Ramsay 06 - The Baby-Snatcher (3 page)

The hospital was on a hill and from the high bed where she sat, propped up with pillows, she had a view all over the town. Helen seemed dull and unadventurous all of a sudden, but it was his mother’s name and better than Sheena. Perhaps she could come up with something glamorous too.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Helen.’

She had planned coming out of hospital after twenty-four hours but Helen had a nasty bout of jaundice and she ended up having to stay in for a week. She quite enjoyed the rest. On the third day, unexpectedly, Mark came to visit. He was on his own and was carrying a huge bunch of flowers – flame-coloured chrysanths and those huge, round, tightly filled blooms which she’d only seen before at village produce shows.

‘Brian said you wouldn’t mind,’ he said.

‘Of course not.’

But she felt coarse, blowzy. Her breasts were spilling milk and her dressing gown was grubby. Helen was asleep in the plastic fish tank the hospital used as a cot.

‘So this is Helen.’ He set the flowers on the locker and peered in with a genuine interest, watched the balletic movement of the girl’s hands. She could tell he wanted to pick the baby up.

‘Helen Scarlet,’ she corrected.

‘Scarlet?’ He seemed faintly amused. ‘Brian didn’t tell me that.’

‘Brian doesn’t know yet.’

Then they giggled together, quietly, so as not to disturb the baby, like school kids at the back of the class. Before he went he kissed her forehead and told her it was the first time he had laughed since Sheena had died.

When baby Helen was born Emma and Brian took on a young woman to help with the boys. Emma had been thinking about it for some time. She had had her eye on just the right person but had been reluctant at first to discuss the idea with Brian. He made comments occasionally when he came home from work and his dinner wasn’t ready or there were toys all over the floor.

‘Good God, woman. You managed a department of fifty people. Can’t you handle two toddlers? I don’t know what you do all day.’

This was said in a good-natured way and was supposed to be a joke but she sensed real irritation behind it. If she asked for help in the house would he think she was quite incompetent?

When she broached the subject, however, on her arrival home from the hospital, he was all for it. Perhaps employing a nanny was like owning the BMW. It confirmed that he was successful at last.

‘It’ll give me more time to spend with Helen,’ she had explained.

‘Bugger that!’ he had said. ‘It’ll give you more time to spend with me.’

Claire was nineteen and had completed an NNEB course at the local college. She lived on the Headland which made her ideal. References from the college were good but she had spent the whole summer without a nannying job. Emma, who had appointed many staff in her career, thought Claire would come over very badly in interviews. Even now, in February, when she had been with them for nearly five months she volunteered little information about herself. Her silences were intense and deadening. She was tall and stately and always dressed smartly in dark skirts and white blouses. She looked like a waitress in a pretentious hotel. Emma thought it unlikely that this dress code had come from the college and imagined Claire’s nannying friends in jeans and sweaters. Though perhaps she was not a person to have many friends.

Emma liked Claire because she was reliable and seemed to dote on the boys. She never lost her temper or raised her voice. She generated an air of implacable calm and was as obsessed as Emma about safety. Emma confided to the other mothers in the baby clinic that she thought she had discovered a treasure. The girl was mature beyond her years. Brian called Claire ‘the dumpling’ which was unkind but reassuring. Brian was at a dangerous age and Emma had heard enough stories about middle-aged men making fools of themselves with luscious au pairs to be cautious.

At the end of February David would be three. Emma wanted a big party, not only to celebrate David’s birthday but the safe arrival of Helen. They had no plans to have Helen christened though Brian would have quite liked it. Mark’s influence again. Emma had insisted that the party would have to do instead.

She discussed the party with Claire one morning over coffee. At least, Emma drank coffee. Claire still had a child’s taste and always chose fizzy pop or milk. It was a grey, cold day and even in the kitchen with its big window facing east the light was on. Helen and David were having a nap and Owen was at playgroup. The house seemed unnaturally peaceful.

‘I want something really special,’ Emma said. She stretched her hands above her head, tightening her stomach muscles, and thought she had got her figure back well this time. She wasn’t in bad shape for a woman who was nearly forty, more firm anyway than the young woman who sat opposite her.

