From the Cradle (32 page)

Chapter 39
Helen – Day 6

Helen found herself spending more and more time alone in Frankie’s bedroom, sitting on the oatmeal carpet with her spine pressing against the rail on her toddler bed, seeing the view of what Frankie ought to be seeing from her pillow vantage point, her bookcase and whirling magic lantern, the decals of Babar the Elephant on the walls, as if somehow she would be comforted by Helen seeing it when she, Frankie, couldn’t. 

Sometimes Helen climbed onto the bed and curled up into a foetal comma, pressing her nose into the brushed cotton sheets, desperately trying to keep her scent in her nostrils as well as in her soul. Her only comfort was that Red Ted was missing too – Frankie must have been clutching him when she was taken, unless the
kidnapper
was particularly considerate. Helen hoped so. She prayed, with varying degrees of hope, to cover all bases with a God she wasn’t sure existed but figured she had nothing to lose by asking, begging Him to return Frankie unharmed, to keep her safe, to leave her unscarred both physically and mentally, that Red Ted was still with her.

Today, as Helen lay there, too traumatised even to move, she thought about the detective, Lennon. ‘Call me Patrick,’ he’d said when he’d first introduced himself. That was less than a week ago but felt like an eternity in Hell.

Sean had just come rushing in clutching his iPad.

‘You won’t believe this,’ he said, ignoring the fact that Helen was lying with her feet hanging over the bottom of Frankie’s little bed, tears sliding silently down her cheeks. ‘I Googled him, that Lennon bloke, and you’ll never guess what.’

Helen wanted to punch him in the throat for thinking she might be remotely interested in playing guessing games concerning the detective entrusted with the search for their most treasured possession. 

‘What,’ she stated baldly.

‘He was all over the papers a couple of years ago. Well, not him, but his missus. She was that one who suffered from such bad post-natal depression that she tried to kill their baby. Over near Hampton Court. Do you remember? We watched it on the news one night. You commented on it because they live so close to us. She got locked up.’

Helen sat up slowly, her blurred eyes open wide and her voice thick with tears. ‘Oh my God, yes, I do remember. We were really shocked – he arrested her, didn’t he? I thought he looked vaguely familiar when I saw him. I felt so sorry for them. Are you sure? That’s really him?’

She didn’t know what to think. Was this a good thing? He might try harder to find Frankie because he understood the pain of almost losing a child, of things falling apart so spectacularly. But on the other hand . . . it was only two years on . . .

‘What if he’s not up to it?’ she blurted.

Sean squeezed in next to her on the tiny bed, patting her thigh. ‘He must be. There’s no way they’d have let him have the case if he wasn’t. Think how badly it would reflect on the Met if he was allowed back to work all screwed up . . .’

Helen stared into space, fighting the urge to push Sean’s ha
nd away.

‘I thought that other detective seemed pretty competent. What was his name? Winkle?’

‘Winkler. He was looking into the person who contacted me on Facebook but I haven’t heard anything. I suppose it came to nothing.’ She still couldn’t bring herself to admit the wasted journey to the M&S café to find out for herself that Janet Friars was a nutter and a timewaster.

‘Maybe we should ask for him to be put in charge of the case.’

Helen wriggled away from Sean’s touch. She couldn’t stand it any more. ‘You think we could have any influence?’

‘I bet we could, if we kicked up a stink.’

‘I don’t know. I trust Lennon. That other guy . . . I’m sure he was checking me out.’
And
, she thought,
he never bothered to get back to me.

Sean smiled. ‘And who can blame him?’

She didn’t see the funny side. ‘Don’t.’

They stared at the wall in silence.

‘Anyway,’ said Sean. ‘If DI Lennon doesn’t get anywhere in another twenty-four hours, I’m going to talk to his boss. And if that doesn’t work, I’ve a good mind to go to the papers, tell them how much Lennon’s ballsing up. After the fiasco of that siege I’m sure they’d bite my hand off for the scoop.’

