Blood Ties (24 page)

Cursing, Robert marched back to his bedroom, snapped on the light and flung open the wardrobe doors. Most of Erin’s clothes were missing while some lay heaped on the floor of the cupboard. On the dressing table, her jewellery box was gone and in the bathroom all female toiletries and Erin’s toothbrush were absent. He checked Ruby’s room, and while more belongings remained, it was obvious that clothes and personal items had been packed and removed.

Robert fell onto Ruby’s bed and pushed his face into the pillow. He felt as bereft as the day when he’d finally managed to dispose of Jenna’s possessions from their home. Piece by piece he had packed her away and shipped her off to charity shops, grieving relatives, the dustbin; her life nothing more than a couple of visits to the council tip.

Robert
, she said.

He jerked his head up, hopeful it was Erin. When Robert realised it was Jenna’s voice, urging him not to repeat his mistakes, he finally acknowledged that Erin and Ruby had left him.

Sarah comes to see me every week. It’s a comfort for both of us. I never take any money from her but I always lay out the tarot, always scam a shot of hope in an otherwise bleak life. She hasn’t told her father that she’s carrying a baby. It tells me how much attention he pays to his beautiful daughter because her belly is proving like bread dough.

She’s visiting on Saturday at six o’clock this week. Her father and brothers are going to a family celebration, and like all good Cinderellas, she’s not invited.

‘It’s men only,’ she tells me when Saturday finally comes. The week has dragged by and clients have been scarce. I get ready for her visit two hours before she’s due. ‘I’m glad not to be going,’ she says. ‘I’m not feeling very well.’

I guide her to the chair and switch on one bar of heat on the electric fire. The sun seems to have dropped too soon and, despite being June, there is an unusual chill in the air. Andy and I were going to open up the tiny fireplace and have real log blazes but we never got round to it before he left.

I reach my arms around Sarah’s belly, as if to welcome the baby into my home. Sarah smiles.

‘I can feel his shape,’ I tell her. ‘That’s his foot there and that lump could be an elbow.’ I place Sarah’s hand on her baby’s protuberances and her grin broadens. I make her happy and I’m happy because there is a baby in the house again. ‘You will still visit me, won’t you, when he’s born?’ It suddenly occurs to me that perhaps she won’t need my friendship when the new love comes into her life.

‘I want you to be his godmother,’ she says. The roof lifts on my miserable existence and sunshine pours in, making everything look like it’s been painted bright yellow.

 

After the press conference Andy and I didn’t take our eyes off the telephone or the television. Sheila moved in with us although she sent Don back home, mainly because he was offering me sympathy and that, as far as Sheila was concerned, wasn’t something I deserved.

The next day our story was on the front page of most newspapers, local and national. When it was obvious there wouldn’t be any immediate developments, like a body, the reporter’s vans gradually diminished as other news became more exciting.

That was it really, apart from a couple of mentions on the evening news and radio bulletins. Our story slipped further down the list until we fell off the bottom. Several of the nationals ran a follow-up story and more pictures of Natasha a week later, reminding the country that our baby was still lost. But before long the people of Britain had forgotten us; we were old news and our plight was in the hands of the police.

Of course, had Natasha been found alive and well, that would have caused a spatter of stories for a day or so but what the press really wanted was a body. Natasha’s dead body would have set the presses rolling triple time, but for now, more important things were happening in the world like Russia announcing stuff about their nuclear stash.

Sheila, despite her pursed lips and severe hairstyle and choppy way of speaking, kept us alive in the weeks that followed Natasha’s disappearance. By attending to the basics of life, such as cooking, cleaning, washing, deflecting phone calls, shopping and sending away unwelcome visitors, she allowed Andy and me to grieve as the faint thread of spider-spun hope stretched and thinned and eventually snapped. As February drew to a close, Natasha minus seven weeks, we knew that we would never see our baby again.

Andy lost his job during the same week that they suspected me of murdering Natasha. I can’t remember clearly whether Detective Inspector Lumley and PC Miranda hauled me in for questioning before or after Andy came home early, angry as sin, saying he’d been fired for spending too much time in the toilets. I could tell by the clear lines cut through his grimy face that he’d been sobbing a while in the loos. We both sobbed every day but not in front of one another and not for the same reasons.

