‘Of course, I understand. You have already been more than generous. Perhaps I could find a small hotel …’
‘Unless you have sorted out your finances, that will be difficult. Sadly our social services couldn’t help. Very restrictive rules. Surely the thing to do is to return home, Izzy, sort everything out there, rather than hanging on in this country without any visible means of support. Living in clothes which have been begged or borrowed, camping in a draughty seaside hotel. And over Christmas? Not what you are used to, I’m sure. Or Benjamin. I hear he’s finding it difficult to adjust.’
He was as accurate as he was well informed. Inevitably Benjy had been badly scarred by the sudden disappearance of those he loved most, and the return of his mother had served only to increase his confusion and apprehension that she might desert him once again. His sleep was fitful, riddled with anxiety that she might leave; his waking hours were spent either clinging to her or fretting for her return. Every time she left the room he was anxious, when they parted he was in tears, at night he woke and screamed until she was there to comfort him. A hotel would be a terrible idea.
‘Perhaps you’re right. Let’s see what the doctors say on Monday.’
‘Of course. I’m so sorry I can’t be of any further help to you.’
But, without intending it, he had. His conviction in urging her to return to the States had been as inflexible yet as persuasive and moderately argued as his original invitation to Bowminster. Confronted with the choice between her body and her departure, he had not hesitated. He wanted her gone. No man she had ever known would have done the same. Devereux was lover turned gamekeeper.
Locking her out.
He was a player in this game, trying to move her around like a pawn on a board. She knew none of the game’s rules, didn’t comprehend its objective, yet as long as the prize was the truth about Bella she knew there was no alternative but to play.
She also knew that, if he had taken the risk of offering her his home, it must have been because the risk of leaving her in Weschester was still greater. She didn’t know what she was looking for but now, at least, she thought she knew where to look.
The inspector at Weschester Constabulary smiled as she and Benjamin were shown into his cluttered office. But men always smiled at her. The secret was to know when they meant it.
She had telephoned for an interview and it had been readily granted – one of the more productive calls she’d made that morning. Katti was uncontactable, no one seemed to know where she was. The credit card company had been difficult when she was unable to give them detailed information such as the number of her card, in any event the account was based in the United States ‘and, madam, you really should have reported the loss at the time, not weeks later. That’s your legal responsibility, you know.’ The girl on the other end of the phone didn’t seem to understand the meaning of the word coma, responding as if she were on the verge of one herself, but eventually informed Izzy that she might be held liable for any misuse of the card since its loss and could pick up a replacement tomorrow at a local bank. Izzy had been unable to get through to the editor of the local newspaper, who didn’t appear to surface much before lunch, so she had left a message accompanied by her WCN credentials expressing the hope that he might have time to see her later that afternoon.
She had used the bus to cover the fifteen miles between Bowminster and Weschester; Chinnery’s constant scowl depressed her, and she didn’t care for him or others to know what she was about.
Along with the inspector’s smile Izzy and her son were offered machine-dispensed coffee and Coke in plastic cups and a homily about how local authority cuts had denied the police vital investigative tools such as fresh tea and biscuits. The station had an air of Victorian gentility about it, no Yankee hustle, no chaos of suspects being dragged inside to account for their crimes, no wailing of sirens or protestations of innocence and, apparently, no kitchen. But, she had noticed, there was a brewery next door.
The inspector listened attentively, sipping tea in between his attempts to inflict further damage with his teeth upon the end of a much-mangled pencil. He did not take notes.
‘I can’t be specific, Inspector, but something is – I don’t know how best to describe it – going on. I want your help in tracing the truth about my baby.’
‘I see,’ he mused. ‘And you think Paulette Devereux may be at the bottom of it?’
‘Of course, I have absolutely no proof, but …’
‘That’s right, you don’t. Let me ask you a few further questions, about the accident. In fact, that’s why I thought you were coming to see me.’
‘I spoke to one of your constables in hospital.’
‘Yes, I know. We were rather hoping your memory might have improved somewhat. After all, it was a serious affair, someone was killed.’
‘That’s what I’m not sure about …’
‘But you are sure you were driving?’
She nodded hesitantly. ‘I must have been.’
‘How was the accident caused?’
‘You know that already. Apparently the car went off the road. No one seems to know quite why.’
‘No other vehicles involved, no collision?’
She shook her head. ‘I simply can’t remember.’
‘You see, Miss Dean, I have a problem. A baby was killed in a car accident with no apparent cause in which you were the driver.’ The pencil was pointing directly at her. ‘That makes you liable to be charged with death by dangerous driving. Unless you can find some reason to explain the accident.’
‘But what about my baby …?’ she gasped, taken aback by the suddenness of the assault.
‘Let me put it to you bluntly, Miss Dean. You are faced with potentially very serious charges to which you have no answer, pleading amnesia. Instead you blame everyone else, from the doctors who saved your life to the hospital mortician. You even seem to accuse our local MP and his daughter of some unspecified crime which involves spiriting off the very baby for whose death you are alleged to be responsible.’ The pencil snapped in two. ‘By the way, aren’t you staying at Mr Devereux’s house?’
