“You sound like you’ve gone eight rounds.” Helen’s voice was sleepy and soft at the edges as if she was stifling a yawn. “What time is it anyway?”
“Late. Or early,” David said. “I had a thought.”
“So you just had another thought, to wake me up and share it with me. Woke up my niece as well.” Helen said, but without rancour. The initial drowsiness was fading as she came more alert and now he could hear the suppressed smile. “You looked all set for a right hook and a possible knockout tonight. She did not seem to me to be a happy lady.” David thought she didn’t realise how close to the mark she was. She would see the bruise in the morning. “Were you in big trouble?”
“Deep shit,” he admitted. “It’s over now.”
There was a silence on the phone as she considered the permutations and possibilities.
“Over.” Another statement and question.
“We finished. Split. And yes, she did hit me on the nose. It bled a bit.”
There was another silence that stretched between them. He wondered whether she’d laugh, or sympathise. She did neither.
“So you just thought you’d wake me up and cry on my shoulder?”
“No. Not at all.” He didn’t really know now why he had called. He thought he did when he dialled but now, in the spotlight of her question, he wasn’t so sure. He’d dreamed, slouched in the seat in front of the flickering screen, surrounded by the papers that they’d been going through earlier, and he’d woken with a start when his arm had slipped and banged against the still tender side of his nose. He’d woken and he’d wanted to reach out and make contact.
“I had a weird notion I wanted to bounce off you.” He said. He took her silence and the odd whickering sound that sounded like a stifled laugh as encouragement to go on. “You’ll think I’m crazy. I mean really out of the park. But I think we’re looking at this from the wrong point of view.” He paused for just a moment then ploughed ahead. “I asked Mike Fitzgibbon what sort of woman steals a baby.”
He closed his eyes and recalled the tall doctor’s response. He could see him frown, hear the measured tones.
“I’ve dealt with several in my time,” he had said. “Though it’s a fairly rare phenomenon. Many people consider it, but few carry it further. It’s a major taboo in our society; in any society. The drive to mother is inherent in most women, despite what the feminists say. It’s a programming thing, as much instinct and inherent as learned. More so in fact.”
Mike had taken David back up to his office and called for two cups of coffee. He turned and looked out the window over the neatly laid out garden where the standard roses were frosted with snow. Two magpies, resplendently irridescent chattered to each other on the tall wall.
“You get bereaved mothers, women who have lost a child or children. They’re the rarest, but occasionally, their sense of loss is so great that they can be motivated to take another woman’s child. They are found almost immediately because they go home and normally present the partner with the problem, which is often a great shock. He usually, almost invariably, reports the matter. These are simply traumatised women who are not at all responsible for their actions in the short term. Their depression is often treatable and it rarely develops into full-fledged psychosis.”
Mike held up his hand and counted off his thumb, moving to the next finger. “Then there’s infertile women, or those who believe themselves to be incapable of bearing children and have developed an obsessive compulsion. It is a distortion of the normally powerful mothering instinct. They are the hardest of all to find because despite their clinical depression, they will have planned the move in advance, like a bank robbery. It is rarely a pram theft though. They tend to take neonates from hospitals, or even go so far as to pose as social workers or district nurses to remove them from homes. Often they build up an elaborate background story and rehearse earnestly, even to the extent of having a name for the child and all the paraphernalia, feeding bottles, cribs, toys, that sort of thing. That’s the kind who take longest to trace. So far, in the UK, there has not been a case which has not been resolved. In America, there are several every year, but then there’s more murders too.”
Mike ticked off another finger. “You get sociopaths, psychopaths, who want to damage another woman. Again, this is very rare. Most woman who take a child are doing it from a deep seated need. There was a case in Boston of a woman taking a neighbour’s baby to get revenge over a garden fence argument.” A fourth finger was marked off. “You get sexual sadists, equally uncommon, but not unheard of, who want to damage a child. For them a baby’s cry hits the wrong programming. For most folk, even for men, the pitch causes anxiety and stress, as a number of tests clearly demonstrate. That’s pure evolution. It’s how a baby gets into your mental software and presses the buttons. For a psycho-sadist, the sound brings pleasure, and of course, in an infant, it’s easily induced. There was a very distressing case in Brisbane back in the eighties. The woman kept the baby fed, but made a blanket out of fibreglass insulation. The baby’s back was suppurating with gangrene by the time it was found.”
