The Outcast Dead (20 page)

The search yields nothing, not even a dodgy cigarette end or a tab of E. Nelson turns to face the two girls, one blonde, one dark, huddled together like a picture of persecuted innocence.

‘Justine, can you take me through what happened yesterday evening? From the time that you arrived at The Rectory to the time you left.’

‘You don’t have to answer,’ says Maddie, her father’s daughter.

‘It’s OK, Mads.’ Justine sits up straighter. ‘Donna rang at about four. She asked if I could help with bedtime, make tea, that sort of thing.’

‘Was this something that had happened before? You getting called in on your day off?’

‘Yes,’ says Justine. ‘Donna finds it hard to cope with the three of them. She hasn’t got any routines, you see. She’s not used to it.’ Her voice is neutral.

‘What about Patrick?’

‘Patrick?’ Now something like a sneer does cross Justine’s face. ‘He was shut away in his office, working apparently,
but when I went in to offer him some coffee he was on level fifteen of Angry Birds.’

‘Angry Birds?’

‘It’s a computer game, Boss.’

‘So you helped Donna with the bedtime routine?’

‘Yes. I made the kids some tea and played with the little ones for a bit. That let Donna spend some time with Bailey. He gets a bit jealous sometimes. She did his homework with him – ridiculous, a kid that age having homework – but at least he had her full attention. Then Donna and the boys watched some TV. I gave Poppy her bath and put her to bed. Then I went home.’

‘When you put Poppy to bed, did you notice anything different.’

‘No. I put her in her cot and put on the nightlight – it wasn’t dark, but it plays a tune and it helps her sleep, Then I kissed her goodnight and went downstairs.’

Nelson makes a note to ask about the nightlight. Was it still on when Donna went to check on her daughter?

‘What about the window?’ he asks. ‘Was it shut? Locked?’

Justine stares at him. ‘It was certainly shut because I pulled the curtains. It was still light outside. I don’t know if it was locked.’

‘Had Poppy ever tried to get out of the window?’

‘No. She wasn’t an inquisitive child, not like Bailey. That boy is into everything. She hadn’t been walking that long.’

Nelson looks at Clough. ‘OK, Justine. That’s it for now.’

Justine stays sitting on the bed but Maddie gets up, as if to make sure that they’re really going. ‘Just one thing,’ says Nelson at the door. ‘Do you know anyone who might call themselves The Childminder?’

Justine blinks at him. ‘What?’

‘Someone left a note saying they had Poppy. It was signed ‘The Childminder’.’

Justine’s face is as white as a sheet. Whiter, in fact, than the rather dubious linen exposed on her bed.

‘How horrible,’ she whispers.

‘Does it mean anything to you?’

‘No.’

On the way downstairs, Nelson wonders whether to share his fears with Clough. But, not for the first time, his sergeant surprises him. As they get into the car, he says, ‘She talked about her in the past tense.’

Ruth wakes knowing immediately that it’s Sunday. It’s not that she can hear bells (Norwich’s famous fifty-two churches are well out of earshot) or that she hurries to dress in her Sunday best for church (though, in South London, her parents will be doing just that). It’s more that the day has its own atmosphere – less exciting than Saturday, less depressing than Monday. Sunday mornings, in particular, have a mood of their own, easy as the song says. After lunch Ruth will still experience that old Sunday afternoon dread – a heady mix of undone homework and uniform drying by the fire, cosy and sad at the same time. She’ll get the Dread even though she doesn’t have to go to work tomorrow. Summer School is over and the holidays have officially started. But as soon as the Sunday evening programmes come on the television – costume dramas, antiques and the countryside – the Dread will descend.

But now, as she makes coffee and settles Kate with her toys in a patch of sunshine, it is purely easy. Ruth sits with her coffee at the table by the window and reads yester
day’s paper. The rain has stopped and the marshes are steaming gently. Flint jumps onto the table and arranges himself, with geometrical precision, on the exact article that Ruth is reading. She pushes him off. She’ll get dressed in a minute, catch ‘The Archers’ omnibus and maybe take Kate for a walk. Nelson is coming to take her out in the afternoon. Then she needs to start getting the house ready for Simon and the boys. Oh God, this probably means going to the supermarket and buying pizzas and things like that. What do almost-teenage boys eat? Ruth recalls that Cathy is extremely fussy about food, dissecting meals for traces of forbidden substances like mushrooms and peanuts, much to her mother-in-law’s irritation. ‘Whoever heard of a child being allergic to mushrooms,’ Ruth’s mother was heard to mutter. Well, Ruth won’t buy mushrooms. In fact, better to avoid vegetables altogether. Maybe they’ll have a barbecue, eat burnt sausages by the light of a camp fire. It’s possible, she supposes, but she can’t quite see it happening. She wishes Cathbad were here. He’d light the fire in a trice and probably organise wild games on the beach into the bargain. Cathbad is one of those strange creatures universally acknowledged to be ‘good with children’.

