Kayleigh still hadn’t spoken a word. The doctor had left, and after a few minutes, another woman had come in with the baby, and Mrs Spears had left. The new woman had asked Kayleigh if she wanted to change Alexandra; when Kayleigh hadn’t replied, she had done it herself, and then had sat with the baby in her arms. She said the baby had been fed, that she didn’t think she would be due another feed for a couple of hours, and would Kayleigh like to feed her next time? Kayleigh hadn’t answered, and eventually she had taken the baby away, saying that Kayleigh would get fed herself soon.
That was why, when Mrs Spears came back, Kayleigh thought she had come to tell her that her meal was ready, but she hadn’t.
‘Kayleigh? The police have just rung to say that they’re going to contact someone they think you’ll be pleased to see. Someone called Phil Roddam?’
Kayleigh closed her eyes briefly. How? How had they got on to Phil? It wasn’t anything she’d said.
‘And … the hospital rang. Mr Waring has had his operation, and they seem quite hopeful about him now.’
That was something, Kayleigh supposed. The first good news she’d had.
Theresa told Chief Inspector Lloyd everything she knew about Lesley and Kayleigh, which wasn’t a great deal, but it did seem to add up. The crisis with Kayleigh that resolved itself in January; the unsuitable relationship that so worried Lesley that she was dragging both Ian and Kayleigh off to Australia, though neither of them had any desire to go; keeping their whereabouts secret from Phil. Was that what it had all been about? Kayleigh had got involved with some boy and had had a baby, and Lesley didn’t want Phil to know? Ian would have been sworn to secrecy as far as she was concerned, of course, in case it got back to Phil through her.
‘So you know Mr Roddam quite well?’
‘No. I don’t actually know him at all. I’ve only spoken to him on the phone. But – well, yes, I suppose we have got quite close that way.’ They had; she felt as though Phil and she were old friends.
‘But you haven’t rung to tell him what’s happened here?’
‘I couldn’t – I had no idea what had happened. I didn’t want to make him think Lesley was dead if she wasn’t And … well, as I said, I had honestly forgotten about Kayleigh. I should have told him – he’ll want to be with her, and she’ll want him here, I’m sure she will. I suspect that if anyone can get her to tell you what happened, he can.’
She had been too busy worrying about Ian to think about Kayleigh. But the doctor had assured her that he was still holding his own, and that the prognosis was now good.
Lloyd sounded thoughtful when he spoke again. ‘You said that Mr Waring had been having problems with Mrs Newton?’
Theresa brought her thoughts back to the here and now, and frowned. She might be giving the man a lift, but he was still a policeman, and there could only be one reason why a policeman was interested in Ian’s domestic troubles. ‘You surely don’t think he killed her, do you? He almost died himself.’
‘I still have no idea what happened. At the moment, there are a number of people who could have killed Mrs Newton, and Mr Waring is one of them. You said you saw him this morning? When was that?’
‘I saw him twice. He came at about seven to borrow the van, and he brought it back again.’
‘He borrowed the van this morning? And then took it all the way to London just to come all the way back?’
My God, when he said he had no idea what had happened, he meant it. They really didn’t know anything. ‘Malworth,’ she pointed out. ‘They lived in Malworth, until today. He was only in London for a couple of weeks before they moved here.’
‘Dr Black, I’m very glad you turned up. Though I have to confess I’m not sure whether you’re clearing up a lot of puzzles or creating a whole lot of new ones.’
She flicked a glance towards him to see him run his hand over the strip of thin hair that still grew on his scalp.
‘Where did they live in Malworth?’ he asked.
‘Riverside. In one of those big town houses on Bridge Street.’
Lloyd gave a whistle.
‘She’s wealthy. Was wealthy.’
There was a little silence before he spoke. ‘Right. Let’s take one thing at a time. What time did Mr Waring bring the van back to you?’
‘I think he came at about twenty to eleven or so. And he stayed for a few minutes, chatting.’
‘About his problems.’
She smiled a little reluctantly. ‘ Yes. He really didn’t want to go to Australia any more than Kayleigh did. But he’d hardly murder Lesley because of that.’
‘It would seem a little extreme. When did he leave?’
