Mad Cows (6 page)

‘Oh, well,' retorted Slynne. ‘Everything has its price.'

‘No corpse, no crime. The baby is missing.' Dwina replaced the spoon in a sugar bowl, encrusted with brown granulated balls. ‘Not dead.'

‘Yes,' said Slynne, craftily. ‘You're right. Much better that I send her into prison proper . . . where she'll be beaten up as a “beast”.'

‘How can that happen when no one but the people in this room know about the missing child?'

‘You know how word travels in prison.' The Detective winked in the prison officer's direction. She reciprocated with a cruel, collaborative grin. ‘Especially when a woman has killed her baby . . .'

Dwina, savouring her Ph.D.'ed smarts over the clueless detective, unclipped one earring and rubbed the lobe. (Maddy presumed she'd attended a workshop for that also – Earring Management in Telephonic Situations: A Psychodynamic Approach.) ‘I don't believe she's hurt her baby. She's hidden him with someone. Didn't you have a visitor yesterday?'

Detective Slynne opened his mouth to speak, but Dwina got in first, forcing him into a goldfish impersonation.

‘Madeline, all that talk of adoption, it all felt so cold, didn't it? So clinical . . .' She squatted down in front of
Maddy
. ‘But what I didn't explain is that there is another way.'

Slynne, ferociously drawing on his cancer stick, rocked from his toes to his heels and back again.

‘What once took just one man, one woman, one bed and Ravel's “Bolero” has become, for many couples, a bureaucratic nightmare. There are ten million childless women in the “civilized” world. And yet the number of babies offered for adoption is falling. Can you imagine the pain of couples longing for a stake in the next generation?' She retrieved a tissue from her sleeve and delicately blew her nose. ‘It's heart-breaking.'

The Detective Sergeant, sighing tetchily, lit a new cigarette from the embers of the old. To him, psychology was nothing more than a guess with a goddamn degree.

‘The beauty of a
private
adoption is that you can choose the adoptive mother. I see the chance here of saving four lives. The hopeful couple's, Jack's and above all,
yours
, Madeline. I'm offering you a chance to
start again
. Just tell us where your baby is?'

All eyes were on Maddy, whose eyes were on her shirt in anticipation of the kettle's cry.

‘Otherwise every bleedin' broom handle you see will have your name on it.'

‘Detective!' Dwina fumed. ‘Centre yourself! You're pro
jecting
!' She impounded the police-officer's cigarette and extinguished it. ‘A cigarette,' she lectured, ‘has a fire on one end and a
fool
on the other.'

‘You don't understand,' Slynne whinged. ‘Ms Smartass here likes a bit of a joke. Liked making an ass out of me in front of my coppers down the nick. How do you like it when the joke's at
your
expense?'

Maddy's mouth was in gear before she knew she was driving. ‘Have you heard the one about the inmate who cut off the detective's testicles and wore them as ear ornaments? Dwina could have a workshop. Earring Management – the
psychotic
approach.'

The kettle shrieked. Maddy, mopping at her shirt front, could have kicked herself. What was wrong with her? She'd have to run her own workshop, entitled ‘How To Lose Friends and Alienate Everyone'.

A convulsive start rattled Slynne's frame, from hair tint to toe-nails. Edwina Phelps, defeated, shook her head in despair. Slynne elbowed her aside and began his sarcastic mantra. ‘You do not have to say anything unless you wish to do so, but what you say may be given in evidence . . . do you want your lawyer?'

Few things in this life are more reassuring than being in the hands of a legal-aid lawyer – one is sitting on a jumbo jet that's about to make unscheduled contact with the Himalayas. This was the thought in Maddy's mind as she waited for legal-budgie Rupert Peregrine in the dank, dimly lit legal-visit room, soured by decades of over-wrought armpits.

‘Look,' she announced urgently as he lumbered into
the
room, ‘they can't do anything to me. Not without a body.'

‘It's touching, your naivety.' Peregrine put down his briefcase and struggled out of his jacket. ‘Two inmates have already made statements saying that they saw you kill the baby.'

‘What!' The heat of injustice flushed her face. ‘But that's crap. Why would they say that?'

Peregrine lowered his great weight on to the swizzle chair opposite, which gave the customary moan of protest she'd come to expect from any piece of furniture unfortunate enough to be in contact with her para-legal's posterior.

