"What a lovely bunch of flowers." The voice on the phone bubbled with laughter. "And completely unexpected."
"Come on, Ma," David protested. "You always get flowers. I even used to pick them for you up in the glen. Remember the bluebells?"
"And they wilted in ten minutes," his mother's voice came chuckling down the line. "I remember. I also remember you were covered from head to toe in mud where you fell into the marsh. Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks for remembering. I called you earlier, but there was no reply."
"I must have been in the shower. You can't hear the phone from there," David said. Helen Lamont raised her coffee cup to him. She was wearing her sheepskin-lined flying jacket against the cold of the day. It looked too warm for indoors.
"Anyway, I always remember and it's always flowers. The only thing I forget is your age." He held his hand up as if his mother was standing right in front of him. "No, don't tell me. That's your secret. You just look the same anyway. Always do. Not like me, I've a face that's worn out two bodies. A face only a mother could love, eh?" He laughed, bantering and bullshitting fondly. "So how is he? Tell him I'll go fishing when the weather's better. And tell him to stay out of the cold, you know how it gets to him."
Helen sat at the table listening to him on the telephone. His shirt was unbuttoned and only partially tucked into his trousers. His hair was still wet from the shower and it gave him a fresh, boyish look. He absently rubbed it with the towel, unaware of her inspection. The muscles of his forearms bunched, released, and she remembered the sudden protective strength when he'd hit the thin man down Waterside Street and slammed him against the wall.
One of the good guys, she had called him that, and she meant it, now more than ever. In the past week, in the past few days, her perspective had strangely altered. She remembered the strength of his body outside celia barker's nightmare house, solid as a rock when she leaned against him. She could still feel the touch of his fingers on the back of her head. Helen could have told herself she was imagining a reaction, but she did not. For a reason she did not quite comprehend, she was able to perceive at a deeper level. She could sense something in him that he himself was probably unaware of. She considered calling over to him to tell him his coffee was getting cold, wondering what his reaction would be to the inevitable question on the telephone, but she changed her mind. The son's affection for his mother was evident in his tone and posture and she let him banter with her for a while before she brought the coffee over. He gave her a wink, just like the one he'd thrown her the night before, just before she'd told him he could stay a while longer. He smiled and took a slurp.
"Yes Ma. I'll make sure I get something to eat. No. I'm fine. Yes. A sweater would be great. But not a Pringle. You know I never wear anything with a name on it." He laughed out loud at something she said. "Yes. I know you've seen my birthmark. No. Nobody else. Honest. Think I'm a pervert?"
Finally, with more laughter he hung up.
"I must remember to look for the birthmark," Helen said, and he laughed again, his face glowing from the heat of the shower and from the warm enjoyment of the teasing with his mother.
"Her birthday?"
"Yeah. She'd kill me stone dead if I didn't send flowers. I didn't manage two years ago when I was undercover on the Toby Cannel job. I was out of touch for a week, down on Riverside close to where we were the other day and I completely forgot about it. We'd been undercover so long I didn't even know what day of the week it was. That was when big Toby got shot. Took six shots and had holes the size of dinner plates out the other side. That scared the hell out of me, watching him keep on running, like he was a machine. Like the Terminator."
"You've done it again, side-tracked yourself," Helen stalled him. "Can't you stick to a subject?"
"Right. Anyway, she'd left a million messages for me and when I didn't come back she called Donal Bulloch. She had to go though five offices until she got him, for he was the only one who knew where I was, except for big Jock Lewis who was with me the whole time and did nothing but eat beans, which I swear was pure murder after the first day." He caught Helen's look again. "The boss told her I was out on a very important job and that I was fine and what was more, he even sent her a bunch of flowers himself. But when the papers carried the pictures of Toby Cannel lying on the cobbles, my mother knew what the big important job was. She's not stupid. She wanted me to quit then and there."
"You ever hear that old Dean Martin song? A man who loves his mother?"
"In the film? Robin and the Seven Hoods?"
"That's the one," Helen confirmed. "A man who loves his mother is man enough for me. It's nothing to be embarrassed about. It's natural."
There were two other messages on the answering machine. David hit the play-back button. June was first. The sound was muted and from the distance Helen couldn't hear any more than a murmur, but she could tell from the way he turned away and she stayed where she was. He didn't say very much and a pang of pity stole through her. It passed very quickly. June was going to lose him. She knew that for certain. And she knew why.
