booksnew/source/incubus-source/CB23.txt

<h2>23</h2>
<p>The baby impelled Kate Park and she picked it up, went through to the living room where the log fire was just beginning to burn itself out. She sat for a while staring at the glowing embers while the baby turned its face into her and felt its change come rushing on.</p>

<p>Half a mile further north east, on the brow of the hill at Upper Loan farm, the old shepherd looked out of his window, wondering if Jackie Park had got the fox he was hunting a while ago. The two shots had not been repeated.</p>

<p>Down in Barloan harbour, old Mrs Cosgrove wondered about the woman who had come limping, with the baby in the old pram. She had gone out in the afternoon, after paying for several nights board, and had not returned. It would be a few days, in this weather, before the old woman would venture round the back of her house to empty the trash. Until then she would be unaware of the old pram angled against the wall. She blinked behind her big glasses, eyes watering, and she whipped a huge handkerchief out to blow her nose vigorously. She always got a cold at this time of the year. Despite that, she was sure she could smell something. She wondered if maybe a bird had got in one of the vents under the eaves and had died. Oddly, she felt a wrench of cramp deep down between her hips, a pain she had not felt for a long time, and her old and sagging breasts tingled strangely. She wondered if her cold was turning into something worse.</p>

<p>All of this happened on the day before Christmas, while the choir from St Fillan<61>s went round the doors of Barloan harbour, singing of peace on earth to men of goodwill and about a new infant, born in a manger, who would still save mankind from its sins.</p>

<p>Two days later, on the night of Boxing Day, David Harper and Helen Lamont were discovering each other all over again.</p>

<p>It had been a long day and a long night. He had brought the papers home with him after reporting their progress to Scott Cruden who was quite reasonable about the delay. He told David he could borrow another two patrols for some house-to-house inquiries the next day, once the shift patterns got back to normal. David wondered if that would do any good because Ginny Marsden was back in the city, she would be hard to find. He wondered if he should ask the public relations folk to put out an appeal in the press, maybe get a picture flashed on the tea-time news. It was still early days yet, he decided. He<48>d let Helen make an inquiry at Celia Barker<65>s bank. It was a long shot, but she<68>d done a fine job so far and he knew she had an instinct for this. They had picked up a pizza, both of them agreeing on a seafood topping (and he pleased to find they had something else in common) and went back to his place.</p>

<p>June had left two messages on the answering machine and Helen felt herself bristle as he played them back. Both messages began with an apology and the first asked him to call her. The second almost demanded that he return her call. He didn<64>t, but while he re-heated the food, she rang again. The pizza was warm by the time he got of the phone.</p>

<p><3E>Doesn<73>t she give up?<3F> Helen wanted to know. He gave her an apologetic look and shrugged wearily.</p>

<p><3E>It<49>s not easy for her. It<49> been a while for both off us.<2E></p>

<p><3E>But she claimed you and I were having an affair, and she half wrecked this place. Plus it was she who told you it was over and you were never to darken her doorstep again.<2E></p>

<p><3E>And I<>ve told her it<69>s over,<2C> David said. <20>I don't like hurting her, that<61>s all, because she<68>d not a bad person. We just came to the end of a relationship and that<61>s the best thing. Convincing her of that is something else. It<49>ll take time.<2E></p>

<p><3E>She<68>s just lonely at this time of the year, and she thinks she made a mistake.<2E></p>

<p><3E>You bet she did,<2C> Helen retorted, fire in her eyes. <20>But that<61>s over now.<2E></p>

<p>He smiled awkwardly and busied himself with the plates. He knew June and realised there would be more telephone calls, more messages on the machine. She was stubborn, and when she was fixed on something, she wasn<73>t easily side-stepped. <20>She<68>ll be fine in a while,<2C> he said, though he knew a while might be a while longer.</p>

<p>They ate the pizza and had a beer apiece while changed the subject nd drew out the old and detailed report a long dead policeman had compiled.</p>
<p>_______</p>

