It was bitterly cold. Hoar frost made filigree jewels of the spiders webs stretched on the hedge along the back of the lane, but she did not see them. The air was chill in her throat and she huddled down against it, her movements fast and jerky. It was still dark, midwinter dark, in the dregs of the morning and she was stiff and sore from her huddled slump against the wall in the corner of the room.
She had tried to call out, tried to cry when she heard the movement at the strange house where she'd huddled in the dark, but it had touched something inside and stifled her. It had made her move, fast, urgent, digging at her with mental spurs and she had run, quickly, out of the back, as soon as she had heard the knock on the door. She had run and it had told her to find sanctuary. It had reached into her mind and found a place she could take them. Ginny had scuttled out and along the track, past the fence where the dogs immediately went frantic and launched themselves, not at the fence close to her, but on the far side, as if they were trying to escape in the other direction. Their howling tore at the air. She had floundered past the ragged bags of refuse behind the Chinese restaurant, down the far alley and took a side street that followed the line of the waterway parkland where the canal meandered through the green belt of trees and narrow, fallow fields.
Movemovemove move! The urgent commands pushed and jolted. Her lungs ached after a while because she could not pause. Every turn she took, with the baby huddled in against her, was down a darkened street, past a shady wall, in the lee of a hedge. She was instinctively avoiding light. It took three quarters of an hour and she was almost fainting from exhaustion when she got to Celia's house. She scrambled up the narrow path, got the keys free and after several futile attempts, she stabbed it into the lock, turned hard to the left, pushed the door and was inside.
It was cold, but not freezing. She sagged down on the carpet, panting like a beaten animal, listening to the rasp of breath in her own throat. The only illumination was the pallid touch of the moon out in the evening sky and the green pulsing light on the coffee table in the corner. It held her eyes while she sat there clenched and huddled feeling the weight against her breasts.
Some time later, the phone trilled and she started back, hard enough to bang her shoulder against the wall. She turned, heart hammering yet again and almost reached for the receiver, but once more the mental injunction froze her to stillness.
The telephone rang, four, five times, insistent and urgent in the darkness, but she could do nothing. It clicked. There was a hollow purring sound then a double crackle of electronic interference.
..... "Hi, this is Celia Barker." The voice was bright and lively. A voice free of cares. "I can't come to the phone at the moment, so leave a message and I'll call you back...." The purr returned, then a rapid series of blips and a long whine of noise.
"Hi again Ginny, I called earlier." The lively voice was different, fresher then before. "Just to say I've arrived and this place looks marvellous. Blue skies and a warm breeze coming in from the sea. And the boys. Mmmm. They're all Greek gods. Wide shoulders, tiny backsides, rippling torsos. We're going to have the time of our lives. Don't worry, we'll be careful, because we can't possibly be good. Just a pity you couldn't come along. You'd have a ball. Several probably. Anyway, thanks for looking after Mork and Mindy for me. There's plenty of tins in the cupboard. Just make sure Mork stays out of Mindy's bowl. Don't have any wild parties and if you do, make sure you tidy up after you. Love and hugs...."
The voice was gone, a brief bubbling stream of words and laugher. The machine clicked, whined again, then shut itself off. The green eye winked steadily and the silence stretched out.
She stayed still, hunkered down against the wall, eyes fixed on the green light, through her mind was a whirl. She was trying to hold on to the familiarity of the voice on the phone, her friend's abundant normality. But it was difficult to think clearly. It was almost impossible to think at all.
The night had been crazy. It had been filled with strange dreams and awful visions and when she awoke she recalled what had happened and the baby was down on her, sucking hard, draining her.
She had tried to resist, tried to haul it off her breast. The instant wash of repugnance had made her want to grab it and rip its mouth from her skin and throw it to the ground. She had suddenly wanted to hurl it to the floor and stamp on it until its sucking pout stopped.
She had tried and the pain had come.
The pain had come in a corkscrew of hurt right at the back of her head. It felt as if the inside of her skull was being split down the bone sutures and the pain had been so immense that for a moment she had blacked out. The room had swum in wavering double vision and she had been swimming in a sea of suffering so fine she could hear it resonating on the inside of her teeth. It was such an agony, so devastating and overwhelming that she could not even cry out.
