Stolen (42 page)

Fern was waiting on tables, Howard working in a gas station, and most of the money they earned had to be handed over to their mothers for the whole family. They had no decent clothes or any real friends, and they both had the burden of caring for their younger siblings. Maybe if they had met and fallen in love with someone who lived the same sort of life and didn’t dream of a better one, things might have turned out differently. But from the first time they sat out together one night on a couple of old car seats someone had dumped at the trailer park, and aired their little dreams to each other, they both sensed they’d found the one person who could make them come true.

The East and West Coasts of America may have been infected by the Peace and Love Movement of the late Sixties, but it had virtually bypassed Kansas. The thousands of well-attended churches, chapels and meeting houses right across the State were testament to Kansas being a God-fearing State. If not for this, Fern and Howard might well have drifted off on a completely different path, perhaps even straight to a criminal one, but instead they chose to join the Christ The Redeemer Evangelical Church.

The love of God or piety had little to do with it. Fern heard churchy folk handed out clothes to the needy, and she reckoned that she and Howard could move up a notch or two with some better ones.

They were given clothes, not only for themselves but their siblings too, but what really influenced them to keep going to that church was the preacher. He talked with such passion about God washing away men’s sins and raising them up to the heavens that the people in the congregation couldn’t wait to open their wallets, purses and pockets and fill the collection plate as it was passed around.

‘I’m going to be a preacher,’ Howard said with utter conviction to Fern one night after a service. ‘We’ll get married and travel all over America in a bus preaching the Word.’

It was the showmanship of preaching that Howard was drawn to, along with all that money in the collection plate. He would’ve preferred listening to poems than verses from the Bible, for there were times when he barely understood them. But he loved it when people stood up around him and bore witness to God calling them away from drink or a life of crime. It was high drama, exciting, moving, and both he and Fern were quick to notice it was a great way to induce people to put even more in the collection plate.

Doubtless sexual frustration boosted their religious fervour too. They were both virgins when they met, and they were both only too aware that an unwanted pregnancy would mean they would be trapped in Merrywood for ever. But they were a passionate couple, and the frantic petting they did nightly behind bushes and in back alleys did nothing to satisfy their needs. Throwing themselves into the Evangelical Church with its spirited music, extravagant witnessing and exaggerated claims of brother- and sisterhood, made them feel part of something bigger.

The preacher must have seen a kindred spirit in Howard as he took him on as his aide, giving him room and board at his house, and Fern trained to be a nurse so that she too could leave the trailer park.

Three years later they got married when Fern landed a job at a nursing home. The owners of the home liked the idea of having a ‘man of the cloth’ around to talk to the patients, so they let the couple have a small apartment on the premises.

Both Howard and Fern had always looked back on that time as being the happiest of their lives. They were together as man and wife at last and unable to get enough of each other. But it was also their lucky break. The lonely old patients were so grateful to the couple for all their kindnesses that many of them left them money in their wills. Had anyone cared to take a little more notice, they might have observed it was the richest of the patients and the ones with the fewest relatives the couple made a fuss of. But the people who owned the nursing home were too busy cutting corners and planning their own get-rich-quick schemes to notice what anyone else was doing.

By the time Fern and Howard were in their late twenties they had amassed a tidy sum between them and Howard had become a formidable preacher. They moved to Alabama to start their own church, but Fern also did private nursing in people’s homes, invariably the old and frail. Sometimes, too, she was hired to care for a new mother and her baby, sometimes she was called in by a midwife to assist her, and this was where she learned the rudiments of midwifery.

Howard felt that this period in his life was when he was at his very best. Preacher Barnes became renowned for his fiery sermons that kept the congregation enthralled. He took witnessing a stage further than any other preacher, creating the best show in town as he urged sinners to come forward and testify to their sins and let Jesus into their hearts.

Folk often marvelled how so many broken people, the damaged, drunks and ex-criminals, found their way to him, but it was more to do with him giving them a few dollars to bare their souls than a call from God.

It wasn’t all trickery, though, for he and Fern fed these people a hot meal and gave them sympathy and hope when they told them they had been saved by Jesus. Most soon slipped back to their old habits, but as Fern always pointed out, the flood of life’s rejects, the dispossessed, mentally ill and the inadequate, would never dry up, and if they genuinely saved just one in a hundred, that was God’s work. And as long as Howard continued to put on a show at the church, his real congregation would continue to put money in the collection box.

It was in Alabama that they arranged the first adoption. No money changed hands; the young girl had come to Howard and Fern distraught because her family would disown her if they were to discover she was having a baby. The Barneses also knew a couple desperate for a child. The girl had her baby in Howard and Fern’s small home, with Fern assisting the midwife, and soon after the birth the baby was handed to its new parents. The papers were signed later, and the adoption became a legal one.

That arranged adoption and helping the young mother was an act of pure altruism. But it led to others where they asked for a small fee to cover expenses. There were real expenses too, for the midwife, the laundry and the mother’s food while she was with them. Howard was satisfied with just the gratitude from the couples who had waited so long for a child of their own. But Fern pointed out that gratitude wouldn’t keep her and Howard when they were old.

It was around that time that Howard realized Fern wanted far more than he did. He was entirely happy and contented with his life as a preacher. The role gave him dignity, poise and importance, and it pleased him to see his wife nursing in the same community, for that proved they were totally dedicated to helping others.

But Fern was growing tired of sitting people on bedpans, of changing dressings and bed linen, of bathing, monitoring and handing out medicine. She wanted to wear beautiful clothes, see foreign places, have her nails painted scarlet and be admired as a woman, not just for her nursing skills.

She often teased Howard by saying she led him around by his penis, and it was very true that she used sex to get what she wanted. They were both highly sexed, but Fern could hold out, and frequently did until he agreed to whatever she was asking.

