“The more info we have on her—middle name, date of birth, that sort of thing—the easier it will be to track her down now,” she said.
“Look for the marriage first—it’ll be easier. We’ve got the husband’s name—Nick, probably Nicholas, Irving—from the cuttings, and Angela’s first name. It says they had a two-year-old son when Alice was taken so they probably married at least a year before he was born. Look for everyone called Irving who married in 1967—it’s done alphabetically—and work backwards through the sixties and then forwards if you don’t find them there. The marriage register will have Angela’s maiden name and then you can search for her parents and siblings. Okay?”
She noticed he was looking at her in a worryingly wide-eyed way and wasn’t writing anything down.
“Make a note, Joe. Reporters make notes. Make that your first golden rule.”
Joe picked up his pen and scribbled down the names while Kate logged into the Births, Deaths, and Marriages website on his computer and left him to fill in the boxes and press enter.
“Actually, start with a search of deaths, in case she’s died,” she added. “We don’t want to waste time looking for a corpse.”
While Joe clicked, Kate speed-read the cuttings files from the nineties. She quickly found the abductions—one was a six-month-old girl, the other practically a toddler. Neither had been found but it didn’t seem likely they would ever fit the description of a newborn. She dutifully noted down names and dates, in case.
When she picked up Alice’s file, there were at least fifty stories—the last in 1999 when three babies’ bodies had been found in Staffordshire. She remembered the case—there was some talk of incest and the mother/murderer had been sent to a psychiatric hospital. It was an investigation that was over before it had got going and the Post’s man in the Midlands had covered the trial, but Kate had been sent to try to get a talk with the family. They’d told her to piss off. She’d been glad. They looked like the cast of Deliverance.
She went back to March 1970, when Alice had been taken, and stared at the photographs of Angela and Nick Irving leaving the hospital in Basingstoke, their arms empty. Kate studied the grainy black-and-white images of the young couple. The mother looked devastated, her arms wrapped round herself as if cradling her grief. Instead of her baby, Kate thought and carefully unfolded the next story.
Bill had been spot-on. The initial coverage of the disappearance of Alice was swiftly followed by articles hinting in a heavy-handed way at the mother’s possible involvement. These seemed to stem from a police search of the Irvings’ house, three weeks after Alice disappeared.
“Routine police work,” was the official comment, but the papers printed pictures of officers carrying items from the house. And Angela Irving being led to a police car. Those arms wrapped tightly around her stomach again.
Was it guilt she was holding in? Kate wondered and wrote down the name of the officer in the case. She’d see if he was still around.
Kate raced ahead, scanning headlines for the outcome of the questioning, but it wasn’t mentioned again. Mrs. Irving hadn’t been charged with anything as far as she could see, and the stories about Alice got smaller as 1970 came to an end. The last few cuttings were anniversary stories—“Whatever Happened to Baby Alice?,” etc.—or she featured as a name in roundups of missing children written as backgrounders to new abduction cases.
Kate noted that Angela wasn’t quoted in the later anniversary stories. The reports said she and her husband had moved abroad. She, too, had disappeared, then.
The online electoral register had more than a dozen current listings for Angela and Nicholas Irvings. They were scattered all over the country, but there were none in Basingstoke.
Kate was looking at her notes when Joe announced he’d established that Angela Alice Irving was not dead and found her marriage to Nick and the births of their two other children, Patrick and Louise. One married and both living in Hampshire.
Kate smiled. They were on the trail of where Angela was now. And she had an Angela Alice and Nicholas Irving listed in Winchester.
She rang Bob Sparkes immediately.
“Hi, think I’m going to be heading down your way on the Building Site Baby case. The baby Alice you mentioned is called Alice Irving and her mum, Angela, is living in Winchester.”
“Is she now?” Sparkes said.
He sounded pleased. Not a man to go overboard, but he added: “Good work, Kate. Will be interesting to hear what she says. What about the other cases? The girl in the car and the one in the pram?”
“Found them, but I think they are too old. Definitely not newborns.”
“Right, well. Is there anything more from the Met about their investigation?”
“No, nothing. There’s a big anti-terror operation going on at the moment. I’m keeping out of their hair. I’m also looking for the officer who led the original hunt for Alice—DI Len Rigby. You don’t happen to know if he’s still alive, do you?”
“I’ll have a look and call you back if I find him. He’ll be long retired by now.”
“Yes, bit of a long shot.”
“Well, let me know when you’re coming down,” he said.
She grinned to herself. “Sure. I’m going to give Mrs. Irving a call now.”
TWENTY
Angela
MONDAY, APRIL 2, 2012
She’d had a feeling that morning that something would happen. A buzz in her head. Nick was quiet, checking an order for the plumbing wholesaler while he ate his cornflakes, but she felt surrounded by noise. She hardly heard him say good-bye when he left.
She’d sat with the number for Kate Waters in front of her while she finished her coffee and promised herself she’d make the call at lunchtime.
But the phone rang just before midday.
“Hello, I’m sorry to bother you but I’m trying to contact Angela Irving,” a woman said. Nice voice, she thought. Polite. Warm.
“That’s me,” she said. “How can I help?”
“Oh, I’m so glad to have found you, Mrs. Irving. I’m Kate Waters from the Daily Post. I wondered if I could talk to you about a story I’ve been working on . . .”
Angela said: “I hoped you’d call.”
There was a sliver of silence as Kate Waters found herself second-guessed.
“Oh?” she said quickly. “Did you see the story I wrote last week, then, Mrs. Irving?”
“Yes,” Angela said. “Do you think the baby is Alice?”
“Do you?” the reporter said.
“I don’t know. I hope . . .” And Angela burst into tears.
Kate Waters waited for her to gather herself, murmuring down the phone that she hadn’t meant to upset her, that she understood how emotional this must be, even after all these years.
When Angela finally spoke again, she just said, “You’d better come round, then. Have you got my address?”
Kate Waters said she’d be there in a couple of hours and the two women said good-bye.
Angela sat in the same place until she heard the knock on the door. Her head was full of Alice. Of the day she went. Of the days that followed.
She hadn’t been able to go back to nursing afterwards. Couldn’t be in a hospital. The smell of the wards, the starched aprons, the laced-up shoes, took her straight back to her loss. Instead she fought the overwhelming grief at home, privately. They both did. Their son, Patrick, had gone to stay with his grandma and the house echoed with his absence.
She and Nick would be sitting, watching television, or reading a paper, or listening to the radio, and something would come on. A silly song she’d liked when she was pregnant, the mention of the name Alice, or the word “baby,” or “pregnancy,” or “hospital”—or anything, really, and she’d cry. Nick would hold her hand and talk her through it. Tell her it wasn’t her fault. She’d been in a hospital. She should have been safe.
But she hadn’t been.
TWENTY-ONE
Kate