Without looking round, David changed his posture and she knew he had passed to a different message. He listened, head cocked to the side and clicked the button again before beginning to re-dial. As he was hitting the keys, he turned round again, and asked Helen to bring the folder with the photocopies. She slid it across the coffee table and he stretched to get it. He selected the picture of the crushed pram.
"It's John Barclay down at the mall. He's been trying to get me for a couple of days." He held up a hand, indicating someone else was on the line. He spoke for a moment, said he'd be down within the hour and hung up.
He picked up the print which showed the tangle of buckled wheels and crumpled metal. "John's found a pram down at the Waterside Mall. One of his boys stuck it out for garbage collection after locking up on the night Heather McDougall died. That's just an aside. I thought he was desperate to get his video tapes back into the machines, but he say's he's had a look at them and he's found something else."
"What is it?"
"We'd best both have a look. Something strange." He seemed glad to have a practical matter to think about. She felt a smile start inside.
He had woken hungry.
It was a different hunger now. The mother had moved in her sleep, automatically and instinctively protecting him from her weight, huddling him close. She trembled deep within herself and he withdrew slowly, unwilling to break the contact, fully awake now. He would have to wait until she was ready before he drank again. Already his limbs were strong enough, the bones quickly grown and articulated. He could move now. He had woken in the twist of hunger pangs.
He had felt the surge of fear when the nest had been invaded in the night, for he had recognised the human, a female one. A potential mother. He had read her scent and her movement and had recognised her from the other time. He had sensed danger and invasion and the need to flee because he was not strong enough, not yet. There was something about the other one too. She had reeled back and he had reached to touch her, putting his mark on her. He had felt her vibration and felt her deep strength. Something inside of him had stirred there and then, even in the height of the emergency, in the need to flee and be gone. Now her scent and her vibration was imprinted inside him.
Out there in the dark something crept quietly and the heat of appetite flared reflexively. He remembered the other one that had come close in the warm place, how he had reached and struck, moving faster than he had ever done in his long and placid life. He had not planned it, not thought about it. The thing had come close, mewling in some alarm, entrapped by the scent, and unable to free itself. There had been no thought, just action. He had reached, quicker than a blink, reacting in an explosion of speed and it had died. The blaze of its mind had flicked out almost in an instant after he had reached and hit. The blow had shuddered up from the end of his arm to the strangely articulated socket, but there had been no pain. The pain of touch was foreign to him. Until now there had been only two pains that he could comprehend, the hurt of bright light and the bite of hunger.
The new pangs twisted inside him at him. They had had jolted him from sleep. Out in the dark he had felt the movement, heard the almost soundless twitch. His eyes blinked open and his other sense reached.
Over there, a point of warmth moved, blazing fiercely against the rolling grey of the background sparked by the tiny, unfocussed lights that showed the ants and other insects in their thousands under the protective lining of the wood.
He moved then, again instinctively, ferret smooth, cat slow, yet with the steadiness of a spider. All of his senses were focused forward. For that moment he forgot the mother. She was lying curled up in the nest. He turned his mind away from her and concentrated on the warmth ahead. The hunger gnawed within him. Unused muscles in new limbs flexed and tensed, He shivered in tension, as if all of his energy was singing along the length of his slender spine. The glands pumped up, subsided, the pores closed.
He struck in a blur and the warm thing squeaked as it felt his rush. It ran for the door, doubled back, almost as fast as he was. It turned, faced him defiantly, its weasel mouth opening to show deadly little spikes of canine teeth. Without hesitation he snatched it. It twisted in his grasp, tried to bite him, a hunting weasel now caught. He leaned forward, impaled it with his eyes and it died with a feeble screech.
He bent his head, licked at the morsel, savouring the heat and the mustelid scent it had sprayed in defiance and defence, so like his own spray. His mouth stretched over the head and his juice ran into its eyes, making them steam and run. He sucked then and swallowed quickly pressing his own tiny teeth to pierce the thin skull and let his own poison drain inside, dissolving the brain and the nervous tissue. He squeezed and emptied the thing into himself. Instantly his whole body glowed with the heat of new nourishment. He made a little gulping sound in the dark, savouring the taste as it slipped down inside him. He bent again to the tiny, shrivelling husk. He froze.
