The Child Page 8

  Kate considered her own position. She reckoned she was on the list somewhere—age and size of salary would count against her—but she crossed her fingers that others would volunteer to take the money before they got to her name. She didn’t want to go. She didn’t know what else was out there job-wise, and life without work wasn’t worth thinking about. What would she do all day? Watch telly and do sudoku in those big puzzle books? She’d rather die. She’d rather write celebrity nonsense. What she needed was a big story.

  Terry walked over and Kate glanced up.

  “All right, Kate?” he asked. “You look terrible.”

  “Thanks, Terry. Sweet of you to say. I’m fine. Just got a bit of a domestic going on. My eldest.”

  “What’s Jake got up to?” Terry asked. “I’m sick of my kids. All they want is money and lifts to parties.”

  “Bit of a wobble at university. It’ll sort itself out,” she said.

  • • •

  The news that the Crime Man was going came at about six thirty. Late enough that he could be ushered out of the building with minimum fuss if things got nasty. He’d been called into the managing editor’s office and, fifteen minutes later, emerged as an ex–Post reporter.

  “They’ve given me a shedload of money,” he said to Kate as he started dumping his belongings into a black bin bag. “I’ll be fine. Time for a change. Been here too long.”

  They both knew there would be no more jobs. Too old. Too old-school.

  “The worst bit is telling her indoors,” he said. “Don’t know whether to phone Maggie or wait until I get home. God knows what she’ll say. But it’s likely to be at full volume.”

  “Oh, come on, Maggie’ll understand,” Kate said. Actually, she had no confidence that “The Iron Lady,” as she was known in the office, would be sympathetic—it was a side of her nobody had ever witnessed—but Kate was trying not to dwell on the negatives.

  “We’ll see,” he said and shook his head wearily.

  “Anyway, where will you have your leaving do? Everyone will want to come and give you a proper Fleet Street send-off,” Kate said, picking up a stray envelope off the floor.

  “Yeah. I’ll sort something out. I’d like it at the Cheshire Cheese—it’s where I was taken on my first day as a national newspaper reporter. Back in the Stone Age. We used to go there when the presses started up. Whole building used to vibrate. And the noise . . .” His voice had begun to stick and he shut up, pretending to check his drawers.

  “I’ll probably do it on Friday,” he said eventually. “Get it over and done with. I’ll let the Major know and he can send an e-mail to everyone.”

  He looked round at the office and his shoulders drooped. “Better go then.”

  Terry walked over and the other reporters began to stand up.

  “Good luck, mate,” the Major called across as the Crime Man picked up the bin bag containing the evidence of his career. Kate picked up her notebook and began banging the desk with it. The other reporters did the same and the subs and back bench joined in the cacophony, thumping the tables with their fists and whatever else came to hand. They banged the Crime Man out as tradition required. It was a roar of emotion in a gray new world and he wept as he left for the last time.

  When the door closed behind him and the noise stopped, everyone looked shaken and teary.

  “I’m going for a drink,” the Major said. “I need one.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Kate

  FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 2012

  The Cheshire Cheese was a labyrinth of wood-paneled hidey-holes and snugs in Fleet Street. It had been the haunt of journalists—the scene of punch-ups, celebrations, and wakes—until the papers scattered to the four corners of the capital in the 1990s. Now, the Cheese sold itself as a colorful relic of those days. The new owners peddled anecdotes of historic scoops and back-slapping camaraderie to the tourists and city workers who had moved in. As if journalism belonged to another age.

  But it still smelled the same, Kate thought, as she shook the never-ending rain off her umbrella and threaded her way through the standing drinkers to the private room upstairs. Stale beer and crisp breath.

  The noise grew as she climbed the last stairs and burst over her when she walked into the party. The Crime Man was center stage, handing pints over the heads of his former colleagues, red faced, shouting, and sweating already.

  She looked round quickly, a reporter’s scan. Who’s here? Who’s interesting? Who do I want to avoid?

