Unable to sleep Adam finally rose at five and gathered his clothes in the darkness. He made his way to the door where he paused and looked back towards the bed where Angela was still sleeping. Part of him wanted to go back and wake her, to climb back beneath the covers and hold her. He imagined her drowsy awakening, her murmured voice as she turned towards him and pressed her body against his. Yet he didn’t move. There was something unreal about the scene he’d imagined. It had the quality of a fragile dream that he preferred to leave intact, at least for now. Instead, he slipped quietly out of the door and along the passage. He checked on Mary, who also appeared still to be sleeping, then went down the stairs and through the darkened house to the kitchen.
Half an hour later he quietly closed the front door behind him and went outside. It was pitch black. During the early morning cloud had gathered, stealing the light of the stars. It was cold and there was a feeling of snow in the air. Adam started the car and drove slowly to the gate with the lights off. He looked back at the house, half hoping to see a light come on upstairs, and yet glad in a resigned sort of way when it didn’t. He had left a note for Angela in the kitchen explaining that he’d made an early start for Tynemouth and that he would see her later. He had deliberated for a long time about whether or not he should add some line of endearment at the end, but he didn’t know what to write. Everything he thought of either seemed corny or false. In the end he’d written simply: Adam.
He turned on the lights at the end of the lane and headed for the A69 that would take him all the way to Newcastle.
The address Geraldine Hope had given him turned out to be a nondescript street of Victorian brick semis in a rundown area of Tynemouth. The house that he was looking for turned out, in fact, to be two houses that had been knocked together to form a hotel. A sign outside advertised budget rooms and special long-term rates. It seemed that Jones hadn’t progressed much during the years since he had left Carlisle. The Park Hotel was depressingly ugly from the outside. Two empty beer bottles that stood on the pavement by the gate seemed to eloquently say it all. It looked like the kind of place that might be a staging post on the slide downhill for life’s perpetual failures. A brief stop before life on the streets.
The front door was open and led into a small tiled reception area. Behind a plain wooden counter a number of keys hung from hooks screwed into a yellowing pegboard. To the right a door with a sign identifying it as the guest lounge was closed, and straight ahead a staircase led to the upper floors. The whole place smelt strongly of fried food underlain with a general unpleasant mustiness.
The counter was deserted, though behind it a door led to what he assumed was an office. Adam hit an old-fashioned bell on the counter and in response a heavy-set middle-aged man wearing a greyish-white open-necked shirt eventually appeared from the office.
‘Yes?’ he said guardedly. His accent was indeterminate, but maybe central European.
‘I’m looking for somebody who may live here. His name is Chris Jones.’
The man regarded him calculatedly as he used a toothpick to clean his teeth. ‘What you want with him?’
‘He’s a friend of mine.’
The man’s narrowed eyes betrayed his scepticism. Perhaps he’d decided that Adam didn’t look like most of the people who crossed the threshold of the Park Hotel. ‘You a friend of his you say? I never seen you before, and Mr Jones, he live here a long time.’
‘Is he in?’ Adam said.
‘No. He’s not.’ The man watched Adam with slightly amused interest as if waiting to see what he would say next.
‘When will he back, do you know?’
‘I thought you said you were his friend. If you his friend how come you don’t know when he will be back?’
‘Listen, just tell me when you expect him, alright.’
The man shrugged. ‘I don’t expect him.’
‘What do you mean? You’re not expecting him back at all, or you don’t know when?’
The man simply shrugged again. He made no move to go back to his office, however. Instead he seemed to be waiting for Adam to make the next move. Getting the drift Adam dug in his pocket for his wallet. He put a ten-pound note on the counter.
‘So, when do you think would be a good time to catch him?’
Bright dark eyes glinted greedily and the note vanished. ‘Maybe you try again in a couple a weeks.’
‘A couple of weeks? You mean he’s gone away?’ The man didn’t answer, so Adam took another ten out and put it down.
‘For somebody who is your friend you don’t know him so good, I think,’ the man said, as the note vanished.
‘You haven’t answered my question.’
‘Mr Jones, he works on the ships. A sailor you know? The last time I see him was in August.’
Adam remembered what Dr Hope had said about Jones keeping in touch with the gardener at the clinic who was an ex-merchant seaman. Something they had in common. ‘When in August?’
The man looked pointedly at Adam’s wallet so he took out everything he had left, which was about fifty-five pounds. ‘You answer my questions, alright?’
