Lullaby (17 page)

Deb smiled reassuringly. ‘I know it’s not much, but the second witness saw a similar sort of thing. It means there’s better odds.’

The other guy was a student at the local college. He’d been stopped by a woman in a silver car, a baby crying in the back, asking for directions. She wouldn’t open the window properly, and the child was obscured by sunshades, so he didn’t get a good look. But he’d thought it was particularly odd, because the woman kept looking away from him while they spoke, although he’d decided it was because she was so worried about the baby screaming. She asked for the road to London, and he remembered very little about her other than she’d had a huge coat on, which was odd, considering the weather, and sunglasses, and he thought she might have had an accent, though he found it hard to describe. Possibly American, he’d said.

‘So now what?’ I asked helplessly. I was horribly aware it was already forty-eight hours since the Louis video had been shot.

‘We’re trying to ID the woman. A local newsflash is asking any women matching the descriptions to come forward to be discounted. We’re trying to trace the car. I know it’s not much, but it’s better than nothing.’

‘Where’s the boss?’ I asked casually.

‘He’s following up other enquiries,’ was all Egg-belly said, and I left it at that.

Since DC Kelly had left, I’d lost the will to live. Deb had a rare night off, and Shirl was out with some new bloke. I went online for a bit: I was going to set up a ‘Looking for Louis’ website, and I wanted to do some research. I surfed the net for yet more stories about missing babies, desperately seeking reassurance that
they were all returned safe and sound—but it didn’t seem to be the truth at all. I read some old news reports on famous cases where bereaved women or women who couldn’t conceive had stolen babies. Some had been found again—some many years later. Some hadn’t. Worse still, a few had actually been discovered dead. I stared in abject horror at the face of a tiny baby boy who’d eventually been found in a drain. Hot tears sprang to my eyes for that little life, and terror mounted again, thudding through my chest—so when the internet connection went down, perhaps it was fortuitous. I thought about running screaming down the road, banging on every door I came to looking for my son, but in the end I knew it wouldn’t help.

I slumped in front of the TV, vaguely listening to some expert drone on smugly about damaging toddler day-care, babies’ faces flitting through my mind, flicking through one of Maxine’s glossy magazines trying to dispel them. There was a picture of some foreign supermodel at an awards show ‘only forty-eight hours’ after delivering her second child, looking svelte and rested. She reminded me of someone. Listlessly I flicked on through. Then I turned back to the model. Heidi what’s-her-name. With a huge great lurch, I realised who it was she looked like.

I jumped up to find the phone. How could I have been so flipping dense? The stranger at the gallery who’d scared me so. The weirdo at the Tate. Tall and blonde and foreign—just like the woman in the car. The woman with the baby.

*

As I rushed across the hall on a hunt for the phone handset, a great breeze flew through the house; somewhere upstairs a door slammed shut. There was a bang followed by the tinkle of glass breaking, a picture dislodged by the gust, I guessed. ‘Great,’ I muttered. But I wouldn’t be distracted from my task now; I kept on towards the phone.

And then I heard a footstep, followed by a soft curse, from somewhere up above me. I froze; only my stomach kept rolling on with fear.

‘Maxine?’ I called tremulously after a second. But I was sure she was at college this evening, and anyway no one replied. The phone was within my sights now; as I picked it up a small bead of sweat dripped as if in slow motion onto my shaking hand, ricocheting onto a black tile on the floor. I switched the button to get a dialling tone—and then I heard the voice.

At first I thought it was a crossed line but, listening, I quickly realised there was someone speaking on my own phone. Speaking on my phone, in my own house, in a tongue I didn’t recognise. Adrenaline swept through my body; I moved swiftly towards the front door and then, with hand trembling on the latch, I shouted down the receiver, ‘Who the hell is this?’ There was a stunned silence, followed by a click as one party hung up. The other cleared his throat before beginning in broken English, ‘Excuse me, Madam, this is Gorek Patuk.’

‘Who?’

‘Maxine’s friend.’

‘Maxine’s friend?’ I repeated foolishly. ‘Where exactly are you, Gorek?’

‘Upstairs,’ he said, as if it was quite normal. ‘I am upstairs.’

‘Oh, I see,’ I said, trying to collect my thoughts, although I really didn’t see. ‘Well, could you please get off my phone and come downstairs. Right now.’

‘Right now—’ he began, but I snapped off the handset before I could hear any more and stood at the foot of the stairs, drumming it against my hand. A surge of fury chased away my fear until it had completely gone—though afterwards I thought perhaps I should have been more frightened. Now I just felt cross.