  Her eyes lit on the coppers in the corners. It was a real gathering of the clans. She could see the Met press office almost in its entirety—even Colin Stubbs on a late pass—and what looked like detectives from every big story the Post had covered.

  “Bob,” she shouted above the din, working her way through the crowd. He hadn’t heard her.

  Detective Inspector Bob Sparkes was deep in conversation with another officer. She hadn’t seen him since the Bella Elliott case. They’d spoken on the phone a few times but Kate hadn’t been on his patch in Hampshire since.

  He suddenly caught sight of her and smiled. Kate felt a bit goose-bumpy. Ridiculous. How old are you? she told herself crossly. She suddenly wasn’t sure how to greet him. Handshake or kiss on the cheek?

  DI Sparkes clearly had no such dilemma. The detective stuck out his hand immediately and she shook it warmly.

  “Hello, Bob,” she said. “Great to see you.”

  “Lovely to see you, too, Kate,” he said, still smiling. “Must be over a year.”

  “More like two years,” she corrected him. She hadn’t let go of his hand yet. She gave it a final squeeze.

  “This is Kate Waters, the reporter I was telling you about,” DI Sparkes said to a younger colleague. “Kate, this is Detective Sergeant Chris Butler.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard all about you,” the young DS said. “The boss is your number one fan.”

  Kate and Bob reddened and the DS grinned. Both started to talk at the same time, stumbling over each other’s words and then stopped. It was Bob who steered the conversation into calmer waters.

  “What are you up to then, Kate? What have you got your teeth into now?”

  She signaled her gratitude with her eyes and plowed on, grabbing at the details of the baby story for cover. She’d actually been working on a story about an MP’s expenses claim for the last couple of days—“An Editor’s Must,” Terry had said—but the baby had popped straight into her head. It seemed to be playing in the back of her mind like an annoying tune. Her earworm.

  She started to change the subject to the MP’s sordid claims for “entertaining constituents,” but Bob stopped her, going back to the baby, asking about the progress of the forensics and the history of the area. The young DS began to glaze over and Kate could see he was looking for a getaway. Bob clocked it, too.

  “Why don’t you get Kate a drink, Chris? She’s going to die of thirst, standing here with us.”

  DS Butler nodded, took her order, and was sucked into the crowd.

  They looked at each other. “It’s so noisy, Kate, I can hardly hear you. Old age . . .” Sparkes said. “Chris won’t be back for ages once Gordon gets hold of him. Let’s go downstairs and have a quiet drink.”

  She followed him out, noting the gray hairs and growing bald patch on his retreating head. He was still sexy, though.

  They sat at a small, sticky table, he with a Diet Coke, she with a warm white wine.

  “So, this baby. Do they have any idea who it might be?” he said, immediately picking up the thread of their discussion.

  Still not up for small talk, then, she thought, abandoning any idea of a cozy tête-à-tête.

  “Not as far as I know, Bob. It’s not a recent burial, they say. Maybe historic, even, but tests are still going on. It was newborn and I’ve heard, unofficially, that the copper on the case thinks i
t was probably a desperate single mother back in the dim and distant past when illegitimacy mattered. I don’t think he’s that interested, really. They’re all up to their ears in the Olympics, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and terrorism threats.”

  Sparkes nodded. “’Course they are.”

  “I’ve written about the discovery of the body—it was in the paper last Saturday,” Kate added. “So small, you probably wouldn’t have seen it. Anyway, I’m not sure how much further I can take it as a story. If it’s a domestic, it’ll have limited news value as far as my lot are concerned. Might make a page lead, but I’m not sure it’s worth too much running around.”

  She waited for a response. She felt she had wittered on long enough. Didn’t want to bore the man.

  “What about you? What are you up to?” she said when the silence grew.

  Bob put down his glass and smiled at her. “Sorry, Kate. Just thinking. I’m doing some policy revision for the force at the moment. Apparently, that’s also police work. Anyway, have the Met looked at missing persons? They must have.”