‘Prison, Ms Wolfe, is full of roach-like reprobates desperate to ingratiate themselves with the Powers That Be.' Scuttling his chair backwards, he checked the doorlock. This guy had the single-mindedness of a cruise missile. ‘I could help quash these reports, lose relevant files on the computer' – he rolled the chair closer to his quarry – ‘if I had the right incentive. My offer still . . . how shall I put this' – a trail of slaver hit the table between them – ‘
stands
.'

Maddy looked over her Law Society-approved knight in pin-striped armour. Yesterday's coldsore was now slick with ointment. ‘If I'm feeling masochistic, Mr Peregrine, I go shopping for a new swimming costume. That's about as self-loathing as I get.'

‘But when the microchips are down?'

Maddy contemplated a subtle hint to let him know
she
wasn't in the mood – like smashing the ceramic ashtray over his head. ‘The answer is still no.' She pointed to his glistening herpes. ‘Besides which, your enthusiasm is kind of catching, you know?'

‘Your court appearance is on Thursday.' The gunshot click of the catches on his opening briefcase made her jump in her chair. ‘Until now, the case against you was fairly flimsy. An illegal immigrant, yes, but white, so we politely call you an over-stayer. Only circumstantial evidence – the stolen wallet – to link you to credit-card fraud and a defence both plausible and tear-jerking. But now, infanticide? The judge will not even consider bail without someone of substance to stand surety. Madam,' – he hooked pudgy thumbs through straining belt loops – ‘my joy pendulum awaits you.'

Maddy's heart sank into her socks. ‘You know, this conversation is strangely familiar.'

‘
Strangely familiar
.' Her solicitor winced, retreating into his professional demeanour. ‘Oxymorons are to me abhorrent. Please remember that, Ms Wolfe.'

Maddy could feel a headache gnawing at her temple. ‘Rupert?'

‘Yes?' Leering hopefully, he rolled up his shirt sleeves, exposing milk bottle-white forearms, formidably shagpiled.

‘Fuck you and the synthetic suit you rode in on.'

Peregrine laughed disproportionately, slapping his massive thighs. Undeterred, he covered Maddy's hand
with
his own. ‘Now,' – his Adam's apple yo-yo-ed up and down with excitement – ‘I've always found cunnilingus to be a good opening courting gambit.'

Maddy snatched back her hand. ‘Why are you like this?' But she knew why. For all his declarations of love, Alex was little more than the same – a heat-seeking penis which did not report to Mission Control. ‘Wouldn't you occasionally like to have sex with someone who didn't press charges later?'

‘Sexually exploiting my clients has the advantage of requiring no more than fifteen minutes of my day, leaving me more time to lavish on the love of my life – a Burmese kitten called Butter Truffles.'

‘In case you've forgotten, I've just had a baby. There's an out of order sign on my underpants, okay?'

He rolled down his sleeves and snapped shut the gaping black jaws of his cavernous briefcase. There was a terrifying finality about it which gave Maddy a panicky feeling in her belly.

‘Anyway, I'll be out in a week.'

Peregrine stood up abruptly. ‘Don't make any plans.'

‘A week I can handle,' she stated, bravely. ‘I mean, there's a library, a gym, educational facilities.'

‘With Advanced Rug Munching on the curriculum.' Peregrine wrestled his way back into his jacket. ‘When I say don't make any plans, Ms Wolfe, I do
not
mean putting your Women's Reading Group on hold. I mean write your will and kiss your loved ones
goodbye
.' Peregrine galumphed to the door. ‘Rug munching . . . a rather resonant euphemism, don't you think?'

Maddy read the graffiti carved into the back of the door which her solicitor had just slammed – ‘Kill All Bitches'. Madeline Wolfe had a terrible feeling that the writing on the wall was about to include her name.

6

There's A Baby In My Bath Water!

‘LET'S GET ONE
thing straight.
I don't like babies
.' Gillian's gigantic face swelled into Jack's myopic vision. ‘I'd rather have a pedigree Weimaraner. At least you can sell them. You wouldn't even
be
here if it weren't for those five years at Our Lady of Maximum Humiliation and Hypocrisy Convent. A Catholic upbringing, my dear, is a life's excursion on a guilt trip. Comprehendé?'

