Means Of Evil And Other Stories (11 page)

   "Maybe that's for the best. What did she die of?"

   "A stroke," said Crocker, and went.

   Ginger and the
   Kingsmarkham
   Chalk Circle

"There's a girl downstairs, sir," said Polly Davies, "and she says someone's taken her baby out of its pram."

   Chief Inspector Wexford had been contemplating a sheet of foolscap. On it, written by himself in the cause of crime prevention, was a politely worded request to the local authority, asking them to refrain from erecting scaffolding around their rented property a full nine months before building work was due to commence. Because of the scaffolding there had already been two burglaries and an assault on a young woman. He looked up from the paper, adjusted his thoughts and sighed.

   "They will do it," he said. "Leave their babies about I mean. You'd never find them leaving their handbags outside shops."

   "It was outside her flat, sir, not a shop, and the thing is, whoever took the baby left another one in its place."

Slowly Wexford got up. He came round the desk and looked narrowly at Polly.

   "Constable Davies, you have to be pulling my leg."

   "No, sir, you know I wouldn't. She's a Mrs. Bond and she says that when she went downstairs to fetch in her pram, her baby had gone and another one been put there."

   Wexford followed Polly down to the ground floor. In one of the interview rooms a girl was sitting at the bleak, rectangular, plastic-topped table, drinking tea and crying. She looked about nineteen. She had long straw-coloured hair and a small childish face, naive and innocent and frightened, and she was wearing blue denims and a tee-shirt with apples and oranges and cherries printed all over the front. From her appearance one would not have supposed her to be a mother. But also in the room was a baby. The baby, in short white frock and woolly coat and napkin and cotton socks, slept in the uneasy arms of Detective Constable Loring.

   It had occurred to Wexford on the way down that women who have recently had babies are, or are said to be, prone to various kinds of mental disturbance, and his first thought was that Mrs. Bond might only think or only be saying that this child was not hers.

   "Now, Mrs. Bond," he began, "this is a strange business. Do you feel like telling me about it?"

   "I've told it all," she said.

   "Well, yes, but not to me. Why not start by telling me where you live and where your baby was?"

   She gulped. She pushed the teacup away. "Greenhill Court. We're on the fifth floor. We haven't got a balcony or anything. I have to go all the way down in the lift to put Karen out in her pram. She's got to have fresh air. And when she's there I can't watch her all the time. I can't even see her from my lounge on account of it looks out over the car park."

   "So you put her out in the pram this afternoon," said Wexford. "What time would that have been?"

   "It was just on two. I put the pram on the grass with the cat net on it, and when I went to fetch it in at half-past four the cat net was still on it and the baby was asleep but it——it wasn't Karen!" She made little whimpering noises that exploded in a sob. "It wasn't Karen, it was that baby he's holding!"

   The baby woke up and also began to cry. Loring wrinkled up his nose and shifted his left hand from under its buttocks. His eyes appealed to Polly who nodded and left the room.

   "So what did you do?" said Wexford.

   "I didn't even go back upstairs. I got hold of the pram and I pushed it and I started to run and I ran all the way down here to you."

   He was touched by her childish faith. In real or imaginary trouble, at time of fear, she ran to those whom her sheltered small-town upbringing had taught her to trust, the kindly helmeted man in blue, the strong arm of the law. Not for her the grosser cynical image her city-bred contemporaries held of brutal and bribable policemen.

   "Mrs. Bond," he said, and then, "What's your first name?"

   "Philippa. I'm called Pippa."

   "Then I'll call you that if you don't mind. Describe your baby to me, will you, Pippa? Is she dark or fair? How old is she?"

   "She's two months old——well, nine weeks. She's got blue eyes, she's wearing a white frock." The voice broke and trembled again. "And she's got the most beautiful red-gold hair you've ever seen!"

   Inevitably, Wexford's eyes went to the child in Loring's arms whom this description seemed perfectly to fit. He said gently to Pippa Bond, "Now you're quite sure you aren't imagining all this? No one will be angry if you are, we shall understand. Perhaps you worried or felt a bit guilty about leaving Karen out of your sight for so long, and then when you came down you got a feeling she looked rather different from usual and . . ."

   A wail of indignation and misery cut across the rest of what he had to say. The girl began to cry with long tearing sobs. Polly Davies came back, carrying a small square hand towel from the women's lavatory. She took the baby from Loring, laid it on its back on the table and undid the big safety pin above its navel. Pippa Bond flinched away from the baby as if it were carrying a disease.

   "I'm not imagining it," she shouted at Wexford. "I'm not! D'you think I wouldn't know my own baby? D'you think I wouldn't know my Karen from
that
?"

   Polly had folded the towel cornerwise. She moved a little so that Wexford could see the baby's waving legs and bare crotch. "Whoever this baby is, sir, it isn't Karen. Look for yourself——it's a boy."

Trevor Bond was fetched from the Stowerton estate agent's where he worked. He looked very little older than his wife. Pippa clung to him, crying and inarticulate, and over her bent head he cast despairing eyes at the policemen.

   He had arrived in a car driven by a young woman he said was his sister-in-law, Pippa's sister, who also lived at Greenhill Court with her husband. She sat stiffly at the wheel, giving Pippa no more than a nod and what seemed like a shrug of exasperation when she came out of the police station with Trevor's arm round her. Susan Rains, her name was, and a quarter of an hour later it was she who was showing Loring and Sergeant Martin just where the pram had stood on the lawn between the block of flats and the main road from Kingsmarkham to Stowerton. While this thin red-haired girl castigated her sister's negligence and put forward her own theories as to where Karen might be, Dr. Moss arrived with sedation for Pippa, though she had become calmer once she understood no one would expect her to have charge of the changeling boy.

