hour, but I got nowhere. There were no baby specialists in the building. They were all these alternative doctors, acupuncturists and so on.’
‘So what did you do then?’ George was pushing them as hard as she dared, and David reacted with sudden anger.
‘What did I do then? What the bloody hell could I do? We’d been duped, hadn’t we? Used and abused and — and there wasn’t a bloody thing we could do about it. All we knew was there’d been a baby we’d cared about an
d now — and now they’d taken him back.’
He put both hands up to his face and again began to weep. They sat there side by side in an agony of distress like a pair of dolls in a Swiss clockwork toy, somehow ridiculous in their pitiful state, and George felt her own eyes prickle in sympathy.
‘And then you come and tell us he’s dead. I thought when I saw your advert, maybe it’s the same people and I can find Teddy again, or at the very least, maybe we could start again. I want a baby! I thought we could start again!’ It was Sylvia who was speaking now, indeed almost shouting, sitting bolt upright and with patches of high colour staining her face. ‘I saw your ad and answered it. I thought we can start again. I pretended I was David and I thought I could start again and when I told him what I’d done he was so — so good about it. And then you come and I think, maybe it’ll be all right this time and all you tell us is that he died … It’s too cruel. How can life be so cruel? What did I ever do to deserve it?’
‘Oh, Sylvia,’ David Hillman said. He turned to her and held her close. ‘It’s not your fault. I keep telling you that.’ He looked at George then over Sylvia’s head. ‘If I’d realized how ill he was I’d have taken him to a doctor right away. To think I kept him from proper treatment because I was scared of being caught! It’s hell and I’ll never forgive myself.’
George spoke without stopping to think. All she wanted to do was help him. She wanted at least to take away from his existing misery the burden of guilt. It wasn’t his fault the child had died and he was entitled to know that. So she said it, and not until she saw his stricken face did she realize how much worse she had made things.
‘But it wasn’t your fault!’ she said. ‘He was murdered, you see. Smothered. By someone we haven’t been able to find. But it wasn’t your fault…’
33
‘Under the circumstances,’ Gus said, ‘you’re forgiven.’ They were sitting in her office; she’d found him there when she’d come pounding back breathlessly from Sloane Street, and was so delighted to have the chance to pour it all out to him that she didn’t stop to wonder why he was there.
Second Opinion Page 34