  “I expect so, but it’s hard when they don’t know what era to start with. Why?”

  “It’s not a long list, wherever they start looking. Abducting babies is an unusual crime anyway, but the number not found is tiny.”

  Kate nodded. She was trying to think of any cases where a missing baby hadn’t been found and reunited with its parents within weeks, if not days. She remembered the disappearance of a baby who was reported stolen from a car. But all the other headline cases had ended happily.

  “I can think of three cases,” Bob said. “Baby taken from backseat of a car in London.”

  “Just thinking about that one,” Kate said. “Must be twenty years ago.”

  “Yes, and then one taken from a pram outside the a co-op somewhere just after—possibly a copycat crime—and a newborn taken from a maternity hospital in Hampshire in the seventies, Alice she was called. Never seen again.”

  “Don’t know either of those. Were you involved in the Hampshire case?” Kate said.

  Sparkes laughed. “Hardly, Kate. I’m not that old. I was about thirteen at the time.”

  “Sorry,” she said and laughed with him. “Hadn’t done the maths . . .”

  “I remember the case because one of my aunties had a baby around then,” Sparkes said. “And she called my cousin Alice. So she and my mum talked of little else for a while. It was a big story—not twenty-four/seven like it would be now, but it made an impression and I’ve never forgotten her name.”

  “Another of your lost children, Bob?” Kate said. She knew the list from their previous entanglement: Bella Elliott, of course; Laura Simpson, taken by her pedophile uncle; Baby W, shaken to death by his stepfather; Ricky Voules, drowned in a park. Bob Sparkes carried them all with him—those he’d rescued and those he felt he’d failed during his career. And little Alice was tucked away there, too, apparently.

  “Have a look at your cuttings files on missing children, Kate, if you’re interested. I might have a quick look at the files our end,” he said, and she knew he would. Sparkes was the sort of detective who could never let anything go.

  “May be nothing but . . .” His thought was interrupted by DS Butler putting his head round a pillar.

  “Speeches, boss. Hurry up or you’ll miss them,” the young officer said, his face flushed and excited.

  “Coming,” Sparkes said. “He doesn’t get out of Southampton much,” he muttered to Kate and they grinned at each other.

  “Bring your wine—we ought to get back up there,” he said, but she knew he was all about the Building Site Baby. And now, so was she.

  NINETEEN

  Kate

  MONDAY, APRIL 2, 2012

  The remnants of the reference library staff dwelled in the bowels of the newspaper, troglodyte survivors of the Google revolution. They were reduced to a handful of oddbods and nerds, a low-budget version of the Star Wars bar, the Crime Man said—used to say, she reminded herself. Their heyday had come and gone with the advent of Internet searches, but they were still there, sorting and filing every story published and holding on to their expert knowledge of news items of the past century until the last paper cutting was digitalized.

  Kate always enjoyed challenging them with bizarre requests: Have you got anything on widows who married their husband’s brother? There would be a pause while the librarian disappeared down the corridors of filing cabinets, and he or she would appear with a brown envelope of cuttings marked “Marriages: Women Who Married Brothers-in-Law.” Never failed to amaze.

  The library smelled of paper and silverfish when Kate pushed open the swing door, and she breathed it in deeply. It was the scent of her past; the days of running down the stairs to the library when a story broke, racing through telephone directories at the counter in search of a name, leafing through cuttings, and spotting the vital link that would make a tip-off work.

  Bill Bridges, a man who wore the sort of jumpers normally favored by Portuguese tractor drivers and seemed to have been on the brink of retirement for decades, looked up from his table.

  “Hello, Kate, what can we do for you?”

  “I’m looking at old missing children cases, from around 1970 to the mid-1990s,” she said.

  “Well, you’ve come to the right place,” he laughed. “We do old. Do you have a name? Or shall I get ‘Missing Children, General’ for the periods?”

