Surrogate – a psychological thriller (13 page)

I scanned to see if she was still in the car park, hiding behind one of the pillars. She would want to see her handiwork and gloat over what she had done. I could almost hear her laughing at us. "Alice," I shouted. "I know you're there. You can come out now." My voice echoed round the car park. Was this how she was going to start taking revenge? A series of pranks that was going to escalate? In my heart, I knew this was just the beginning. I did a complete circle of the car park. Nothing.

Mole got out of the car looking anxious. "Hugo, for God's sake, you sound mad," she said. I kept shouting Alice's name. I knew she was out there, she had to be. Mole came forward and tried putting her arms around me. "Stop mothering me," I said, shrugging her off. The bitch was watching us, laughing at us.

In the end there was nothing we could do but wait for the AA van to come out.

We wasted an hour while the mechanic changed the tyres and then drove home from Gatwick to report our baby missing. It was a nasty foggy day in September, and my headlights reflected the fog blankly. Without looking at each other we discussed whether to post a reward, and then realised how little we really knew about our surrogate. All we had was the form the clinic had supplied us with – everything else we had taken Alice's word for. It all could have been a pack of lies. Was Alice even her real name? How I wished we had listened to people's advice and not gone anywhere near her. She was out there. Somewhere. A young woman carrying our baby in a city of eight million people. And what if she went back up north? Then we really would never find her. I thought of our baby, perhaps a little girl by then, all grown up and wearing a school uniform, completely unaware that her real parents lived nearly two hundred miles away and had searched desperately for her. It was too sad.

If our baby lived, that was.

This other possibility was too dreadful to think about.

I thought back to my sleepless night. What was to stop Alice going to a family planning clinic and having the baby aborted? As far as the clinic was concerned, it was her baby. She would invent some cock-and-bull story about a one-night stand and within an hour our baby girl would be dead, bagged up in a yellow sack marked medical waste. I didn't want to think about that. I looked over at Mole. My God, she was lovely. She was salve to my soul. I thanked my lucky stars or whoever for bringing her into my life and thought about how I had managed to royally screw things up. Either way, the clock was ticking. We just had to find Alice.

A derelict was sitting staring down at the floor when I went up to the officer behind the scratched window to report our baby missing.

"Hello," I said. "I want to report a crime."

"What sort of crime, sir?"

"Kidnapping. Our baby. Our unborn baby," I said, feeling vaguely self-conscious. I turned to Mole for support. Go on, she nodded.

The policeman put down his pen and scrutinised me. "Are you saying your child's been stolen?"

"Not exactly, no. It's complicated. Look, is there anybody in charge I could see? I don't want to talk about this in public." The tramp lifted his head from his hands, interested in our conversation.

"I’ll need all the details. I have to register the crime first. Now, when did your baby go missing?"

"Last night at around half past ten. Look, our baby hasn't actually been born yet. We're using a surrogate mother. It's our surrogate who's gone missing. We don't know where she has gone to. I've tried calling her and texting her, but she hasn't replied. I'm worried. Both for her safety and our child's."

"So really you want to report a missing person?"

"I suppose so. But as far as I'm concerned, this is kidnap. She's carrying our child. It's our baby, not hers."

The officer's pen scratched over the report sheet. He shook his head as he finally caught up with what I was saying. You could tell he thought this whole thing was amusing. "What's the name of the missing woman?"

"Alice Adams. Age twenty-six. She was living with us during the pregnancy. Her home address is in Manchester somewhere. I can give you a photograph–"

He shook his head. "Sir, if you sit down, somebody will come and get you."

"Fine. I'm glad you find this funny." I raised my hands in the air and walked back to where Mole was sitting.

"There was no need to be so rude," Mole whispered. "He was only doing his job."

Then there was the agonising wait for something to happen as other people came in and were seen before us. I don't know how many times I read the notices above the bucket seats opposite. Occasionally I checked my BlackBerry and saw the incoming emails piling up, which only added to my stress level. I squeezed Mole's hand to reassure her that everything was going to be all right, and she squeezed mine back. I knew that I had been lucky up till now. My parents' splitting up when I was a teenager was really the only blemish on my childhood. Dad had paid my way into public school (I had failed the entrance exam, and he had promised the school a new sports hall or something), and had then waltzed into a job I was never even interviewed for. Currie's jibe about being born with a silver canteen in my gob was right. I was earning over a hundred thousand pounds a year, drove a Porsche and owned a luxury Docklands penthouse. So far I had been untouched by the car crashes and train wrecks that happened to everybody else, the nagging disappointment that somehow life had not turned the way you expected it. And yet now my life seemed to be caving in. One small error, a tiny mistake – losing my wallet – had led to a series of events that had unravelled everything. I began to wonder whether losing my wallet had even been an accident. I remembered how Alice had barged into me that afternoon. Wasn't that what pickpockets did? I was in the middle of wondering whether Alice could have pick-pocketed me when another policeman stuck his head round a side door. "Mr and Mrs Cox? Could you come this way, please?"