It kept going through Helen’s mind, long after Sean had left the room (he didn’t like to stay in Frankie’s room for long, as though her pain and Frankie’s absence collided in there like two particularly noxious gases). She didn’t feel all that sorry for Patrick – not as sorry as she felt for herself, for Patrick’s baby had survived, but she conceded it must have been horrendous. As she roamed around Frankie’s little bedroom, trying to find things to do, she idly wondered if she would dare broach the subject with him. Patrick was a strange sort of guy, for a policeman, even though he was really good-looking. Hair a bit too long, glimpses of all sorts of tattooed tendrils creeping under his shirt collar. Not to mention a kind of hooded reticence in his face that suddenly seemed to make more sense to her.

She could hear Sean downstairs, tipping ice into a glass. Within an hour, she knew, he’d be drunk again. She was tempted to join him in oblivion.

She opened a red plastic drawer in a stack of three primary-coloured ones, like huge Lego bricks. A sheaf of Frankie’s paintings had been stuffed in there, the thick mix of poster paints rendering the cheap off-white paper almost corrugated. Sifting through the usual toddler daubings, she found a few of the ‘naps’ she had drawn on Frankie’s insistence, and caught her breath.

Frankie loved maps, which she referred to as ‘naps’. She’d gone through a big phase recently of demanding that everyone around her draw her special ‘naps’, and Helen loved her daughter’s world view this afforded. The ‘naps’ were a mixture of fantasy and reality, a collision of fact and fiction along dotted lines denoting ima
ginary borders. 

The first one she pulled out took her straight back to the afternoon she’d drawn it for Frankie, a few weeks ago, as she sat astride on one of her legs, leaning forward on the table to keep her balance, her finger tracing the lines she drew and crowing with delight as Helen added each of Frankie’s suggested landmarks:

‘There, Mummy,’ pointing with a tiny forefinger, ‘that’s where the three little pigs live.’

Helen remembered drawing three pink faces with snouts, and carefully inscribing
Little Pigs’ House,
which was a few doors down from
Frankie’s House
. ‘And up here is really really actually Heaven.’ So she had written
Really Really Actually Heaven
, with an arrow pointing skywards, towards the clouds. It made her smile, but with a pain like a sharpened icicle simultaneously stabbing her gut. The other landmarks on their map included
An Orchard, Ross’s Car
and
The Cold Place Where They Make Ice-Lollies.

She picked out another one, one she hadn’t seen before, in Alice’s rounded handwriting. NAP OF MY ROAD. The word had become part of their family’s lexicon.

 ‘Oh Frankie,’ Helen whispered.
‘Draw me a nap to tell me where you are?’

Both of them gone, Alice and Frankie. But Helen wasn’t so worried about Alice. She’d be home soon enough, after her diva tantrum had deflated and her money run out. She was with Larry – Larry’s mum had rung in tears that morning and Helen was ashamed that she had felt little about the plight of Alice and her scrawny boyfriend, and had almost had to pretend to sound half as concerned as the hysterical woman on the end of the line. 

Helen turned her attention back to the NAP OF MY ROAD. Alice had drawn a picture of their blue front door for Frankie, and the garden path, with shapes of cars outside that she had got Frankie to attempt to colour in. The picture was annotated with big X’s over several of Frankie’s random instructions:
Fluffy cat from Number 18, Max’s house, Sandpit, Where Red Ted’s Eye Fe
ll Out. 

Helen’s own eye fell on something she hadn’t noticed before. There was an X on the far side of the road, as drawn by Alice, and underneath it were the words
Cross Ghost Who Lives in the La
mp Post.

Cross ghost who lives in the lamp post? What did that mean? Helen got up and went to Frankie’s window, hauling up the roller blind to look out. The place across the road Alice had marked with an X was outside number 26, where an elderly gay couple had lived until recently, when one of them had been taken ill and they had both moved to a nursing home. The house had been empty since, so no cross ghosts there – or anywhere else in their street, that Helen was aware of. She frowned. So many of Frankie’s comments were fairly nonsensical, and that had become part of the adults’ enjoyment of the ‘nap’ drawing game. But they usually had some sort of basis in reality, or a recollection of something that had happened to her that day. 

