“It was all I ever wanted to be, a nurse. Used to run doll hospitals for my friends’ toys. I trained not far from here, in Basingstoke. Where I had my babies . . .”
She faltered, then squared her shoulders. “Well, two of my babies. Louise was nearly born in Germany, where we were stationed in the seventies. Nick was in the army—but you knew that. But we came home for her birth.”
Kate nodded, urging her on.
“Where were you in Germany, Angela? Was that after Alice disappeared?”
The name hung in the air between them.
“Yes. We went after the police stopped asking their questions,” Angela said. “Nick said we needed a new start and there was a posting offered by his regiment. Compassionate grounds.”
Kate took a sip of her coffee to allow Angela a moment to collect herself.
“That must have been incredibly difficult, leaving your home and families at a time like that,” Kate said gently.
“It was,” the older woman said. The anguish of those weeks had clearly never dimmed. Kate could see the pain on her face. She was ready to talk.
“Tell me about that day, Angela. Tell me about the day that Alice was taken.”
TWENTY-THREE
Angela
MONDAY, APRIL 2, 2012
She’d been waiting for this moment. Dreading it but wanting to tell her story again. The pain of experiencing that moment of loss made Alice seem more real to her.
She told Kate Waters how quiet the evening had been, how Alice had been brought into her private room by a nurse to have a feed and then Nick had taken Patrick home, when their toddler son got tired and started whining.
“We’ll leave you girls to it,” Nick had said, kissing them both and hoisting Paddy onto his shoulders.
The kiss and her brother’s wails had made Alice stir, and Angela had picked her up and brought her back to bed. She’d tried to feed her, but the baby had refused to latch on to her breast, fussing and snuffling before going back to sleep.
Angela hadn’t worried too much—Alice was her second baby and there were none of the first-timer fears to deal with. She knew that the drugs she’d had for the delivery were probably still making her baby drowsy and that she’d feed later, when she was ready.
She re-swaddled her new daughter in the soft white hospital sheet to keep her warm and secure, put her back in the cot by her bed, and gathered her soap bag and towel. She’d padded down to the showers, walking slowly and deliberately.
“Nick said I looked like John Wayne when I’d got out of bed earlier,” she told Kate. She’d giggled, she remembered, because he looked happier than she’d seen him for ages. Maybe having Alice would help them rebuild their relationship, like Nick said. Perhaps they were turning a corner, she remembered thinking as she struggled down the corridor.
The reporter was looking at her.
“Sorry,” Angela said. “It just hurts so much to remember.”
Kate stroked her arm. “Take your time, Angela,” she said. “I know it must be very hard for you.”
“The thing is, I can’t remember if I looked at my baby again before I left her in the room,” Angela said, and her voice faltered.
Kate Waters looked up from her notebook and met her eyes.
“Did you see anyone in the corridor, Angela?” she said gently.
“I think there were a couple of visitors—people on their way out of the ward—but I didn’t take much notice. I wanted a quick shower before Alice woke for her feed.”
She’d stood under the hot water for what felt like two minutes, but the police said was more like ten minutes. Time did strange things in hospitals. Sometimes it stretched minutes into hours and sometimes it vanished altogether.
And when she trudged damply back to her room, the baby had gone.
By the time the nurses arrived, skittering down the linoleum of the corridor at the sound of her howl, the cot was cold.
Her kitchen was silent. All she could hear was the tick of the electric clock. Angela looked down at the table. She could feel the surge of panic as if for the first time, the hot prickling of her skin, the sudden nausea, the paralysis. She clenched her fists into her lap and went on, desperate to get to the end without collapsing.
“I was telling myself that a nurse must have taken her. I was trying to stay calm. I remember saying out loud, ‘She’s been taken back to the nursery.’ I thought I called out, ‘Nurse!’ But the staff told the police that they heard me scream and came running.”
“The baby,” she’d said to them. “Where is the baby?” and she’d known from their pale faces and the way they turned to each other, as if lost, that they didn’t know. No one knew. Except the person who’d taken her.
She told Kate about the frantic search of all the rooms and wards, which produced nothing but general terror. No one had seen anything. It was evening and the first-time mums had been curled against their stitches and cramps, gazing fearfully at their new sons and daughters while the old hands gossiped and clucked with each other on the subject of childbirth. Curtains between the beds in the wards had begun to be drawn to allow some sleep, and the visitors had almost all been ushered out.
“And while all that was going on, someone came into the room. Just walked in and took her.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Kate
MONDAY, APRIL 2, 2012
Kate wrote quickly, jotting it all down in shorthand, while never taking her eyes off the woman across the table. She hardly needed to ask a question, just the occasional nudge when more details were needed. Angela’s narrative started to slow when the story reached their return home from the hospital.
“It must have been very hard to come back to an empty nursery,” Kate said.
Angela nodded, dumbly. “We stood in Alice’s room for a long time. But she wasn’t there. She’d never been there. There was just a cot and a mobile of zoo animals. I felt so empty inside.”
“What were the police doing to try to find her, Angela?” Kate said.
“All the usual things,” Angela said, her voice exhausted by the tale. “Searches, news conferences, chasing all over the country.”
“No real suspects?” Kate asked. “There must have been loads of people walking about the hospital.”
“There were, but no one saw anything,” Angela said. “It was like she’d disappeared into thin air.”
She waited a beat and added: “You know, of course, they came to the house after a couple of weeks and asked about my feelings towards Alice.”
“Your feelings? Why? What was that about?” Kate said, knowing full well what it was about. “How awful for you.”
Angela looked grateful for the comment and nodded. “I thought so, too. But I think one of the nurses must have said something about me. I was so drugged up after the birth I didn’t know what I was doing, really. Maybe I didn’t appear maternal enough. The police kept asking why I had left her alone.”
“What did you say?” Kate asked.
“I said she was asleep and I thought she was safe.”
“Of course,” Kate said. “God, if your baby isn’t safe in a maternity hospital, where would she be?”
Tears were running down Angela’s face and Joe fished a packet of tissues from his bag and offered them to her.
“What do you think happened to her, Angela?” Kate said.
The older woman wrapped the tissue round her knuckles and closed her eyes. “Someone took her. In the ten minutes I was out of the room, someone came in, lifted her out of her cot, and took her away.”
“Who do you think would have done such a thing?” Kate asked.
“I don’t know,” Angela breathed. “You hear about sad women and evil men taking children. But I don’t know who took her. I would give anything to know.”
The two women sat in silence for a moment, focusing on their drinks.
To Kate’s astonishment, Joe suddenly spoke.
“Why do you think the Building Site Baby is Alice, Mrs. Irving?”
Kate bit back her annoyance. She’d wanted to ask that question but she couldn’t say anything to Joe in front of the interviewee. She tried to give him a look, but he was staring at Angela intently, mirroring Kate’s approach. And Angela was looking at the youngster kindly.