Little Darlings

Lay me down me dilly dilly downwards

Down by the green-

‘Listen, I don’t mean to be rude but can you stop singing, please? You’re going to wake everyone up.’

The woman stopped singing with a sharp intake of breath. She raised her eyes from the basket. Lauren heard a high whining sound, another layer of hum but getting louder. It came from nowhere but inside her own ears. Run, it told her, leave, go, now. But her feet were rooted. Heavy as lead.

It took a long time for the woman’s eyes to meet hers and when the moment finally came Lauren had to blink away cold sweat to see her. She was young, perhaps eight or ten years younger than Lauren, but her eyes seemed ancient. She had hair that had formed itself into clumps, the kind of hair, a bit like Lauren’s, that would do that if you didn’t constantly brush it. The woman’s face was grimy, and when she opened her mouth to speak the illusion of a rather dirty youth who could even be beautiful if given a good scrubbing was destroyed. She seemed to have no teeth and a tongue that darted darkly between full but painfully cracked lips. There was something about the way the woman eyeballed her. What did she want?

‘You’ve twin babies,’ said the woman.

‘Yes.’ The word had tripped out, travelling in a cough. Lauren wanted it back.

‘Ye-es,’ the woman drew the word out lengthily, ‘twin babies. Just like mine, only yours are charmed.’

Lauren couldn’t think what to say. She knew she was staring, open-mouthed at the woman but she couldn’t not.

‘Mine are charmed too,’ said the woman, ‘but it’s not the same. Mine have a dark charm. A curse. You are the lucky ones, you and yours. We had nothing, and even then we were stolen from.’

She must have had a terrible time, this woman. And those poor little mites in the basket, what kind of life would they have? There were people who could help her, charities dealing in this kind of thing. She must be able to access something, at least get some new clothes. The long dirty hair hanging in dog’s tails each side of her face was doubtless crawling with infestation. It wasn’t healthy.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Lauren, ‘shall I see if I can get someone to help you?’

The woman stood up and took a few steps around the basket, towards Lauren. The muddy smell became stronger and the air, colder. It seemed to come out of this woman, the cold. There was an odour of rotting vegetation stirred up with the mud and the fish. Lauren wanted to look into the basket but the woman was standing in the way. Closer now, she lowered her voice, breathy, hissing.

‘There’s no one can help me. Not now. There was a time but that time passed, and now there’s more than time in between me and helping.’

The woman moved slightly and Lauren could see that the basket was full of rags, a nest of thick grey swaddling and she couldn’t see a face, not even a hand or a foot. She hoped the woman’s babies could breathe in there.

‘Maybe social services could find you somewhere to stay,’ said Lauren. ‘You can’t be alone with no help, it’s not right.’

‘I’ve been alone. I’ll be alone. What’s the difference?’

‘But the babies.’

They both looked at the basket. The bundle was shifting, folding in the shadows. One of Lauren’s boys sneezed from behind the curtain and she was unrooted.

‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to go, my baby.’

She leapt away from the woman, out of the cubicle, into the dry heat.

‘Your baby,’ said the woman. And she lunged, crossing the space between them in an instant. A bony hand gripped Lauren’s wrist and she tried to pull it free but she was jerked bodily back inside the curtain walls. They struggled, but the woman was stronger.

‘Let’s deal,’ hissed the horrible woman, bringing her face up close to Lauren. ‘What’s fair, after all? We had everything taken, you had everything given. Let’s change one for another.’

‘What?’

‘Give me one of yours. I’ll take care of it. You have one of mine, treat it like your own. One of mine at least would get a life for himself, a taste of something easy. What’s fair?’

‘You must be mad, why would I do that? Why would you?’ She pulled against the woman, their arms where they were joined rising and falling like waves in a storm. Nothing could shake her off. Lauren felt her skin pulling, grazing, tearing in the woman’s grasp, filthy nails scoring welts that she was certain would get infected, would likely scar. ‘Get off me,’ she said through gritted teeth. She would bite the woman’s fingers to make her let go. But they were disgusting.

‘Choose one,’ said the woman, ‘choose one or I’ll take them both. I’ll take yours and you can have mine. You’ll never know the difference. I can make sure they look just the same. One’s fair. Two is justice done.’

