The Child(26)

“I’ve only got one. Alice, I think, so I’d better take all the folders,” she said.

“Alice Irving,” Bill said, quietly, mentally flicking through his internal filing system. “The baby who disappeared from a hospital, right?” His knowledge and recall of news stories was legendary.

Kate nodded.

“Hmm. Army family. Based in Hampshire. Aldershot, was it? Or Basingstoke? Mother suspected, I seem to remember,” he added.

“The mother? Really?” Kate said, her pulse quickening. “Well, let’s have her folder, too, please.”

Upstairs, she and Joe unpacked the bulging envelopes. The cuttings were yellowing and starting to crumble, and Joe looked doubtful as he carefully unfolded the first one in the “Missing Children, General” folder.

“You’re looking for the mother of a baby who went missing between twenty and forty years ago?” he asked, his brow puckering. “Why?”

“Because I want to know what happened, Joe. It’s called human interest. Not all news is about soap stars or politicians. This has got the makings of a good story. I can feel it in my waters.”

Joe looked slightly squeamish.

“It’s a saying, dear. Nothing gyno about it.”

He looked mortified and she felt terrible. She was turning into one of the dinosaurs.

She could see he was disappointed. He had probably expected to be part of an investigations team blowing the lid off some international conspiracy when he joined the Post.

“Come on, it’ll be fun,” she heard herself say, as if to a recalcitrant child. Why does everything have to be fun to matter these days?

“We’re looking for babies who disappeared without a trace. A contact has suggested three possibles, but we’ve only got years and one name.”

She looked at Joe’s drooping mouth and sighed.

“You take Alice Irving, then. We are looking for clues to the whereabouts of her mother, Angela Irving.” Oh God, I sound like a policeman. “Anyway, we need to find her now and there may be leads in the stories at the time.”

“Leads?” he said.

“Clues, Joe. Things like relatives’ names, old addresses, places where she used to work. We can go back to them and ask where she moved to. She might have stayed in touch. Do you see?”

Joe nodded glumly. No keywords or search engines. He looked lost.

“Okay, how about if you search for her birth and marriage certificates online first,” Kate said. Joe looked a bit more interested.

“The more info we have on her—middle name, date of birth, that sort of thing—the easier it will be to track her down now,” she said.

“Look for the marriage first—it’ll be easier. We’ve got the husband’s name—Nick, probably Nicholas, Irving—from the cuttings, and Angela’s first name. It says they had a two-year-old son when Alice was taken so they probably married at least a year before he was born. Look for everyone called Irving who married in 1967—it’s done alphabetically—and work backwards through the sixties and then forwards if you don’t find them there. The marriage register will have Angela’s maiden name and then you can search for her parents and siblings. Okay?”

She noticed he was looking at her in a worryingly wide-eyed way and wasn’t writing anything down.

“Make a note, Joe. Reporters make notes. Make that your first golden rule.”

Joe picked up his pen and scribbled down the names while Kate logged into the Births, Deaths, and Marriages website on his computer and left him to fill in the boxes and press enter.

“Actually, start with a search of deaths, in case she’s died,” she added. “We don’t want to waste time looking for a corpse.”

While Joe clicked, Kate speed-read the cuttings files from the nineties. She quickly found the abductions—one was a six-month-old girl, the other practically a toddler. Neither had been found but it didn’t seem likely they would ever fit the description of a newborn. She dutifully noted down names and dates, in case.

When she picked up Alice’s file, there were at least fifty stories—the last in 1999 when three babies’ bodies had been found in Staffordshire. She remembered the case—there was some talk of incest and the mother/murderer had been sent to a psychiatric hospital. It was an investigation that was over before it had got going and the Post’s man in the Midlands had covered the trial, but Kate had been sent to try to get a talk with the family. They’d told her to piss off. She’d been glad. They looked like the cast of Deliverance.

She went back to March 1970, when Alice had been taken, and stared at the photographs of Angela and Nick Irving leaving the hospital in Basingstoke, their arms empty. Kate studied the grainy black-and-white images of the young couple. The mother looked devastated, her arms wrapped round herself as if cradling her grief. Instead of her baby, Kate thought and carefully unfolded the next story.

Bill had been spot-on. The initial coverage of the disappearance of Alice was swiftly followed by articles hinting in a heavy-handed way at the mother’s possible involvement. These seemed to stem from a police search of the Irvings’ house, three weeks after Alice disappeared.

“Routine police work,” was the official comment, but the papers printed pictures of officers carrying items from the house. And Angela Irving being led to a police car. Those arms wrapped tightly around her stomach again.