Well, Ruth might not be a natural entertainer but she’ll try her best to be a good aunt for a few days. Maybe she should buy a kite or something. She wonders what happened to the old Monopoly board …

‘Your cousins are coming to stay,’ she says to Kate. ‘That’ll be fun, won’t it.’

Kate carries on stacking bricks, obviously underwhelmed. From his vantage point on the table, Flint blinks at her. He certainly won’t enjoy the addition of two large tail-pulling children. Hang on, isn’t one of them asthmatic? Ruth is sure that everything in her house is coated with a fine layer of cat’s fur. Just as well they’re camping in the garden. Should she mow the lawn? Bob usually does it for her but he’s still away in Australia. Oh well, they can have fun playing in the long grass.

Ruth sips her coffee and tries to get herself in a positive frame of mind. She’s looking forward to seeing her nephews, of course she is. It’s just that she had been planning to get a bit of work done. She needs to check the proofs of her book. She still can’t quite believe that she’s become a person who has
proofs
, almost as if she’s a real author. The book,
The Tomb of the Raven King
, was surprisingly easy to write. She finished it just before Christmas, pouring out the story of the buried king and also all the fevered emotions surrounding the discovery. It had been therapy, if you like. She hadn’t had much hope of getting it published and had been amazed when the first publisher she contacted expressed interest verging on enthusiasm. She had travelled to London to meet her editor (her editor!), an extremely keen young man called Javier. Before long she had a contract, a book jacket (a moody shot of ruins in the mist) and a marked increase in respect from Phil. She still won’t be able to believe it until she sees the finished book. It’s due out in the autumn.

Still, the proofs can wait for now. Family is more important.
She’ll go upstairs in a minute and start sorting out bed-linen. After she’s listened to ‘The Archers’ of course.

But, at ten o’clock, just as the jolly strains of ‘The Archers’ fill the air, the phone rings. It’s Michelle.

‘Hallo,’ says Ruth warily.

‘Hallo, Ruth. Just to say that Harry won’t be able to make it this afternoon. He’s been called away on an urgent case. You’ve probably seen it on the news.’

Ruth hasn’t seen or heard the news but she says that she quite understands. She knows that it’s very good of Michelle to ring her at all. Michelle sounds resigned, as if she’s had to cancel such arrangements many times before. In her position, Ruth knows that she’d soon come to resent the urgent cases that take priority over everything else. But then Ruth never will be in Michelle’s position.

After Michelle rings off (‘Love to Katie’), Ruth turns on the TV, still with the Archers quarrelling bucolically in the background. A familiar face fills the screen. ‘Detective Sergeant Tim Heathfield of the King’s Lynn Serious Crimes Unit,’ reads the caption, in solemn capitals.

‘… anything at all,’ Tim is saying, ‘that might help us trace Baby Poppy. She’s a little girl, not much more than a baby, away from her mum and dad. She must be very scared right now. Please, if you have any information at all, call us on this number …’

Ruth stares at Tim’s earnest face, feeling as if he’s addressing her directly. And, as always, when confronted with an appeal like this, she immediately feels guilty.
Does
she know anything about this disappearance? Poppy,
the name sounds strangely familiar. Poor little girl, and poor Nelson too. She knows that all policemen hate cases involving missing children, but for Nelson the reminders of Scarlet and Lucy must make it almost unbearable. She finds another news channel and learns that Poppy was taken from her bed in the middle of the night. Police are anxious to trace a woman seen pushing a pram in the vicinity of the house, if only to eliminate her from their enquiries.

‘Dora,’ says Kate in a commanding voice.

‘In a minute,’ says Ruth. ‘I’m just watching my own programme.’