<p>Greta Simon had disappeared in the middle of May, 1941. She had been a scullery maid in Overburn House, the dower house to the mansion in the valley behind Lochend, where the old Coleraine family had held their clan seat for centuries. At this time the dower house was owned by an English ironfounder who was rolling out tank treads and armoured panels for the war machine and would later be elevated to the House of Lords.</p>

<p>She had been a skinny, plain girl, in her late twenties, with thin hair and large teeth. There had been a rumour that she had indulged in a passionate affair with a married man from Levenford, where she<68>d initially been raised, the only daughter of a widow who had died five years before. The un-named man, (known from her letters as Mars - she called herself Hesper, after the morning star, a fine play on words, linking the god of war with the goddess of love) the unknown lover, some folk believed, had been killed on the beach at Dunkirk. Greta Simon had gone missing from the dower house in 1941 and some folk believed she had killed herself. She had failed to turn up for work on the seventeenth day of May. The next time anybody heard of her in any official capacity, was in 1967. Nobody knew how she had evaded official notice. There was no indication of how she had made a living. Her tiny apartment held only the bare essentials and another strange collection of toys and baby clothes, all of them hand-made. Her landlord said she had paid the rent in coins. A neighbour said there were always coins in the pram and she even recalled that she herself, the neighbour, had put money in for the baby several times, luck money, an old Scots tradition. That was a puzzle to her, Sergeant Ron McBean noted in his stolid hand. The tradition only calls for one donation of silver. The woman could not remember why she had been moved to be so generous. She could not recall what the baby had looked like. It had just seemed the right thing to do.</p>

<p>Ron McBean had noted the strange, rancid smell in Greta Simon<6F>s house. He had smelled it before.</p>

<p>It had been routine work, more than two decades prior to this, when McBean had been a young constable in Lochend, he had stumbled onto the mystery. If he had not, five years later, taken a transfer for promotion to a town on the other side of the country, he would never have made the connection between Greta Simon and Harriet Dailly.</p>

<p>The connections were laid out in a chart, on sheets of yellowed legal-pad paper which had been stuck together with glue. The glue itself was old and hard and looked like a fine amber. The rest of the report was written out in McBean<61>s clear, laborious hand. He had been a good, methodical policeman. What he had discovered, he could hardly believe himself and he had been unable to get anyone else to believe there was more than coincidence involved.</p>

<p>Phil Cutcheon had been too busy with the murder inquiry to be concerned with myth and fable as he had called it then, but now, more than fifty years after Greta Simon walked away from her job (to her death, some thought at the time, suicide from a broken heart) Phil Cutcheon had changed his mind.</p>

<p>Harriet Dailly had been a woman of sixty two when she jumped off the Pulpit Rock, an outcrop of slate which overlooked Loch Corran, famed in song and for the mythical creature said to swim under its dark surface, and its own connection to the low roads of the underworld. She might have drowned, but could possibly have been saved, because the teenage son of the ironfounder who ruled the Dower House was fishing for salmon nearby, in a boat rowed by his own bailiff. Unfortunately Harriet landed on a half submerged tree trunk and had caved her skull in. She died instantly and her brains and blood had spilled out into the clear water, colouring it pink for several yards around the body.</p>

<p>There would have been no real interest, had it not been for the baby Harriet had been seen carrying in her old shawl on the path up to the rock. A few girls from the dower house, Greta Simon included, had been given the afternoon off to pick elderflowers for the season<6F>s wine. The bushes near the pulpit were a traditional source. Two of the girls had seen Harriet jump. It was May 17, 1941. An immediate search for the baby turned up no sign at all. There was speculation that dogs or foxes might have taken it. Or perhaps that Harriet herself had killed the infant herself and then committed suicide. That part of the loch was searched by a team of navy divers in cumbersome suits, but the water dropped straight down from the edge to more than two hundred feet to blackness and nothing was found.</p>

<p>Nobody knew where she had come from, not immediately. Constable Ron McBean was charged with finding her nearest and dearest. A perfunctory post mortem showed that the woman had a degenerative condition, a loss of bone tissue at her joints which would have made movement almost impossible, and at the very least, quite excruciating. Quite unbelievably, according to the young doctor who would soon be carrying out triage on the awful wounds of war, she was still producing milk and showed signs of menstruation. She had been chronically anaemic and her liver was grossly enlarged.</p>