‘I can tell you that exactly, because I was leaving to go on my rounds. He left at five minutes to eleven.’ She realized from his reaction that the time was important, and took her eyes off the road again to glance at him. ‘When did all this happen?’
He looked as though he was going to get official on her, but if he had been going to, he changed his mind. ‘He made the emergency call just on eleven o’clock, and we arrived within five minutes of that call.’
Theresa relaxed. ‘Well, there you are. He couldn’t have done it – it takes five minutes to get from my flat to the cottage. You can’t do it any faster than that because of the speed bumps. So he could hardly have packed in killing Lesley and getting half killed himself before you got there, could he?’
‘No,’ Lloyd agreed. ‘He couldn’t.’ There was a heartbeat before he asked his next question. ‘Do you go from your flat to the cottage often?’
She smiled. ‘Not to meet Ian in secret, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’ve been doing it every day to pick up the mail, because I keep forgetting to tell the post office my new address, and poor Ian hasn’t been in one place long enough to decide what his address is, so his mail still goes there too.’
‘Could it have been later than twenty minutes to eleven when he brought the van back?’
‘I don’t think so. But I expect the security cameras in the garage area at the flats will tell you exactly.’ It took Theresa a moment to work out why he wanted to know. ‘Because he could have done it before he left the cottage, is that what you’re saying? You think he killed Lesley and then calmly brought the van back to me?’
‘I deal in possibilities, Dr Black, and that is a possibility. I’d be delighted to cross Mr Waring off my list of suspects, believe me, I would.’
Theresa sighed. ‘ I wish you’d call me Theresa. I don’t call myself Dr Black anyway. And how do you know I could if I wanted to?’
‘The mail. You didn’t pick it up today. Just one letter. It’s at the forensic lab, but you’ll get it in due course.’
‘No need. It’s just junk mail.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because,’ she said patiently, despite the implication that she was lying about not being at the cottage today, ‘ they’re the only ones addressed like that. They get the lists from professional organizations that I once belonged to.’
‘And why didn’t you pick the mail up as usual?’
She sighed, and indicated the left turn off the dual carriageway. ‘I didn’t want to risk running into Lesley. Forbearance goes just so far.’
‘I’m sure it does.’
‘Am I on your list of suspects?’ she asked. ‘I was shopping from about half past nine.’ She gave him a list of the shops she had gone to, before he asked. ‘And then I went to the bank, where I stood in an enormous queue, and I posted some letters at the town centre post office. I got home at about half past ten, I think. You can probably track my movements on a dozen security cameras.’
‘I’m afraid that at the moment everyone is on my list of suspects, though I’m inclined to believe that it was someone closer to Mrs Newton than you are.’
‘In other words, Ian. Despite what happened to him?’
‘Including Ian,’ he said. ‘But not exclusively Ian.’
‘You don’t know him. Even if he had resorted to murder as a means of getting out of going to Australia, he could never have carried it off like that. He’d have confessed what he’d done as soon as he’d seen me.’
She pulled up outside the greengrocer’s as instructed, and Lloyd got out. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Can I ask – did you have a heavy cast-iron doorstop in the cottage?’
‘A doorstop? No.’
‘Not necessarily a doorstop, though that’s what it is. It could be thought of as an ornament. It’s shaped like a cat.’
‘I didn’t have a heavy cast-iron anything.’
He smiled. ‘Thanks. I might see you at the hospital tomorrow – I’ll want to talk to Mr Waring as soon as they let me. And we might need to talk to you again.’
‘If the security cameras don’t bear me out?’ She smiled. ‘I’ll either be at the hospital or at home. Feel free to talk to me any time you like.’
She had finally put Charlotte in her cot, but she still hadn’t left her, couldn’t leave her. She stood in the shaded nursery, her arms folded on the edge of the cot, watching her sleep. She heard Lloyd’s footsteps on the stairs, heard the front door open, heard him come into the nursery, but she didn’t look round; she couldn’t take her eyes off Charlotte. Lloyd came and stood beside her, his arm round her shoulders, his head touching hers. He didn’t speak, just held her, and she felt safer with him there.
‘Is this what maternal instinct feels like?’ she asked, her voice hoarse.
‘Sometimes, I suppose.’