Sudden alarm shivered through him. The mother was awake and he had let her go. He turned, eyes wide in the darkness. He could feel her fear and pain, feel her urgent need, the way he could sense the other things in the night. Underneath it, even more, her bubbling desperate anger came to him. He saw her pale hand reach slowly for the fork. His own senses were wound up to a jittery speed, that made everything seem sluggish. She reached for the thing on the wall. He saw the four curved points. It came swinging down. He moved to the left, new limbs thrusting against the ragged floorboards in a powerful shove. A clanging noise rolled out, deepened now in his hot-speed, sounding like an old gong. The vibration shivered the air.
He flicked forward, eyes wide. She never had a chance to move again. He launched himself at her, scuttling up her dark shape, glands swelling again.
She made a sound, a whimpering noise that sounded like a low grunt to him. He fastened to her. His tail went around her neck, coiling and tightening. She grunted this time and the fork dropped away to land with a quivering thud on an old grow-bag of compost, impaling it to the floor. He sprayed instinctively and the fight went out of her. She fell back as if her ligaments and nerves had been severed. He waited in the dark until he knew she was subdued, under his control. He loosened the coil from her neck very lowly, listening to the pulse of her heartbeat slow, feeling it through his own skin.
His new hunger was sated, but there were other needs and other hungers. He sat in the dark, his wide, night-vision eyes fixed on hr, slowly loosening his grip and nuzzling down in against her heat. There was no fight in her now, but he would have to be wary. This was the first, the only one who had ever fought, the first who tried to break away, who even could break away. There was a danger in that.
He waited for a while until he sensed the impending arrival of grey dawn, and he woke her, urging her to move. He heard the creak in her bones as she made the effort, but he did not know what caused that. He had no words and no real knowledge outside his own self and the mothers.
But he was learning quickly.
Down in the security ofice in Waterside Mall John Barclay offered them coffee but David and Helen were more interested in what he had to show them. All of the screens in his office were on, a bank of flickering grey and white squares showing all the views. It was still early, before nine, but already the place was filling up with early morning shoppers, hurried people, not casual browsers, picking up what they wanted on the way to work. As David and Helen watched the screen, Carrie McFall came walking quickly past on the main floor close to the escalators.
"This is is," John said. "I've been through them all and I thought you'd want to see this." He thumbed the cassette into the slot, hit replay and they watched the blurred figures race backwards, their steps odd and jerky and vaguely silly. Finally he slowed it and the whine ground to a whisper. "Here. This is from camera four on the side foyer. Watch."
"What are we looking for?"
"Your woman. The collapser? We've got her coming in." John raised a hand and pointed. "There she is. The one behind the fat man? That's her."
"Are you sure?"
"Couldn't be surer. I spent a whole afternoon going through the tapes after you left, mostly because I wanted them back, but after I saw this, I thought you should have a look too. Didn't you get my messages?"
David shook his head. John gave him a disbelieving look. They turned back to the screen where a portly man in a heavy coat and a hat too small for his round head came bulling through the door. Behind him, a tall, spare woman, came walking forward, head bowed.
She was pushing a dark coloured pram.
"That's the same one our boys found round the back. One of the men stuck it there after the place was closed. He thought somebody had just dumped it, for it's pretty old and one wheel's got a squeak that sends shivers down your backbone." John stopped the video. Heather McDougall, if it really was the woman, flickered unsteadily on screen, her head half-turned into the shadow. "It was only after I saw this that I asked and somebody remembered finding the thing. What we've got here's a real puzzle."
He thumbed the switch again. The spare woman came in through the automatic doors, into the light. She raised her head, moving slowly, almost painfully, to the left. Even in the wavering image on the television screen, she looked gaunt and dishevelled. The pram looked black and its hood was raised. They watched in silence as she moved further to the left and then began to head out of the picture.
"That's it?" David said, though his brain was already trying to work things out. There had indeed been a baby, assuming there had been one in the pram. Either that, or she'd been a bag-lady, just using the old pram as a trolley. He was about to say something else when the woman, right at the far edge of the screen, leaned forward, bending right over the push-handle and stooped over the pram. The definition was not clear enough to see her lips move, but her head did sway from left to right. It was clear she was talking to something inside the pram. She was talking to a baby the way mothers do. It was clear in the sway, in the timing. Seconds later, she moved beyond the scope of the camera. John Barclay stopped the machine.