<p>It was not until a quarter of a century later that Ron McBean would read a similar report, by sheer luck or coincidence, in a similar town separated by the narrow width of the country, and he would start adding up the coincidences. Initially, he was driven only by curiosity, as he admitted in the summation of his report. It was to become an obsession.</p>

<p>McBean almost by accident found a clue in Harriet Dailly<6C>s shabby little house, down an alley at the west end of Lochend, a crumbling little shack tacked on to the end of an even older dye-house. It had a bed and a sink and the gutted remains of two rabbits, liver, kidneys and brains all gone, the rest substantially chewed. The place stank, possibly of the lye from the old dye works, or possibly from rot. There was a hardboard chest full of baby clothes and the bed was piled high with hand-crafted toys. McBean found a pile of bones in an old wooden barrel in an outhouse. Some of them had been chewed. There were rabbits and pigeons, a couple of cats. Nobody remembered the old woman having a dog. Everybody had seen the tightly swaddled baby and had believed it was a grandchild. They had taken her for an old tinker woman who kept to herself. People passing by gave her money for the baby.</p>

<p>The young policeman, whose career would take a four year vacation during which time he would see more murder and mayhem in North Africa and then in France than he would experience in the rest of his life, discovered a photograph of a young couple, alike enough to be brother and sister, and an old letter to <20>Dear Harry<72> and signed <20>Yr Lving Bro, Chas.<2E> The address on the envelope was faint, but legible. The letter told Harry that Chas would be coming home on leave in less than two weeks and he was looking forward to a break from all the square bashing. It was dated 1918.</p>

<p>It was a fifty mile train ride to Lanark where Ron McBean found the Reverend Charles Dailly, a short, portly man with the ruddy cheeks of a committed drinker and the smile of a jester. McBean had taken sandwiches wrapped in a sheet of greaseproof paper and tied with string, just in case he got hungry, but the minister brought him into the manse and plied him with tea and home baking.</p>

<p>When he saw the picture of himself and his sister, instant tears sparkled in both eyes and he had to dab them with his spotted handkerchief, blowing his nose vigorously, much as old Mrs Cosgrove would do more than half a century later. By sheer coincidence, if anything relating to this could be, the old woman who did bed-and-breakfast in her cottage in Barloan Harbour, had been one of those girls who had seen Harriet Dailly jump from the Pulpit Rock. She had been with Greta Simon that afternoon, both of them singing that old Gaelic song about the fairies who stole babies from their mothers, but McBean, who would have recorded such detail in his notes, was long dead by the time Ginny Marsden and her strange and deadly little bundle came to stay for a night.</p>

<p><3E>I haven<65>t seen Harriet since the year the Great War ended,<2C> Charles Dailly said when he composed himself. <20>Dead, you say? How, where?<3F></p>

<p>The minister explained that his sister had grown up in his house, the old manse in Lanark where his father had been the incumbent before him. <20>Harry and John, that was her husband<6E>s name you know, they had been hoping to have a family, but she couldn<64>t have babies. Something wrong with her innards you know. But she helped foster the youngsters from the orphanage, and she told me she would adopt as soon as Johnny came marching home. She had taken responsibility, she told me, for the child of a woman who had been admitted to the sanatorium down in Carstairs, a poor soul who had gone mad. That was on the same day she got the telegram that John had bought it in France. He was killed on the Somme, you know, just before the end of it all, poor soul. I never saw Harriet again after that. I went round to her house and she was gone. Someone said they had seen her at the train station, and somebody thought she might have been carrying a baby, but from that day to this, there<72>s never been a word, not a whisper. We reported her missing, of course, but that was under her married name of Burton. It was a log time ago, but we never thought she<68>d go back to her own name.<2E></p>

<p>The red-faced minister gathered himself together.</p>

<p><3E>In fact I had always had the notion that she<68>d killed herself all those years ago, from the grief of it all. She and Johnny were made for each other. The young folk would say, crazy for each other. He was a handsome devil, and quite a catch. His father had the strawberry farms down the valley, and they made a fortune out of preserves.<2E></p>

