“Not as far as I know, Bob. It’s not a recent burial, they say. Maybe historic, even, but tests are still going on. It was newborn and I’ve heard, unofficially, that the copper on the case thinks it was probably a desperate single mother back in the dim and distant past when illegitimacy mattered. I don’t think he’s that interested, really. They’re all up to their ears in the Olympics, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and terrorism threats.”
Sparkes nodded. “’Course they are.”
“I’ve written about the discovery of the body—it was in the paper last Saturday,” Kate added. “So small, you probably wouldn’t have seen it. Anyway, I’m not sure how much further I can take it as a story. If it’s a domestic, it’ll have limited news value as far as my lot are concerned. Might make a page lead, but I’m not sure it’s worth too much running around.”
She waited for a response. She felt she had wittered on long enough. Didn’t want to bore the man.
“What about you? What are you up to?” she said when the silence grew.
Bob put down his glass and smiled at her. “Sorry, Kate. Just thinking. I’m doing some policy revision for the force at the moment. Apparently, that’s also police work. Anyway, have the Met looked at missing persons? They must have.”
“I expect so, but it’s hard when they don’t know what era to start with. Why?”
“It’s not a long list, wherever they start looking. Abducting babies is an unusual crime anyway, but the number not found is tiny.”
Kate nodded. She was trying to think of any cases where a missing baby hadn’t been found and reunited with its parents within weeks, if not days. She remembered the disappearance of a baby who was reported stolen from a car. But all the other headline cases had ended happily.
“I can think of three cases,” Bob said. “Baby taken from backseat of a car in London.”
“Just thinking about that one,” Kate said. “Must be twenty years ago.”
“Yes, and then one taken from a pram outside the a co-op somewhere just after—possibly a copycat crime—and a newborn taken from a maternity hospital in Hampshire in the seventies, Alice she was called. Never seen again.”
“Don’t know either of those. Were you involved in the Hampshire case?” Kate said.
Sparkes laughed. “Hardly, Kate. I’m not that old. I was about thirteen at the time.”
“Sorry,” she said and laughed with him. “Hadn’t done the maths . . .”
“I remember the case because one of my aunties had a baby around then,” Sparkes said. “And she called my cousin Alice. So she and my mum talked of little else for a while. It was a big story—not twenty-four/seven like it would be now, but it made an impression and I’ve never forgotten her name.”
“Another of your lost children, Bob?” Kate said. She knew the list from their previous entanglement: Bella Elliott, of course; Laura Simpson, taken by her pedophile uncle; Baby W, shaken to death by his stepfather; Ricky Voules, drowned in a park. Bob Sparkes carried them all with him—those he’d rescued and those he felt he’d failed during his career. And little Alice was tucked away there, too, apparently.
“Have a look at your cuttings files on missing children, Kate, if you’re interested. I might have a quick look at the files our end,” he said, and she knew he would. Sparkes was the sort of detective who could never let anything go.
“May be nothing but . . .” His thought was interrupted by DS Butler putting his head round a pillar.
“Speeches, boss. Hurry up or you’ll miss them,” the young officer said, his face flushed and excited.
“Coming,” Sparkes said. “He doesn’t get out of Southampton much,” he muttered to Kate and they grinned at each other.
“Bring your wine—we ought to get back up there,” he said, but she knew he was all about the Building Site Baby. And now, so was she.
NINETEEN
Kate
MONDAY, APRIL 2, 2012
The remnants of the reference library staff dwelled in the bowels of the newspaper, troglodyte survivors of the Google revolution. They were reduced to a handful of oddbods and nerds, a low-budget version of the Star Wars bar, the Crime Man said—used to say, she reminded herself. Their heyday had come and gone with the advent of Internet searches, but they were still there, sorting and filing every story published and holding on to their expert knowledge of news items of the past century until the last paper cutting was digitalized.
Kate always enjoyed challenging them with bizarre requests: Have you got anything on widows who married their husband’s brother? There would be a pause while the librarian disappeared down the corridors of filing cabinets, and he or she would appear with a brown envelope of cuttings marked “Marriages: Women Who Married Brothers-in-Law.” Never failed to amaze.
The library smelled of paper and silverfish when Kate pushed open the swing door, and she breathed it in deeply. It was the scent of her past; the days of running down the stairs to the library when a story broke, racing through telephone directories at the counter in search of a name, leafing through cuttings, and spotting the vital link that would make a tip-off work.
Bill Bridges, a man who wore the sort of jumpers normally favored by Portuguese tractor drivers and seemed to have been on the brink of retirement for decades, looked up from his table.
“Hello, Kate, what can we do for you?”
“I’m looking at old missing children cases, from around 1970 to the mid-1990s,” she said.
“Well, you’ve come to the right place,” he laughed. “We do old. Do you have a name? Or shall I get ‘Missing Children, General’ for the periods?”
“I’ve only got one. Alice, I think, so I’d better take all the folders,” she said.
“Alice Irving,” Bill said, quietly, mentally flicking through his internal filing system. “The baby who disappeared from a hospital, right?” His knowledge and recall of news stories was legendary.
Kate nodded.
“Hmm. Army family. Based in Hampshire. Aldershot, was it? Or Basingstoke? Mother suspected, I seem to remember,” he added.
“The mother? Really?” Kate said, her pulse quickening. “Well, let’s have her folder, too, please.”
Upstairs, she and Joe unpacked the bulging envelopes. The cuttings were yellowing and starting to crumble, and Joe looked doubtful as he carefully unfolded the first one in the “Missing Children, General” folder.
“You’re looking for the mother of a baby who went missing between twenty and forty years ago?” he asked, his brow puckering. “Why?”
“Because I want to know what happened, Joe. It’s called human interest. Not all news is about soap stars or politicians. This has got the makings of a good story. I can feel it in my waters.”
Joe looked slightly squeamish.
“It’s a saying, dear. Nothing gyno about it.”
He looked mortified and she felt terrible. She was turning into one of the dinosaurs.
She could see he was disappointed. He had probably expected to be part of an investigations team blowing the lid off some international conspiracy when he joined the Post.
“Come on, it’ll be fun,” she heard herself say, as if to a recalcitrant child. Why does everything have to be fun to matter these days?
“We’re looking for babies who disappeared without a trace. A contact has suggested three possibles, but we’ve only got years and one name.”
She looked at Joe’s drooping mouth and sighed.
“You take Alice Irving, then. We are looking for clues to the whereabouts of her mother, Angela Irving.” Oh God, I sound like a policeman. “Anyway, we need to find her now and there may be leads in the stories at the time.”
“Leads?” he said.
“Clues, Joe. Things like relatives’ names, old addresses, places where she used to work. We can go back to them and ask where she moved to. She might have stayed in touch. Do you see?”
Joe nodded glumly. No keywords or search engines. He looked lost.
“Okay, how about if you search for her birth and marriage certificates online first,” Kate said. Joe looked a bit more interested.