No! A wordless command sliced inside the pain.
The motion of her hand froze in mid strike, hovering paralysed inches from the back of the baby's neck. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion, the way it had been in the dream, but this was no dream, she knew now. This was a nightmare maybe, but no dream. The pain subsided fast and left her gasping with sudden relief.
Her hand was stayed. She blinked twice and great tears rolled down from eyes that were raw from the dreamlike sobbing of before. The baby's head was still pressed against her skin. It's silky hair was black and shining and there was a line of matte down trailing on the slender neck and between the pink shoulders. The cold puckered the skin into shivering goose-flesh. Her hand was freed from its stasis and she looped the edges of her coat around the tiny frame.
The baby turned, mouth still fixed on her nipple but no longer sucking. It opened an eye which again seemed to be red and protuberant at first and then changed, wavering to blue. It fixed on hers and the scent came rolling up like a mist to infuse her senses.
Get off me. Her panicked thought came in blaring capitals and the pain flared instantly. The revulsion and loathing was squashed underneath the sudden weight and the scent filled her head and the repugnance fragmented, then coalesced as some other emotion.
Mother me...the command shunted into her senses. Love me.
The pain faded again and was replaced by a sudden warm infusion of unexpected pleasure. She tried to fight it, tried to keep her mind clear but it was impossible. She felt as if she was being torn apart while her emotions wrestled and heaved and her thoughts jittered and sparked and the fear and the alien sense of need looped and writhed around each other in a confusing maelstrom.
She drew her hand down and cradled the baby's head against her, dizzy with the conflicting sensations. Its skin was warm and dry
Yet underneath that perception she sensed something cold
to the touch as it nuzzled gently, tugging the way Tony had done only the night before behind the steamed windows of his car.
After a while she was able to move. She rose from her slump in the corner, still hugging the little thing in against her. She knew she needed to wash, but there were other needs clamouring at her. All of a sudden she understood she had to move, to get out of the flat. The urgency swelled in her mind and without hesitation, she went into Celia's bedroom. The bed was neatly made up, very feminine, with embroidered pillowcases to match the eiderdown. She drew it back one handed while the other hand clamped the baby to her breast. All the time, her mind was reeling and spinning, though underneath the mental storm, everything was icy cold and clear,
She drew the cover down and then the sheet, folding it corner to corner then doubling that until it formed a square. Finally she was able to take the baby away from her. It twisted, letting the nipple slide out of its mouth with a rubbery little pop. It turned and its eyes swung up to her. They were wide and clear, big baby eyes that stared into hers with mute appeal.
My baby.
The thought came strong. The infant hand moved away, small and pink, minute fingers clenched into a fist. For a brief instant, a mere fraction of a second, the she imagined skin began to ripple and tendons writhe under the surface. A shimmering iridescence, as if the dim glow of the street lamp were being reflected back from minute facets, broke the light into fragments. A tickle of pressure nudged in her brain and the iridescence vanished. The tiny fingers opened, closed and then slackened again, clean and rosy, each little nail perfectly formed.
The baby gazed liquidly, needfully at her and she felt her heart flip over. She was borne high on the surge-tide of mother need. It was impossible to resist for now.
Ginny bent quickly, her hair sweeping down on either side of her face with the sudden motion. She laid the child on the blanket and wrapped it up, tucking the hands in tight. She swaddled the baby into a bundle then turned round. Beside the telephone, the twin green eyes of the machine's answering lights blinked mutely.
She found her own bag on the carpet where she had spent the night, rifled it quickly, taking her credit card out along with the rest of money she'd taken to buy Christmas presents. It wasn't much and she needed more. She went back into the bedroom and checked in the drawers on either side of the bed, but found nothing except bottles of pills and a substantial package of condoms. Under any other circumstances she'd have made a comment, probably one of surprise, but they hardly registered on her mind. The dresser on the far side yielded two twenties, tucked inside a make-up case. Back in the living room there was a sideboard where Celia had stashed her work-a-day handbag. She dragged it out, experiencing a warm, almost savage glow of triumph. She had known it would be here somewhere, and inside, she knew she'd find Celia's bank card.
