The Child (Kate Waters #2)(101)

Back in the lift, this time she was alone. The doors opened on the postnatal floor and there were the same people, flowers and congratulations delivered, on their way home now. She’d bought some flowers from a seller on the street outside and clasped them to her stomach.

When the lift doors closed behind her, she was alone for a moment. Then she saw a woman come out of her room halfway down the corridor. She had her wash things and a towel in her hand. She walked away from Jude without seeing her, to the bathroom at the end.

Jude paused, pretending to look in her shopping bag. The woman might have forgotten something. She might come back. But she didn’t. She went into the bathroom and closed the door. Jude couldn’t move for a moment, transfixed by terror at what she was about to do, but then she heard a baby cry in the woman’s room.

I can do this, she said in her head and moved, as if in a dream, through the door. The baby was snuffling in its cot. She walked straight over, picked it up, all wrapped ready, and put it in her shopping bag. And walked away. She took the stairs this time. Nobody used the stairs.

On the train home, a woman said companionably: “When’s yours due?”

“Not long now,” Jude said, and went and stood near the doors, where there was more noise to drown out the baby if it cried. But the baby didn’t make so much as a murmur.

Back in her room, she unwrapped it, like a present, and sat looking at her sleeping child for the first time. It was a girl.

“Hello, Emma,” she said.





EIGHTY-TWO


    Angela


WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, 2012

The doctor had given her some pills to dull the shock, but she kept jumping up every time a car passed the house. DI Sinclair had phoned to say he’d be there in twenty minutes. He’d sounded somber and tired and she’d let him go without any further questions.

Nick came downstairs and paced round the room.

“Angie, we’ve got to prepare ourselves for the worst,” he said. “The police have got it wrong. There’s nothing we can do to change it. I think he’s coming to apologize. Don’t you?”

“Let’s see, Nick,” she said. Her head was buzzing again. Filled with Alice.

Nick opened the door before DI Sinclair could knock. “Come in, Andy.”

Angela stood at the window, looking at the detective’s car. There were three people in it.

“Aren’t your colleagues coming in?” she asked.

He hesitated. “No, not at the moment.” The officer cleared his throat.

“Angela, Nick,” he said. “Please sit down. I’ve got some news for you. I’m not sure how to tell you, to be honest.”

He was perspiring, the beads of sweat on his forehead winking in the light.

“That you’ve made a mistake?” Nick said. “We thought that was it.”

“Well, no,” the detective said. “The thing is . . . look, we have found Alice. But she is not the baby on the building site.”

Angela gasped and stood.

“Angie,” Nick said, his voice shaking, pulling her back down beside him. “Tell us, Andy. Just tell us what you’ve found.”

“Alice is alive,” DI Sinclair said.

“Alive?” Angela and Nick both shouted, the sound bouncing off the window.

“Yes.”

“How can she be?” Angela said, frantically looking around the room for her child. “Where is she?”

“She’s here,” DI Sinclair said, his voice catching with the emotion of the moment. He’d never cried on a job, even when he’d been breaking terrible news. But the tension was unbearable.

“Where? Where?” Angela shrieked.

“She’s in the car,” he said.

Angela was out of the front door before they could stop her, running to the car and stopping beside it, her hands spread on the passenger window.

The woman looked back at her, dark hair like Paddy, Louise’s chin. And she put her hands up to mirror her mother’s.





EIGHTY-THREE


    Emma


THURSDAY, MAY 3, 2012

Angela and I cannot stop looking at each other. Even when DI Sinclair is talking to us, we look at each other, drinking each other in. She looks like me. I look like her.

I feel like I’m in some sort of surreal dream. I haven’t stopped thinking of Jude as my mother, but I feel like I might love this stranger, too.

DI Sinclair had wanted to wait before reuniting us. He was worried that it would be too much for everyone. “You are in a fragile state, Emma,” he’d said after Jude was taken away to the police station. “There’s a lot to take in. Why don’t we give it a day so you can prepare yourself?”

But I wouldn’t let him leave without me. I was terrified that Angela would reject me, but I had to see her. To be sure.

In the car, I kept thinking that all this time I’ve been looking for a father and I should have been looking for my mother. Paul sat beside me in the back of the car, holding my hand but unable to speak.

And when I saw her burst out of the front door and run towards the car, I knew it was her. I wanted to touch her to see if she was real and I put my hand up to hers at the window.

But I’m not sure what will happen now. The euphoria has faded to a pleasant hum in my head, but there are spikes of fear in my stomach. I’m still afraid. Afraid of how it’ll turn out. Maybe I’ll lose everyone. Jude will go to prison for what she did, and Angela . . . may not want me.