From the Cradle (2 page)

Chapter 1
Helen – Day 1
Eighteen months later

‘Hurry up, Hel!’

Helen could hear Sean jangling his keys in the hall, no doubt checking his watch and tutting.

‘I’m nearly ready!’ Helen called back down the stairs from the bathroom, trying to keep her tone light. This was their first date night in weeks and she didn’t want it to start off on the wrong foot.

Frankie was in the bath, playing with her bath toys, three brightly coloured water-squirting plastic vehicles. She squirted a long stream of water at Helen and giggled so hard that she lost her balance and slipped backwards under the bubbles. Helen lunged for her and hoisted her back up, holding her breath for the imminent cries, but Frankie just looked surprised and then, realizing she now had a Regency-style wig of bubbles on her head, laughed even harder. Helen laughed too, even though her vintage silk blouse now had a long wet streak down the front.

‘Come on, time to get out. Alice is going to read you a story. You promise to be a good girl for her?’

Frankie nodded vigorously, sending bubbles flying around the steamy bathroom. Helen was privately slightly bemused by her three-year-old daughter’s devotion to her surly teenage half-sister. Alice had the sort of grudge against humanity that made Pol Pot seem positively benevolent and, worse, since she’d started dating Larry, there was more than a faint whiff of booze around her. Alice’s beautiful caramel-coloured skin was permanently caked beneath a thick layer of dark foundation to hide spots that were barely visible to start with, and her soft black curls had taken on a limp defeated appearance.

‘Teenagers,’ Sean often said, definitively. ‘They’re all the same.’

But were they really? Helen wondered. She lifted Frankie out of the bath, with the towel twisted in front of her body to form a tight handle so she could lift her without touching her – a favourite game. She giggled again as Helen set her down on the bathmat and hugged her wet body close. Her almost-black hair was plastered in spikes to her head, and her brown eyes laughed as she hugged Helen back. Like Alice, Frankie had caramel skin, a shade lighter than Helen’s. Sean was the only Caucasian in the family, something that confused people when they learned that the two girls were half sisters – as if it did not compute that a white man could choose not one but two black women as mothers to his children.

For a second Helen thought of those two other sets of parents, both within three miles of their own house, who no longer heard their babies giggle, could no longer feel their dense fragrant warmth in their arms. It was unspeakable. For the dozenth time she felt anxious about leaving Frankie with Alice.

‘HELEN!’ bellowed Sean from the front door. ‘They’ll have given away our reservation if you don’t get a move on! Let Alice do it – Alice, can you go up and take over, please?’

Helen had already persuaded Frankie into her Dry-Nite pull-ups and brushed cotton pyjamas. She was rubbing her daughter’s hair dry and helping her clean her tiny teeth by the time Alice finally dragged herself away from her beloved iPad and the endless supply of humorous YouTube videos and old episodes of
The Big Bang Theory
which was all she ever seemed to watch.

Frankie’s face lit up when she saw her big sister. ‘Ali! You read my story, yeah?’

‘Alright, trouble. Come on, let’s go and choose a book. Only one, mind, and no fuss when it’s finished.’

Frankie wriggled off Helen’s lap and dragged Alice away towards her room.

‘Alice?’ Helen called, unbuttoning her shirt to change it for a dry one. ‘If you let the cat out the back door, make sure you—’

‘—lock it again straight away. I
know,
Helen. Chill out! I’m not stupid.’

‘We won’t be late back, no later than about half ten anyway. Have you got revision to do?’

‘Nah. Only Drama left, and I don’t need to revise for that. It’s a practical.’

‘Call us if anything at all doesn’t – well – seem right.’

It sounded crazy. Alice had babysat loads of times in the past year or two – but it was only in the past month that two small children had been abducted in the area . . . Alice rolled her eyes to indicate that she held the same opinion – that it did sound crazy.

‘Um – one more thing . . . Larry’s not coming over, is he?’

Alice squared up to her, with Frankie still clinging on. ‘So what if he is? Don’t you trust me to look after Frankie properly?’

Helen took off the damp shirt and hung it on the heated towel rail, turning back to Alice in her bra. Alice looked contemptuously up and down at her body. The look was enough to make the most confident woman wither. Helen wasn’t as slim or pert as she had been before Frankie, her belly softer, gravity and pregnancy having launched a twin assault on her figure.

‘It’s not that. Of course I do. And I don’t dislike him, Alice. I just think that on a school night . . . Plus you know your dad doesn’t like him being here when we’re out.’ She braced herself for the fight, but to her surprise, Alice conceded.

‘He’s not coming round, so don’t get your knickers in a twist.’

‘Good.’

‘STORY, Ali!’ Frankie reminded her, kicking her thin legs against Alice’s hips.

‘Stop it, squirt,’ she grumbled, and carried her away.

‘Hurry up!’

‘Oh Sean, for God’s sake, I’m
coming
, OK?’

Just as soon as she’d kissed Frankie goodnight.

Later, in the restaurant, both their moods had mellowed after a bottle of silky Merlot, and a very nice
coq au vin
.

‘This is lovely,’ Helen said.

‘It certainly is, my sweet,’ Sean agreed, in his comedy Del-Boy voice. ‘
Mange tout, mange tout
.’

She laughed, and studied him affectionately. ‘You’ve been saying that for years.’

‘Ah but it never gets old, does it? Unlike me.’ He rubbed ruefully at his bald head, now kept shaven to draw attention away from the large hairless spot at the crown. The stubble made a small scratchy sound under his fingers. Sean had great cheekbones, but a slightly unfortunate cone-shaped skull. He didn’t look
bad
with a shaved head, but Helen had to admit he’d looked better with hair.