Who was the cross ghost and what was it doing outside her house? Helen stared at the nap for so long that the dotted lines began to undulate, swirling slowly before her eyes. And that other drawing, the one of the man looking in through the window that they’d found the night Frankie had been taken – where had that come from?

‘What were you telling us, Frankie baby?’ Helen spoke out loud, an idea springing into her head. Sean had put a whole box full of Frankie’s artistic efforts up in the loft just a couple of weeks earlier – naps and finger paintings and bits of macaroni glittered and glued onto wrinkled craft paper. He’d been all for chucking them out with the recycling, but Helen had put her foot down, and the loft had been the compromise. What if someone had been watching Frankie for weeks, and this has been her way of trying to tell them? 

She walked up to the second floor, Alice’s domain and, out of habit, frowned at the dirty washing and creased wet towels that Alice had dumped on the landing, not even bothering to move the two paces necessary to reach the laundry basket. The pole that opened the loft trap door was lying by the skirting board behind the basket. Helen picked it up, hooked the end into the catch, and pulled down the ladder. From below, she could hear Sean shouting at the TV.

Fifteen minutes later she climbed back down the ladder, her feet blindly trying to find the treads, and her mind blindly trying to process what she had just seen.

Chapter 40
Patrick – Day 7

Patrick had seen some unspeakable things over the course of his career, but something about the sight of the swollen, bandaged girl lying motionless in the hospital bed moved him so much that he had to turn his face away from the porthole window of the room, tears actually coming to his eyes and his throat catching.

Perhaps it was that her appearance was so at odds with the beautiful photograph of he’d seen of her the day before on the kitchen wall of her house, which had immortalized her as someone she would never ever be again – a vibrant teenager at the tipping point between girlhood and womanhood, her skin flawless, apricot-rosy, her eyes shining with the assurance of her beauty.

Or maybe it was a paternal instinct, that this could be Bonnie, twelve years from now. It was the same dreaded unbidden thought that he awoke to suddenly at night. Recently, it had been whoever took Liam and Izzy might come for Bonnie too. In the dead of night, all the children on whom horrors and tragedies were visited wore Bonnie’s face, and Patrick could never save her.

Georgia’s eyes were open – just barely. They looked like two puffy black water-wings. She lay listlessly on her pillows with her hair spread across them like the Lady of the Lake. Patrick suspected April had arranged it that way, probably to distract from the awful swollen abomination that was once her daughter’s face.

April herself was sitting on a camp-bed next to Georgia’s hospital bed, looking as though she hadn’t had a wink of sleep. Scratches, from the gardening she had been doing the day before, still decorated her legs beneath her shorts and criss-crossed her forearms. ‘Hello, detective,’ she said flatly. ‘Can’t keep you away?’

He smiled sympathetically at her, wishing he’d had the common sense to bring her a coffee and a croissant or something.
Carmella
would have done.

‘I need to ask Georgia some questions, I’m afraid,’ he said, gesturing towards one of the horrible blue vinyl hospital armchairs on the other side of the bed. ‘May I?’

She nodded, and he sat down. He took out his Moleskine and a pencil and leaned forward. ‘Georgia? How are you feeling today?’

Stupid question. A tear popped out from the slit between her eyelids, at the exact same moment that a drop of fluid dripped out of the IV bag into the tube running into her arm.

‘Can you talk?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered. Her eyes were so swollen that Patrick couldn’t tell whether she was looking at him or not.

‘I’m so sorry you’ve had to go through all this. I understand you were found in Bushy Park? What were you doing there?’

‘Went for . . . a run.’ Another tear. Another drop of antibiotics.

‘Can you tell me what happened?’

She tried to take a deep breath, but moaned with pain at the exertion. Her mother caressed her fingers and frowned at Patrick as though accusing him of bullying her daughter.

‘Take your time,’ he said patiently, giving April what he hoped was an encouraging smile.