‘I don’t like it.’
‘Instinct’s a very primitive thing,’ he said. ‘It frightens us.’
In that moment, as in many previous moments, she knew why she loved him. He knew what was frightening her, better than she knew herself. That it wasn’t what had happened so much as her reaction to it, because it wasn’t just disturbed, sick, unbalanced people who reverted to the untamed state. Judy knew now that she would kill to protect Charlotte, and that realization of her own lack of civilization was what had frightened her so much. And it frightened her a little less now that Lloyd had put into words what she had merely felt.
Lloyd straightened up the cot blanket that his sister had made, and the movement momentarily woke Charlotte. Then her arms went up beside her head, she gave a little sigh, and fell asleep again. Lloyd kissed her, straightened up, and put his arms round Judy.
‘I couldn’t get here any sooner,’ he said, kissing her, too. ‘And I have to go back to work.’
She nodded. She didn’t know which variant of wickedness he was having to deal with, and right now she didn’t want to know. Wicked enough for him to have to carry on dealing with it regardless of the time. But she was very glad he was here now.
‘I’ve time for a sandwich,’ he said. ‘ I’ll make you one.’
Her automatic protestation that she had no appetite was silenced by his finger on her lips.
‘You have to eat. And I’m sure Charlotte wishes we would get the hell out of her bedroom and let her sleep.’
She took another look at Charlotte, then allowed herself to be propelled gently out of the nursery and into the kitchen.
‘A lioness protecting her cubs still finds time to grab the odd impala.’ Lloyd reached into the breadbin as he spoke. ‘And so can you.’
The doorbell rang, and they looked at one another.
‘Tom,’ she said. ‘I made him promise to tell me what happened.’
‘I’ll go.’
Judy didn’t leave the kitchen, not until she heard Lloyd’s voice echoing up the stairwell.
‘A doll? How the hell could you mistake a doll for a baby?’
She went back out to the hallway as Lloyd and Tom came upstairs. ‘A doll?’ she said, uncomprehendingly, when they arrived in the doorway. ‘Did I hear you say it was a doll?’
‘Judy, I swear to you, it looks exactly like a baby. ‘Well – not really when it’s close to, but from a distance, in the water – I made them bag it up, so you could see it for yourself.’
‘I don’t want to see it for myself!’
‘I’m sorry.’ Tom looked helplessly at Lloyd. ‘ I’m so sorry. I would never have—’
‘Nothing to be sorry for,’ said Lloyd briskly. ‘It wasn’t a baby – that’s the main thing. I’m just about to make some impala sandwiches. Do you want some?’
Tom looked a little puzzled.
‘Private joke,’ said Lloyd. ‘Irritating, aren’t they? I don’t know what will be in them until I look in the fridge, but it probably won’t be impala. Do you want some?’
‘Yes, thanks, I’d love a sandwich, even if it is impala. I’m starving.’ Tom looked at Judy. ‘That’s if I’m welcome.’
Judy’s maternal instinct was running riot now; she looked at poor Tom, all pink and worried and upset, and she wanted to cuddle him too. She contented herself with smiling at him. ‘Of course you are,’ she said, and followed him and Lloyd into the kitchen. She felt guilty for having snapped at him, but sheer relief had prompted that reaction. ‘It wasn’t your fault. And thank God it wasn’t Emma.’
Judy found out what Lloyd was working on, as he quickly and efficiently made enough sandwiches to feed the entire Bartonshire constabulary, and he and Tom proceeded to demolish them. Her ravaged emotions had done nothing for her appetite.
Lloyd told them that he had thought at one point that he had found Emma, but now he thought it might possibly be Kayleigh’s own baby. ‘ But if it is, I still don’t know what happened to all the baby things, so I’m keeping an open mind about that.’
‘And do you really reckon this Waring bloke did it himself?’ asked Tom.
‘He’s fast becoming my favourite, but they’re all still on the list, including Kayleigh herself. I’m crossing no one off but Alexandra.’ His mobile rang, and he sighed. ‘Oh, well, that’s my meal break over.’
Judy smiled. ‘Maybe it’s a breakthrough.’