Sheila finally moved back to her own house but visited regularly, mainly to see Andy, to bring round bags of frozen stew and soup. The day I was taken in for questioning she’d called by unexpectedly and handed me a box of food for the freezer, knowing I was still incapable of shopping, but she wouldn’t come in when I said that Andy was out.

A few minutes after she’d left, there was another knock at the door and I recall thinking that she’d changed her mind, that perhaps I wasn’t such a careless daughter-in-law after all and maybe it wasn’t entirely my fault that her granddaughter was gone. I skipped back to the door, desperate to be loved by Sheila, feeling the first pang of hope in ages that something good could come of this, but it was the police standing there. Detective Inspector George Lumley and PC Miranda, all serious, requested that I accompany them to the station for questioning. Once again my world crashed into an unfathomable vortex of noise.

I was allowed to put on my shoes and a coat and lock up the house. I sat in the back of the police car with PC Miranda next to me. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders, pull her hair, scratch her face, poke out her eyes – anything to make her consider the time we had spent together in the days immediately after Natasha was taken. She was my ally in the endless and lonely search for my baby. She was the person who had reeled me through the early days, consoled me and talked endlessly to me about the future, that there would be one, and once she had even bathed me when I’d vomited and my hair was matted. PC Miranda had gone above and beyond the call of her duty. Now she was just doing her duty.

‘You’re not being arrested, Cheryl. The detective inspector just wants to get a few things clear about what happened that day.’ PC Miranda patted my leg and gave me a forced half-smile, which told me I was as good as arrested.

At the police station I was taken to an interview room and told to wait. PC Miranda sat with me but didn’t talk. The room was cold and everything in it was grey. When she saw me shivering, she went and fetched me a coarse blanket. That was grey, too. She offered me a cup of tea but I couldn’t drink it. While I waited, I was thinking, am
I
the criminal now?

DI Lumley came into the room with another policeman who I didn’t recognise. Lumley was tall with broad shoulders and an impatient face with small features. His eyes looked like boiled sweets that had been sucked away and his nose was a crooked line, too narrow for such a wide man. Now that he wasn’t on my side any more, he didn’t look very nice.

PC Miranda moved me over to a melamine table and I sat on one side while the police sat opposite. They each had clipboards and there was a tape recorder between us. They switched it on and began to log dates and case numbers and state who was present in the room. I’d seen all this before, on the television, when criminals were arrested. I tried to remember what it was I was meant to have done but all I could focus on was that I’d lost my baby.

Lost my baby, I repeated over and over. Lost my baby.

Perhaps they were questioning me because I’d been so careless. That could be a crime, leaving your car unlocked or indeed leaving your baby in the car in the first place. Maybe I was unfit to be a mother and I deserved to be locked up.

‘This won’t take long, Mrs Varney. There are just a couple of things we want to clarify about . . .’ DI Lumley paused, glanced at his partner and then continued. ‘About the day that your baby was abducted. I know this isn’t easy and I want to assure you that I have a number of my top men working on this case. But we have very little to go on and just need your clarification on a couple of points.’

‘Of course,’ I said. My shoulders were hunched and hurt whichever way I sat. Since Natasha had gone, my body had begun to shrivel and desiccate. I was managing to eat a little these days and had sips of water and tea but even so, my bones dug into whatever I sat on and ached as if they were going to snap. My hair was falling out too. ‘I’ll try to help.’

‘I’d like to start with the bootee.’ Lumley looked at his associate and nodded. The other man produced a sealed plastic bag from behind his clipboard. It contained Natasha’s knitted boot, the one that I’d found in the street. It was squashed flat and looked greyer than I remembered. ‘Do you recognise this item, Mrs Varney?’