"You can have that one. Now look at the tape from Number Three, next to the escalator." It slid in, switched on, the picture came to life. "I should have made a compilation to save time," the security man told them, "But I don't have editing facilities here."
Heather McDougall came towards the camera, still pushing the pram. Two girls crossed her path, passed her by, then both stopped. They looked at each other and one of them shook her head violently. Her friend put a hand up to cover her nose and mouth. They hurried away. The woman walked to the wall where two other buggies were parked. She stooped forward again, reached into the pram and made some small movements, as if she was tucking a baby in tight. When she leaned back she raised the cover and snapped it firmly in place. Slowly, painfully, she turned and walked off towards the Mothercare shop, slowing momentarily as if catching her breath. The motion of the camera, timed to swing left to right and back again in the space of a minute, followed her progress as if directed by human hand. Helen recognised the handbag as the one they had found in the bushes where Carrie McFall had thrown it. David recognised the creaking falter of a woman with only minutes left to live.
"You've seen the next bit," John Barclay said. "You've still got the tape. I thought you should see what happened."
"I appreciate it, Jab," David told him. "The medics were right. And the woman from Rolling Stock. she told them she'd a baby."
"But whose?" Helen asked. "And what happened to it?
John's face creased into a wide smile. "I wondered when you'd ask that. That's exactly what I asked when I saw her walk off towards Mothercare. We saw her coming back again and throw a wobbly in the middle of the mezzanine, so after I found her coming in, pushing the pram, I had to look through the rest of them. Lucky they're all timed. It's a fiddly job, but you can work out a sequence."
On screen, Heather McDougall, spare and gaunt, a scarecrow of a woman with an oddly protruding chest, limping a little, walking as if she was struggling uphill at the end of a long day, merged with the early evening crowd at the door of the shop and then disappeared from view.
John lifted the next tape from the pile and exchanged it. David and Helen stood facing the screen expectantly.
"I hope I can get to use the rest of the tapes after this," John said. "And I reckon the force could stand me a few drinks."
"May the force always be with you John. We appreciate this."
The ex-policeman hit the button again. Once more, the figures danced and jiggled backwards. The camera panned from right to left, taking in the crowd of people comically staggering up the escalator in fast reverse. The lens swung beyond them. Right at the edge of the picture, they could see a part of the crowd that had gathered round the fallen shape slumped on the tiles.
The small woman in a grey coat bent forward at the side of the pillar, just inside the frame, turned and disappeared back into the crowd with the dropped shopping bag. Just within view, Carrie McFall came walking quickly, heading for the spot where the handbag had fallen. Both of them disappeared from the shot. For a second, the only people visible were the two girls who had passed by Heather McDougall and reacted strangely. They were turned towards each other, obviously comparing purchases.
A figure walked past them, moving quickly, with an almost jaunty step. She was slim and fair-haired, almost athletic in her movements. Her hair was pleated and pinned up, as far as they could tell, under a neat beret. Her long coat was open and flapped in time to her step. The picture was not pin sharp, and the screen was grey and grainy, but even then, the girl looked as if she might be smiling.
"Good heavens," Helen whispered. John Barclay held up a forestalling hand.
"Watch this," he said. It was only then that the camera reached the end of its travel and began to swing to the right again. The girl was coming more into the field of view. The camera swung just enough to pick up where the second one had left off. The small row of prams and two baby buggies stood against the wall.
The girl came sauntering past. Her head turned slightly to the right, and although they couldn't see anything else in the frame, they knew she must have been glancing at the commotion in the centre of the walkway. She slowed, peered, obviously curious, then started walking again. From her gait, it seemed she couldn't make out what the disturbance was and quickly lost interest. A hand went into her pocket, and a small movement brought that side of the coat flapping round in a wrapping curl. David could see the health and confidence in that simple movement. The camera tracked her as it had followed Heather McDougall. The girl came abreast of the small queue of baby carriages. Very briskly, obviously intent on getting where she was going, she strode past them.
"Here," John Barclay said, quite unnecessarily.
The girl walked three steps, slowed at a fourth, almost stopped on the fifth. Her head went up, showing her face for the first time. She was pretty and regular featured.