How did he know …?
‘Your accusations might strike some as lacking a certain gratitude, don’t you think?’
‘Inspector, I came to you for help in clearing up what has happened to my child.’ She was flustered. The sudden tension in the office had caused Benjy, until then patiently sitting in his mother’s lap, to start wriggling, and she lunged to prevent his drink spilling down the front of her dress. She was doing battle on two fronts at once; Clausewitz would not have approved.
‘You have other responsibilities, Miss Dean, to your surviving child. Our law is very protective about impecunious parents subjecting children to unnecessary hardship, and overstaying your welcome in these parts might be deemed by our social services to be just such an unnecessary hardship.’
‘I am not impecunious!’ she snapped.
‘No, I’m sure you’re not. But I want to remove as much possibility for misunderstanding from this matter as I can. You have already caused far too much. Some might even deem your accusations to suggest a measure of instability on your part – temporary, I am sure, the after-effects of your medical condition, an understandable depression. But enough to cause good people concern about the welfare of little Benjamin here. They might feel it wise to consider taking him into care.’
‘What are you trying to do to me?’
‘It’s what you are doing to yourself, Miss Dean. Can you not see that?’
‘You won’t help me search for my baby?’
‘There is nothing to search for. Forgive me, but I have a hospital report, a death certificate, reports from the autopsy and the Coroner’s Office, even a certificate of cremation, all testifying to the fact that your baby is dead. You refuse to believe it but haven’t a single shred of evidence. The obvious answer is that your medical condition is adversely affecting you, and may therefore be endangering the wel
fare of your child.’
‘You are not taking Benjamin away from me. Never!’
‘The alternative proposition is that you are deliberately seeking to confuse matters in order to cover up your guilt and responsibility for the accident. That is what a court might conclude.’
‘You are going to charge me with my own baby’s death?’ She could barely believe what she was hearing. Benjy had begun to whimper.
The inspector looked at her over the broken ends of his pencil, encouraging her to imagine the worst. When eventually he spoke, his tone was more conciliatory.
‘I think, at this stage, not. I believe we have the prima facie evidence to charge you but I am not convinced, not yet convinced, that it would serve any useful purpose. To be honest I am more concerned with the welfare of Benjamin and also your own state of mind. I am sure that neither can be served by you staying on in Weschester longer than your doctors require.’
‘What are you saying precisely?’
‘You are in grave danger of abusing our hospitality. Go home, Miss Dean. I’m telling you to go home.’
Not until much later in the day did Izzy begin to wonder how, all of a sudden, the inspector seemed to know one hell of a lot about her plans to extend her stay.
She was considerably more circumspect with Barry Brine, editor of the Wessex Chronicle, when, eventually and after some considerable delay, she was invited into his office to share yet more machine-manufactured beverage. She couldn’t get further than describing it as beverage; its identity as tea, coffee or oxtail soup remained heavily disguised beneath its frothy and swirling suds. To everyone’s relief, including his own, after walking around the town for some considerable time Benjy had fallen fast asleep.
Brine gave her the physical impression of being foreshortened, as though a vast hammer had hit him from above and compressed all his features until it seemed as though he would burst at the seams. The top of his bald head was flat and square-edged, the neck thick, waist heavy, with legs simply not long enough to do justice to his top-heavy body. Perhaps, she hoped for the sake of her own endeavours, he had spent his life remorselessly bulldozing his way through locked doors and closed minds. Alternatively, banging his head against a brick wall. She would soon discover which.
She did not mention her fears about Devereux or his daughter, she stuck instead to the possible case of mistaken identity at the hospital and mortuary. Unlike the police inspector, Brine made copious notes with one of a series of coloured pens he kept in his shirt pocket.
‘Have you raised this matter with the hospital?’ he enquired, stretching the vowels in traditional West Country manner as though he were eating them for lunch.
‘Oh, yes.’
‘And what did they suggest?’
‘Sedatives and a course of psychiatry.’
He arched an eyebrow but, before he could explain whether it implied scepticism of his visitor or her doctors, they were interrupted. He had not shut the door, a steady stream of disturbances was likely and, perhaps, on the editor’s part, wanted. A young man, late twenties with the rain-softened brogue of a southern Irishman, required urgent decisions about photographs. The editor excused himself and disappeared. He was gone many minutes and, when he returned in the company of the young man, was apologetic.
‘I’m very sorry, Miss Dean, but sadly we have deadlines approaching. And, as much as I would like to, I fear there is little we can do.’
It was the brick wall.
‘Couldn’t you simply ask? Make a few enquiries? All I want to do is to establish the facts.’
‘I’m afraid that missing children are not really our diet.’
‘Please …’
‘You see – I hate to admit as much to another journalist, but I have to be up-front about it – people don’t buy our paper for news and scoops. They buy it for the classified advertising, the news about the sales and what’s on at the cinema and who’s got arrested or died. Strictly hatches, matches and despatches, that’s us. We’ve no call for investigative journalism here.’ He threw his hands wide. ‘Look around my office. Does it look like a hotbed of intrigue and insight?’