‘Maybe. Hello – Lloyd.’ He smiled. ‘I think your sister should be on a retainer.’ His face grew serious as he listened. ‘No – I’ll go. I’ll update you when I get back.’
‘Is it a breakthrough?’ Judy asked.
‘It could well be.’ He stood up. ‘ Could I have the keys to your car? Mine’s run out of petrol, would you believe, and now I don’t even know where the petrol can is. I think I probably left it in a panda car.’
Judy gave him the keys, and he was gone. When she and Tom were alone, he apologized again.
Judy shook her head. ‘ I was overreacting. I wasn’t being very professional about it, was I?’
Tom smiled. ‘You’re off-duty, and you’ve had a lot to cope with recently. You get to overreact. But you’re always professional.’
It was funny, Judy thought. Someone, somewhere, would be very upset, because these dolls that looked almost exactly like real babies cost a lot of money, and it had presumably been lost. But it wasn’t a real baby, and that put the loss of an expensive toy into perspective. And her mistaken belief that Emma was dead had put her disappearance into perspective too; it seemed somehow less hopeless. Everything was relative.
‘That couple look as though they must be kosher. They were interviewed separately, and they both saw Andrea with the baby in a pram, but said they didn’t see the baby on its own. And the husband saw a couple of other people while he was there painting, but …’ He shrugged. ‘He says they weren’t still around by the time the girl arrived. He saw you, and gave a good description, so I think he’s quite reliable.’
Judy didn’t ask what the description was; she felt she’d rather not see herself as others saw her.
‘We’ve got security camera videos of the Bridge Street car park, and they picked up Andrea taking the baby out of the car and putting her in the pram. There didn’t seem to be anyone taking any interest in her, and no one followed them from the car park.’
Judy pushed the remainder of the sandwiches over to him. ‘Do you think Andrea could be involved?’
‘You’ve thought that all along, haven’t you? What makes you think she is?’
‘Two things, really. One is the way she was acting. She said she didn’t see anything, but I felt as though she knew more than she was saying, and she seemed so calm about it all, even though she’d just been screaming her head off.’
‘And the other thing?’
‘It was what you said earlier. About the only person who saw the baby left unattended having stolen her. If you think the couple had nothing to do with it, that makes five people in the immediate area who all saw the girl with the baby, and yet no one noticed the baby on her own.’ She shrugged. ‘It just seems odd.’
‘It does, doesn’t it? But she did go back to her car for her phone – the security video confirmed that as well. All the same, I hadn’t thought about that. I’ll see what McArthur thinks about leaning on Andrea a bit.’
‘If he agrees that we should,’ said Judy, ‘see if he’ll let you do the leaning.’
‘Why?’
She once saw an angelfish on a wildlife programme. There it was, swiniming along, gently opening and closing its mouth, looking as though it only thought beautiful thoughts and longed for nothing more than universal love and world peace, when it turned its pretty head towards the fellow marine creature swimming by its side, and, without breaking its aquatic stride, ate it.
She smiled. ‘Just because.’
‘Well, well, well. If it isn’t the prodigal nephew.’
She looked older, he thought, as he pecked her on the cheek. But then, she would. He hadn’t seen her for a long time. How old was she now? Seventy? Seventy-five? He knew she was quite a bit older than his mother, but he wasn’t sure by how many years. He smiled. ‘Can I come in?’
‘How long for this time?’ she asked, standing aside to admit him. ‘Ten minutes or ten weeks?’
‘The weekend, if it won’t put you out too much.’ He followed her through to the living room, and put his overnight bag down on the trendy wooden floor. Not for his aunt the time capsules that so many solitary, elderly people made for themselves. She had acquired a widescreen telly, he noticed. One of his aunt’s prouder boasts was that she had never needed a man to provide for her. She had had a good job with a good pension, and she had invested her savings well and wisely, which was why she could afford to retire to her seafront bungalow. She wasn’t short of a bob or two.
‘No, it won’t put me out.’
She sat down, but he stood by the window, looking out at the sea. When he was little they had come here on holiday; he used to stand on the shore and imagine how one day he would go to sea. He was going to join the navy and see the world, his mother would say. But he had become an accountant, and he still regretted that just a little. No one wrote rousing drinking songs or romantic adventure stories about accountants. No accountant had ever had his likeness put on top of a one-hundred-and-eighty-five-foot monument. Accountancy did not inspire poets to stirring lines of verse. Home is the hunter, he thought, home from the hill, and the accountant, home from the office. Ah, well. At least he’d seen some of the world now.
