A Dark Dividing (39 page)

The agents were sure they could find a suitable tenant on this basis, and probably without too much difficulty. There was the nearby school of languages, they said. Oh no, they were not suggesting renting to students, but there were very often foreign lecturers who came there on a one- or two-year contract. That might fit the bill very nicely. Such people quite often liked to bring their wives over with them, so they did not mind paying a reasonably generous rent. Yes, certainly the rental monies could be paid directly into a bank for her; that was a perfectly normal arrangement.

‘I’ll let you know in a couple of weeks if I get the job in the north,’ said Roz.

She had some leave due to her for Christmas, which she spent on her own. There was a nurses’ party at St Luke’s to which she could have gone—beer and fruit punch in the canteen, it was—and then one of the other nurses invited her to a New Year’s Eve party at her home, but Roz had never gone to any hospital parties in the past and she did not want to do anything out of pattern in case it drew attention to her. So she said she would be having a quiet family Christmas, thank you.

For most of the holiday she watched television and listened to the radio or did crossword puzzles, and when she was not doing that she was working out the details of her plan. At times she was awed at the vastness of it, but Rosie thought it was the right thing to do. It was a good plan; parts of it were flexible, and parts of it depended on other people and on events coinciding. But Roz thought—and Rosie agreed—that it would work.

She strung Christmas decorations in the front sitting-room window because people might notice if she did not, and on Christmas Day she cooked a turkey, eating part of it for her Christmas dinner, and slicing and jointing the rest for the freezer. The neighbours on both sides of her house were away, and it was very quiet indeed. Roz did not mind; she was able to focus all her attention on what was ahead. She was used to being quiet, and in any case Christmas was really a time for children.

Ah, but this time next year—

The agents dealing with the house where Isobel Ingram lived were a much smaller firm than the ones Roz had approached about letting her own house. This was fortunate, because it was important to keep all the different parts of the plan separate.

The agents were helpful and efficient. They would be more than happy for the quietly-dressed lady to view the ground floor flat. It was not strictly speaking on the market yet because they were still waiting for probate to be granted. But they had the keys, and if she was interested they could let her know the asking price when it was fixed. Oh, and she would have to allow for the current condition of the rooms, which were a bit grubby. But it was amazing what a lick of paint and a few rolls of paper could do to a place.

‘Yes, of course I’ll take that into account. What about the keys? The thing is that I’m a nurse at St Luke’s and my current shift means I don’t finish until half past eight in the evenings. I couldn’t really get out there until nine.’

The firm’s rule these days was that all viewings had to be accompanied, but there was no furniture in this particular flat, and surely to goodness a nurse ought to be trustworthy. And nobody in the office really wanted to turn out for a nine p.m. viewing of an empty flat on a winter’s evening. If they let her take the keys for viewing the place tonight, could she bring them back the following morning?

‘What I could do,’ said Roz, pretending to think about it, ‘is put the keys through your letter-box later tonight, after I’ve had a look at the place. That way you’d have them first thing the next morning. Would that do? And I’ll be very careful about locking everywhere up.’

This was all quite acceptable. The electricity was still on, because of leaving a bit of heating in the place during the cold weather—frozen pipes, you know—so perhaps Miss Raffan would make sure that all lights were switched off when she left?

There were no problems about any of it. Miss Raffan even telephoned the next morning to make sure that the keys had been found. No, the flat was not quite what she had been looking for, after all. But you had to check, hadn’t you?

As the year gradually died, the small flutter caused by Simone and Sonia Anderson’s birth died as well.

Shortly before Christmas there was a brief announcement that the operation to separate them—the operation their father had considered against God’s wish—had gone ahead. Hard on the heels of this came a second announcement that the younger twin—Sonia—had died from respiratory arrest on the operating table. This was followed by a slightly different announcement in another newspaper that it had been renal failure, and that Sonia had not died until nearly a week later. There was next a report that Mrs Anderson would not be returning to England, and although one or two feature-writers optimistically requisitioned travelling costs and booked half-page spreads, as one editor gloomily pointed out, the world was a big place and even if you narrowed it down to Switzerland, which was the likeliest country, there were any amount of private, discreet clinics in Switzerland, and where did you start?