He slouched down the stairs, jangling his car-keys in one hand, as innocent as the day he was born, though thankfully with more clothes on.

‘Hi,’ he said cheerfully, which rendered me entirely speechless for a second. ‘I was just waiting for Maxine, okay?’

‘How did you get in?’ I asked him, and I held out my hand for my phone. He came very close to me and his eyes were black as night. ‘Maxine, she give me her key. Okay?’

‘No, actually, it’s not really okay.’ For some reason my knees had gone a bit wobbly. I put my hand out to steady myself on the banister, but he was too quick for me. He slid his hand around my wrist to support me; his skin was very hot.

‘You all right?’ He looked right into my eyes and I found I couldn’t answer. I was utterly disconcerted now. ‘I wait in the car for Maxine. I give her the key back. Thank you for the phone.’ He picked up my other hand and slipped the sweaty handset into it. I breathed in
his smell, a strange musky kind of scent. Then he was gone.

And it was only later, when I’d collected myself a little more, when Shirl finally came home and found the note Maxine had left reminding me she’d gone to Cambridge for the night with her English group, that I realised the whole time we’d spoken, his blue-tooth mobile receiver was clamped to his well-oiled head. So then why did he need to use my phone?

Early the next morning I waited anxiously for Deb to arrive, to tell her about Gorek, to ask her what I should do. She was running unusually late, so I paced the house putting things in piles and then moving them again rather pointlessly until Shirl finally appeared, half-dressed and yawning. She was all nervy about her meeting later with a big new gym in town.

‘I’ve gotta look smart, and you know me, babe. I don’t really do smart.’ She dangled a white shirt from one hand rather pathetically; it looked like the archetypal dishrag.

‘Give it here. I’ll find the iron.’ Glad to have something to do, I ironed while she squatted on the floor, sorting out her massage oils. Catching our reflection in Mickey’s huge designer mirror, I nearly managed a wry smile behind the ironing board.

‘What?’ Shirl looked up from arranging the small bottles.

‘Nothing. I was just thinking—this wasn’t quite how I saw things when we were seventeen.’

‘What—you in a big posh house ironing my shirt?’

‘Me in a big posh house perhaps.’ I thought about it for a minute. ‘No, neither of those things.’

‘Or me going out to work and you being a stay-at-home—’ Too late, she stopped herself.

‘Mum,’ I finished for her, quietly.

She shrugged. ‘I guess I always saw you as the one that’d get away.’

I had a sudden vision of Shirl and me behind the art room, both with school skirts barely past our bums. Shirl smoking, me with my Walkman that my Nana bought me when my dad died, sharing a pair of headphones, listening to Shirl’s tapes of Marvin, laughing at
Viz.
Of us lying on the scorched grass outside the canteen the year we did our GCSEs; me sketching Shirl in the back of my maths book (never enough money for the fancy sketchbooks that I craved); Shirl’s everlasting legs eliciting admiring glances from every boy that passed. Glances from Robbie’s gang—when Robbie put in a rare appearance at school. No one looking at me, not really, not so that I ever noticed. Shirl telling Robbie he was thick for running with that crowd. Me poring over the glossy travel brochures that I’d pinch from Thomas Cook in the precinct in my lunch-break. Dreaming of being anywhere but on our estate. Leigh in the sixth form, all blonde and perfect in her uniform, poker-straight hair and pale pink lipstick, the other girls in my year so admiring of my sophisticated older sister. Leigh leaving to do a typing course on Oxford Street, very grown-up in her stilettos, engaged to Gary on her nineteenth birthday. Me determined not to go
down that path. Planning my getaway. Always planning. Planning to go to art school; my art teacher giving me extra time in the evenings because she said I had talent. Imagining myself in long woolly jumpers and black berets, drinking cheap red wine and absinthe till four in the morning with intense and glowering male artists, with girls who used cigarette-holders and spoke like Audrey Hepburn and said ‘darling’ a lot. Messing up my exams because I got involved too fast with a boy who broke my heart as I searched for some kind of substitute for my dad. Something, anything, to fill the gaping hole in my heart. Dealing with the nightmare that took place at seventeen, when the police came knocking again, even though my dad was long gone. Not going to art school because of my mum. Because she couldn’t cope with life any more on her own—not after the police raked it all up again. Because I had to get a job; had to earn some money to stop her going under; because Leigh and Robbie were gone. Ending up behind the counter in Thomas Cook in the precinct, the place I’d imagined booking my great travels in, not other people’s cruises or caravans or their two weeks in Benidorm. Wearing a horrid nylon uniform and not a stripy arty jumper at all, nor a natty beret. Hardly what I’d planned. Not what I’d planned at all.