‘What wound are you licking this time?’ she asked.
He turned. ‘ What makes you think I’m licking a wound?’
‘Because the last time your wife had left you. And the time before that you had been made redundant.’
He sat down then, and thought about that. ‘Do I really only come to see you when I’ve got problems? I hadn’t realized.’ He smiled. ‘ Shows you how few problems I’ve had in my life, doesn’t it? I promise I’ll come and see you some time when everything’s going great.’
‘I’ll get us some tea.’ She went through to the little kitchen, and he heard the kettle being filled.
He noticed another acquisition. ‘When did you get the computer?’ he called through to her.
‘Oh, a couple of years ago. I thought it was time I found out what the information superhighway was all about.’
He grinned. ‘And do you surf the Net often?’
‘When I want to find things out,’ she said, coming in with biscuits and little cakes. ‘And I like email. It’s a lot cheaper than the post, for one thing.’
‘What, are all your cronies online too?’ He followed her into the kitchen, and plucked mugs from the tree. No china tea-services for auntie.
‘I don’t write to my cronies.’ She put teabags in the pot, and poured on the boiling water. ‘ What would I want to write to them for? I see them every day.’
‘Who then?’
‘Whoever I feel like writing to.’
‘I’ll have to give you my email address. Then we can keep in touch. Have you got a mobile phone yet?’ He picked up the tray on which she had put milk, sugar, and the teapot, complete with cosy, the only old-fashioned touch he’d noticed, so far. She had always been practical; no sense in letting the tea get cold just to be modern.
‘Not yet, but I’m thinking about it. I should keep one on my person at all times, according to the advice sheets. You never know, at my age – I could fall and break my hip.’
Lesley had kept hers on her person at all times; clipped to her belt, or in her pocket. Organized, well-meaning, infuriating, misguided Lesley. Phil sighed, as he set the tray down on the coffee table.
Jean sat down, as he poured the tea. ‘What have you been up to, Phil Roddam?’
‘Nothing very clever.’ He put her mug down in front of her. ‘You wouldn’t want to know.’
And the wonderful thing about his Aunt Jean was that she would accept that non-answer, and enquire no more deeply into the circumstances.
Bob Sandwell had put out a description of the Audi driver, and his sister, coming in for her night shift, had discovered that Barton General had a patient answering that description whose clothes had been stained with someone else’s blood. The staff in the accident and emergency department had been debating the ethics of telling the police; she made their minds up for them, and phoned Bob.
His police record had been brought up on the computer, and Bob, resourceful as ever, and a great believer in the six degrees of separation theory, had rung a friend of a friend of a friend until he had spoken to someone in the Met who had actually worked on the investigation into the sexual offence for which Fletcher had been imprisoned. According to him, Fletcher had found Kayleigh through an Internet chat-room, had arranged to meet her, had cynically and systematically abused her over a period of several weeks, then claimed that she had misled him.
‘I put him in here,’ the doctor said, stopping at a side room off the main ward. ‘ We’re keeping him in overnight because of the blow to the head. And I can only let you see him for a few minutes. He’s really very tired.’
Lloyd nodded, and went in. ‘Dean Fletcher?’
The young man lying on the bed nodded wearily. His mouth was swollen; his arms had masses of tiny cuts and scratches on them. His ribs were strapped up.
‘My name is Lloyd. I’m a detective chief inspector with Stansfield CID.’ He showed him his warrant card. ‘Can I ask where you were at around eleven o’clock this morning, Mr Fletcher?’
‘In Stansfield.’
‘What brought you to Stansfield?’
‘I went there to meet Kayleigh Scott.’
Lloyd nodded. ‘ Would you like to tell me how your clothing came to be stained with blood?’
Fletcher sighed. ‘ I fell over a dead body.’