A deep sigh. ‘It was . . . a guy called Jerome. I don’t know his last name. He lives on the . . . Kennedy Estate.’

‘Jerome Smith?’ She nodded. ‘Why would he do this to you?’

‘He . . . hates me.’

‘Why, Georgia?’

Patrick could see that the girl was trying to work out lies in her head, trying and failing to internally muster up a convincing story. She bit her lip.

‘Georgia, you do realize that all you can do now is tell the truth?’ He spoke as gently as he could. ‘The chips are down. It’s time to start being honest. I promise you, things will be so much better for you in the long run if you tell the truth now.’

A long, long pause. Patrick shifted on his vinyl armchair and the seat squeaked, breaking the silence.

April blew her nose, then spoke: ‘Georgie, sweetheart. If you’re in trouble, we can fix it. I won’t be cross and nor will Dad, I swear. Whatever’s gone on, you’re our girl and we love you more than anything in this world. We’ll stand by you.’

They were both crying now.

‘Mum . . . where is Daddy?’ Georgia turned her head slightly as though her father had been there all the time, silently holding up her drip bag.

‘He’s on his way, darling. He’s on a plane back from his conference in Singapore – he came as soon as he heard. He’ll be he
re later.’

They were going off-piste. Patrick tried to steer them back. ‘So, Georgia, why did Jerome want to hurt you?’

She moaned again. ‘I owe him money. He . . . gave me some drugs to sell and . . .’ her voice became almost inaudible, ‘I left them on the bus and he’s been after me for the money.’

Georgia couldn’t quite believe this was happening. A couple of years ago she used to have fantasies about being in hospital, leg in plaster after perhaps a car crash, or an incident in which she had rescued a baby from a burning building or something. In her imagination she would lie there while all her friends and family crowded around her bed, cooing with sympathy. One Direction would come and visit her themselves, in person, and bring flowers because she was a
heroine
. Zayn would fall in love with her and they’d become a couple. She’d be in the papers.

But now it was really happening, this was the last place she wanted to be, and she wouldn’t want any of her friends, and certainly not One Direction, to see her lying like this, bandaged up like an Egyptian mummy. Every part of her body hurt, but particularly her face and her belly. She couldn’t move.

And now her mother was staring at her with the sort of horror she had never seen on her face before, ever, as though she, Georgia, was an alien freshly landed from Mars. Who said that telling the truth was a better option? She had just confessed to the drugs. To Jerome trying to kill her.
Oh my God,
she thought.
Now I’ve grassed him up, he’s definitely going to kill me.

But then a fresh wave of pain reverberated through her body. Her face was going to be scarred for ever – how could it not be, when she could feel the stab and itch of every stitch holding her cheeks together? It felt as though there were hundreds of them. She was ruined. So what if Jerome killed her? She would kill herself before he got to her. There was no way she was going to live being a scarred freak that everyone felt sorry for. No way.

Then she felt a stab of something equally sharp: regret. She couldn’t top herself without confessing what she knew about Frankie. She had to say something. Surely things couldn’t get any worse? The nice detective was sitting gazing at her with his pencil poised over his notebook. If she didn’t tell him now what she knew, then she might never get the chance. Alice would never speak to her again either way, but so what? She, Georgia, wouldn’t be around, so what did it matter?

‘There’s something I need to show you,’ she whispered, before she changed her mind. Her mum looked like she was going to
be sick.

‘Yes?’ the detective asked.

‘It’s on my phone . . . last photo on there . . . It’s of the person who took Frankie.’

Her mother and the detective both gasped, and her mum lunged for the iPhone in the bedside cabinet.

‘Tell me, Georgia. Tell me everything.’ The detective didn’t sound so calm now.

This was it, thought Georgia hazily. Now it was all coming out, it didn’t feel too bad. It was all like a dream, anyway, a half-waking nightmare. Nothing left to lose.

She forced herself to remember. She’d been on the loo at Alice’s; that was when she first got the idea . . .

It was a brilliant idea.