Mike held up his small finger. “Lastly, and this is more common than you might expect, even in this country, there’s witchcraft. I read a paper on babies being sacrificed in Gambia, Zaire and Haiti. Some of them, it is believed, were stolen, but the majority, probably were sold, or even given willingly. There were two suspected cases in Bristol two years ago as far as I remember. That’s about it.”
The coffee arrived, two small cups, lukewarm and bitter. Mike grimaced, as if he’d made the same gesture many times.
“So, what about Greta Simon?” David asked. “Do you think she’s telling the truth?”
“With what’s left of her brain, it’s hard to know. But she could be. The short term memory is gone, which means that by now, she wouldn’t remember your face or your name. She might, one time in a hundred, remember who I am, but I wouldn’t put money on it. Certainly, as I told you, there were no signs of her ever having given birth, but signs that she had cared for a baby, and of course, there was nothing to show why a woman of her advanced years was still lactating. That was a mystery.”
“It sounds very like the case I’m working on.”
“I know. But as far as Greta is concerned, she lives in a small series of bubbles in time, if you forgive the analogy. She is not in the present. That temporal part of her brain is damaged beyond repair and at her age, there will be no new neural pathways to be established. Whatever she’s lost is gone for good. I can guarantee that. But whenever she is in one particular time zone, as I like to call it, she sees things perfectly clearly. If she tells you she is holding a baby, then she believes that is what is happening, because the memory is forming a perpetual rationality loop. The brain is a wonderful, and mysterious organ. It tries to rationalise what it cannot comprehend. It can also recreate, more vividly than any memory, the exact conditions relating to any given period, so long as the recalled input has been strong enough initially.”
David said he didn’t quite understand that.
“Basically the cerebral cortex is a time machine. You trigger the response and it puts you back to where you’ve been. The injury Greta Simon suffered caused lesions and scarring which caused considerable damage. She has lost the bulk of her memories and that is not unusual with trauma of this sort. The brain compensates of course, boosting inherent and surviving memories, giving it some frame of reference. Basically, there are a few parts of her life which are still extant, still current. Each of these parts, at any given time, is real, and because her short term memory function is gone they are more real than the present. For Greta, the present does not really exist. Her whole life is encapsulated in those surviving areas of memory. At any given moment, she could be back in the sixties, or she could be five years old again, and she can tell you the name of everybody in her school class, where they are sitting and what they wear. It never varies, because she actually believes she is there. Most of the time, she’s cradling a baby, Tiny Tim. She sees him as vividly as we see each other. Now that itself leads me to believe that at one stage, probably very shortly before the accident, that she was indeed responsible for, however temporary, the care of a child. Greta has no capacity to lie.”
“But not her baby?”
“No. Quite unequivocally not hers.”
Back in his own place, David had poured himself a drink, still shaken in the aftermath of June’s anger and in reaction to the stinging blow to his nose. He let the Jack Daniels bubble over ice and then sipped it slowly, letting the smooth burn spread in his throat. He tried not to go over what had happened, still feeling guilt and a certain strange elation which added to the guilt-weight. He had cleared the glass from the hallway, buttoning down the anger at her nasty swipe which crashed the picture frame to the floor. The whole thing had been unexpected, though, inside himself, he knew he had only been postponing the inevitable.
His nose throbbed and his emotions did an eightsome reel, and after a while he pulled together the papers on the floor, collected them into a neater pile, and put them all under the coffee table, realising that he would get no more work done tonight. Instead, he poured himself another whisky, popped a can of lager, sat down on the carpet with his back against the couch and thumbed the remote control. The television came to life and offered him a choice was golf, a chess match, or old soap repeats, none of which were worth staying in for. Instead, he checked his list of tapes, possibly the most organised part of his life and selected the wildlife series he’d been compiling week by week.
The beer was almost ice cold and after the first swallow, he held the can against his nose, letting the chill numb the hot throbbing.
On screen, the famous naturalist was hunkered down observing a troop of baboons spread over a rocky clearing. He turned to the camera, his well known, almost beatific smile wide and excited.
“And here,” he said, “the subordinate male protects itself from the Alpha, the leader of the troop.” The camera zoomed in on a bulky primate, tail held high over its rainbow backside, as it snatched a tiny baby from its mother. She screamed in protest and the baby whimpered in fright, but the baboon ignored both. From the edge of the picture, an even more massive male came powering in, its mane hackled and forelegs stiff with aggression. The first baboon began to run the tiny mite’s fur upwards against the grain and immediately it shrieked its discomfort.
The dominant animal stopped in its tracks.