The baby's hands jerked past his face. He didn't seem to realize that they were attached to his body. Alternatively amused and intrigued, he watched his own fingers fly by as though they were performers at the Moscow State Circus . . . Oh well, Gillian reflected, he wasn't the first male she'd met who could be entertained by bits of his own anatomy.

* * *

‘I'd like some baby clothes,' said Gillian, gruffly, to the Mothercare assistant.

‘Yes, madam. What sort?' The shop girl was so enthusiastic Gillian thought her face might fall off.

‘
I
don't know,' she snapped. ‘
Clothes
for a
baby
. Oh, and nappies.'

‘What size?'

‘How the hell do
I
know?' She wrenched open the handles of her handbag and pointed contemptuously at Jack ensconced within. ‘
This size
.'

Gillian was too irritated to appreciate the incongruity of the situation; she, in her false eyelashes which looked, when she blinked, like terantulas mating, and a four-and-a-half-week old baby, held at arm's length like a contaminated package. Watching the startled sales assistant assembling the basic-maintenance kit, Gillian idly pondered that she actually knew more about babies than she'd realized. Essentially they were just like designer cars; the fuel tank needed constant topping up and it was impossible to get any replacement parts.

‘Well, rug-rat,' she said, going through her wallet with painstaking care, ‘the silver spoon one was born with has somewhat tarnished. We've got just enough money to keep us until your mother gets back, unless I feel the urge to buy anything. Like
food
, for example.' Gillian thought of the money she'd squandered when she'd been solvent; if only she'd known its worth.

There wasn't much in life that the worldly Ms Cassells hadn't sampled. She'd hot-air-ballooned with Richard Branson. She'd Glydnebourned with more Royals than you could shake a corgi at. She'd joined the Mile High Club on Concorde (no crew, someone new and not in the loo). She'd lain on private yachts, in Parisian hotel suites and under the knives of Hollywood plastic surgeons.

But work was an unknown phenomenon.

‘It's not just the grey pube,' Gillian confided to her handbag, as she sashayed up Regent Street. ‘The other night, during a romantic encounter, I remarked to my partner that he was skilled enough to do it professionally and, dah-ling, do you know what he said?' She didn't wait for Jack's reply. ‘He said that he was. And that the payment would be fifty quid. It was then I noticed the V.F.M. tattooed on his penis. Value For Money.'

She paused to examine a bikini she was far too old for in the windows of Liberty's. ‘You see, Jack – one thought one would be on to one's third or fourth hubby by now, getting richer by decrees, dah-ling.' It was an exquisite bikini. Perhaps with a little cosmetic enhancement? Gillian signed, pulled in her stomach muscles and marched onwards. The only plastic surgery Gillian Cassells was now likely to experience involved banks cutting up her credit cards.

At Oxford Circus tube station, she bought a newspaper. Tight-lipped with embarrassment, she flicked to the employment section.

‘From queen bee to drone, dah-ling.' She despaired to her hidden kiddie contraband. ‘It just ain't natural.'

As inexperienced as she was, Gillian suspected that arriving one hour late for her job interview was perhaps not the best way to impress a prospective employer. It was not her fault. Despite inflating condom balloons to amuse him, Jack had howled the whole night. Once he
did
go to sleep, he became a capricious clock radio, going off unpredictably and tuned into long-wave static. But when she
needed
a wake-up call, he'd slept right through. Hence her flustered arrival on the threshold of ‘Ronald La Roux Fine Art'. An ice-cream van inched along the pavement, the syrupy music dripping out on to the street. ‘Listen,' Gillian pleaded desperately to her small, whimpering ward, ‘they're playing your song!'

Gillian was in the middle of her pitch on depersonalized perceptions of abstract dichotomies when the ice-cream cone propped in the pram lost its sloppy sanctuary and slid in slow motion on to the work of a primitive (not so Naïve, to judge by the number of zeros on her price tag) Fauvistic Impressionist.

‘Kid loves art,' Gillian gushed on the brink of her own Premenstrual-Tension Nervous Breakdown Blue Period. ‘His first words were Mama and Dada,' she added pathetically, then left before Roland La Roux
was
tempted to break Jack down to his most basic geometric form.