He led us down a canary-yellow station corridor, our steps ringing out along the floor. More notices. The constable showed us into an interview room. The walls were painted municipal grey. A steel strip, some kind of panic button, ran along one wall, and two CCTV cameras looked down at the table and four chairs. I found myself walking around the table, touching it, unable to comprehend why. Then it struck me. I had seen this room so often on television, but only in two dimensions. The police constable asked if we wanted something to drink. A cup of tea, Mole said. I nodded. Same for me, with two sugars. We sat down, but my chair wouldn't budge. To stop people throwing them around, I supposed. "They can follow where she went just by looking at CCTV images," I said, glancing up at the camera. I imagined jerky time-lapse footage of Alice banging through a Tube barrier and following her journey to God knows where. I mean, you saw this stuff all the time on TV.

The constable reappeared holding two steaming plastic cups with lids. Sorry I can't give you mugs, he said. Health and safety. The sugar in the tea tasted silky and delicious.

Detective Inspector Deepa Syal was not what I expected. For a start, she was a frumpy, middle-aged Indian woman, not the haunted-looking detective you expect from TV shows. She was wearing a cheap-looking trouser suit. We shook hands, and she sat down clutching the crime report the desk constable had filled out. Our detective got right down to business.

"So, let me get this straight, the woman who's stolen your baby, you paid her to carry your child?" she said.

"That's right," Mole said. "I can't get pregnant, so we decided to use a surrogate. Her references were really good–"

I interrupted, "She even had a criminal-record check. The clinic told me it had come back fine."

"–and so I asked her to move in with us. I wanted to keep an eye on our baby."

DI Syal frowned. "Is that normal? To have a surrogate live with you?"

"It depends," Mole said. "It's entirely up to you. She needed somewhere to live and I thought, why not? She moved in, and I thought everything was fine, and then Hugo, well, you explain what happened next ..."

I cleared my throat. This was going to need careful handling. "I, uh, noticed she began to have certain feelings for me. I made clear this was just a financial arrangement."

"What do you mean, 'certain feelings'? Can you be more specific?" DI Syal spoke as if she was attacking me. She came across as very aggressive. Perhaps she didn't like men, or she'd had to act doubly tough to get on in a man's world.

"I found a Facebook page she'd made, all about the two of us being together. She seemed to think that we were in a relationship. She'd stolen photographs from our wedding album and superimposed her head on my wife's. It freaked me out."

"I'm sorry, but I have to ask this. You gave her no cause to think you were interested?"

I shifted in my seat. "Of course not. As far as I was concerned, this was purely a money transaction."

"How much were you paying her?"

"Well, the clinic charges sixty thousand pounds. Half up front. I don't know how much of that went to Alice."

"I want to stop and slow down. How did you meet? Was she a friend of yours?" Syal asked Mole, who shook her head.

"My gynaecologist recommended this clinic. We did everything by the book. The clinic has hundreds of surrogate mothers on its files–"

"–We just happened to choose the wrong one," I said, finishing her sentence. The possibility of suing the clinic hadn’t entered my mind before. I made a mental note to have a chat with Nigel Rosenthal about our legal position.

DI Syal looked up at me. "Do you both work?" she asked. "What do you do?" I got the feeling she didn't like me very much, so I gave her my best insurance salesman smile.

"I'm a company director. In the City. I run an insurance firm, and my wife works in an art gallery in the West End."

"When did Alice Adams move in with you?"

"About three months ago," said Mole. "Once she'd had the procedure."

"And everything was fine until recently? When did things change?"

The night I got back from the surrogacy clinic, I thought, and there hasn't been a single day when I haven't regretted what I did. "It was just small things at first. I started noticing that she was behaving, what's the phrase, 'inappropriately' around me. Especially when Emily wasn't around."

"And you told your wife this?"

"No, not at first, no. I didn't want to alarm her." I glanced at Mole. "My wife knows I had misgivings about Alice moving in with us. It made me uncomfortable." That's for sure. Go on, keep digging Hugo, keep lying away. One day this is all going to come back to haunt you, you know that, don't you?

"What caused the fight you had last night?"

"When I got home, it was if nothing had happened. Alice was cooking a romantic supper for the two of us. Candles, the whole thing. To be honest, it really alarmed me. It was like she was in a dream, not listening to a word I was saying."