“Like us,” the presenter said, “like chimpanzees and the great apes, baboons have a defined family structure. Instinctively, they react to the sound of a baby’s cry, which is pitched at such a level to cause distress in the adults. As you can see here, the Alpha male has stopped in its advance. It wants to fight the Beta male, driven by its natural response to dominate the troop. But the inferior male is using the baby’s shrieks as a shield. The dominant male is anxious and agitated, because the baby’s cries for help trigger the adult’s protective response, in the same way that an infant’s cry automatically attracts attention from a human. Confused by the interference of the baby baboon’s cry, the Alpha stops, unable to attack. In this way we see that the baby’s genetic programming coincides with that of the adult. It demands attention and the adult is powerless to ignore it.”
Almost miraculously, while the tiny baboon shrieked its glassy cry, while its mother chattered in real distress close by, impotent to snatch her baby out of danger, the huge male stopped, sat still and looked quite comically confused. The rival continued rubbing the infant’s fur up the wrong way as it sidled off, far enough to be out of danger. Then, quite casually, he dropped the baby onto the ground. The mother rushed in, snatched it up and held it close, checking for damage. Instantly the baby buried its head against her fur and began to suckle. Its cries stopped immediately.
David watched the programme through, but his mind kept jumping back to the scene with June which clamoured for his attention, demanding to be picked over and analysed, and for some reason, when he thought of her, Greta Simon’s strangely sly, lopsided face, would intrude in to his thoughts.
“I found him,” the old woman had said. “And he was mine.”
He’d been thinking about June, how she’d wanted to start a family, how she’d get depressed whenever one of her friends announced a pregnancy while she wasn’t even married. He thought about the biological drives some people have in abundance, recalled asking Helen, quite clumsily as he now remembered, about the reproductive imperative and she’d laughed, telling him that her sisters had it in great abundance.
“Because of that, I’ve got a tight rein on mine,” she’d said. “I make a terrific aunt, costs me a fortune at Christmas, but the rest of it I can do without.” She’d looked up at him and given him a teasing smile, nudging him with her elbow. “Unless I find the right man, of course.”
He’d smiled at that recollection, faintly embarrassed despite the third Jack Daniels, and then again, with no warning, Greta Simon’s face floated into his memory.
“She fell down and the baby called to me and he needed a mother.” The good eye had rolled round to face him, pinning him with its oddly iced sharpness. “I look after him and I feed him. He’s so hungry all the time. He could suck you to death, but he needs me.”
The old woman had believed she was suckling a baby, from the motions of her hands and the posture of her body. Her hands moved, the way the baboon mother’s hands had moved, a natural clutching, hugging motion as she pressed the imaginary child to her thin, shapeless chest.
Superimposed on that image, he saw the baby baboon, skinny and flat faced, its arms stretched and fingers clenched on its mother’s fur, nuzzle in against the black teat.
“Oh, not so hard Timmy. You’ll empty me right out.” Greta Simon had complained, pretended to complain, as the invisible baby suckled.
There was something in those images, an important connection tugging at him. As before, he reached for it, but it danced away. By now he was on his third can and the effects of the liquor and the events of the day began to overtake him. He tried again to make the connection and failed. He considered calling Helen, dismissed the notion.
On the screen the camera swung round past a crackling flame which ate its way up a trailing vine. It zoomed in to a hollow in a tree where a bird, something small and plain, a lark or a maybe a linnet, sat on its clutch of eggs. The flames of the brush fire made the air waver and dance in heat mirage, but behind it, the bird’s eye, black as a coal could be seen sparkling. The camera zoomed even closer, a terrific feat of photography, and even managed to capture the red flames flickering angrily in the eye’s reflection
The red eye glared, sending a strange and unexpected shiver of intuitive recognition inside David, despite the numbing effect of the beer and whiskey.
“As you can see,” the famous naturalist explained in hushed, awed tones, “this bird continues to sit on the nest. The other animals, the lizards and the snakes, the meercats and the other birds have fled the approaching flames. In this bird, however, the urge to protect her chicks is too strong. This is genetic programming at its most implacable. The bird wants to flee the flames, but it senses the danger to the nestlings. The need to protect its children is stronger even than its own natural imperative to survive. Again, we can see the command children have over their parents, and this it to the death. The mother bird will sit here as the fire consumes the bush she chose as a safe haven, defying the heat and the fear. All to no avail.”
The flames crackled as the scene began to blur on the screen, the great red eye staring desperately out. The mother bird sat there until the heat and the smoke filled the screen, blotting everything out.