"I'd better leave them here just in case," her friend had said, practical as ever. "If I lost it abroad with the rest of them, I'd have no money when I came back." The card was in a small blue plastic case. She knew the number was simply the day and month of Celia's birthday.
The door closed with a dull thud, muffled by the swirling mist that was more frost than fog in the early silence of the morning. The orange lamps were haloed and somehow eerie. Some distance away, a truck engine coughed into life, sounding like a large animal. Further away, miles down the river, a ship's foghorn came wavering on the still air, a distressed bellow in the far distance.
The cold was intense and she wrapped her coat around the bundle, cinching the belt tight. The little face was snug against the warmth of her blouse and the huge eyes were closed. It made no sound, but she could sense its warm thoughts inside her own. It was snug and protected, safe in her arms. Her heart flipped over in the powerful wash of mother love.
And underneath that, struggling desperately, her own sense of self was thrashing frantically like a drowning creature in a pit of black tar.
The path behind the houses took her back down towards the alley. The dogs were either sleeping or they recognised her. They made no sound from behind the chain link fence. There was no sign of the tramp She made it out from behind the Chinese restaurant and onto the road.
There was no-one about at this time in the morning. Her heels clacked on the concrete and the sound came reverberating back at her, muffled in the ground mist. She passed the church and made it to the high street before she saw anyone else. It was an early morning police patrol car nosing along, two bored officers close to the end of their shift, looking forward more than anything else to a cup of hot tea and a warm bed. Both of them, turned to follow her progress as she hurried along past the shop windows, head down and shoulders up against the chill of the morning. She was no threat, no burglar. The car moved on. It turned the corner and she stopped, turned back and walked forty steps to the bank she'd just passed. Without any hesitation she slid the card in the slot, punched in the number and hit the key for a balance inquiry.
There was less than a thousand in the account. Celia, normally a good saver, must have taken plenty out for her holiday. It would have to do. She keyed for the maximum, waited until it coughed out two hundred in clean twenties, folded and wadded the money into her purse and hurried on.
She experienced no guilt, not on the surface. The baby needed the money.
And still, underneath the numbness and the strange overwhelming mother-love, she was screaming in terror and revulsion.
In the dark of the early morning, she made her way back to Celia's place, taking great care to avoid being seen on the main streets.
_____
It was after two by the time David Harper looked at the clock, realised how long he'd been sitting and dragged himself away from the small pile of papers. He had a long, hot shower and toyed with the idea of another malt whisky before deciding against it. He went to bed. It had been a long day and a longer night, but despite the physical tiredness, his mind was still wide awake, trying to make sense of what he'd been reading.
Thelma Quigley.
That had been the name on the rent book, but he was convinced that it was not the name of the woman who had fallen and died screaming in the Waterside shopping mall. He had spent most of the night reading the diaries and going over the papers and notes and the cuttings from old newspapers, yellowing pages, brittle and fragile with age, worn at the folds.
There had been two diaries, both from the mid sixties, tattered and loose in their covers. With them there had been a number of school exercise books, all of them different colours and a pair of spiral bound notebooks the kind reporters use.
She had been a note-taker, Thelma Quigley, or the woman who carried her rent book and used her name, had been. A compulsive recorder of events, though apart from the diaries, there was no way he would know, unless he passed them along to forensics for paper typing and dating, to which period the others belonged. Oh, there were clues, and he supposed if he sat with them a while longer, he might spot a chronological give-away, but for the moment, all he had to go on were the battered diaries.
March 17, 1967. Thelma wants to go to France this summer. She's so adventurous. I asked what's wrong with Brighton and she laughed. She says the French men are much more romantic than the English, and they don't have all those Mods and Rockers causing fights and trouble. She'd got a part in the Sound of Music at the Citizens Theatre and she wants me to audition for the chorus, but I can't sing as well as she can.