The sound that came out of Lauren was from a deep place. It burst from the kernel at the centre of her, the place all her desires were kept, and all her drive. It was the vocal incarnation of her darkest heart, no thoughts between it and its forceful projection into the grimacing face of the woman. A sound of horror, and protection, a mother’s instinct, and her love. The shape of the sound was No.

And in that moment the sound took her arm from the iron grip of the woman, her body away to the trolley where her babies lay, her feet to carry her and the sleeping twins into the hospital bathroom where she swung the handle into place to lock the door.

Chapter 5 (#ulink_aa603f82-f786-5564-ac55-6ca6044156aa)

July 15th

7.15 a.m.

Police Headquarters

Jo Harper parked her white Fiat Punto in the underground car park. The place was almost deserted, only a few civilian vehicles dotted about and a line of sleeping patrol cars against the far wall. A cool early-morning breeze flowed down the ramps from outside, shivering around her knees and elbows, and she hugged herself as she walked across to the doors. The outfit she wore was too brief for the current temperature but she knew she’d appreciate the light cotton knee-length skirt and short-sleeved shirt later on in the day when she was out and about in the full force of the sun.

She stood in the lift, nostrils full of the smell of the sun cream on her skin and the car park’s oily, mechanical odour, waiting for the four-digit security code to register. A long beep, the lift doors slammed shut and a second later she stepped into the foyer.

The uniformed desk sergeant looked up as she walked towards him. ‘Morning, Harper, early again I see.’

‘Just very, very diligent, Gregson, you should try it one day,’ she replied, with half a smile.

‘Ha ha. I’m here too, aren’t I?’

‘Yes you are, mate. And where would we be without you? We’d have to get an automatic door, for a start.’

Phil Gregson was probably ten or twelve years older than Harper, fifty or so, but the years had been less kind to him than they had been to her. Or perhaps he’d been less kind to himself. Either way he looked easily old enough to be her father.

‘What on earth are you wearing?’ He leaned over the desk to point at her feet.

She wiggled her toes. ‘Trainers.’

‘They are not trainers. They’re gloves. Rubber gloves for feet. They’re the weirdest things I’ve ever seen.’

‘They’re good. They’re for running better. Your feet are unrestricted, see?’ She wiggled her toes again.

‘Urg. Stop doing that. You won’t get away with those if Thrupp sees them.’

Harper curled her lip. She knew the five-toes trainers were a bit far out for work. She’d brought her shoes in her bag to change into before the boss arrived but she wanted to spend as much time ‘barefoot’ as possible. It was meant to improve your technique; she was competing in a half Ironman in a few weeks.

‘You can swim in them, too, you know.’

‘Fascinating,’ said Gregson, miming a big yawn.

Though the time Jo Harper spent outdoors had added wrinkles to her face, her body was lean and strong. Whereas Gregson looked as if he was gently melting into his swivel chair. Admittedly there may have been an element of genetic advantage – she had her mother’s great cheekbones and her father’s naturally not-yet-grey hair. Harper had slept with men older and greyer than Gregson, back when she’d thought she only liked men, but the desk sergeant elicited nothing more than a fond daughterly reflex in Harper that he no doubt would have been upset to be made aware of: she wanted to get him a haircut, feed him a salad and some peppermint tea, take him on a nice long walk and make sure he got an early night. Poor old Gregson, with his slowly broadening middle section held in by the wide black police utility belt, and his ear-length hair swept across the emerging scalp. Harper thought he could go up a size in shirts. Maybe two.

Harper made herself a bad coffee in a mug with a joke about dogs on it, the bottom of which got stuck to the tacky surface of the kitchenette that she shared with a hundred or more other officers, none of whom – from the evidence – knew how to work a cloth. The mug jerked as it came away, causing it to spill a little and scald her hand. She was still cursing when she reached her desk, but there was no one there to hear her; at that time in the morning the building was quiet, just the way she liked it. She took a sip of the too-hot liquid and grimaced, then fired up the system for her usual early-morning perusal of the overnight incidents. This was not technically part of her job as detective sergeant. It was a habit, a form of work-avoidance that she could just about justify because sometimes it threw up something interesting, something that hadn’t been handed to her by the DI.