‘Okay.’ He shoved the notes in his pocket. ‘Beginning of the month some time. I don’t remember exactly.’
Which had to be before Jane Hanson had turned up, Adam thought. His eye strayed to the open office door behind the counter. Against the wall was a photocopier.
‘Did somebody else come here looking for Jones? It would have been some time later in August. A girl?’
‘Sure.’
‘You showed her Jones’s room, didn’t you? She used that photocopier there afterwards.’
‘How you know that?’ the man asked in surprise.
‘Never mind. I want you to show me the room too.’
The man hesitated, then again the shrug. ‘Okay.’ He grabbed a key off the board. ‘Follow me.’
The room was in keeping with the rest of the hotel. That is to say it was furnished cheaply and simply and the carpet was so old and worn it was hard to distinguish the pattern any more. A single window overlooked a car park at the back. Apart from a double bed the room contained a set of drawers and a large wardrobe, a small table and two chairs and a TV set. It turned out the man behind the counter, whose name was Nicos, was the proud owner of the Park Hotel. He leaned casually against the door as Adam looked around and seemed happy enough to answer his questions now that he knew there was no more money.
‘He’s not a very sociable man, Mr Jones. Not very happy, you know? Doesn’t like to talk much. When he’s here he spend most of his time in the pub along the road.’
‘How often is he away?’
‘Seven, eight months in a year. Depends.’
Adam opened the wardrobe door. It contained a few shirts and some jackets and a coat but not much else. Nicos was from Selonika. He kept up a nonstop commentary, partly about himself and partly careless observations about Jones. He described Jones as being taciturn and a heavy drinker.
‘I never see him with a woman. Maybe his face put them off …’ He shrugged, which was a gesture he used to complete many of his thoughts.
It turned out that Jones had worked on the ships ever since he’d arrived at the hotel five years earlier. The Park Hotel rented rooms to half a dozen or so sailors who were away for more of the year than they were at home, and when they were at home they just wanted a place to sleep.
‘Where’s he gone, do you know?’ Adam asked.
‘Who knows? I don’t ask, he doesn’t tell me.’
Adam fetched a chair so that he could reach to the top of the wardrobe. He lifted down the suitcase that was up there and put it on the bed. When he snapped open the catches he found it contained some more clothes, a pair of old shoes and half a bottle of whisky. There was also a large thick yellowing envelope.
‘Did the girl who came here look in this case?’
‘Yes.’
The envelope contained Marion Crane’s original file that Jane had photocopied. A brief scan of the first page revealed things he hadn’t been able to decipher from the distorted remnants he’d recovered from the wreck. Adam frowned as he flicked through the pages. There was still no clue to Marion Crane’s real identity, or why Jones would have kept these records. When he came to the last page, however, something fluttered free, a single sheet that turned out to be a photocopy. When he picked it up he realized it was the third document he’d found, only the copy Jane had made had been too far gone to make any sense of beyond the fact that it was some kind of official-looking certificate. Now as he read it, everything started to make sense.
He compared the certificate against Marion Crane’s file, checking the dates on one against the other. Something stirred in his memory and a vague unease settled over him. He turned to Nicos.
‘The young woman who came here before me, can you remember exactly when that was? I mean the exact day?’
‘Sure. It was the day my nephew he have his birthday.’
It was mid-afternoon by the time a car pulled up outside the house where Adam had been waiting for the past two hours. He watched the driver get out and open the garage door before putting his car away and going to the front door. Adam switched off his mobile phone and crossed the street as the man put his key in the lock. Hearing footsteps behind him the man turned and the slightly surprised smile he wore faded when he saw who it was.
‘I suppose I’ve been expecting you,’ Councillor Hunt said. ‘You better come in.’
They went through to the kitchen where they had talked the last time Adam had been there. Hunt took off his coat and carelessly dropped it over the back of chair. He rubbed his hands together as he filled the kettle.
‘Would you like a cup of tea? Mr Turner isn’t it?’
‘Adam, yes. And thanks, tea would be good.’
‘I always come in here if I’m home early. It heats up faster than the rest of the house,’ Hunt said, as he looked out of the window at the heavy sky. ‘I think it’ll snow later.’ He got some mugs from a cupboard, pausing for a moment. ‘Do you mind these or do you prefer a cup? I like a mug myself.’
‘A mug’s fine.’