Claire looked at her over a tumbler of milk and said nothing.

‘There’ll be adults, of course, besides the kids.’ Emma stretched again, looked with satisfaction through the open door to the enormous living room which had been created when the Coastguard buildings had been knocked together, thought Brian had been right after all about this place. ‘It’s just as well we’ve got plenty of space.

I was thinking of laying something on to amuse the little ones. A children’s entertainer. You know the sort of thing.’

‘My brother-in-law’s a magician,’ Claire said and Emma nearly fell off her chair, in surprise, because Claire had never volunteered any information about her family before and it was such an odd thing to come out with. It was like saying ‘ My Granny’s a witch.’

‘Oh.’ For once she was the one who couldn’t find the words.

‘He does kiddies’ parties,’ Claire said. ‘He’s very good.’ There was a pause. ‘I live with him and my sister.’

‘Oh.’ Emma was confused. ‘Oh, I thought they were your parents. And doesn’t he work for the DSS in Newcastle?’

‘He’s only a part-time magician,’ Claire said, scornfully.

‘Of course. Yes. I see that he would be.’

Emma’s knowledge of the other residents of the Headland was sketchy. She had little reason to meet them. Her friends lived in the smarter parts of Otterbridge or in the rural, villages away from the old coal fields. Any information she had came from Kim, a single mother with a daughter the same age as Owen. The nearest playgroup was in the church hall in Heppleburn Village centre and Emma often gave Kim and her little girl a lift home. It was from Kim that she had heard about Claire, who had trained to be a nanny but who was having problems finding a job.

‘Not worth going to college, is it?’ Kim had said cheerfully. ‘All that work then nothing at the end of it.’

Then, when they were coming home one evening after a playgroup trip to Edinburgh Zoo, Kim had pointed out the middle-aged man standing with his bike outside the house where Claire lived. He was bending to pull the bicycle clips from his trousers.

‘They say that cycling makes you fit,’ Kim had said with a giggle. ‘He cycles all the way into the Ministry in Longbenton every day and look at the state of him!’ And it seemed to Emma that the man did look remarkably unhealthy with his flabby stomach, his thin hair and pale greasy skin. She had assumed automatically that he was Claire’s father.

Now, sitting in the Coastguard House kitchen, she did not know what to say.

‘My parents died,’ Claire said. ‘ Bernard and Kath took me in.’

‘Oh I am sorry.’ To Emma it seemed the worst sort of tragedy.

‘Kath’s seventeen years older than me. I suppose I was some sort of mistake. Mum died when I was a kid, and Dad was never very well. Not really fit for as long as I can remember. We lost him four years ago.’ Without changing the tone of her voice she added, ‘Shall I ask Bernard, then? About doing the show?’

Emma hesitated. She felt she was being rushed. She would have liked to consult the mothers at the very nice mother and toddler group in Otterbridge where she went with David and Helen before coming to a decision but she didn’t want to offend Claire. Claire was a treasure. And how could she refuse after hearing what she’d suffered?

‘Why don’t you ask him to come and see me?’ she suggested. ‘We could discuss the sort of thing he does.’

‘OK’ Claire said, and lapsed into her customary silence, as if the exchange had quite exhausted her.

The next evening Bernard Howe turned up at the house. It was dark and rainy and if Emma had been on her own she might have been quite scared by the figure that stood in the security light. He wore a black PVC cape and his hair was dripping. But Emma was not on her own. Mark had called in after school. He had helped Claire to bath the boys and put them to bed, had jiggled Helen on his shoulder when she refused to settle. He had started coming to the Coastguard House after school quite often though he knew that Brian often worked late. Mark said he didn’t enjoy being in the Otterbridge house on his own any more. It held too many ghosts. Besides, he loved playing with the children.

When the knock came at the door Emma was feeding Helen in front of the fire in the living room. The fireplace had been one of Brian’s grand ideas. It was big enough to hold whole logs and spit-roast a pig. Mark was there too. Emma was being very discreet, holding Helen under one of the baggy sweaters she’d bought while she was pregnant and still wore, but all the same she felt quite brave. She had never been one of those women who could expose themselves in public.