“The natural imperative, the drive to reproduce, to protect its offspring against all dangers, is so powerful that it has over-ruled every other instinct,” he said, “In the end, it has killed them all.”
The credits rolled and the dramatic music swelled. David leaned back against the settee and closed his eyes, listening to the soulful notes while the images, June, Helen, Greta Simon, the baby baboon, the dreadful red eye, they all came swimming and circling in his memory. By the time the next programme began, he was half asleep.
The tape rolled on. On screen, a mass of moving twigs resolved as the camera pulled back, into a mound of ants. The voice came on again, whispering atmospherically, explaining the army ant bivouac. As the teeming mass of insects broke up, the camera followed the monstrous, swollen thing that was the queen, hauled hither and yon by the nurses, bloated and helpless.
“She lays eggs constantly,” the naturalist said. “While the workers, her daughters, are programmed to raise them. They will die to defend the queen’s offspring, obeying the queen’s own reproductive imperative. She needs to breed. It is her sole function, and it is that drive which powers the whole colony.”
David did not hear those words, not consciously. He was fast asleep. And in his sleep, he dreamed.
“Bastard.”
June’s face twisted in anger as she spat the word and all of the pictures fell from the walls, spinning away from him, each of them warping and twisting, each of them now a screen in which the subjects moved in their own separate cells of life.
“Bastard.” The word echoed from the walls and she was turning to face him, her face white and eyes wide. “You must be impotent!”
He looked down and thought he might be impotent because he was naked and nothing was happening where it should and when he looked up again, Helen Lamont was coming towards him, hunched against the cold in her flying jacket. Somewhere in the distance a cuckoo hooted and they were sitting beside a pool where dragonflies swarmed in fighting squadrons, snapping insects out of the air.
“You’re one of the good guys,” Helen said and smiled at him while June was storming across the field, her skirt blowing in the breeze. “I might have one if I find the right man.”
He had turned towards her and she had smiled again and the flames were in her eyes and they were all red.
The cuckoo hopped again closer in now and he could see it flutter from bush to bush, seeking the pipit’s nest. He turned away from Helen and watched it settle on the nest, furtively pressing down, head swivelling from side to side. The egg came out, soft and membraned and it wriggled and swelled and then burst open to show the big-eyed bird that jostled the others out of the way, out of the nest and then shrieked for food.
“Poor little thing,” Helen said and he turned back to her while the baby cuckoo begged for food. “It needs fed.”
“Of course it does,” he told her, edging forward to plant his lips on hers. “We all need fed.” The words came out smooth as oil and he marvelled at how cool he was and her tongue came out and the tasted the freshness of it and closed her eyes, lifting a hand to her breast.
He touched the leathery skin and his eyes flicked wide open. Heather McDougall was writhing on the ground, the three moles like risen cancers on her cheek, while he was pressing against her chest, trying to get the heart to start and the smell of her blood and vomit was like a cloud in the air. Helen was screaming at him to do something while June just kept telling him he was a bastard and that he’d destroyed another one and that she wouldn’t have his children if he was the last man on earth.
He turned back to the dying woman and Greta Simon leered up at him with that monstrous dent caving in the side of her head and forcing her red eye to look at the other one, madness swimming vin her gaze and her laughter cackling out.
“I left my baby lying here,” she screeched. “And went to gather blueberries. She took it she took it she TOOK IT.”
“I did not,” June hissed. “I didn’t want that baby. I wanted yours.”
David spun, confused and the sun was going down and the dragonflies game whirring in on their helicopter wings, great eyes redly reflecting the setting sun. Helen lay back in the grass beside the water filled crater. He bent to kiss her again, now strangely excited. She put her hand down between his legs and trailed her fingers up against his thigh. He felt the heat expand on the side of his cheek and she leaned into him once more, pressing against him and he was inside her, slowly surging, back and forth, smelling the heady scent of her body and feeling the shudder and gasp as she forced against him. She lay back and looked at him with the sun in her eyes and after a while the water rippled and something dark and devilish broke the surface and began to haul its way up the stalk of reed, expanding as it came until it reached eye level and the skin on the back split down the middle and something else came out. He raised his camera to get a picture of the light reflecting on the bulbous, predator’s eyes, but it was no dragonfly emerging, it was a small, fragile baby baboon, screeching in fear and alarm and he felt the sudden anger build up inside him.
“Bastard,” June bawled fiercely. “It’s your baby, don’t you see?”