   His fate was removal to a Kingsmarkham Borough nursery for infants in the care of the local authority.

   "Poor lamb," said the children's officer Wexford spoke to. "I expect Kay will be able to take him in Bystall Lane. There's no one to fetch him, though, they've got ten to bath and get to bed down there.".

   Young Ginger, Wexford had begun to call him. He was a fine-looking baby with large eyes, strong pudgy features, and hair of a curious pale red, the colour of a new raw carrot. To Wexford's not inexperienced eye, he looked older than the missing Karen, nearer four months than two. His eyes were able to focus firmly, and now they focussed on the chief inspector, a scrutiny which moved the baby to yell miserably. Young Ginger buried his face in Polly's boyish bosom, crying and searching for sustenance.

   "You don't know what they're thinking, do you, sir?" Polly said. "Just because we can't remember anything about when we were his age we sort of think babies don't feel much or notice things. But suppose what they feel is so awful they sort of block it off just so as they won't be able to remember? Suppose it's dreadful pain being separated from your mother and not being able to say and——Oh, I don't know, but does anyone think of these things, sir?"

   "Well, psychiatrists do," said Wexford, "and philosophers, I expect, but not many ordinary people like us. You'll have to remember it when you have babies of your own. Now take him down to Bystall Lane, will you?"

   A few minutes after she had gone Inspector Burden came in. He had heard the story downstairs but had not entirely believed it. It was the part about putting another baby in Karen's place that he couldn't believe, he told Wexford. He hadn't either, said Wexford, but it was true.

   "You can't think of a reason why anyone would do such a thing," said Burden. "You can't think of a single reason why even a mentally disturbed person would do such a thing."

   "I suppose," said Wexford, "that by 'you' you mean yourself or 'one' because
I
can think of several reasons for doing it. First of all, you've got to take some degree of mental disturbance for granted here. Well-adjusted normal people don't steal other people's babies, let alone exchange them. It's going to be a woman. It's a woman who's done it because she wants to be rid of that particular child, yet she must have a child. Agreed?"

   "Right," said Burden. "Why?"

   "She has to show it to someone else," Wexford said slowly, as if thinking aloud, "someone who expects to see a baby nearer in age and appearance to Karen Bond than to young Ginger, or who expects a baby of Karen's sex. She may be a woman who has several sons and whose husband was away when the last one was born. She has told him he has a daughter, and to bear this out because she's afraid of him, she has to have a girl to produce for him. On the other hand, she may not be married. She may have told a boy friend or ex-boy friend the child is younger than it is in order to convince him of his paternity."

   "I'm glad you mentioned mental disturbance," said Burden sarcastically.

   "She may simply be exhausted by looking after a child who screams incessantly,— young Ginger's got a good pair of lungs——so she exchanges him for a baby she believes won't scream. Or she may have been told that Ginger has some illness or even hereditary defect which frightened her so she wanted to be rid of him, but she still has to have a baby for her husband or mother or whoever to see."

   Burden seemed to be considering this inventiveness with reluctant admiration but not much conviction. He said, "So what are we going to do about it?"

   "I've taken everyone in the place off what they were doing and put them on to this. We're getting on to all the hospitals and GPs, the Registrar of births, and the post-natal and baby clinics. I think it has to be someone local, maybe even someone who knew the pram would be there because she'd seen it there before."

   "And seen the baby who was in it before?" asked Burden, quirking up an eyebrow.

   "Not necessarily. A pram with a cat net over and whose occupant can't be seen implies a very young baby." Wexford hesitated. "This is a hell of a lot more worrying," he' said, "than a run-of-the-mill baby-snatching."

   "Because Karen Bond's so young?" Burden hazarded.

   "No, not that. Look, Mike, your typical baby-snatcher loves babies, she yearns for one of her own, and that's why she takes someone else's. But this one's
got
a baby of her own and one she dislikes enough to hand him over to a stranger. You can pretty well take it for granted the ordinary baby-snatcher will care for a child almost extravagantly well, but will this one? If she doesn't care for her own child, will she care for a substitute? I say it's worrying because we can be certain this woman's taken Karen for a purpose, a use, and what happens when that use is over?"

The block of flats in which the Bonds lived was not one of those concerning whose vulnerability to break-ins Wexford had been drafting his letter, but a privately owned five-storeyed building standing on what not long ago had been open green meadows. There were three such blocks, Greenhill, Fairlawn and Hillside Courts, interspersed with rows of weatherboarded town houses, and each block was separated from the main road to Stowerton only by a strip of lawn thirty feet deep. On this turf, a little way in from the narrow service road, Karen Bond's pram had stood.

   Wexford and Burden talked to the porter who had charge of the three blocks. He had been cleaning a car in the car park at the relevant time and had noticed nothing. Wexford, going up in the Greenhill lift, commented to Burden that it was unfortunate children were forbidden to play on the lawns. They would have served as protection of Karen or at least as witnesses. There were a good many children on this new estate which was mainly occupied by young couples. Between two and four-thirty that afternoon the little ones had been cooped up in small rooms or out for walks with their mothers, the older ones at school.