So it was Mark who went to the door while Emma pulled the sleepy baby away from her breast and buttoned herself up.

‘There’s a magician to see you,’ he said in a deadpan voice, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He was standing in the living-room doorway leaning against the frame, more relaxed than he had been for months. She liked to think she was responsible for that.

The front door must have been open too because she could feel the damp wind against her face.

‘Oh.’ She felt suddenly flustered and again thought she was being rushed into something which had not been properly planned. ‘You’d better show him in.’

And when she looked up again from straightening her clothes there Bernard Howe stood, dripping on the parquet floor. He must have come directly from work because his trousers were bunched around bicycle clips. He was large and clumsy and the baggy trousers made her think more of a clown than a magician. He smiled nervously.

‘Claire said …’ He took off the black cape and looked for somewhere to hang it. Mark took it from him. ‘But perhaps I’d best come back another time.’

‘No, no.’ Emma had regained her composure. ‘Please. Do come in.’

He took a chair opposite her, still close to the fire. His socks were thick, hand-knitted and they began to steam. There was a hole in one toe.

‘I thought you’d want to see …’ He seemed incapable of finishing a sentence.

She sat back with the sleeping child on her knee, waiting for him to continue. Instead he launched into his magic act and all of a sudden silk scarves were being pulled from his sleeves and sweets from his ears and balloons from his nostrils. Although she sat near to him she could not see how it was done, and despite her irritation at his just turning up on the doorstep, she was swept away by the magic. She gasped at each new trick. He beamed. When he finished she turned and saw Mark clapping behind her. It was an amused, self-conscious clap which made her enthusiasm seem foolish, as if he were an adult and she were a little girl.

‘That’s the sort of thing …’ Bernard Howe muttered. His clumsiness had returned when the act was over. ‘And I end with a cake. All the ingredients put into a bowl. Sugar, flour, eggs. And then there’s a finished cake with icing and the candles all lit. The kiddies love that.’

‘Oh yes,’ Emma said. ‘I can see that they would. You must come if you’re available. Would you like a deposit? What do you charge?’

‘I don’t know about charging. You’ve been so good to Claire.’

‘Of course you must charge. And Claire’s been very good to us.’

So it was arranged that Bernard Howe, otherwise known as Uncle Bernie, would perform at David Coulthard’s birthday party. As he prepared to go out again into the rain he turned back to them.

‘Thank you, Mrs Coulthard. Mr Coulthard.’

‘Oh no,’ Emma said awkwardly. ‘ Oh no. This isn’t my husband.’

The magician gave a strange stare before walking out into the night.

They woke on the morning of the birthday party to an unexpected snow fall. The boys wanted to be out in it immediately. Usually Emma would have shared their excitement but today she was edgy and irritable. She’d had a bad night. The boys came chasing in from the cold and she moaned at them for the footprints on the kitchen floor, the sodden pile of outdoor clothes. Then, when Brian said he might go to work for a couple of hours, she turned on him.

‘But it’s a Saturday,’ she said.

‘It’s a good time to catch up. When no one’s there.’

‘I could really do with your help here, you know.’

‘Na. I’d just get in the way.’

She thought he was like a big spoilt kid standing there, grinning. His nose was still slightly twisted from a crunch during a school rugby match. He’d been a single child and he’d been able to get away with murder in his parents’ house.

‘Oh, go on then!’ she said and he smiled more widely, thinking she’d fallen for his charm again, not realizing that at that moment she couldn’t bear the sight of him.

She stood in the kitchen with her hands flat on the bench, breathing deeply, until she heard the BMW start and the garage door close automatically behind it. She was still standing there when Claire stamped past the window, flat footed in elephantine wellingtons.

During her wakeful night, while the baby snuffled in her cot, Emma had been thinking about Claire. She had reason to wonder how loyal to the family she really was. Now, seeing her march through the yard those suspicions seemed ridiculous and Emma thought if she needed someone to talk to, Claire might be the person she would choose. She was so solid and practical, more sensible surely than her friends from the Childbirth Trust, or old colleagues from work.