She could pay Jerome back – and buy a car to have driving lessons in with the leftover cash! She was dying to have a Mini Cooper, a red one with a black sunroof. The gripes in her stomach ceased. Georgia sat very still on the toilet, staring at the words
‘£100,000’
in bold black newsprint. It was a dead cert that if they were offering that for the other two missing kids, there’d be a similar reward if a third child went missing, maybe even more.

Frankie knew Georgia. She wouldn’t object if Georgia took her on a little adventure. Georgia had the keys to her parents’ flat in her pocket because that was where they’d filmed their movie. Her mum and dad never went to the flat. Every couple of months her mum muttered something about ‘getting round to renting it out again’ – but they didn’t need the money, so they never did get round to it, and the flat stayed empty. It was only five minutes’ walk from here.

It was a no-brainer.

Georgia felt a new and exciting rush of optimism. She’d found a solution! She flushed, washed her hands and crept back onto the landing and halfway back up the stairs towards Alice’s room. As she’d suspected, all had fallen silent, but when she listened hard she could hear a few little moans and gasps. Excellent.

She tiptoed back downstairs and found a Waitrose carrier bag in the kitchen into which she put a couple of the plastic sippy cups and a bottle with a teat that she selected from the dozens in the cupboard. Helen was the sort of mum who stockpiled stuff in the kitchen like nuclear war was about to break out any minute – the cupboard next to the fridge was packed full of long-life milk, cereal bars, boxes of raisins and Pom-Bear crisps. She found night-time nappies under the sink, and took half a dozen of those. Nobody would notice a few things missing, and tomorrow she could go out and get some more supplies if she stole cash from her mum’s purse. She glanced at the huge clock on the wall – 10:05
P.M.
They wouldn’t be back till probably eleven at least, and Alice and Larry would likely be in bed for half an hour.

She left the bulging Waitrose bag by the back door and crept back upstairs. Frankie was wearing pink pyjamas with Tinkerbell on and was breathing steadily around the thumb plugged loosely into her mouth. She was hot, and little spikes of black hair were plastered to her forehead. She looked so sweet.

Georgia had her first moment of doubt. Would Frankie sleep alright with her in the double bed in the flat? What would she do with her, when she had to go out to get stuff? She could hardly take her with her. But, she reckoned, it was only for a few days, and she wouldn’t leave Frankie for long when she did have to go out. Nobody would hear if she cried – it was a garden flat facing away from the road, and as far as Georgia knew, nobody was living in the first-floor flat, and when they’d been there the other day to make the movie, post for the people on the top floor was all piled up in the hallway, so they must be away . . .

Should she? She looked down at Frankie again. Helen would go out of her mind with worry. Perhaps there’d be some way she could let her know Frankie was safe? No, don’t be stupid, she thought. It would be fine. It would just be for a couple of days, then she could march into a police station carrying Frankie, saying she heard crying in the park, went to investigate and found her abandoned there, of course recognizing her immediately because she was her friend’s little sister. Everyone would be ecstatically happy with her. She’d get the reward – and, undoubtedly, her allowance reinstated. Helen and Sean would be so grateful! She smiled, already bathing in the glory of it all. Already picturing herself driving to college in her new Mini. She’d be able to afford the road tax and driving lessons and everything. All for the sake of two days of discomfort for her and Frankie, and worry for Helen, Alice and Sean.

Yes, it was more than worth the risk.

She scooped Frankie out of her cot and Frankie snuffled, opening and closing her mouth like a goldfish. There was a baby monitor on her chest of drawers, but it wasn’t switched on. Georgia knew that this was because she so rarely woke up any more, once she was asleep, and if she did, her voice was plenty loud enough to alert her parents without additional amplification.

‘Come on, sweetie-pie,’ she whispered. ‘We’re going for an adventure. You up for it? It would really help me out if you are.’ She hoisted Frankie up in her arms so that her head was on her shoulder. Wow, she was heavy. She considered taking the pushchair, then dismissed the i
dea –
surely real kidnappers wouldn’t do that. Frankie babbled something, then went straight back to sleep, still clutching her weird thin little teddy bear. Excellent.