The Child (Kate Waters #2)(37)

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said finally. “How did I feel about my baby? I loved her.”

“Loved?” the policeman said.

“Love her. Why are you trying to confuse me?” Angela said.

“And you, Mr. Irving? How did you feel about Alice?” Rigby said. Tone even. No drama.

Nick slumped into his chair. “The same. I’m sorry, Inspector. I am so tired; I can’t think straight.” His voice was flat and exhausted and Angela reached out to touch his hand.

The inspector cleared his throat, nervously. There’s more, she thought, gripping the sofa edge as though she was about to fall.

“I understand there have been problems in your marriage,” he ventured.

Angela looked up. “All marriages have problems,” she said and dropped Nick’s hand.

“What sort of problems have you been having?” DI Rigby asked gently.

“You had better ask Nick,” she said and closed her eyes.

She could hear her husband’s voice as if in another room, stumbling as he told how he had betrayed her.

“It was a mistake, Inspector,” he was saying. “A terrible mistake. A fling. It meant nothing.”

She realized he was using exactly the same words he’d used when she’d confronted him.

He’d stumbled then, too. He’d talked her round. Persuaded her they could repair the damage.

And she’d been too frightened of the alternative to say no. Their lives were so entwined; she couldn’t see a way to disentangle them. The loneliness of an existence without Nick yawned at her and she set about the task of burying her outrage and hurt. She never used the woman’s name, not even in her private thoughts. She was faceless—she’d never seen her and that helped—and nameless. A nobody who had tempted her idiot husband after a night’s drinking with the boys.

She would never have known if she hadn’t taken his jacket to the dry cleaners. Out of habit, she’d turned out the pockets and found part of an empty Durex packet.

“It was only once, Angie,” he’d wept. “I was drunk and stupid. Please forgive me. I love you and Patrick so much.”

“Let’s have another baby,” he’d whispered in bed a few weeks later. “You’d like that, Angie, wouldn’t you? It’ll bring us close again.”

And Alice was conceived. The sticking plaster for their marriage.

The trouble was she didn’t know if he’d done it before—or would carry on doing it. A leopard never changes its spots kept coming into her head when he got home late or popped out for an hour. But if he did it again, he was more careful.

Angela had opened her eyes as Nick came to the end of his confession. The inspector was sitting on the edge of his chair, weighing every word.

“Why didn’t you tell us about this earlier, Mr. Irving?”

“I couldn’t see it had anything to do with Alice,” Nick said.

“And the woman with whom you had the fling, as you call it?”

Angela closed her eyes again.

“Marian,” Nick said.

“Surname?”

“I never knew it,” he said. “I told you, it was a drunken mistake. She is nothing to do with us and our baby. Why are you asking this? Why are you digging all this up?”

“We need to know the full background, Mr. Irving,” the detective said. “We need to know everything.”





TWENTY-NINE


    Kate


MONDAY, APRIL 2, 2012

Len Rigby was gardening when Kate and Joe arrived at his house, on his knees, grubbing up the weeds and furtively flinging slugs into his neighbor’s privet hedge. He looked up blinking into the sun when he heard his name called.

“DI Rigby,” Kate said, leaning over the low brick wall.

“Who wants to know?” he growled, trying to heave himself upright with the help of a windowsill.

“Let me help you,” she said, already opening the wrought-iron gate to walk up the path. “I’m Kate Waters, from the Post.”

“Are you indeed?” he said, adding, “I can manage, thank you,” as she got nearer.

Kate ignored him and offered her hand.

“I’m hoping you can help me with one of your old cases, DI Rigby. I promise I won’t take up too much of your time.”

He laughed as he allowed himself to be steadied by Kate, adding: “Time is what I’ve got plenty of. I’ll get Mrs. Rigby to make us a drink.”

He led Kate and Joe through to the conservatory at the back of the house and disappeared to announce their presence to his wife.

“Now then, what do you want to ask me about?” he said as he lowered himself down into a rattan chair.

“Alice Irving,” Kate said. No point beating about the bush. DI Rigby was a straight-up-and-down bloke, she could see.

“Ah,” he said, taking a cup from his wife and placing it carefully on the matching side table. “Thanks, love.

“Baby Alice. Basingstoke Hospital. Vanished without trace. Never found,” he said, reeling back to 1970. “Very strange case,” he added.

“Strange how?” Kate asked.

“Well, there were no witnesses apart from the mother. In a busy hospital like that. I remember we talked to over a hundred people who were in the building that night—mums, visitors, nurses, cleaners, doctors, auxiliaries, maintenance men—but no one saw anything. So we only had the mother’s account to rely on for timings of when the baby disappeared. I always wondered about her. Angela. She was a bit of a cold fish and her husband had been playing away.”