<p>Ron McBean had not told the minister, feeling it was neither his business nor necessary information, that his sister had jumped into the loch. He did not elaborate, but left the bereaved brother with the idea that she had fallen accidentally. There was no harm in that.</p>

<p>When he mentioned the possibility that the old woman (who local people had thought of as a tinker, possibly of Irish extraction, a wartime version of a bag-lady) had been carrying a baby, Charles Dailly said that was quite in character.</p>

<p><3E>Loved them. She would have had a dozen if the Lord had blessed her. She was always looking after other folk<6C>s children and it was a real shame that she was cursed to be barren.<2E></p>

<p><3E>What happened to the baby she fostered?<3F> McBean asked. It was only curiosity, as his older self would later write. Obviously the child was now a man of twenty three, unless he too had died in this new war.</p>

<p><3E>Well, nobody knows. Who could know? She just disappeared. I didn<64>t know if she even adopted it. It was all very confused at the time.<2E></p>

<p><3E>Who would know?<3F> It was just a loose end, but McBean was a painstaking and thorough young policeman who was not ambitious as such, but would always do a job to the best of his ability. He turned down a sherry, but accepted another cup of tea, while the minister wrote down the address of the sanatorium at Carstairs. <20>It would be June 7, 1918. That<61>s when the telegram came. I remember because it was Harriet<65>s birthday. My mother had baked her a big cake. We gave it to the orphanage.<2E></p>
<p>
The place in Carstairs had been a madhouse at one time, and now it just seemed like a madhouse, in the May of 1941. The three main wings had been given over to the wounded, the men of the Scottish battalions who had been blasted and broken on the shoreline in the dreadful retreat. Some of the men, young boys, hardly out of their teens, with dreadful injuries and missing limbs, were sunning themselves on the grass or on benches, all of them smoking, and the ones that could see, staring into the distance with that long-range stare of men who still looked into the fires of hell and felt the heat.</p>

<p>Ron McBean recorded in his personal notes how the dreadful damage, both physical and mental, made the place look like an image of another hell. He would also later record in his personal papers, after his own war experiences, how familiar that look became.</p>

<p>Matron Ducatt, a squat, grim-faced woman with a transforming smile, took him to the records office. She had been a nursing sister back at the end of the Great War and remembered Harriet Burton. She had gone to school with her cousin. She could not remember any adoption, though Harriet had taken several children into her care, easing the burden of mothers whose husbands had gone to war. McBean gave the date and the elderly nurse checked the records of admissions.</p>

<p><3E>Oh, I remember that day,<2C> she said when she looked up the entry. <20>It was awful, and I shall never forget it as long as I live. That was the day we brought Mrs Parsonage in. She had killed her husband with a coal scuttle. She said he<68>d tried to kill her baby. She was quite demented of course and she was sent away to Dalmoak when they made it a State Mental Hospital. We had the charge of her until then, and no matter what treatment we gave her, she stayed in a strait-jacket for most of the time.<2E></p>

<p><3E>What happened to her?<3F> Ron McBean wanted to know.</p>
<p><3E>Well, she killed her husband all right, but she never had a baby, not one of her own. She had adopted the child, some time before, after its guardian died, some relative, an old washerwoman from down in Dumfries. The baby was thought to be her grand-daughter<65>s who<68>d had it out of wedlock. Mrs Parsonage<67>s husband, he was a planter in India and he was never home from one year<61>s end to another. It<49>s all coming back now. Anyway, he came home and he never took to the baby at all. Even the minister </p>

<p>said he asked him to come down to the house to make his wife give up the baby. He said it was possessed. Whatever the case was, she hit him with a coal scuttle and killed him and she was completely deranged when she came here. They found her in the garden of her house, all covered in blood, and with hardly a stitch on. She was trying to feed the baby herself, poor soul, at her age.<2E></p>