"Do you think she was on drugs?"

"I don't think so, no."

The detective turned to Mole. "Had she ever acted oddly around you before?"

Mole said no, she'd never noticed anything. I did not like the way this conversation was going. The detective clearly thought I had something to do with Alice's disappearance, and I felt righteous indignation growing. "I followed her into her bedroom, where she began to pack, and that's when she hit me with a brass candlestick," I continued. Syal's eyes widened.

"Darling," Mole said, "show her how bruised you are." Once again I unbuttoned my shirt and showed the detective inspector my chest, which, if anything, had gotten even blacker. Every time I breathed, I felt as if I was being knifed. "You could charge her with assault and kidnap, couldn't you?"

The detective peered at my chest and made a note. "We'll need a photograph of that. Have you seen a doctor? No? Well, you should. Go on, after she attacked you, did you retaliate?"

"Absolutely not. I think I was in shock. She really went for me. Then Alice just packed her bag and stormed out. That was the last contact we had with her."

Syal turned to Mole. "Where were you when all this was going on?"

"Away on business in Italy. One of our artists is having a show in Florence."

"This girl, do you think there's a danger that she might hurt herself?"

"Well, she’d been moody right from the start," I said. "She would go into these sulks-"

"What I mean is, do you think she might harm your baby?"

There. Now it was out in the open. Mole and I looked at each other. This was exactly our unspoken fear, and we reached across and held hands. I cleared my throat again. "Yes, I think there is. I'm afraid that she's going to do something stupid unless we find her."

DI Syal tapped her ballpoint against her teeth. Voices were raised outside and doors slammed. Finally DI Syal shrugged. "I'm sorry Mr and Mrs Cox," she said, "but I really don't think I can help you."

Mole gasped and leaned forward, gripping my hand. "What do you mean? She's stolen our baby."

"No. All she has done is moved out with her baby. The law is quite clear on this. Alice Adams is pregnant with her own child. No crime has been committed here."

We both sat there, stunned. This was a turn of events I had never expected.

"What do you mean, no crime has been committed? This woman has stolen our baby–" I said.

DI Syal looked at me sympathetically. "I am sorry for your loss, really I am. But there's nothing we can do. No law has been broken. You entered a voluntary arrangement."

Mole squeezed my hand to try and calm me down. Losing my temper was not going to help.

Syal continued. "Can I give you some advice?" When she spoke, I noticed the diamond-looking stud she was wearing in her nose for the first time. Recovering, we both nodded. "Hire a private detective. There are plenty out there. Perhaps they'll be able to find your missing woman."

She slid her business card across the table and I glanced at it. Detective Inspector Deepa Syal, Woolwich CID, listing her email, telephone and mobile numbers. With that, our interview was over. I felt the anger heating up again, and I don't quite remember how we made it back to the car. I think we were both still in shock.

What I do remember was how cold the car was as we sat there digesting what had just happened. I turned on the ignition, waiting for the interior to warm up. All around us, people were going about their daily lives, yet for us the world had turned upside down. Outside the supermarket entrance a father was struggling with his daughter, trying to buckle her straining, protesting body into a buggy. How I longed to be that man, to know the feel of my own child's hot, stout body.

Finally, Mole said, "The clinic. They must have her home address. Her parents. They must have some other way of finding her."

What I couldn’t tell my wife was that I was thankful Alice had disappeared. With one bound, he was free; all my problems were solved. We could try again, use somebody else. But Mole would never countenance that. She wanted our baby back. Our baby, the one we had spent so many hours making up a rich fantasy life for. But was it really ours, or was Alice telling the truth? I felt sick to the pit of my stomach. Everything seemed unstable, as if I was flailing about with nothing to hold on to.

"I'll try the clinic now," I said, digging my BlackBerry out of my pocket. We listened to the burr of the dialling tone and then the inevitable answering machine. There was nothing for it. We would have to try again first thing Monday.

We spent a miserable weekend waiting for Monday to come round. Our missing child was the only thing we could talk about, and even when we weren't talking about our baby, the subject was there, hanging over us. Why had Alice disappeared so suddenly, Mole kept asking, what exactly had I said to her? I gave noncommittal answers hoping she would drop it. Her questioning was like a tongue, probing until it found the sore spot.

Sunday morning I tried to cheer Mole up by taking her to our old stomping ground of Columbia Road market. There was a dress agency that she liked, and also an Aladdin's-cave perfume shop. Leaving her going through dresses on a rail, I jostled through the market to buy some flowers. I so wanted her to feel better. Walking back to the car, we passed her old front door. You can never go home again, was what they said, and home wasn’t a place, it was a time. Flashback. A painting by Masaccio we had seen during our honeymoon: Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden. That was how I felt. I had done something bad, and now I was paying the consequences. Instant karma. I remembered Eve's agonised face, and the way Adam covered his face with his hands, acknowledging that he had done something shameful. They had eaten from the tree of knowledge and could never turn back. I understood his remorse.