Lloyd walked round the little room, glancing out of the window, opening the door of the cupboard beside the bed, picking things up. His purpose, if it could be called that, was two-fold; one, it tended to unnerve people when he did it and gave him the chance of catching them off guard, and two, he wanted to give himself a moment to try to assess Fletcher. To Bob, he represented the prime suspect, and Lloyd could hardly disagree; he was there, objecting to their taking Alexandra to Australia, and he ran away. But Lloyd couldn’t see how that argument would lead to his battering Kayleigh’s mother to death, and Fletcher could just as easily fit the description of the witness shy of giving his name to the police.
All he knew right now was that Fletcher had broken the conditions of his parole in order to come to Stansfield, and that was very stupid, very brave, or very calculating. Already, Lloyd had discounted the first possibility, because even tired and in pain, there was an alertness in the eyes that simply wasn’t present in truly stupid people. But either of the other two could apply and while the picture painted of him by Sandwell’s contact suggested the latter, Lloyd wasn’t convinced.
‘You fell over a dead body.’ Lloyd put on his glasses and looked at the chart at the end of the bed. It meant nothing to him; he just liked having props. ‘ Where?’
‘In a cottage in the middle of a wood.’
‘And what were you doing there?’
‘I told you. I went to meet Kayleigh. But she wasn’t there. And I tripped and fell as I went in. I landed on a dead body.’
‘And is that how you cracked your ribs and banged your head?’
‘No. I did that when I fell over the branch of a tree.’
Lloyd looked at him over his glasses. ‘You seem to have been particularly unfortunate.’
‘Yeah, well. It makes a change. I’m usually lucky, apparently.’
Lloyd could hear the bitterness in Fletcher’s voice. ‘A man answering your description was seen abandoning an Audi Quattro, and running into Brook Way wood. Was that you?’
‘Yes. I took the car from the garage.’
‘In that case, Mr Fletcher, I’m arresting you for the attempted murder of Ian Waring.’ He noticed, but didn’t comment on the show of innocent puzzlement from Fletcher, at odds with his candid answers. ‘You will be taken to a designated police station as soon as the hospital releases you into our custody, where you will be questioned about these events. I will be taking your clothes in order that they may be forensically examined. You will be given suitable clothing to wear while yours are being examined.’ He cautioned him, informed him of his right to free legal representation. ‘Do you understand?’ he asked routinely.
‘I understand the caution. I don’t understand what you’re arresting me for.’
A male nurse appeared, and Lloyd left, without further enlightening Mr Fletcher, heading back for Stansfield.
There wasn’t much they could do on the murder during the night, but Lloyd didn’t want vigilance relaxed even though they had apprehended the prime suspect. He wanted every call to the incident room followed up until it was too late to do so, every statement cross-checked, and he wanted Phil Roddam found.
Fletcher hadn’t mentioned Alexandra, and though it was becoming more and more unlikely, there was still a possibility that the baby was Emma, because they still hadn’t found anything at all to suggest that a baby was moving into the cottage. He had no sooner thought that than PC Sims, on attachment to CID on Tom’s recommendation, knocked, and put his head round the door. ‘Alan Marshall found a pram dumped in Brook Way wood this afternoon, sir. He’s downstairs with it – he says he thinks you’ll want to see it.’
Downstairs, Lloyd found Marshall, standing as proudly by the pram as any brand-new father. ‘ It’s been dusted for prints,’ he said. ‘Just in case. It was in a clearing where people do fly-tipping, but it’s far too good to have been thrown out, so I think it must have come from Mrs Newton’s car. And I found a handbag – probably Mrs Newton’s, since hers is missing. I think the car was looted by those kids as soon as it was abandoned.’
Lloyd was impressed. ‘What made you think of searching the woods?’
‘He did.’ Alan Marshall jerked his head towards Sims.
PC Sims looked a little bashful. ‘I asked the lab to take a look at the Audi to see if it had fixings for a baby seat – it occurred to me that if Alexandra had been transported in it, it should have had a baby seat in it.’
And why hadn’t it occurred to anyone else, thought Lloyd? More specifically, why hadn’t it occurred to him? Because, he thought, he had been so convinced that Alexandra was Emma.
‘And they confirmed that there are fixings, and since the baby seat had gone, I told Alan I thought the car might have been looted.’