<p><3E>And what happened to the baby?<3F></p>

<p>The Matron looked at the old file, flicking several pages over before turning back to him. <20>Mrs Burton, Harriet Dailly as was, she was on the parish board at this time and she took the child to their care, for adoption. I imagine she did. Didn<64>t she?<3F></p>

<p>The old parish records showed no such admission. It was getting dark by the time Ron McBean discovered this, apologising to the old church clerk who got a box of redundant ledgers and records down from the loft where they<65>d been untouched for many years. On the way home, he pondered over what he had gleaned, but at that time, he had nothing at all to make him suspicious. On the train journey back to Kirkland, with one stop in the city centre, in a station which would be later demolished and the site redeveloped and renamed Waterside Shopping Mall, he passed over the very spot where more than fifty years later a woman masquerading at Thelma Quigley would drop to the ground, her heart burst asunder. He had to avoid two porters with a stack of cases on an old trolley, skirting the corner where Ginny Marsden would later be filmed turning to take a baby out of a pram.</p>

<p>At that stage, he had nothing to be suspicious of. But McBean was methodical and he was conscientious. He may also have had a trace of the fey Highland <em>touch,</em> being from that superstitious and shadowed area of mountains, and being the seventh child of his family. Over the years, his notes revealed, he thought about the strange case, wondering what had happened to the baby that a demented, bloodstained woman had tried to suckle in the garden of her substantial home.</p>

<p>As time passed, through correspondence mainly, he built up a kind of picture which made no sense at all. He had, after speaking with Charles Dailly, discharged some of his duties, but if Dailly<6C>s sister had adopted a child, now obviously a young man, he had a further duty to try to trace him. While the parish orphanage records showed no such adoption, </p>
<p>
</p>
<p> and though had been seen with the child, both by witnesses and by her brother there was no subsequent record of the baby after she had run away</p>

<p>That left him with a series of mysteries which nagged at him down through the years. Who was the baby that Harriet Dailly had cared for when she had died. Who was the first baby adopted by mad Mrs Parsonage and then taken by Harriet? What had happened to them both?</p>

<p>There was a possibility, he had to consider now, that Harriet Dailly, crazy old lady that she seems to have been, had killed both children..</p>

<p>Over the next two years after Harriet Dailly<6C>s death back in the war years, McBean discovered, with the help of a local undertaker who was an unofficial historian down in Lanark, that Mrs Parsonage had become a sort of recluse during the year before her breakdown, since she had taken the baby into her home. The unregistered adoption had come after the suicide of that distant cousin, an impoverished washer-woman widow from Dumfries, some forty miles south, whose death had caused a some notoriety, as she had leapt naked from a stone bridge which spanned a narrow, rocky gorge. When recovered, her whole body was found to be covered in bleeding lacerations and bruises which a doctor described as very similar to the sucking circlets caused by lampreys on salmon from the nearby River Nith. McBean automatically noted the similarity in the odd circular lesions uncovered in the autopsy on Harriet Dailly.</p>

<p>It was to be almost fifty years after that strange suicide, following the accident at Duncryne Bridge which took away most of Greta Simon<6F>s brain, that Sergeant McBean was moved to dig further. The records by this time were sparse, but what had started as a routine inquiry, gathered a mass and momentum of its own for McBean as he counted up the coincidences</p>

<p>The cousin in Dumfries, an Emily Melrose, youngest daughter of a hatmaker who had succumbed to the madness of mercury poisoning, had left her home in Lanark to work as a seamstress, though she had ended up in the parish workhouse in 1890. She had disappeared from there, vanished from sight in fact, on the same day after a fire in which an elderly woman and her baby grandchild had died. No trace of the infant was ever found in the ashes of the poorhouse.</p>
<p>
</p>

<p>It was only after the Duncryne Bridge case when driver Brian Devanney was sentenced for the manslaughter of a baby whose body was never recovered, that Ron McBean<61>s personal investigation became an obsession.</p>

<p>He listed, in his papers, his growing consternation and concern: <20><em>In all this time, I have never been able to identify any one of the children alleged to have been involved. I can draw a number of conclusions, but coincidence is not one I can honestly infer, not any more.<2E></em></p>