‘You’re still gorgeous,’ she said, smiling at his spikily fringed dark green eyes.

‘You’re not so bad yourself, doll-face.’ He winked at her and they clinked glasses, but Helen couldn’t help wishing that he would occasionally return a compliment with something a little more romantic than a silly accent.

Her phone buzzed, and she immediately picked it up from the table, where she’d kept it throughout the meal. But it was only an electronic notification of someone’s move in Words With Friends, and she sighed with relief. For once, she had actually remembered to charge her phone before going out, something she was hopeless at. Sean was always nagging her about it.

‘Perhaps I should call to see how it’s going,’ she said, phone still in hand. Sean reached across the table and gently took it from her. ‘Relax, Hel. If there was a problem Alice would’ve called. You know she would. She might be a lazy madam but you know she adores Frankie. Besides, there’s no way she’d deal with a pile of vomit or too much screaming on her own if she knew we were only te
n minutes
away, so we can be certain that nothing’s amiss. Why are you so jumpy all of a sudden? You haven’t been this paranoid since she was a baby!’

Helen felt annoyed with him again. ‘You know why. Liam McConnell and Izzy Hartley, that’s why.’

Liam and Izzy were the names of the two stolen children.
Helen’s
friend Elena took her child to the same nursery Liam had been enrolled at, and knew his mother. The poor woman was a total wreck apparently, dragging herself around hollow-eyed with Prozac, on permanent tenterhooks for the smallest morsel of news of her son, news that so far – almost a week in – hadn’t materialized. Both children had vanished seemingly into thin air, within two days of one another.

Sean bristled slightly at the implied criticism, as he always did when it came to his daughter. ‘Alice would never let that happen.’

Helen poured them both another glass of wine, to try and dispel the image of little dark-haired chubby bespectacled Lia
m –
his photo was all over the papers – being unstrapped from his car seat and removed. CCTV in the supermarket car park showed a single glimpse of a muffled-up person carrying him away, but there was no trace of where and no indication whatsoever of who it was. Liam’s mum had only nipped back into the supermarket to retrieve some dry cleaning she’d forgotten. She was gone barely t
wo minutes.

Sean gave Helen one of those long, impenetrable gazes where he could be thinking anything from ‘This is the woman I really, really love’, to ‘Wow, you make my life a living hell.’ She didn’t really think it was the latter, but by the same token, she did find him unreadable sometimes. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel loved by him – perhaps just not loved as much as she’d have liked. Not loved as much as he’d loved Alice’s mother, all those years ago. Helen had given up fishing for information on that score. She had long realized that the shutters clanged down the moment she even mentioned the woman’s name. The dreaded dead perfect first wife – pretty much impossible to live up to that ideal, so Helen had stopped trying, and Sean never spoke of her.

‘I just can’t stop thinking about those children – both younger than Frankie. Hardly more than babies . . . Let’s change the
subject
– what shall we talk about?’

Sean smiled properly at her. His smile could still make her heart quicken. He took her hand across the table, sliding her phone into his pocket so she couldn’t keep checking it. ‘There was something I wanted to run by you, actually,’ he said, and she was puzzled at the slightly shy tone of his voice.

‘You’re not going to beg me to let you buy a new car are you?’

‘No . . .’ He took a deep breath and gazed into her eyes. ‘Hel, I know I was joking about the nightmare of having two screaming babies, but Frankie’s almost four now and—’

She felt a sudden sharp pain of love and excitement in her belly.

‘—do you think it’s time we had another one? It would be so nice for Frankie to have a little brother or sister. Alice would love it too.’

Helen’s smile broadened into a beam, and she squeezed his hand tightly to stop tears of joy spilling down her cheeks. He’d been anti the idea of a second child for so long that she’d given up hinting.

‘Really? You’re ready?’ Every atom of her danced when he nodded slowly back.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Actually I think I am.’

They were a lot later getting home than Helen had originally told Alice they would be. She’d insisted that they celebrate with two glasses of champagne, and after they paid the bill and left, they decided to walk the long way home. They went through the locked park, climbing over the gate to get in like two giggly teenagers, enjoying the crisp summer air. They kept stopping to kiss, the way they used to when they were first together and couldn’t keep their hands off one another.

By the time Sean turned the key into the lock of the front door, it was 11.25
P.M.
All the lights were still on downstairs, and Helen sobered up enough to tut when she heard the sound of the TV coming from the living room. Alice should have gone to bed an hour ago.

She dumped her handbag on the bottom stair. ‘Ali? We’re back. Sorry we’re later than we – oh!’ She walked into the living room to find Alice fast asleep on the sofa, and immediately dropped her voice, as Sean followed her in. ‘Look, Sean, she’s sparko, bless her!’

‘Have you checked to make sure Larry’s not hiding under the coffee table?’ They both laughed softly. ‘You wake her up, darling, while I go and check on Frankie.’

Helen climbed the stairs, smiling to herself. She didn’t usually like to make love late at night – too tired to feel suitably receptive – but the prospect of a baby banished her tiredness. She went into the bathroom and chucked her unopened contraceptive pills straight into the swing bin. Then, even though she was dying for a wee, she came back out and crept down the hallway to Frankie’s bedroom. The cartoon dinosaurs around her magic lantern threw soft violet and peach shadows around the room as she pushed open the door, waiting to see the hump of her in her toddler bed – she always manoeuvred herself into a sort of prone kneeling position when she slept, as though praying to Mecca.