‘Very good.’ Lloyd looked closely at the pram. ‘It’s a collapsible pram, isn’t it?’ he said.
The other two agreed that it was.
‘Did you find it like this?’
Marshall nodded.
A puzzle, thought Lloyd. ‘So why wasn’t it collapsed? Surely it would be easier to transport that way?’
‘The kids probably used it to wheel away anything they could sell, and then dumped it,’ said Marshall.
Sometimes his little puzzles didn’t last very long. Lloyd was a bit surprised that the boys who stripped the car hadn’t been a little more enterprising, because prams were expensive, as he had recently found out, and it would certainly have a second-hand value. But the missing baby things had ceased to be a puzzle, and Alexandra wasn’t Emma. Tom had been right; Sims would be an asset.
He brought the baby-snatch team up to date, and now he could concentrate fully on the murder. Tomorrow, he would have everyone’s background thoroughly researched, Theresa Black’s movements checked, and the times that Waring was at her flat confirmed by the security cameras in the garage area. This case, he felt certain, was far from over, whatever everyone else thought.
But tonight, Lesley Newton was in the mortuary, Ian Waring was in intensive care with Theresa Black by his side, and Dean Fletcher was in casualty with an officer right outside the door, well aware of his charge’s history of absconding. With almost all the major players tucked up, one way or another, in Barton General, Lloyd really could go home, this time with a clear conscience.
‘No, mate, sorry. No one like that.’
Tom was back to square one, now that Lloyd’s mystery baby was almost certainly no longer a mystery. McArthur had said that he could-interview Andrea Merry tomorrow; as his last job tonight, he was trying the bus drivers, but he was down to his last one.
Judy had been suggesting that Andrea herself had taken Emma, but that wasn’t borne out by the video camera evidence. All the same, Tom thought, it was odd that no one saw Emma in the pram on her own. And while it was true that they all saw the baby with a girl, they might not, it seemed to him, all have seen the same girl; the clothing was hardly distinctive. They had been thinking in terms of an older woman, but it could have been a young girl who had taken her. So he asked if they had seen anyone carrying a baby, especially a youngster.
‘Most of them are youngsters,’ said the one he was speaking to now. ‘ Never heard of contraception, these kids.’
‘Was there one who had the baby in her arms, rather than in a carrycot or whatever?’
‘No. I mean, you notice. You see them making their way down the bus with a baby, and you know you’re going to be there for ages while they find the pushchair or the wheels or whatever it is they’ve got, and get it out and all that – sometimes you’ve got to get out and help them or you’d be there all bloody day. If one got off the bus with a baby in her arms and didn’t pick up a pushchair – you’d notice.’
It had been the same story from the taxi drivers. Pushchairs and folding prams were bad news – they always held things up. Besides, a baby that wasn’t in a carrycot or one of those pouch things – you didn’t see that very often, not in the middle of town. You’d remember if you picked up someone with a baby in her arms, wouldn’t you?
And, so far, no one had reported seeing anyone at all walking with a baby in her arms. They had had one or two calls from neighbours who reckoned that they had suspect babies next door, but so far they had turned up nothing.
If it had been a professional snatch, the baby could be anywhere by now, Tom thought gloomily, especially if Andrea was in their pay. And if that was the case, he had to hope that he could gain her confidence enough for her to get cocky. Just one slip; that was all they would need, and McArthur could be relied upon to put the fear of God into her, Tom was sure.
He drove home to his own children, safe and well with their expectant mother, and hoped that this last throw of the dice would be successful, and that the hunt for Emma didn’t turn into the kind that made national headlines.
It hadn’t surprised Dean when the cop had appeared; he had known, as soon as he was put in a side ward, why he was getting VIP treatment.
It hadn’t surprised him when he had been arrested; that had been going to happen the minute he had fallen over the branch. He had known there was no way he could avoid capture, because those kids had seen him, and he couldn’t run, not this time.
He had declined the nurse’s offer of something to help him sleep, but now he wished he had taken him up on it, because in addition to being in pain and scared about what was going to happen, he was completely baffled, and that was what was keeping him awake. Because what had surprised him was what he had been arrested for.
Who the hell was Ian Waring, and when was he supposed to have attempted to murder him?