<p><3E>Do you believe in coincidence?<3F> Helen asked David as she finished reading the old policeman<61>s account.</p>

<p><3E>Sure I do. But I<>m with McBean. He was a cop<6F>s cop. And nobody believed him, the same way nobody would believe us if we came up with the same idea. They<65>d lock us up, wouldn<64>t they? Phil Cutcheon says he<68>s on the point of belief, though he hasn<73>t a pension to lose. What I don<6F>t believe in any more is that there is any coincidence in all of this.<2E></p>

<p><3E>Me neither,<2C> Helen said. <20>The woman who died in the fire, Agnes Lassiter, she had a baby with her, but after the fire, nobody ever knew whose it was. Then Emily Melrose, who was in her fifties, and was looking after a child, and she was long past her sell-by date. She took a dive and killed herself, just like Harriet Dailly.</p>

<p><3E>They<65>re all connected, in time and in space,<2C> David said. <20>Lassister, Melrose, Parsonage and Harriet Dailly. Like a chain, down the years. They die or they disappear, or they go mad. McBean did not discover until very late on, a quarter of a century later, the connection between Dailly and Greta Simon, but it was there. Nobody sees the obvious when it cannot be explained in rational terms.<2E></p>

<p><3E>And how would you explain it?<3F> Helen asked.</p>

<p><3E>I<EFBFBD>ll show you something in a minute that you<6F>re going to think is very crazy, crazier than the idea I had before. But let me get the sequence right. Greta was there when Harriet jumped and she disappeared the same day. There was no sign of the baby, though there were dozens of people who knew the old woman had one. Twenty five years later, Greta gets hit by a truck and her baby disappears, presumed dead. On the very same day, Heather McDougall does a runner, turning up nearly thirty years down the line, and once again, she has a baby which, very strangely disappears, taken by a woman who, as far as we know, is acting well out of character.<2E></p>

<p>He tuned to Helen, counting on his fingers, much as Mike Fitzgibbon had done. <20>Look at the conditions in Harriet<65>s house. Exactly the same as Greta<74>s place. Kids clothes, toys; hardly anything else. Same with Heather. McBean mentions the smell in the house in Lochend. Probably the same as the stench that<61>s been getting up our noses since this whole thing started. I don<6F>t think it<69>s poison. And I don't think it<69>s a disease.<2E></p>

<p><3E>So what do you really think?<3F></p>

<p><3E>I think it<69>s what McBean believed.<2E> David reached down into the side of the box and found the thin envelope that had been jammed down the lining. He took out the thin sheets of paper. The top one had the yellow band at the edge where sunlight had dulled its whiteness. He read beyond the first page of this separate letter which was undated and unaddressed. He drew Helen<65>s attention to the part near the end, the few paragraphs Phil Cutcheon had showed him that morning.</p>
<hr />

<p><em><3E>All I know is that it appeared on record some time in the past century. It will appear again, but where and when, who knows. All I can say, with absolute clarity and conviction, is that it will appear again and anything that can do that, time and time again, is not natural.</em></p>

<p><3E><em>When I was a boy, my mother used to sing a song, the same one that Greta Simon and her friend were singing back in 1941 while picking elderflowers. You could say my mother was an old, uneducated Highland woman whose first language was the Gaelic, and who clung to the old ways. </em>Hovan Rovan<em>, was the song, about the fairies who would steal a mother<65>s baby and leave another of theirs in its place. The infant was a goblin, a thing they called the Tachara. The mother felt the pain and loss of her child, but the goblin had the power to make it love it and nurture it and raise it as her own, and the woman was damned for ever and her own child was gone. An old wives tale from the highlands, but somehow, it rings a chord now.</p>

<p><3E>My mother would have said that the Tachara had stolen these mothers. She would have said that somewhere in the past, a real baby had been spirited away and this goblin put in its place. They called the thing a changeling. It is possible they were right.<2E></p>

<p>As Helen read, her eyes widened. Finally, very slowly, she put the sheets of paper down on the table and turned to him. <20>That<61>s just what you said. What kind of baby would steal a mother.<2E></p>