"Bloody hell," Helen said. "That's her."
"Hold on," Barclay forestalled again. "This is the bit."
The old black pram was right in view. The new arrival was standing just beyond it, maybe three paces past the upraised hood. Her head came up and turned just a fraction to the right. On the grainy screen, it looked as if she was sniffing the air.
Something cold trickled down David Harper's back. A strange and curdling sense of prescience rippled along with it. He knew what was going to happen.
The girl stopped dead. She sniffed again, though they could see nothing but little twitches of her head, blurred on screen. She half turned away from the pram, as if determined to walk away. One foot took a step, The other seemed to be stuck to the floor. The handbag swung with the momentum and came back to strike against her hip, dangling from the strap. The hand came out of the pocket and reached forward, away from the direction of the pram, as if the girl was trying to push through an invisible barrier, maybe even trying to haul herself away.
She stopped again. Her mouth opened. The three of them could see the black circle. No teeth showed. The girl could have been punched in the belly from the suddenness of the expression, like all the air was whooshing out of her. The mouth opened further, in a strange and tortured gape.
"She's going to be sick," Helen said.
"No." John Barclay didn't elaborate. He didn't have to. They were strangely fascinated, unable to draw their eyes away. David could feel the prescience building. For some reason he could not explain, completely unnatural, or preternatural, he wanted the girl to keep walking. The sense of chilling menace reached from the black maw of the pram where the hood showed a square of inky darkness. It travelled through time, through the four days since Heather McDougall had died. Travelled through the air, fast as light into the camera, through the wires, onto the tape and back into the screen and he could still feel it. Helen was sitting close enough to feel him shiver and wondered what the hell was happening to him.
"Move," he heard his inner voice urge. "Walk on, love."
The girl turned, moving very slowly, for all the world as if the camera had slowed down. John Barclay's hand was nowhere near the controls. There was no sound of course, but David had the impression that if there was, it would be dopplered down to deep clunks and groans like a tape that had slowed almost to a stop. He did not know why that thought came to him, but it came with an inexplicable sense of foreboding.
She swivelled towards the pram and even then, they could see the pull of her body trying to move away. Her feet were almost hen-toed in the obvious internal struggle. She leaned forwards, pulled back. Her foot moved again, took a step in the direction. She turned again, her face twisting back towards the light. Her shoulders twitched and the long, elegant coat twitched with it. Off to the left of the screen Carrie McFall the shoplifter came briefly into view and disappeared, unaware of the drama happening not twenty yards away, interested only in her new find.
The girl in the coat walked forward, legs moving awkwardly, like a zombie in a B-movie. It would have been comical under any other circumstances, but none of them felt the humour. Her steps were ungainly, forced, somehow obscene.
"Oh Jesus," Helen said, feelingly. It was a strange, cliff-hanger of a moment for them. Even John Barclay, who had seen the sequence before, seemed to be holding his breath.
On screen the girl reached the pram and leaned forward, body still twisting, all the elegance gone. She seemed to have no control at all now, no volition. It was all in the posture and the motion. A mime artist couldn't have conveyed it better.
She stood stock still, trembling, both hands visibly fluttering. Then she leaned further, stooping low. The black square under the hood darkened further with her shadow. She reached inside. They could see her shoulders working as she manipulated something with her hands. She stood up clutching a baby tight against her, huddled inside her coat.
"Good God," Helen breathed. "It is her."
"I could hardly believe it myself," John Barclay said. He stopped the video, leaving the girl standing there, half turned towards the camera, with the little bundle wrapped in a shawl clutched in against her chest. Her eyes were wide and her face completely devoid of expression as if all the muscles had sagged. The smile was long gone.
"That's Ginny Marsden," Helen told David. "I'm sure of it. Her parents said she was coming here anyway. I should have thought of going through these tapes, but it never stuck me. Honestly, David, it really is her."
He was standing, eyes glued to the screen, seemingly unaware that she had spoken. He turned to Barclay. "Turn it back on John. Let's see what happens next."
The camera was moving, once again, tracking the motion. David could have believed there was some conscious power guiding the lenses. The girl turned away from them, heading for the far door beyond the melee where the paramedics were just in the picture now, racing for the door.
"You'll have to watch this closely. I can rewind it if you want, but look at the top end of the screen."