I got through to the Arlington Clinic at 9:03 on Monday morning. I could picture Trevor Wallace-Jones's round pink face blinking anxiously behind his glasses while he listened to what I had to say.

"Mr Wallace-Jones? Hugo Cox. We came to see you back in November. You put us in touch with our surrogate, Alice Adams."

"Ah yes, Mr Cox. How nice to hear from you. Everything all right?"

"No, it's very much not all right. Alice, our surrogate, she's disappeared. She's taken our baby. Has she been in touch?"

"What do you mean, your surrogate? I thought you cancelled. When Alice told me she didn't want to go ahead, and then I got your email–"

"What email? I never sent any email."

"The one you sent after your visit telling us that you'd had second thoughts."

Mole was listening intently to our conversation and I was desperate to shield this from her. "And you never thought to check?"

"Mr Cox, we have dozens of couples eager to undergo surrogacy. If one couple pulls out, I don't have time to phone up and try and persuade you ..."

But I never sent any email, I felt like screaming. Instead, I said, "Look, Mr Wallace-Jones – Trevor – we need to find her. Do you have any other contact, through her family, perhaps? You must have a home address."

"I just want to be clear about this. Are you saying that you went ahead and conceived a child with Alice Adams anyway?"

"Yes, that's it." I stole a glance at Mole. "Please, Mr Wallace-Jones, you must know some way of getting in contact with her."

"This is highly irregular. You went behind our backs and entered into a private arrangement."

"No, that's not what happened. I thought we were still on your books." All the time, I was trying to make sense of what Wallace-Jones was telling me.
If Alice had never gone through with the transfer, she really was pregnant with my child.
How had she got pregnant so quickly?

"Please, Mr Wallace-Jones, we're desperate. We never knew Alice had dropped off your books. You must have some way of getting in contact with her."

"Well, she gave us an address, but I seem to remember that she was renting. There's her referee, of course."

Of course. The referee from her CRB check, the search into her background to see whether she had a criminal record. "Can you give me the name and address?" I asked, cradling the phone between my neck and shoulder. I reached for a pen.

"I can't do that. Data-protection rules."

"Now listen here," I said. "The woman you recommended to us has kidnapped our baby. Given her state of mind, there's no telling what she might do. I wonder what my lawyer would say about your vetting procedures. Or the press, for that matter." Mole was looking on anxiously, mouthing something. I was bluffing, of course. The last thing I wanted was publicity. My voice softened. "The police say they can't help us. No crime has been committed. You've got to help us. If not for our sake, then for Alice's. She's clearly unwell. We need to find her before she does something stupid."

Silence. Wallace-Jones appeared to be weighing up what to do. "Perhaps you had better come down," he sighed. "These things are done best face to face."

Next I phoned up Brian Sibley to tell him that I wasn't coming in today. "More personal business, I suppose?" he asked. Christ, how his voice annoyed me. Who cared what he thought? After all, I was the boss of the company, wasn't I? "We still need you to sign off the accounts, Hugo," he said. "The Americans have nearly finished going through the figures." Of course, the accounts. Given everything that had been going on, I hadn't given much thought to my other problem. All this pressure was crushing, bearing down on me. "I'm not going to be pushed into anything," I replied. Sibley started talking about the Inland Revenue sniffing around, but I cut him off. "It doesn't matter if they're a few days late," I snapped. What was I going to do? Blow the whistle and possibly send my father to jail? Of course not. Or I could just hold my nose and sign.

Mole agreed to stay at home while I went back down to the Arlington Clinic. There was no need for us both to go and, after all, Alice might call at any moment. In my heart, though, I knew this wasn't going to happen. She had gone for good.

It started to rain on the motorway down to Wiltshire, a nasty driving rain, and a wall of water cascaded down the windscreen. At times it was difficult to see. I listened to the thock of the windscreen wipers and nearly missed the slip road.

The ugly red-brick Victorian house hove into view through the trees. I parked as close as I could and sprinted across the gravel in the wet. Even so, I was soaked by the time I got in. I asked reception if they had a towel I could borrow and was towelling my hair when the message came through that Wallace-Jones was ready to see me.

So here we were, back in his office with the saccharine baby photos on the walls. Wallace-Jones got up from his desk, blinking behind his glasses. This was all his fault. No, that's not true, you picked out Alice Adams yourself, and nobody forced you to sleep with her. Caveat emptor. Buyer beware.