He slumped back into his chair, shirt buttons straining, shirt tail adrift. As he replaced the pen in his pocket he left a smear of fresh ink on the polyester. She could see what he meant.
‘Your story touches me, more than I can say. I’ve got kids, four of ’em, I know what you must be feeling.’
She had been waiting for that one. She wanted very much to scream.
‘I wish with all my heart I could help you, this gives me a real and deep sense of personal failure – it is not for us. I hope you will understand.’
And already she was being ushered to the door and a secretary was weaving her between the desks of the cluttered newsroom towards the far exit. Before the door closed on her she turned for one final look. Behind the protective glass walls of his office, the editor was hiding his real and deep sense of personal failure by recounting a joke which caused the whole of his heavy frame to wobble like a jelly.
That evening, as she travelled back to Bowminster on the bus, she clung to Benjy with all her might, burying her head in his hair, pretending to sleep. She wanted no one to see the tears.
‘Did you see her? Practically falling out of her dress. Cut up to her knickers and down to her navel. Tart!’
The Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Richard Flood, as usually happened when he’d had one malt and mineral water too many, havered and gyrated between relaxation and aggression. What with reshuffles and rising unemployment and being bloodied at by-elections in Scotland it had proved a difficult parliamentary session, though underway scarcely a month, and everyone had grasped at the approach of Christmas with acute relish. And Christmas, it was commonly agreed, was getting earlier every year. The two other men nodded in understanding.
‘I found her, you know, years ago,’ the Prime Minister continued, ‘when she was … what? Opposition spokesmistress for Misery or Moral Decay or some such crap. In her little office at the House of Commons overlooking Speaker’s Court, with a parliamentary researcher half her age. Can’t imagine what he was researching but she certainly wasn’t providing very effective Opposition!’
The laughter was coarse. Devereux wondered what Flood, who at the time could have been no more than a junior Government spokesman himself, had been doing wandering late at night around the none-too-accessible corridors where Shadow Ministers had their miserably cramped quarters, and in particular inviting himself into the office of a woman whose widely discussed parliamentary reputation had been established as much on her back as on her feet. He tried to fashion an innocent interpretation for his colleague’s motives, and failed.
‘She was a remarkable sight tonight, I must admit,’ offered the American Ambassador. ‘Crimson dress, that eyeshadow. The pile of extraordinary yellow hair.’
‘A parrot,’ Devereux riposted. ‘You know, in the Green Room, against the backdrop of that marvellous Japanese wallcovering you have, all that lush foliage and bamboo? She reminded me overwhelmingly of a parrot.’
‘A bird of paradise, in her day,’ Flood mumbled.
‘Antique, you know,’ the Ambassador added, a trifle vaguely. ‘The wallcovering, I mean. Not the parrot.’
The locker-room laughter erupted once again. They were sitting in the private quarters of the Ambassador’s residence, Winfield House, an elegant mansion set in the heart of London’s Regent’s Park. Half an hour earlier they had watched a fox slinking through the grounds in search of a duck dinner, but that had been a couple of stiff whiskies ago. And the Prime Minister had already exhausted himself after battling against the flood tide of Embassy hospitality that had flowed freely through the reception rooms downstairs. He was relaxed, amongst friends, vulnerable; it was a good time for the Ambassador to strike.
‘So what do you think? You guys going to be able to help us on the Duster, Prime Minister?’
‘The man never sleeps!’ the h
ead of government responded in a tone of mild rebuke, seeking inspiration in his glass. ‘It’s … looking good.’
‘But not certain,’ Devereux interjected flatly.
‘I thought you’d made a lot of progress on your last trip to Washington, Paul. We’ve given a damn sight more than makes strict commercial sense. We’ve guaranteed you a massive chunk of the design and manufacturing spin-offs, you’ve got the funding arrangements you want, the specs have been adapted to suit you. Hell, we even twisted the arms of the Saudi navy to order a new destroyer from one of your yards. Sure is difficult to see what more you can expect from us to make it a good financial proposition.’
The Prime Minister looked to Devereux. Flood had been elevated by his colleagues for his capacity to listen and his willingness to heed their point of view, but what had been seen as a source of strength at a time of prosperity was increasingly regarded as indecisiveness as the pendulum swung back towards recession and retribution. The Prime Minister convinced himself he was standing firm; to others, including his colleagues, it appeared increasingly the stance of a rabbit before the headlamps. In any event he felt too relaxed to throw his mind around the Ambassador’s questions; he was happy to leave it to his colleague.
‘It’s not just a financial proposition,’ Devereux began. ‘You have to understand the political problems it causes, too.’
The Ambassador arched a thick greying eyebrow.
‘We’ve had a difficult period,’ Devereux continued. ‘Jobless figures rising, miserable by-elections, media whining all the time. It could be said – will be said – that the country needs a multi-billion-dollar fighter project slightly less than a Government-sponsored arse-kicking contest.’
‘You’re not going to let a little whingeing deflect you, surely?’
‘Of course not,’ snapped the Prime Minister heatedly.
‘Of course not,’ Devereux repeated with considerably more control. ‘We can ignore the whingeing, but we can’t ignore the political realities.’