The kettle boiled and Hunt poured hot water into a teapot in a routine Adam thought he probably went through every day. This time he suspected there was some comfort in the familiarity of the task, no doubt while he tried to order his thoughts. When he finally brought the tea to the table he seemed quite composed, like a man who had reconciled himself to what was about to come. As he sat down Adam noticed he glanced at the photographs of his wife and daughter on the fridge door. What had he said? A holiday in Spain? Now Adam looked with new eyes. He remembered Hunt’s wife rushing out the door the first time he’d come, and her slightly over-frenetic manner. A symptom of a highly strung nature he now guessed.
‘Councillor Hunt,’ Adam said. ‘When you voted in favour of the Forest Havens development, were you being subjected to some kind of pressure?’
A small smile touched the corners of Hunt’s mouth. ‘Do you mean was I being blackmailed?’
‘Yes.’
‘I suppose you already know the answer to that.’
‘I think I do.’ Adam took the documents he’d found in Jones’s room out of his pocket and laid them on the table. ‘These are the records for somebody called Marion Crane who was a patient at Carisbrook Hall in 1985. According to these she was admitted in April of that year suffering from acute depression after suffering a miscarriage in the thirtieth week of pregnancy.’ He paused. ‘Marion Crane was your wife?’
Hunt nodded. ‘She used the name of a second cousin who lives in Devon.’ He sighed wearily. ‘My wife has never been what you would call a strong person. Mentally I mean. She was forty years old when she suffered that miscarriage. It was the fourth time, though all the others happened much earlier. We had given up hope of ever having a child, and then as sometimes happens, when we least expected it Anne fell pregnant.’
Hunt picked up his tea, and was silent while he drank a little. He looked tired, the evidence of a long-held secret scored in the heavy lines around his eyes.
‘How did you know from this that Marion Crane was my wife?’ he asked.
In reply Adam laid down a copy of an original birth certificate. The child named was Judith Hunt, born on 19 May 1985 to parents George and Anne Hunt.
‘My guess is that Dr Webster arranged for this,’ Adam said.
He had put it together during the drive back from Tynemouth earlier. His theory was that Anne Hunt, under the name of Marion Crane, had been admitted to Carisbrook under Webster’s care as a private patient. Somehow or other Webster had found a way to switch somebody else’s baby for the one Anne Hunt had lost, then he had signed the official birth documents and nobody was any the wiser. What Adam hadn’t been able to figure out at first was how the Hunts had managed to explain the sudden presence of a baby daughter. Anne Hunt had suffered a miscarriage, at which a doctor must have been present, most likely at the local hospital. The answer he’d come up with was simple, and he put it to Hunt now.
‘Your wife was admitted to Carisbrook before her miscarriage,’ he guessed.
‘Anne became depressed a month after she fell pregnant. Her condition became worse as time went on. You see, she was convinced that she would lose the child as she had all the others. With every week that passed her mental state deteriorated. Ironic really. It was the impending loss, as Anne viewed it, of what was rapidly becoming a fully developed child that was so hard for her to cope with. She was given more drugs, and it was probably those that did the damage in the end. A kind of perverse Catch 22. When she did eventually lose the baby she went completely to pieces.’
Hunt looked like somebody who was if not exactly making a plea for Adam to condone what happened next, then at least to understand it.
‘If I had not agreed to what I did, I think my wife would never have come out of that hospital.’
Adam sidestepped offering any comment on the moral issue, concentrating instead on the remaining questions he had. ‘Whose idea was it to substitute a live baby for the one your wife miscarried?’
Hunt winced at the clinical description of what had been done. ‘I tried to convince myself that it was only a matter of adoption really. Albeit without the normal documentation. That was the way Webster described it.’
‘It was his idea?’
Lost in his recollection of the event, Hunt seemed momentarily confused. ‘Webster? Yes. Yes I suppose it was. He said that it was really for the best. That, in fact, the baby would have been put up for adoption anyway. The mother didn’t want her.’
‘He told you that?’
‘Yes.’
Adam didn’t point out that an official adoption agency would never have granted care of a child to a couple when the wife was suffering from a severe mental illness, even if they hadn’t already been in their forties. But despite that, with the benefit of hindsight and with the evidence of the apparently healthy young woman in the picture on the fridge, perhaps it would have been easier to be more understanding if Adam hadn’t known there was more to it. This hadn’t come about because Webster was such a compassionate soul, into whose hands circumstances had delivered the means to do good in the world.