Wallace-Jones came round, offering me his soft handshake. "Mr Cox, there's something I don't understand. What made you change your mind? And why didn't you contact us if you wanted to go down the surrogacy route after all?"

"I told you. I didn't change my mind. What you'd told me was the first I heard of it."

"I really must apologise. Nothing like this has ever happened."

Apology bloody Britain. Sometimes it seemed as if the whole country spent its time apologising: we apologise for the inconvenience, for the lack of service, for your child going missing.

Wallace-Jones continued. "Most of our surrogates come to us through personal recommendations. Alice came to us out of the blue. I suppose that was unusual. She said she needed money. I told you that most of our surrogates are already mothers. That wasn't the case with Alice either. She seemed normal apart from that, just a healthy young woman who needed to earn some extra cash. There's still something I don't understand. If she cancelled, how did she get pregnant? Did you go to another clinic?"

I shook my head. "Mr Wallace Jones, may I speak frankly? Do you promise to keep what I say within these four walls?"

Wallace-Jones looked baffled but anxious to please. "Of course. Client confidentiality is something we take very seriously."

I drew a breath. "Alice and I– we slept together. Just once. The day that I came down to give my sperm sample. I'd lost my wallet and she came to return it. It's not something I'm proud of. In fact, I bitterly regret it. But it did happen."

"Go on. None of this will go any further." He looked like an Anglican vicar taking confession. "Can you tell me why Alice disappeared? The last time I spoke to your wife, she said everything was going fine."

"We had a row," I said, wondering how much to divulge. "Alice had made this Facebook page about me, us. She seemed to think that we were in a relationship. I tried telling her it was all in her head, but she wouldn't listen. Things got heated. I'm afraid I lost my temper."

Inwardly I felt myself sagging. So the missing baby really was mine alone. If anything, this only raised the stakes.

"I dug out the CRB check, which was absolutely clear. No problems there."

"CRB checks don't tell you about somebody's mental health. The police want us to hire a private detective. That's why I need the name of her referee. It's somewhere to start."

"Do you have a pen and paper?"

"No. I need to show the detective the original, or at least a photocopy."

"I can't do that. CRB checks are confidential."

"You give me that original or I'll instruct my lawyer to sue you and your company for negligence. I'm sure he'll have something to say about your vetting procedures."

It took a moment for Wallace-Jones to realise that I wasn't joking. His smile evaporated. "You mustn't tell anybody where you got this from. I could lose my job."

"Look, I don't want to make trouble. I've got a wife at home who's crawling the walls, desperate to get our baby back. What I told you, that must be our secret. I just want to find Alice and give her the help she needs. I'll cover the costs. But we need to find Alice before she does something stupid.”

Wallace-Jones looked grateful and went off to get a photocopy of the single sheet of paper.

The first thing I noticed when he handed it to me was that the referee lived in Falmouth, Cornwall. Mary Sneddon, Shangri-La, Truro Road. I wondered who Mary Sneddon was – probably a girlfriend of Alice's, or a work colleague who had moved down south. I looked at my watch. I reckoned Cornwall was another four hours from here. I could be there by five o'clock, see Mary Sneddon, turn around and drive home through the night. It would be gruelling, but I could not take another a third day off work.

Sitting in my car, I dialled the number on the photocopy Wallace-Jones had given me. A woman's voice answered. "Shangri-La, how can I help you?"

"May I speak to Mary Sneddon, please?"

"I'm afraid she can't come to the phone right now. May I say who's calling?"

"She doesn't know me. I'm a friend of a friend. Alice Adams. I was wondering if she could call me back. If I left you my number?"

Pause. "Mrs Sneddon doesn't make telephone calls."

Mrs Sneddon? "Well, perhaps I could email her then?"

I could hear a dog barking in the background, and somewhere an alarm was softly and mournfully ringing. "You could come and see her if you like. She likes visitors."

"Yes, that would be fine. I'd like to come and see her today."

"Do you live locally? When were you thinking of coming?"

"I could get to you for about five o'clock."

"Of course. Do you have the address?"

"Yes, I've got it in front of me."

"Good. We'll see you later then, Mr–"

"Cox. Hugo Cox."

I snapped the phone off and sat there watching the glistening evergreens. My body longed for a cigarette. I could almost taste its sweet, delicious tobacco. Instead, what I needed to do was tell Mole that we had found somebody who at least knew Alice. We had our first counter on the board. Once the message had gotten through that we were on to Alice, we would be reunited with our unborn child within hours. It was only a matter of time.

At least it had stopped raining.