Martin Brannan, recently back from a holiday in France, was tracked down and questioned, but he gave no help at all. In any case he might be leaving gynaecology altogether, he said; he had been offered a research fellowship in Canada, which was a very attractive prospect. Yes, certainly he had seen the reports that Sonia Anderson had died somewhere abroad, but he knew no more than anyone else. No, he had not been involved in the operation to separate the twins; it was a very specialized field of surgery, wholly outside his province, and in fact the twins and their mother had ceased to be his patients for quite some time. Yes, of course he had recommended one or two specialist paediatricians to Mrs Anderson after the twins’ birth, but it would be a breach of medical ethics and patient confidentiality for him to disclose any of those names. No, he did not know where Melissa Anderson and the surviving twin might be now. His tone said that even if he had known he would not have divulged it.

The journalists ferreted around for a further week or two; some of them ferreted longer than others and some of them ferreted deeper than others, and a young man called Clifford Markovitch, who was trying to raise the finance to start his own gossipy, celebrity-slanted magazine and who considered himself more far-seeing than many of his colleagues, added the name of the Anderson family to the rather complex card-index he was compiling.

But in the end, since nothing is so stale as yesterday’s news, and nothing is so saleable as tomorrow’s scandal, by the third week of January the twins and their story had more or less faded from the public’s mind.

In the mind of one person it had not faded at all. Roz did not believe these rather contradictory reports of Sonia Anderson’s death. She had a very good insight into the twists and turns of the bitch’s mind, and she believed that these reports about Sonia were false, partly intended to throw journalists off the scent, but mostly intended to fool Roz herself. She kept watch on both Isobel Ingram’s flat, and on the bitch’s house. Just as she had thought, in the week following Christmas, a ‘For Sale’ board appeared in the garden of Mel’s house, with a sticker saying that viewing was strictly by appointment with the estate agents. As with Isobel’s flat, Roz took careful note of the position of curtains, and saw the mail pile up on the other side of the glass-panelled front door, although she did not think Melissa would come back here.

But on the second Saturday in January the curtains of Isobel’s flat were pulled all the way back, as if someone had wanted to let in light and air. Two of the little top windows were open, and a car—a smallish hatchback, the kind that a lot of women drove—was parked on the drive. In the back of the car was a child’s safety seat.

Just one child’s safety seat.

The agents’ keys to the empty flat in Isobel’s house had, of course, only fitted the ground floor. Roz had not expected otherwise. But on the key-ring had been a key that unlocked the main door of the house. It could not have been otherwise, of course; the occupants of the two flats would need to secure the outer door against prowlers and cats, and they would each need their own key to it. Roz had duplicates of all the keys made in one of the big, while-you-wait, key-cutting places in the town. It was a busy lunchtime, and nobody would be likely to remember the small, ordinary transaction.

As for the other transaction—

You did not work in a large hospital without getting to know a bit about all the other departments. Roz had been on the staff of Martin Brannan’s maternity clinic for two years, but she had worked in the men’s surgical ward before then, and she had also done a stint in Casualty—what was beginning to be called Accident & Emergency.

She did not know everyone who worked in St Luke’s, of course, but she knew a lot of people by sight, and a lot of people knew her by sight, which meant she could go pretty much anywhere in the building without being questioned. But could she go into the morgue? Could she openly consult the fatalities list that was posted on the notice-board outside? Yes, why not?

She went along calmly and unhurriedly the next morning. She was in uniform and she carried a hospital folder, and if anyone challenged her she was going to say she had been asked to help with some new NHS statistics that were wanted about juvenile deaths. But no one did challenge her. Right was on her side, and the stars fought in their courses for her and for two days running she was able to go down to the semi-basement where the morgue was situated without being stopped.

She had been afraid that she might have to wait a long time for a suitable death, and this had worried her quite a lot because although she could probably get away with three or four expeditions, more than that might attract attention. But on only her third trip to check the notice-board there was a new entry. A little boy, the victim of a cot-death. JDF/2841/M, and a date of birth three months earlier. How sad. The autopsy had taken place two days ago and the funeral would be the following Tuesday. A boy, a three-month-old boy. Roz considered carefully. Could she take the risk with a boy? But she might wait months for a girl. This was as nearly perfect as she could hope for. She would do it, and she would do it at once.