David found it hard to take his eyes from the girl. There was something awful, something un-natural and dreadfully fearful about her posture. She had changed utterly, in the space of a few seconds, from the confident striding young woman who had come swinging down the main walkway of the mall for last minute Christmas presents. She had crumpled and contorted, in those few seconds, into a strange, flaccid , somehow pathetic figure. David had seen the attitude before, on the shell-shocked victims of Dresden as they stumbled through their smoking streets, shadowy and indistinct in the old newsreels. He'd seen it in the posture and expression of the people in the cattle-trucks on their way to Auschwitz and Birkenau. It was the knowledge of certain catastrophe. It was the presentiment of doom. A trickle of sweat ran down the side of his ribs.
John pointed a finger. The trolley was moving towards the door. A number of people were coming through and despite the silence, they reacted to the obvious shout from Phil Coulter. One woman stopped in her tracks. Her husband pulled her to the side by her arm. The trolley stopped rolling. One of the medics had a hand out towards the door.
"Here," Barclay said.
The dying woman on the gurney sat up, face contorted as badly, as painfully, as the girl's had been. Her mouth opened and closed as through she was gasping for air. Phil Coulter reached a hand out towards her. She twisted, rolled off the trolley and hit the ground. Without any hesitation she was crawling, like a flapping black insect, towards the with the baby. On the silent screen, she was a strange and grotesque apparition, moving jerkily on the patterned floor. A small dog tethered nearby strained against its leash, mouth scissoring angrily, possibly fearfully. The woman scuttled past it, a round, pale breast dragging close to the floor like a monstrous tumour. A girl came walking out of a shop, laden with parcels, unaware of the scene right in front of her. She almost fell over the crawling woman and the parcels went up into the air. The old woman scrabbled past, made it half-way along the walkway. Just on the very edge of the screen, the flapping coat of the girl could be seen. She stopped, turned quickly and came back towards the camera. The old woman stopped, flopped forward with the momentum so that her forehead smacked the floor. Even in the silence it looked like a heavy blow. She rolled over twitched and then was still.
"What do you think?" John asked. "Is this weird or what?"
David stood open-mouthed, next to Helen whose expression mirrored his exactly. The girl walked quickly, but still jerkily as if her muscles were responding to mixed up commands. She clutched the baby in against her coat. The closer she came, the more her face expanded on the screen.
"It is her. That's Ginny Marsden," Helen said. "I'm sure of it."
"Who's she?" John Barclay asked.
"She's a girl I've been tying to find. She went missing a couple of days ago."
"Well now you know why. She's a bloody baby-snatcher."
"Look at her face," David said.
Ginny Marsden's mouth was contorted in a dreadful grimace. She now looked is if she was struggling with all her strength, pushing forward as if pushing through a crowd, or against an invisible barrier. Her mouth was drawn back into a rictus that showed almost all of her lower teeth. The tendons on her neck stuck out like wires.
"She looks as if she's throwing a fit," John observed.
The girl walked quickly past, heading out of the camera's range. She got to the corner, turned, and as she did so, the baby's face was just visible, turned in against her coat, clamped to her shoulder and half hidden by the wide lapel. It was just a blur, but David felt something turn over in the pit of his belly.
"Is that a baby or a stuffed toy?" John wanted to know. "It's an ugly little bugger."
It was just a glimpse, an indistinct, undefined shape on the screen, fuzzed by the distance and motion. But even then, the small and flickering television image was peculiar enough to make them look twice. David asked John to replay it again. They watched it three times, but the image was still blurred and out of focus, though the details of Ginny Marsden's features were still clear, etched with panic and shock. David knew he'd have to take it to the lab for scanning to see if they could get some enhancement that would sharpen the picture.
"I couldn't figure any of this out," John Barclay said. "The paramedics were right when they said she'd gone crawling off. I heard the same thing happened when they got her to the hospital. But I can't figure out how come she turns up here with a baby and then it gets picked up by somebody else. I was wondering if maybe they were working as a team? Maybe even using the pram for shoplifting?"
He looked at David and Helen. "That was the first thing I thought of, but then I had another look. I don't think they even knew each other. The way that girl came in through the door, she looked as if she didn't have a care in the world. By the time she went away with the baby, she'd put on ten years. I tell you, that's the weirdest thing I ever saw."