seventy

“Talk to me,” I said softly, wondering if Stannard had got hold of the police. “From the beginning, tell me how you wound up without your kids.”

Wary and tentative, Stacey said, “I took Ryan to the hospital because he wouldn’t stop crying. I did what any mother would do when they see their child in pain.

“Doctors examined him and thought he should have an X-ray. That’s when the nightmare began.” Her face went pale with remembered fear. “Ryan had multiple hairline fractures to his ribs and legs. It’s easier to explain away clean breaks, they told me. Tiny cracks are less easy. I knew straightaway they blamed me.”

“Where was Ryan’s dad?”

“Fabio? Back in Spain.”

“Okay,” I said indicating for her to continue.

“The doctors called social workers, who called the cops. They tried to get me to confess. They said I’d lose my child if I didn’t. How could I confess to something I hadn’t done?”

“You never struck him?” I watched her carefully.

“Never.”

Did that word connect to her eyes? Honestly, I couldn’t be sure. Perhaps she had smacked her child on a couple of occasions. Not great, but it didn’t equate to the beating social workers had suggested. “So they took Ryan?”

“And because I was already pregnant …” Her voice petered out.

“They warned you that Anita would also be taken?” I said, remembering Gerald’s words.

She nodded, as blindsided by the thought now as she’d been then. “As soon as I knew what their game was I tried to escape with Ryan, but they picked me up at the border. Even contacted Interpol.”

“You didn’t appeal?”

“Fuck’s sake, it costs tens of thousands of pounds. I didn’t have that kind of loot. Even if a parent is proven to be innocent on appeal, if the child has already been adopted, it’s too late. You can’t challenge the quacks.”

“But surely—”

“You don’t even know who half of them are,” she said, eyes darting, agitated. “All kinds of people—radiologists, paediatricians, psychiatrists and so-called la-di-dah experts—are wheeled out, faceless nobodies with posh jobs and the right lingo. Every one of them can overrule a parent. It’s a clique. It’s a con. And the speed,” she gulped, frenzied now. “Kids with you one minute, gone the next. Did you know the courts don’t need a criminal conviction to remove a child? Local authorities swoop in with a court order and court orders are never refused.”

What an utterly inadequate response to the indescribable injustice of her situation. Gerald was right to be contemptuous of the system.

“When you lose your kids,” she continued, wrenching each word from the back of her throat, “you lose them for good. Forced adoption is irreversible. There’s no going back. There wasn’t a fucking thing I could do about it. They might as well have handed me a death sentence.”

She leant towards me, her thin lips centimetres from my face. “Have you any idea what it feels like to know that your baby calls someone else mummy?” Spit from her mouth flecked my cheek.

“I’m so sorry.” It was horrific. My head throbbed. Here was a woman who had desperately wanted to mother her children, while my own mother took a different choice.

She cracked a sad smile. “Nobody has ever apologised for what they did to me, to us.”

I wanted to ask what she did next, but feared any sound I made would shut her down. A glance at the clock on the wall told me twenty minutes had passed.

With a haunted expression, she continued, “Afterwards, I fled to Spain and worked in kitchens.” She held my gaze. It’s how she’d learnt to wield a knife, how she learnt her trade, her eyes told me. Christ, if she were responsible, the exposure of Martell’s ribs suddenly made sense. Accused of breaking her son’s ribs, she was making a statement with Troy’s. I ought to get out of there. Yet I stayed put.

“You took Fabio’s name?”

“After I’d officially drowned, yeah,” she said with a sly look. “We weren’t married or living together, nothing like that. Not much good at picking men.” She clicked her tongue, smiling at her own failure. Fearing a detour, I risked a direct question.

“How did you trace the Vellenders?”

“Contacts,” she said stone-faced. “Took me years. I paid hard cash to some dodgy bastards. I got beaten up on more than one occasion, my hard-earned stolen money. Once, I was ra—” Her voice broke at the memory of something too unspeakable and raw to put into words. She swallowed, gathered momentum again, and drove herself on just the same as she must have driven herself through the many dark and empty years. “That’s what you do if you love someone. I’d have sold my own soul.”

I believed her. The way she said it made me realise how much she’d crossed over to the other side. Could that explain how she had been able to butcher Troy Martell without missing a beat? Although I still didn’t understand what specific beef she had with him.

“And you found Judge Hawkes?” I did my best to keep my voice controlled.

She cocked her head with a one step ahead of you expression. Double fuck. She knew where I was going with it. She was toying with me. I told myself to rein back.

“Tell me about Troy Martell.” I aimed to smooth the urgent rasp in my voice. Not sure I achieved it.

She fell quiet. The light in her eyes changed to one of decay and smashed dreams. I recognised the deadly intoxication of revenge. I had the feeling that she was going over in her mind what she’d done to him, enjoying and extracting the essence of it. Taking pleasure. For a woman to whom power was the ultimate aphrodisiac, exercising it helped her regain control over all those aspects of her life that were in chaos. In this regard, she was exactly like my clients. Food, or the lack of it, was the weapon used by anorexics to create order in their disordered lives. More than this, the subliminal message with each pound they lost was See, look what you’ve done to me. In the same vein, Martell’s mutilated corpse was designed to grab attention.

“How did you meet him?”

She visibly relaxed. “Like I said, you get to hook up with a lot of nasty people when you’re desperate. Met this conman, a Yank—or so I thought. Found out later he’d changed his name. We became partners.”

“Sexual partners?”

“Sometimes,” she said with a slow, So what if we were? blink. “By then, I’d discovered that my daughter was a bag of bones and my son had disappeared.”

“So you hatched a plan?”

She nodded again. “Troy’s job was to get close to Paris Vellender and find out what had happened to my son. I took a job with that bastard Otto. Rumour had it that Otto had done away with him. In a way, he had.”

Pulse racing, I crouched in the sticky silence once more. “Did you ever approach Anita?”

She shook her head. “If I’d done that, the Vellenders would have been down on me like a landslide. I’d have lost all hope of finding Ryan.” She tugged at the fabric of her jogging pants with nails bitten to the quick. “And then my baby died.” Her shoulders hunched. Her head sank into her neck, like an injured animal that has lost the will to live. “Hit Troy surprisingly hard,” she said, as if talking to the floor. “Think he had a thing for her, dirty bugger.” She paused, no doubt contemplating it. “Trouble with him, he was lazy, cut corners. Thought he was smart when he used you. He was certain you’d do all the legwork while he stood back and took the credit. He was convinced you’d find Ryan.”

And I did. “You fell out with Troy. Why?” I said.

“Tried to blackmail me. Said he’d tell the Vellenders who I was if I didn’t give him money—a lot of money,” she said, emphasising the point.

So you killed him. “And Joyce Conway?”

“Who?” Her fingers stopped moving. She looked up, her blank expression so spontaneous it couldn’t have been fabricated.

“The social worker that facilitated the adoption.”

“Never heard of her.”

I raked her face for lies. She stared straight back.

“But you’ve heard of Judge Michael Hawkes.”

She continued to stare, a faint smile flickering on her lips.

“My mother is facing a murder charge,” I exploded.

“So?”

“She didn’t kill him.”

“And neither did I. Had him in my sights, but someone beat me to it. Did me a favour.”

I blanched. “You didn’t shove a bag over his head?”

“Not my style.”

The room bled silence and threat. I was fast running out of time. And Stacey Walton knew it.

I should have seen it coming. I didn’t.