That was how she got him to go along with the plan for the adoption agency. Hartford in Connecticut was the place she picked; close enough to New York and Boston to make it practical for prospective adoptive parents, but distant enough for the mothers to feel secure in the knowledge that their relatives wouldn’t drop in.

There in a large house on the outskirts of town, Howard and Fern became Dr and Mrs Kent and set up their business, with an associate who had fingers in various pies and would direct would-be adoptive parents to them for a fee.

White babies were at a premium in the early years, and Howard often donned a dog collar again to go down to New York. It wasn’t just in the hope of finding frightened pregnant girls a long way from home who might be tempted by the offer of free room and board in return for giving their baby away. He also looked for girls who for a sum of money would agree to have a baby for someone else. Sometimes the girls were impregnated with the sperm of the would-be adoptive father. But mostly Howard used his own, telling the parents it came from a sportsman, scientist or mathematician, whichever he thought they’d prefer.

It was soon a thriving business which they ran efficiently between them, outwardly as a charitable trust which helped unmarried mothers estranged from their parents through their confinement. Not even their closest neighbours or those who came in to clean, cook or garden, suspected they were in fact selling the babies. This was partly because they made sure they displayed no signs of wealth, and they had an office elsewhere in town where they handled the business side of things.

But when they went away on cruises or to New York, Boston or England, sometimes as Gullick, sometimes as Ramsden, Fern wore the kind of clothes and jewellery she had always craved.

The drug smuggling was born out of this. They had met Jarvis in a hotel in the Bahamas and when they told him they often went on cruise ships, he put the proposition to them about booking on a Dutch cruise line to South America and picking up a package for him in Colombia.

The danger element in the drug smuggling worked like an aphrodisiac on them both. They became more and more sexually charged as the ship neared Colombia and the pick-up point, and again as they approached Rotterdam at the other end. Once they’d delivered their package and picked up the money, they invariably went straight to a hotel and had wild sex which lasted for hours.

When Jarvis retired from drug trafficking, they did too, for they felt their run of good luck couldn’t last much longer. They took cruises to places other than South America, and concentrated their energies on their adoption business.

It was rather ironic that they were back in South America when they got involved with Lotte. They had never been to Chile before and thought it would be wonderful to see the fiords. In truth they were a little disappointed; the ports along the way were dull, and the scenery wasn’t as spectacular as they’d expected.

If it hadn’t been for meeting Lotte, they might have given up the adoption business, sold the house in Hartford and probably the one in Itchenor, and moved to Florida. They could have been sitting out by a pool now, watching the sunset with a drink in their hands. Now she was gone, and he was dying. It had all been for nothing.

Chapter Twenty-One

Lotte was awake at dawn. The window in the cell was frosted glass, and even if it had been clear she couldn’t have seen out of it because it was too high up on the wall, but she lay on the narrow hard bunk looking at it and observed daylight gradually brightening it.

It reminded her of the window in the basement, and it seemed to her that although she had viewed that room as a prison, the real thing was a great deal worse. She’d had a shower there, but there were no such luxuries in a police station. She supposed there might be a sink with hot water further down the corridor which they’d let her use for a wash, but she doubted she’d get any privacy.

All night long there had been noise from the other cells. A couple of drunks were singing and shouting, and another rough male voice with a Liverpool accent kept shouting for them to shut up. She guessed it would be noisy in Holloway too. She was so scared she felt sick.

‘Ready, Lotte?’ The fresh-faced WPC who had brought her breakfast earlier and let her use the sink at the end of the corridor to wash her face and clean her teeth, was now ready to take her upstairs to the van which would take her to the court.

This same WPC had brought her a bar of chocolate late last night, perhaps because she’d noted Lotte hadn’t eaten the cheese sandwich she’d been given. That little kindness had meant a lot.

‘As ready as I’ll ever be,’ Lotte replied, her voice cracking because she was so afraid. Simon must have borrowed the navy and white pin-striped trouser suit she was wearing from one of the girls at the salon. It fitted as if it had been made for her, and she was very grateful to the owner for she had had very few clothes back at his flat and nothing suitable for a court appearance. Luckily she’d only recently washed her hair, so it looked OK, and on the WPC’s advice she left it loose. Her hands were shaking so badly she hadn’t put on much makeup, just some mascara, blusher and lipstick.

‘You look really nice,’ the WPC said, putting her hand on Lotte’s arm. ‘We’ll all be thinking about you today. All of us feel for you.’

Lotte tried to smile and thank the woman, but the little kindness made the tears well up and she knew if she started to cry she would never stop.

The cell at the police station was swapped for another under the court. But this time the door was just bars, so she could see people coming and going. She was the only female prisoner as far as she could tell, and although some of the men called out to her and asked what she was in for, she didn’t reply.

She had been there nearly two hours, her heart thumping and her palms sticky with nervousness, when at eleven, a court official came and unlocked the door and led her up a different staircase to the one she’d come in by. As she got to the top she found herself in the courtroom and was asked to sit in the dock.

There were perhaps twenty people already there in the court. Mr Harding, her solicitor, was talking animatedly to DI Bryan. Both men glanced round and on seeing her, smiled, but then continued their conversation, which she found unnerving.

Simon, Adam, David and Scott were all sitting together. Their smiles and little waves and gestures of solidarity were all stiff, as if they were struggling to hold their emotions in check. She thought that the row of rather untidy-looking people by the door must be press, because they looked as though they were on a mission and all seemed to know one another. There were a few other older people too, some of whom she recognized as neighbours of her parents, but her mother and father hadn’t come.

Lotte wasn’t sure whether she was disappointed by that, or relieved, but all at once the Clerk of the Court was asking everyone to rise for the magistrate.