He turned, whirling, and saw Helen was gone and spun back to June who was turning slowly away with the red sun in her eyes. Over in the bushes the pipits were feeding a huge bird, the size of a turkey and the baboon squealed harshly as it sank slowly into the water.
He awoke with a sudden start, heart hammering, thrown out of sleep by the sudden fear of the incomprehensible and by the sudden flare of pain in his nose when his arm knocked against it. The heat on his cheek was almost a pain and a real pain was jabbing in at the muscle of his neck. In the video recorder the tape was screeching to a halt, rewinding itself back to the start.
Groggily he forced himself up onto one elbow, then pushed again until he was sitting. He had slid down to the thick rug, too close to the gas fire. His cheek felt as if it was baked and for and instant he imagined he could smell scorched hairs. The tape squealed shrill then clicked to a stop. The terrified baboon sound, or what had seemed like a baboon in his dream, died instantly. He moved again and his neck protested in a stab of stiff pain. He groaned, knocked his glass over, spilling a tablespoon of Jack Daniels onto the carpet. The scent of whisky overpowered anything else and David came fully awake.
The after images of his dream danced in his vision, fading slowly. June’s face still held the expression he had seen when she’d stormed out. Old Greta Simon’s distorted head slowly fuzzed out, leaving Helen Lamont, eyes glazed and mouth open, as she had been in the strange dream. Embarrassment and sudden lust challenged each other and cancelled each other out.
For a few minutes, blinking the sleep away, he tried to recapture the details of the dream, but they faded as quickly as the images had done, leaving him with the slightly disoriented, half-bewildered sense of something not quite achieved, of something half-grasped and now lost.
He got up, went to the bathroom to wash his face in cold water, massaging the cramped muscles of his neck with a cool hand and then came back through to the living room. Somewhere in the ten yards from bathroom to where he’d fallen asleep, the notion he’d been reaching or came in on him with complete, crystalline clarity. The connection.
He sat down by the table and clenched his hands together, resting his chin on the lattice his fingers made, thinking about a concept so monstrous he could hardly believe he could even consider its possibility. He let out a long, slow breath. The dream images had fragmented and vanished, but the core of the symbology remained with him, mental pieces interlocking, parts forming a monumental whole. He wondered why he had not put them together before, because his interest in the natural world had already provided him with all of the clues. He had known about the drives and the imperatives without having to see them again on a television programme.
Drives. Imperatives. Programming.
Pieces of the jigsaw. Could they all fit? He sat and forced himself to think, drawing on the dream images, sizing them up. The naturalist on television had spoken of fundamental drives, the basic instinct that is the engine of the vast and intricate biosphere of the earth, the urge to replicate. The cuckoo of David’s previous dream came back to him, the hairless and blind chick, murdering its foster-siblings by throwing them from the nest while its new parents could do nothing but follow their programming to respond to its cries for food and work themselves to exhaustion to feed their giant ward.
A brood parasite, the cuckoo was. There were worse parasites, but this one used the parents drive to protect its offspring. Like the baboon baby’s cry which drove the adults to feed and protect. Like the bird in the nest, suicidally remaining on the nest, the genetic program was clear. The bird had no choice.
And in humans, biologically no further along on the evolutionary trail. Did humans have any real choice? He thought of a baby’s high-pitched cry and knew that even he would experience the quickening of his pulse and the tightening of his nerves if he heard a child’s wail. That response was an evolutionary necessity. It was how the infant controlled the parent.
If, if there was a kind of thing that had evolved to use humans, how best to be protected? There was one answer to that.
The concept he’d arrived at was such a stupendous one that he really had to sit down and think it through. The bottle of Jack Daniels picked up the light and gleamed from the far side of the table. He almost reached for it again, changed his mind, and hauled himself out of the chair, his stiff joints protesting at the sudden motion. He flipped the switch on the kettle and paced the kitchen, still juggling with mental images, until the kettle boiled. He made a pot of coffee, strong and aromatic, downed a cup, had another and by the time he was on his third, he was almost completely awake.
“Say that again?” Helen said, on the other end of the line, her voice quizzical. “And slowly this time, so I can understand it.”
“I asked Mike Fitzgibbon the wrong question, I think. What sort of woman would steal a baby. What if it was the other way round?:”
“You’re serious?”
“Sure. Maybe. Christ, I don’t know.” He stopped, pulled himself tight. Took a mental step forward. “Yes. I’m serious. It sounds crazy, and it is crazy. But we’ve done the checks and this is not the first time it’s happened, and there’s no real evidence of any other babies. Not ever. People have seen the prams, maybe even got a glimpse, but there’s no name, no real identity.”