<p><3E>He thinks it<69>s been going on a long time,<2C> David said. <20>I know it<69>s hard to believe, but I<>m very close to going along with the old guy on this.<2E></p>

<p>He put the file back in the box and put it away, not wanting to read the dead man<61>s words again. Helen was about to say something else, but he motioned her to silence with his hand while he reached for a video cassette. </p>

<p><3E>I spent a couple of hours compiling this lot. I just want you to look at them and tell me what you think.<2E> He jabbed the starter and the screen flickered to life. The bird in the burning bush glared wide eyed and desperate over the rim of the nest, while the naturalist explained the unbreakable conditioning that made it sit on the eggs until she was consumed by flames.</p>

<p>The screen blurred, danced then focused again as the scene switched to another shot of a baby cuckoo in the next, blindly ejecting its rival foster brothers from the pipits nest, arching its back to roll the eggs up and over the rim. A commentator described the hollow in the naked little bird<72>s back, an evolutionary design which allowed the bird to carry an egg and eject its rivals forever.</p>

<p><3E>The cuckoo,<2C> the narrator said, <20>is a successful brood parasite, driven by instinct, because it obviously cannot learn this behaviour from its parents. Within an hour of hatching, helpless and completely blind, it gets rid of all competition by killing its rivals. It is an efficient little murderer, and now it will reap the benefits. The pipits will feed it, unaware that they have adopted a killer, and it has adopted them.<2E></p>

<p>Another flicker, pause, another scene.</p>

<p>A <em>Pepsis</em> wasp battled with a tarantula spider, forcing the curving fangs away from its thorax while it manoeuvred its abdomen right underneath the poison needles to plunge its sting into the arachnid.</p>

<p><3E>This is a pendulum battle, win all or lose all,<2C> the voice-over informed. <20>The wasp risks death, driven by its procreative imperative. If she wins, then her genes will carry on to the next generation.<2E> On screen the insect paralysed the spider and dragged it into an underground chamber where it laid an egg inside the former foe. <20>Alive, but motionless, the spider is now a food store for the emerging grub. It will be eaten from within.<2E></p>

<p>Helen shivered. <20>I hate spiders,<2C> she volunteered. The screen flicked.</p>

<p>A baby looked directly into its mother<65>s eyes.</p>

<p><3E>Humans, like animals are programmed by their own genes,<2C> the well known anthropologist intoned, <20>programmed to recognise a human face. That is why we see faces in patterns and in rock formations, in the craters of the moon. We first recognise our mother, both by smell and eyesight and later, by voice. It is a two-way process. The human infant, like the young chimpanzee, like the nestling bird is dependent on the mother for food, for shelter, for protection and the mother is made, genetically programmed, to respond to its demands. A human baby<62>s cry is pitched at a level which causes her distress and impels her to rush to its defence or its aid. The smell of a baby, human or mammal, imprints upon the mother, increasing the flow of hormones from the pituitary and other glands, reinforcing the mothering instinct. If this system had never existed, then higher mammals, primates, the human race, would never have existed. You could say, that the most powerful force on the planet, the controlling influence, is the power a baby exerts on its mother.<2E></p>

<p>David switched the machine off. <20>There<72>s plenty more, but that should do for now.<2E></p>

<p>Helen gave another exaggerated shudder.</p>

<p><3E>That,<2C> she said. <20>Is the creepiest thing I have ever seen in my life.<2E></p>

<p><3E>Ah, but does it really apply?<3F> They looked at each other, both wondering. Both on the cusp of belief in the impossible.</p>

<p>Sometime in the night, he woke with a start, drenched in sweat and shaking in the aftermath of a surreal dream where an unseen baby whimpered and cried while he searched for it in the dark of an old and derelict house, following its high echoing cry through the nooks and crannies and cobwebbed hollows, all the time knowing that it was trying to lure him into danger and that if he set eyes upon it, it would ensnare him in a dreadful, hypnotic power.</p>

<p>Helen held him tight in her arms until the aftershock of the dream faded.</p>