“I’m glad you are here, too, Ms. Massingham,” DI Sinclair said to Jude. “I called your home, but there was no answer. I need to talk to both you and Emma.”
“Why?” Emma said. “Jude didn’t know about the baby.”
“Not your baby, Emma,” he said. “Alice.”
? ? ?
Jude knew immediately it was all over. The detective’s face was set. There’d be no dancing round the facts. Or new lies. The truth could no longer be many things.
So she told the story of how she’d lost Charlie’s baby at five months. How she’d fallen, tripped over the cord of her hair dryer in the bedroom as she rushed to get ready for work, and crashed face-first onto the floor. There was no one there to help as she grasped her stomach and tried to will away the burning pain, and the blood, lots of blood. She went and sat on the toilet as waves of agony took over her body. She’d flushed away all that came out of her, unable to look into the bowl and acknowledge that her pregnancy was over. She’d rung work from the pay phone in the hallway of her rented flat and said she was ill.
“I was going to tell Charlie that night, when he rang,” she said. “But his first words were so loving, calling me his angel and asking about the baby. And I said: ‘We’re fine’ and the lie was told. There was no going back.”
Emma wouldn’t look at her but the detective held her gaze steadily.
“Go on, Ms. Massingham.”
“I decided to pretend to lose the baby later. After he’d promised to marry me. He should have married me, then none of this would have happened,” Jude said, but the detective’s expression didn’t alter.
“I made layers of padding out of an old foam-rubber cushion, adding layers and wearing bigger maternity clothes. I told Charlie on the phone about how my legs were aching. I think I believed I was still pregnant.”
“And your boyfriend? Didn’t he suspect anything?” DI Sinclair asked.
“He was a musician and away in Europe, on tour with his band. And the dates kept being extended so he didn’t see me for months.”
“What did you tell your friends and family, Ms. Massingham?” Andy Sinclair asked.
“My parents stopped talking to me when I told them I was having a baby. An illegitimate baby was too much for them to bear. What would they tell their friends at the golf club? But I kept on working—I needed the money—and when I got to seven months, I took maternity leave. I told them I had to leave early because my blood pressure was up and I’d been told to put my feet up for the baby’s sake. The girls at work were disappointed. They’d wanted to have a party for me . . .” Jude looked across at her daughter. What are you thinking, Emma?
She told the detective she’d rung the medical center to tell them she would be away, abroad with Charlie for a while. So no more antenatal appointments were necessary.
And she’d waited at home and tried to work out what she was going to do. She could still summon up the dulling panic that had invaded every moment as D-day approached. Charlie was coming home in two weeks, expecting to find her heavily pregnant, about to deliver their child. He’d know as soon as he held her, wouldn’t he? Wild ideas presented themselves in the middle of the night. She’d say it was a tumor and hadn’t wanted to tell him. He’d be too shocked to question it. Wouldn’t he? She’d say the baby had died. Too many questions and then he’d leave her.
“I couldn’t bear the thought of him leaving me. I had to give him a child.
“I went to Waterloo Station and caught the first train south that came up on the board. I was out of my mind, I didn’t know where I was going—I just needed to find a maternity hospital.”
She remembered that someone had stood up to give her a seat and she had smiled her thanks, lowering herself down like a pro.
“I got off at Basingstoke,” she said.
“Had you ever been there before?” DI Sinclair asked.
“No, I had to ask the way to the maternity hospital.” Jude took a deep breath and, in her head, walked back through the hospital doors.
She took the lift, avoiding eye contact with the other people crammed in with her. They had bunches of flowers, presents in baby and stork wrapping paper, held toddlers by the hand. They were excited, laughing. No one seemed to notice her.
But she realized she’d picked the wrong time. She needed to come at the end of visiting time, not the beginning. There were too many witnesses now. She left the hospital and sat in a nearby park for an hour, growing cold as the weak spring sun began to disappear.
Back in the lift, this time she was alone. The doors opened on the postnatal floor and there were the same people, flowers and congratulations delivered, on their way home now. She’d bought some flowers from a seller on the street outside and clasped them to her stomach.
When the lift doors closed behind her, she was alone for a moment. Then she saw a woman come out of her room halfway down the corridor. She had her wash things and a towel in her hand. She walked away from Jude without seeing her, to the bathroom at the end.
Jude paused, pretending to look in her shopping bag. The woman might have forgotten something. She might come back. But she didn’t. She went into the bathroom and closed the door. Jude couldn’t move for a moment, transfixed by terror at what she was about to do, but then she heard a baby cry in the woman’s room.
I can do this, she said in her head and moved, as if in a dream, through the door. The baby was snuffling in its cot. She walked straight over, picked it up, all wrapped ready, and put it in her shopping bag. And walked away. She took the stairs this time. Nobody used the stairs.
On the train home, a woman said companionably: “When’s yours due?”
“Not long now,” Jude said, and went and stood near the doors, where there was more noise to drown out the baby if it cried. But the baby didn’t make so much as a murmur.
Back in her room, she unwrapped it, like a present, and sat looking at her sleeping child for the first time. It was a girl.
“Hello, Emma,” she said.
EIGHTY-TWO
Angela
WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, 2012
The doctor had given her some pills to dull the shock, but she kept jumping up every time a car passed the house. DI Sinclair had phoned to say he’d be there in twenty minutes. He’d sounded somber and tired and she’d let him go without any further questions.
Nick came downstairs and paced round the room.
“Angie, we’ve got to prepare ourselves for the worst,” he said. “The police have got it wrong. There’s nothing we can do to change it. I think he’s coming to apologize. Don’t you?”
“Let’s see, Nick,” she said. Her head was buzzing again. Filled with Alice.
Nick opened the door before DI Sinclair could knock. “Come in, Andy.”
Angela stood at the window, looking at the detective’s car. There were three people in it.
“Aren’t your colleagues coming in?” she asked.
He hesitated. “No, not at the moment.” The officer cleared his throat.
“Angela, Nick,” he said. “Please sit down. I’ve got some news for you. I’m not sure how to tell you, to be honest.”
He was perspiring, the beads of sweat on his forehead winking in the light.
“That you’ve made a mistake?” Nick said. “We thought that was it.”
“Well, no,” the detective said. “The thing is . . . look, we have found Alice. But she is not the baby on the building site.”
Angela gasped and stood.
“Angie,” Nick said, his voice shaking, pulling her back down beside him. “Tell us, Andy. Just tell us what you’ve found.”
“Alice is alive,” DI Sinclair said.
“Alive?” Angela and Nick both shouted, the sound bouncing off the window.
“Yes.”
“How can she be?” Angela said, frantically looking around the room for her child. “Where is she?”
“She’s here,” DI Sinclair said, his voice catching with the emotion of the moment. He’d never cried on a job, even when he’d been breaking terrible news. But the tension was unbearable.
“Where? Where?” Angela shrieked.
“She’s in the car,” he said.