Hunt looked at the picture on the fridge. ‘She’s a bright girl. She’s due back from an exchange in Spain next week to do her last year at school before she goes to university. She wants to become a linguist and work for the United Nations.’
There was no mistaking his tone. It was full of the pride of a loving parent and Adam had no doubt that the Hunts had raised the girl as if she was their own. In the photograph they looked happy together. He wondered if Judith Hunt had ever wondered why she hadn’t inherited either of her parents’ features. Though perhaps she thought she had. No doubt she had heard all her life how she resembled one or other of them, most likely her mother.
‘Anne doesn’t know,’ Hunt said.
It took Adam a moment to absorb his meaning. ‘She doesn’t know that Judith isn’t her biological child?’ he said incredulously.
‘At least she doesn’t allow herself that knowledge. Perhaps on some level she is aware of it, but she’s never showed it. It’s as if she completely blocked out the miscarriage. In Anne’s mind Judith is her child. Quite literally.’
Christ, Adam thought. What would happen to this family when all of this came out?
‘Why did Webster do it?’ he asked.
‘Because at the time I worked for the council department that was considering the future of Carisbrook,’ Hunt replied.
Suddenly Adam understood. This question had plagued him during the drive from Tynemouth. Despite everything he’d discovered he hadn’t been able to imagine this as a simple case of babies for sale. It hadn’t seemed either Webster’s or Hunt’s style. But if Hunt had been able to influence the decision regarding Carisbrook, that made perfect sense. ‘You bought him some time?’
‘Yes. Closure was inevitable in the end of course, but I managed to delay it on several occasions.’
‘How did you first learn that somebody knew about what had happened?’ Adam asked.
‘It was a telephone call.’
‘From who?’
‘A man. I don’t know who it was.’
‘But you must have met him?’
Hunt shook his head. ‘I only spoke to him twice, whoever it was.’
‘But didn’t you ever see these documents?’ Adam gestured to the papers on the table. ‘Didn’t you want proof?’
‘Of what?’ Hunt said. ‘He knew everything that happened including the name my wife had used at Carisbrook. At first I thought he wanted money. When he told me that the price for his silence was that I should vote in favour of the development I agreed. Perhaps I considered very briefly going to the police, but if I claimed it was anything more than a fleeting notion I would be lying. I don’t expect you to believe this, but I did it for my wife, and for Judith.’
Hunt appeared to contemplate the inevitability of his secret now coming out. The flesh of his face seemed to sag and turn a greyish pallor before Adam’s eyes. It was difficult not to feel sorry for the man and for his family.
‘Didn’t you at least wonder who the blackmailer was?’
Hunt blinked and rubbed his temples. ‘Of course. But the only person I could think of was Webster. But even if I did know who it was it would have made no difference to the threat and my compliance.’
Adam could see that made sense. ‘Was there anything familiar about the person you spoke to?’
‘He spoke with a local accent, that’s all I can say.’
It had to have been either Jones or David, Adam reasoned. But Jones had no motive to try and blackmail Hunt beyond money, which he had never done before, probably because he hadn’t wanted to risk his own criminal activities at the hospital coming to light if something went wrong. But if he had heard about the development and realized that Councillor Hunt was on the planning committee he might well have seen that the information was potentially valuable. All he had to do then was find somebody who would pay for it. Somebody like David.
Adam had guessed during the drive from Tynemouth that whatever Jane had overheard it must have been enough that she knew somebody on the committee was being blackmailed, but not who. Perhaps she’d overheard Carisbrook mentioned, or Jones’s name. Probably both. And from there she’d gone searching for proof. He had followed her footsteps all the way. And eventually she’d found what she was looking for, and that was what bothered him.
‘Councillor Hunt, I asked you if you knew Jane Hanson last time I was here. You said you met her.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did she mention anything about your wife? Or give any impression that she was aware you were being blackmailed?’
‘No.’
‘And did you ever see her again?’
Hunt shook his head. ‘Why do you ask?’
But Adam didn’t answer. He was thinking. Why hadn’t Jane confronted Hunt with the evidence of the birth certificate? He’d been working on the premise that she had been bought off, but now he knew the day Jane had visited the Park Hotel was as Nicos had told him, the day of his nephew’s birthday. September the fourth.
‘What is it?’ Hunt asked.
Adam shook his head. He’d had it all wrong.