The Child(54)

Her mum and dad had given her the “more in sorrow than in anger” treatment with a dry peck on the cheek and serial tutting when she’d appeared at their door with a suitcase and Emma in her pram. Her mum had bristled all morning but Jude pretended not to notice.

Lunch was hideous. There was meat—a joint of bloody beef—and her mother shrugged as her vegetarian daughter helped herself to cauliflower. “Well, we didn’t know you were coming,” she said.

A stifling silence followed. Jude struggled to fill it, talking about the baby, her job, how lovely the garden was looking.

“So, Judith, where is the father?” her mother said as she handed her the roast potatoes.

“Gone, Mum,” Jude said, keeping it simple.

“I see,” she said. “And how long are you staying?”

“Not sure, Mum,” Jude said.

“Your baby needs stability and she’ll get little of that if you flit off again.”

“Deirdre,” her father said, a warning note in his voice. “Now is not the right time for this conversation.”

Jude gave him a tight smile of thanks.

“Well, when is the right time? She doesn’t contact us for months, gets herself pregnant and throws away a perfectly good career, and then turns up and we’re supposed to pretend nothing’s happened? For goodness’ sake, Judith. You can’t imagine how much unhappiness you’ve caused. I haven’t slept for months.”

Jude stabbed a potato with her fork.

“I was not trying to make you unhappy, Mum. I made the wrong decision. Can we leave it at that? There’s a baby to consider now. Can I have some carrots, please?”

And, trained to be polite even in the midst of a row, her mother passed the bowl with a face like thunder.





FORTY-FIVE


    Kate


THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 2012

She rang DI Sinclair early that morning, eager to hear the latest in the investigation before the Editor’s news conference. She hoped the officer would have something for her. She and the DI were getting on like a house on fire after their shaky start. She’d made sure of that. This was a story that could run and run, and she was going to keep him onside, whatever that took.

So she behaved herself, never straying from the official lines. It had been a happy collaboration so far; the DI was very pleased with the public response provoked by the Post’s story—mothers who’d given birth at the same time as Angela, the nurses who’d searched for Alice, even one of the officers who had investigated the case. Their chats had got cozier.

Kate now knew he had kids the same age as hers and he supported Spurs.

“Hello, Andy,” she said. “Sorry to be an early bird. How are you?”

“Been better, Kate,” he said, sounding weary.

“Sorry to hear that. Heavy night?”

“No. Not really.”

He hesitated and she let the silence force him to continue.

“Look, something has come up on the Alice Irving case. Bit of a problem. Can we talk off the record?”

“’Course,” she said, brain on full alert. “Problem, Andy? What kind of problem? Is it the DNA tests?”

“No, no. The match is solid. But there is a major snag with the timeline.”

Kate pulled out her notebook. Off the record now but she wanted to get it all down for later. In case things changed.

“Go on,” she said.

“As we know, Alice was taken on March 20, 1970,” DI Sinclair said.

“Yes . . .”

“Well, she wasn’t buried in Howard Street until the 1980s. Couldn’t have been.”

“What? Why? How do you know?” Kate said.

“Forensics are telling us the paper wrapped round the body was from the eighties—something to do with the ink on the newsprint, haven’t got the details in front of me—and we’ve been looking at the history of the site. Should have done it earlier but the DNA match blindsided us. Anyway, the houses had tiny concrete yards, not gardens, until the end of the seventies. The yards backed onto a Boys’ Brigade hall and workshops. The buildings were only knocked down in 1979 when the houses were bought by a developer and the gardens extended. So the body couldn’t have been buried before then.”

Kate swallowed hard.

“Peter, the lad who found the body, said there were concrete foundations in the garden,” she recalled. “They were digging them up. Underneath where the urn was.”

“Did he? I’ll go back to him,” DI Sinclair said, making his own notes.

“So, what does this mean, Andy?” The million-dollar question.

“I suppose it means that Alice’s body must have been kept somewhere else for ten years.”

“Christ. This is all becoming pretty macabre.” Who else knows this? she thought.

“Indeed,” he said, adding as if reading her thoughts, “No one outside the team knows yet, Kate. I haven’t even told Angela. Want to be absolutely sure we’ve got everything right.”

“I’d love to write this, Andy.”

“Yes, I bet you would. Hold off until tomorrow, though, Kate. Then you can write as much as you like. I need your help getting this new timeline out there.”

“’Course. Whatever we can do to help.”