‘Damn it.’

A bottle slipped from Shirl’s hand, the oil spilling across the floor in a greasy little pool. A smell of oranges pervaded the room; it made me think of Christmas. I stared up at Louis on the wall just for a moment; we hadn’t even had a Christmas together yet. I checked
the clock for the umpteenth time this morning. Come
on
, Deb. I turned Shirl’s shirt over very carefully.

‘I didn’t think I’d have kids by now. Not before thirty, you know. Not ever, necessarily. Not after my mum and dad.’ I tried not to dwell on the fact that it hadn’t been part of the plan in any way; at the initial anger I’d felt at being trapped by my own stupidity.

‘No, well, I didn’t think you’d know what an iron was either, but you do. God, I think my flipping lavender is off.’

Silently I thanked her for not reminding me of my early maternal failings; of the sobbing wreck I momentarily became. ‘I didn’t really until Mickey.’

‘That figures.’

‘Though Jean does most of the ironing these days.’ I caught myself. This time Shirl smiled.

‘Listen to you, lady of the manor.’

I blushed. ‘I sound like a wanker, don’t I?’

‘You sound like you, babe. Never the latter.’ She slotted her oils very carefully back into their compartments. ‘Only sometimes you do sound a bit like—’

I finished the second cuff without looking up. ‘Like?’

‘Like
him’

‘Well, that’s natural, isn’t it?’

‘Is it?’

‘I mean, he’s a strong character.’

‘I’ll say.’

The tip of the iron caught my inner wrist, burning the thin skin there. ‘Ow. Bloody hell that’s hot. Oh God, where’s Deb?’ I handed the finished shirt to Shirl. ‘Do you know what gets me the most? Apart from feeling
crap when I think of all the times I wanted to go out dancing instead of sitting in with Louis every night.’

‘All new mums feel like that sometimes.’

‘Do they?’

‘Of course they do. They’d be lying if they said they didn’t. And actually,’ Shirl put the shirt on, ‘actually some of them just go and do it. Some of them never stay home with their kids.’ She didn’t say it but I knew she was thinking about my mum.

‘The worst thing is all this waiting all the time. It’s this constant feeling that I’m absolutely bloody helpless. That it’s all out of my hands.’ I leant down to unplug the iron, the rant building in my chest. ‘That I could hunt and hunt and hunt for Louis, that he could be right nearby somewhere, but that unless that person who’s got him slips up, you know, like, lets someone see him by mistake, or actually changes their mind, I won’t have a hope in hell of knowing.’

Shirl hung her bag over the back of the armchair and hugged me. ‘You’re doing the best you can, babe. Don’t beat yourself up about it.’

‘I’m trying not to, but it’s bloody, bloody hard, Shirl, you know. I keep thinking of what I could have done to stop this happening.’

‘It’s not your fault, Jess. None of this is your fault. Know that, girl. Okay?’ She kissed my forehead, catching sight of the clock as she did so. ‘Shit, is that the time? I’d better get a wiggle on.’

As Shirl left ten minutes later, banging the front door behind her, the photocopies I’d made of Louis’s picture, which had sat waiting on the hall table, fluttered in the
breeze. One floated slowly to the floor; I pinned it beneath my bare foot. I looked down at Louis’s little face; I seized the phone and rang Deb again but she didn’t answer. In the kitchen I found sellotape and scissors in the drawer, grabbed my bag and left Deb a message saying I’d be back soon.

I tramped across the baking heath, attaching a picture to every lamppost and road-sign that I came to, fighting the feeling I was wasting my time entirely, ignoring curious stares from passing strangers. One man slowed and wound down his window, gazing at my still-swollen boobs. I felt a lewd remark brewing so I gave him my death-stare until he shot off in a blast of diesel fumes. And every house I passed I wondered whether Louis was inside. I worked my way down the hill into Greenwich, ending up outside the library on the High Road with my last photocopy. I stuck it to the bus-stop outside the entrance of the next-door language school. My poster looked utterly pathetic, already curling in the heat, Louis’s little face staring out all blurry, my big bold pleading letters all wonky beneath—
‘MISSING FOR NEARLY SIX DAYS’.
Did I honestly believe that anyone would ever respond?