“You had better ask Nick,” she said and closed her eyes.
She could hear her husband’s voice as if in another room, stumbling as he told how he had betrayed her.
“It was a mistake, Inspector,” he was saying. “A terrible mistake. A fling. It meant nothing.”
She realized he was using exactly the same words he’d used when she’d confronted him.
He’d stumbled then, too. He’d talked her round. Persuaded her they could repair the damage.
And she’d been too frightened of the alternative to say no. Their lives were so entwined; she couldn’t see a way to disentangle them. The loneliness of an existence without Nick yawned at her and she set about the task of burying her outrage and hurt. She never used the woman’s name, not even in her private thoughts. She was faceless—she’d never seen her and that helped—and nameless. A nobody who had tempted her idiot husband after a night’s drinking with the boys.
She would never have known if she hadn’t taken his jacket to the dry cleaners. Out of habit, she’d turned out the pockets and found part of an empty Durex packet.
“It was only once, Angie,” he’d wept. “I was drunk and stupid. Please forgive me. I love you and Patrick so much.”
“Let’s have another baby,” he’d whispered in bed a few weeks later. “You’d like that, Angie, wouldn’t you? It’ll bring us close again.”
And Alice was conceived. The sticking plaster for their marriage.
The trouble was she didn’t know if he’d done it before—or would carry on doing it. A leopard never changes its spots kept coming into her head when he got home late or popped out for an hour. But if he did it again, he was more careful.
Angela had opened her eyes as Nick came to the end of his confession. The inspector was sitting on the edge of his chair, weighing every word.
“Why didn’t you tell us about this earlier, Mr. Irving?”
“I couldn’t see it had anything to do with Alice,” Nick said.
“And the woman with whom you had the fling, as you call it?”
Angela closed her eyes again.
“Marian,” Nick said.
“Surname?”
“I never knew it,” he said. “I told you, it was a drunken mistake. She is nothing to do with us and our baby. Why are you asking this? Why are you digging all this up?”
“We need to know the full background, Mr. Irving,” the detective said. “We need to know everything.”
TWENTY-NINE
Kate
MONDAY, APRIL 2, 2012
Len Rigby was gardening when Kate and Joe arrived at his house, on his knees, grubbing up the weeds and furtively flinging slugs into his neighbor’s privet hedge. He looked up blinking into the sun when he heard his name called.
“DI Rigby,” Kate said, leaning over the low brick wall.
“Who wants to know?” he growled, trying to heave himself upright with the help of a windowsill.
“Let me help you,” she said, already opening the wrought-iron gate to walk up the path. “I’m Kate Waters, from the Post.”
“Are you indeed?” he said, adding, “I can manage, thank you,” as she got nearer.
Kate ignored him and offered her hand.
“I’m hoping you can help me with one of your old cases, DI Rigby. I promise I won’t take up too much of your time.”
He laughed as he allowed himself to be steadied by Kate, adding: “Time is what I’ve got plenty of. I’ll get Mrs. Rigby to make us a drink.”
He led Kate and Joe through to the conservatory at the back of the house and disappeared to announce their presence to his wife.
“Now then, what do you want to ask me about?” he said as he lowered himself down into a rattan chair.
“Alice Irving,” Kate said. No point beating about the bush. DI Rigby was a straight-up-and-down bloke, she could see.
“Ah,” he said, taking a cup from his wife and placing it carefully on the matching side table. “Thanks, love.
“Baby Alice. Basingstoke Hospital. Vanished without trace. Never found,” he said, reeling back to 1970. “Very strange case,” he added.
“Strange how?” Kate asked.
“Well, there were no witnesses apart from the mother. In a busy hospital like that. I remember we talked to over a hundred people who were in the building that night—mums, visitors, nurses, cleaners, doctors, auxiliaries, maintenance men—but no one saw anything. So we only had the mother’s account to rely on for timings of when the baby disappeared. I always wondered about her. Angela. She was a bit of a cold fish and her husband had been playing away.”
“Really? I never read about that in the cuttings,” Kate said, leaning forwards.
“We never made it public,” he said, slurping his tea. “We kept it quiet while we checked out the husband—Nick, isn’t it?—but we never got anywhere. He and Angela both stuck to their testimony like glue. And, of course, there was never a body. Is that why you’re here? Has something new turned up?”
“Possibly,” Kate said carefully. “A baby’s skeleton has been found on a building site in Woolwich and I’m looking to see if there could be any connections.”
“Right. Woolwich,” he said, rolling the word round his mouth. “No, can’t think of any connection off the top of my head. Well, it has a military connection—the husband was in the army, you know. But all this is a lifetime ago, and at my age, I’m losing my marbles rapidly.”
“I’m sure that isn’t true,” Kate said and grinned at him.
“Well, I think I might still have some of the paperwork in my study—don’t tell the wife, I promised to clear all my police stuff out,” he said, grinning back. “Shall I have a look? Have you got time?”
“Definitely,” Kate said.
The study was all about cars. Photos of expensive bodywork, chrome detail, and racetracks were everywhere. Joe pointed at one and said, “That’s Goodwood, isn’t it?”
Len Rigby went over to examine it. “Yes, that’s it. Go every year to the Festival of Speed. Have you been?”
“Yes, my mum gets invited and I blag a ticket,” Joe said. “Love it.”
“We don’t want to take up too much of the inspector’s time, do we?” Kate said pointedly to her sidekick.
“No, well. Let’s have a look at the stuff I kept on the Irvings,” the DI said and winked at Joe.
It was a slim file of handwritten notes and Kate lowered her expectations immediately.
“Right,” Rigby said. “What have we got?”
He leafed through quickly—too quickly for Kate’s liking—but stopped halfway through and pulled out two sheets.
“These were notes I wrote up after we found out about the husband’s affair,” he said. “Nick Irving said it was a fling and he didn’t know the woman’s full name when I questioned him in front of his wife. But he did. He rang me the next day and told me. He didn’t want Angela to know. We checked her out—the other woman—where’s her name? Marian Laidlaw. That’s her.”
Kate wrote it down, checking the spelling. “And what was she like?” she asked.
“My sergeant saw her. Says here she was a pleasant, decent woman of thirty-five. Older than Nick Irving but a nurse, like Angela. The fling had gone on a while, according to her. There’d been talk of Nick Irving leaving his wife but then it had ended. When Angela found out.”
“A nurse?” Kate said, her pulse quickening. “Bloody hell. Did she know Angela? Did she work at the Basingstoke Hospital?”
“No, sadly not,” the detective said. “We got all excited like you—thought we’d found ourselves a proper suspect—but Miss Laidlaw had a cast-iron alibi. She was on duty on a geriatric ward in Southampton—miles away and with dozens of witnesses. Another dead end.”
“Interesting, though,” Kate said.
“Len, dinner’s on the table,” his wife shouted through.
“Well, I think I’ve told you everything I know,” DI Rigby said.
“You’ve been brilliant,” Kate said and shook his hand firmly. “I don’t suppose I could borrow your notes for a couple of days? Promise I’ll return them . . .”
“Len!” The voice was more insistent now.