  “I’ve only got one. Alice, I think, so I’d better take all the folders,” she said.

  “Alice Irving,” Bill said, quietly, mentally flicking through his internal filing system. “The baby who disappeared from a hospital, right?” His knowledge and recall of news stories was legendary.

  Kate nodded.

  “Hmm. Army family. Based in Hampshire. Aldershot, was it? Or Basingstoke? Mother suspected, I seem to remember,” he added.

  “The mother? Really?” Kate said, her pulse quickening. “Well, let’s have her folder, too, please.”

  Upstairs, she and Joe unpacked the bulging envelopes. The cuttings were yellowing and starting to crumble, and Joe looked doubtful as he carefully unfolded the first one in the “Missing Children, General” folder.

  “You’re looking for the mother of a baby who went missing between twenty and forty years ago?” he asked, his brow puckering. “Why?”

  “Because I want to know what happened, Joe. It’s called human interest. Not all news is about soap stars or politicians. This has got the makings of a good story. I can feel it in my waters.”

  Joe looked slightly squeamish.

  “It’s a saying, dear. Nothing gyno about it.”

  He looked mortified and she felt terrible. She was turning into one of the dinosaurs.

  She could see he was disappointed. He had probably expected to be part of an investigations team blowing the lid off some international conspiracy when he joined the Post.

  “Come on, it’ll be fun,” she heard herself say, as if to a recalcitrant child. Why does everything have to be fun to matter these days?

  “We’re looking for babies who disappeared without a trace. A contact has suggested three possibles, but we’ve only got years and one name.”

  She looked at Joe’s drooping mouth and sighed.

  “You take Alice Irving, then. We are looking for clues to the whereabouts of her mother, Angela Irving.” Oh God, I sound like a policeman. “Anyway, we need to find her now and there may be leads in the stories at the time.”

  “Leads?” he said.

  “Clues, Joe. Things like relatives’ names, old addresses, places where she used to work. We can go back to them and ask where she moved to. She might have stayed in touch. Do you see?”

  Joe nodded glumly. No keywords or search engines. He looked lost.

  “Okay, how about if you search for her birth and marriage cert
ificates online first,” Kate said. Joe looked a bit more interested.

  “The more info we have on her—middle name, date of birth, that sort of thing—the easier it will be to track her down now,” she said.

  “Look for the marriage first—it’ll be easier. We’ve got the husband’s name—Nick, probably Nicholas, Irving—from the cuttings, and Angela’s first name. It says they had a two-year-old son when Alice was taken so they probably married at least a year before he was born. Look for everyone called Irving who married in 1967—it’s done alphabetically—and work backwards through the sixties and then forwards if you don’t find them there. The marriage register will have Angela’s maiden name and then you can search for her parents and siblings. Okay?”

  She noticed he was looking at her in a worryingly wide-eyed way and wasn’t writing anything down.

  “Make a note, Joe. Reporters make notes. Make that your first golden rule.”

  Joe picked up his pen and scribbled down the names while Kate logged into the Births, Deaths, and Marriages website on his computer and left him to fill in the boxes and press enter.

  “Actually, start with a search of deaths, in case she’s died,” she added. “We don’t want to waste time looking for a corpse.”

  While Joe clicked, Kate speed-read the cuttings files from the nineties. She quickly found the abductions—one was a six-month-old girl, the other practically a toddler. Neither had been found but it didn’t seem likely they would ever fit the description of a newborn. She dutifully noted down names and dates, in case.

  When she picked up Alice’s file, there were at least fifty stories—the last in 1999 when three babies’ bodies had been found in Staffordshire. She remembered the case—there was some talk of incest and the mother/murderer had been sent to a psychiatric hospital. It was an investigation that was over before it had got going and the Post’s man in the Midlands had covered the trial, but Kate had been sent to try to get a talk with the family. They’d told her to piss off. She’d been glad. They looked like the cast of Deliverance.