‘Dora,’ repeats Kate, clearly not thinking much of Ruth’s taste in early morning TV. Ruth sighs and gives in. She usually tries not to switch on the television in the morning but today seems to be going downhill. She finds a children’s programme and goes back to the radio. She doesn’t know why she feels so jolted by the news about Poppy. Perhaps because there’s just too much bad news about children at the moment. She thinks of Liz Donaldson, whom she has never met, and of Bob Donaldson, standing in her kitchen and begging her to intercede with Nelson. She thinks of Mother Hook and The Book of Dead Babies. She remembers seeing Judy in the university car park on Friday, the missing child alert that had turned out to be a false alarm. And now a child is missing for real.

The buzzing of her phone makes her jump. At least it’s her mobile, which means it’s more likely to be good news.

‘Hi, Ruth. It’s Frank. Frank Barker.’

‘Oh. Hi, Frank.’

‘You remember we were talking about visiting Saxlingham Thorpe? Well I wondered if you fancied going one day next week.’

‘I’d love to,’ says Ruth, ‘but my brother’s coming to stay on Tuesday.’ As she says this, she thinks how normal it sounds. As if she and Simon were sane, well-adjusted adult siblings, continually having shared holidays with their mingled happy families. She doesn’t mention the missing child.

There’s a slight pause and then Frank says, ‘Well, what about Monday? Apparently it’s going to be a good day. There are going to be “sunny spells”. I love the British weather forecast.’

Ruth hesitates. For some reason, it feels wrong to be planning a day out when Nelson is on the trail of a lost child. But, then, what on earth can she do to help?

‘I’ll have Kate with me,’ she says.

‘Great. I’d love to meet her again. I’ll be sure not to call her a baby this time.’

‘OK,’ says Ruth at last. ‘That would be fun.’

As she puts the phone down, she remembers why the name Poppy sounded familiar. Bailey, Scooter and Poppy. The children with outlandish names. Can it be the same child? She sends up a prayer to whoever’s listening. Please look after Baby Poppy.

*

Judy squats on the floor next to Bailey and Scooter.
They’re building a police station out of Lego. Nelson has taken Donna and Patrick to the TV studios in Norwich where they’re going to film an appeal for Poppy. Judy had encouraged Donna to do this. ‘It can really help. If the … the perpetrator sees the parents it makes them think about the child as a human being. It could make them put themselves in your shoes.’ Privately she wonders if Donna will be able to go through with it. During the morning, as each hour went by and Poppy wasn’t found, Donna seemed to disintegrate before their eyes. By lunchtime, she was sobbing hysterically on the sofa. Patrick wasn’t much help but then he was clearly in shock himself. It was only Judy’s urging that had got her up and dressed and ready for the broadcast. Judy wishes that she could have gone with Donna to the studio but someone needs to look after the children. Tanya, standing by the window and fiddling with her phone, is no help at all.

‘The policeman has a big gun,’ says Bailey, clicking several pieces of Lego together.

‘That is big,’ says Judy. ‘It’s bigger than the police station.’

Bailey points the gun at his brother. ‘Bang bang. You’re dead.’

Scooter starts to cry. He, too, has spent most of the morning in tears.

‘Come on, Scooter,’ Judy cajoles. ‘Let’s put this tower on the top.’ There is Harry Potter Lego mixed in with the ordinary stuff so the police station is starting to take on a distinctly exotic appearance. It has stained glass windows
and an astronomy tower (complete with owl). Judy feels that it’s a look that could catch on.

‘Shall I put the TV on?’ asks Tanya. ‘See if we can see the appeal.’

Without waiting for an answer she switches on the set.

‘Look, there’s Mummy,’ says Bailey.

Donna is crying, her face contorted in a way that’s painful to watch, but she is still managing to speak. Patrick sits beside her as if turned to stone.

‘She’s our little baby. We miss her so much. Please, if anyone knows anything at all, please let the police know. She’s my baby, my little girl …’

Judy looks at Tanya. They both have tears in their eyes. Bailey is watching solemnly, sucking a Lego man.

‘Poppy’s hiding,’ he says suddenly.

Judy turns to look at him. ‘What?’

‘Poppy’s hiding. We play hide and seek with Justine sometimes. She’s waiting until Justine tells her to come out.’

Judy leans towards the little boy. ‘Bailey,’ she says. ‘Does Justine knows where Poppy is?’

Bailey’s eyes are blank. ‘Justine?’

‘Yes. Does Justine know where Poppy is? Has Justine hidden her?’

Bailey shrugs. ‘I don’t know. Poppy’s gone missing. Mummy said.’ And he puts the Lego man back in his mouth.