I wanted to kick their legs under the table, reach out and punch their chins, gouge out their eyes to show them a fraction of the pain I was suffering, would always be suffering. But that would only bring them closer to their goal, to find a suspect. I would fit the bill nicely, because they hadn’t made any progress. Unsolved cases cluttering his desk obviously didn’t please DI Lumley. He’d never really been sympathetic to my trauma. Now he was reduced to searching under his nose for a solution. Futile follow-ups on the leads they’d so far investigated had driven them to me. I took the plastic bag from the policeman. Inside was Natasha’s bootee, a little muddy, but definitely the one I found that awful day.

‘Of course I recognise it. I’ve already told you all this.’

‘Take another look, Mrs Varney. Study it very closely. Is there any possibility that it isn’t your baby’s?’

‘No. It’s hers, I tell you.’ I gave the bootee another quick glance. ‘Sheila, my mother-in-law, knitted a pair of bootees and a matching hat. I found this on the high street when I realised Natasha was gone and I saw someone running away through the car park. They were carrying a baby. It must have fallen off Natasha’s foot when the . . .’ it’s hard but they’re making me angry, ‘when the kidnapper took her. They always used to fall off.’

‘I see.’ DI Lumley made some notes on his clipboard and then requested something else from his associate. He was handed a piece of paper. ‘Mrs Varney, what if I told you that this isn’t your baby’s bootee and that you are mistaken. Naturally, we have interviewed your mother-in-law, Sheila Varney, and requested that she provide us with a sample of wool from the bootee and hat set that she knitted. Fortunately, she had some wool left over and when the sample was analysed, it was found to be a completely different brand and mix of wool to the one this bootee is made from.’ DI Lumley took the bag from my fingers and held it up, shaking it so that the bootee danced. ‘The lab report is conclusive. This bootee is not the one made by Sheila Varney.’

DI Lumley slid the piece of paper across the table to me. I stared at it but didn’t understand it. It was scientific jargon from the police forensic department.

‘But it is Natasha’s, I swear.’ My voice began to crumble and my eyes filled with tears. How could they do this to me? It was the only glimmer of hope I had, a finger pointing them to Natasha, and now they were disputing the trail. ‘How many little bootees like this can there be? Perhaps Sheila gave you the wrong sample of wool. She’s got a whole basket stuffed full of wool.’ I was desperate for them to believe me.

‘Of course we considered that possibility so we also ran a DNA test on the skin cells harvested from the bootee.’ Lumley stopped there, his lips chewing together as if he could hardly contain the words he wanted to hurl at me. His partner slid another piece of paper across the table to me. I glanced at it but again it didn’t make sense. ‘We hoped to match it to Natasha’s DNA sample that we took from her hairbrush.’

‘And? ’ I gathered my thoughts and compacted my voice into a terse missile. I didn’t want DI Lumley to think that I was getting agitated.

‘The test was negative, Mrs Varney. No match. This bootee is definitely not your baby’s.’

How can they know all this? I wondered. Be so sure about the opposite of what I’m telling them?

‘Moving on, Mrs Varney, we also need to clarify about the cake.’

‘Are you going to show me that too, all sealed up in a bag? It’ll be a bit mouldy after all these weeks.’ My head dropped forward onto the edge of the table and I exhaled. PC Miranda was suddenly beside me, stroking my back, probably warning me to watch what I said. I’d heard of innocent people being arrested for crimes they didn’t commit. If I offered enough little signs of desperation, they would eventually add up to one big piece of evidence and I would be arrested. But what crime was I supposed to have committed? How could I steal my own baby? What were they implying?

‘In your statement from the afternoon of Saturday, the fourth of January, you told us that you parked your car in the supermarket car park, see attached plan for exact location of vehicle, and went into the shop carrying your purse in order to purchase a cake to take to your mother-in-law’s house. You left your baby Natasha asleep in the car. You paid cash for your cake at the express checkout and when you returned to your vehicle Natasha was not there.’ He stared at me, his trained eyes boring into me.

‘That’s right,’ I said.

‘Perhaps you could explain then, Mrs Varney, why the supermarket’s accounting records show that you paid for your cake on your Visa debit card a full twenty minutes
after
you claim that you purchased the cake for cash?’