“Are you drunk?”
“I’ve had a drink. But I’m not drunk.” He wasn’t sure if that was the actual truth or not, but right at that moment he felt absolutely sober. For a moment of misgiving, he felt that he might have made a complete idiot of himself, but then he realised how it all fit.
“You think we should look for a baby that steals mothers?”
The silence drew out for longer than before. He hadn’t heard a click on the line, but just as he wondered whether they’d been cut off, Helen’s voice came back. She spoke quite softly.
“I don’t want to talk about this just now. I think you should get some sleep and we’ll talk about this in the morning.”
This time she hung up.
She never got back to sleep that night. Now that she was awake, now that he’d put the idea into her head, she couldn’t let it go, and the more she thought about it, the more, however preposterous the notion seemed, the more it seemed to fit with the facts of the case. She lay in the dark, with a shaft of moonlight lancing between the narrow gap of the curtains to slash a silver line down the wall, trying to sleep while her mind picked and teased, refusing to let it go.
What if. What if?
He’d told her about Greta Simon, when they’d arrived back from Levenford where the trail had suddenly gone cold. Greta Simon had been on the bridge where she’d been hit by the front end of a lorry and lost too much of her forebrain to exist in anything but an institution and a sphere of time somewhere back in the distant past. She had had a baby and it had gone missing, presumed drowned. But nobody knew who the baby was, or, more to the point, whose. And it was never found, dead or alive.
Heather McDougall who had vanished on the same day. She turned up dead in the mall, with a baby in a pram, caught on camera in the moment of death. The baby caught, blurred on the screen only when it too vanished. Ginny Marsden who had gone missing so dramatically while the McDougall woman lay writhing on the ground. Ginny Marsden had stopped and snatched the baby, cuddling it tight against her body.
The baby.
The link was there. It was clear, and yet Helen was reluctant to reach for both sides, because that would make her a conduit, a link which would keep the circuit, make the connection between one case, another, a third. If she was a conduit, the electrical connection, a canal linking them all, then she could be contaminated by this thing. Something inside of her mind, a part of her brain which might not quite operate on the truly rational, the part of her mind that the little parasite had recognised over the distance when she had felt someone walk over her grave, shied away from this.
The fingers trailed down her spine again. Out in the dark, at the far end of the hallway , one of her nieces snuffled in her sleep and wailed faintly in dream distress and Helen remembered the same feeling of impending danger that she’d sensed when Nina Galt had opened the door and the bitter smell had come wafting out from the room. That part of her mind that could reach out of the rational and pick up a taste of the other-natural, flexed, still weak, still unready, and gave her a sensation of shadowed and threatening prescience.
There was danger here and it was real.
The same smell as at the house on Latta Street. The same as at Celia Barker’s apartment where the dead cat had got up and danced and the walls had breathed and the two-headed beast had come lurching for her in the hallucination. She sensed danger looming ahead.
What sort of baby would steal a mother?
Helen closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but still the shiver of prescience wouldn’t let her go and her mind still tickled and itched with the preposterous notion of something completely unnatural.
Yet.
She had sensed something that morning when she’d come out of the cafe where Margaret and Maisie had told her of the girl with the baby. She’d stopped and the unnerving sensation of being watched had insinuated itself. She had felt eyes on her, felt the touch of something else slide across her consciousness, leaving her with a besmirched feeling of contamination. She had dismissed it then, in the cold light of day, but in the dark of the night, with the dust motes dancing in that strip of moonlight, it came back to her and she knew why she had been scared in the hostel. She had pushed the idea of being watched, shucked it away from her, but it had clung to her. In the chill of the winter’s night, she knew her instinct had not been wrong. She had received a warning then, just as she felt the warning now.
And who had been watching unseen? Had it been Ginny Marsden? Had it been someone else? Intuition buzzed inside her head, an angry, insistent insect. Had it been some thing else?
Damn David Harper, she thought. He was probably sound asleep by now. He’d sounded thick and mumbling when he’d come on the phone, as if he’d just woken, or as if he’d gone the distance with that bottle of Jack Daniels. He was most likely snoring like the proverbial pig by now, while she tossed and turned and tried to shake off the images that came dancing into her imagination, images she did not want to consider in the cold shallows of a midwinter’s morning.
The baby’s blurred, unclear and wavering likeness on screen stayed with her. It had no face.