More along these lines, a woman in her thirties, a little shy, a few years older than her best friend who has theatrical ambitions and who had further horizons than a holiday in Brighton. The diary of a woman who had been cloistered by nature and by circumstance and who experienced the world vicariously through Thelma Quigley's eyes. The name, repeated often enough, began to nudge a distant memory.
May 22, 1967. I haven't been able to write for all this time (this after more than a week of empty pages and the ink is smudged where tears have softened the page long ago.) I went up to her grave, but there isn't a headstone there yet. I can't believe she is gone. Dead. Just like that. All the life and all the smiling. She would have been wonderful. The police came round to ask me more questions, but there was nothing I could tell them. Thelma had lots of boyfriends, but nobody serious. I wanted to see her before the funeral but they said best not to. It was a closed coffin because they said she was marked and I can't believe that somebody would do it to her. Oh what a terrible thing. If I could catch him I would stab him myself until he was dead. I miss her and I wish I'd told her I would go to France.
July 26, 1967. The headstone is in a polished stone with her name on it. My flower holder with the white heart in marble is still there and I put some carnations in it. Her name looks so lonely there on the stone and I can't still believe that she is down there and not up and dancing around the way she always did, laughing and joking with the boys. They haven't caught him yet, the b*****d (God forgive me but I can't forgive him). Tomorrow, I'll go up to the bridge where we went with Tom and Geoffrey last year when Thelma fixed up that double date without telling me and then we laughed all the way home because she said Geoffrey looked like Adam Faith except smaller and everybody knew Adam's only five foot nothing. That was the last real laugh I remember and since then it's all been grey. Nothing matters any more. I have nobody to talk to. My mother says just to snap out of it and dad doesn't know what to say. Nothing matters and I don't have any other friends and I'm so very lonely. I'm going to go up to the bridge tomorrow, because wherever Thelma is, she'll be laughing and she'll make me laugh again.
There was a space in the diary for the next fifty pages. Nothing had been written from July until some time in September. David could have been forgiven for assuming that whoever had written the lines in July, a woman clearly grieving and suffering a deep sense of loss, had done as she said she would do and gone up to the bridge, wherever that was, and joined her dead friend.
But no.
September 22, 1967. He wants fed, poor little thing. He needs to be fed all the time and when he turns those big eyes on me I almost melt. I go all squishy inside and I know Thelma would have just adored him. She always said I'd be a great mother, and she was right. I take care of Baby Grumpling better than anyone could and I love him to death. Really I do. I just can't wait for him to learn to speak and I know just what his first words will be.
The writing was clear and rounded, exactly the same as in the earlier pages before the blank stretch. They had been written by the same woman.
I'll have to get another pram for him because the wheel on the other one is buckled and he doesn't like to be jiggled about. I always know when he's not happy. He soon lets me know. That's just the way babies are. He sucked me really hard today, and I got a big bruise, but he can't help it. He must be really hungry all the time and I don't mind because he needs his food and he won't take anything else.
December 20, 1967. I got him a big teddy and a furry hedgehog that looks really cuddly. He'll start playing with toys soon but he's too young yet, just a tiny little thing and so helpless. He needs me so much and I know he loves me. All I want to do is hold him in my arms. I have to go out to the shops for more liver. I never liked it before, but I need more all the time. Funny isn't it. They say you get notions and cravings before you have a baby. I'm getting them all the time. Liver and eggs and eggshells. Funny that. I'm so looking forward to Christmas. Just me and the baby. It'll be like the first ever Christmas and he's so sweet, just like the baby Jesus. Maybe I'll sing him a carol.
The next diary had been more of the same. Not every day had been filled in, sometimes there were gaps of weeks, but every entry consisted of nothing else but the rituals of feeding and clothing Baby Grumpling. As he read on, David sensed the strange alteration, the obsession the woman had with the baby, but it was not that realisation that made the hairs on his arms begin to crawl.
There was something odd, something unnatural about the whole thing. Sometime during the reading, he'd got up and poured himself a decent measure of Islay Malt and he'd sipped at it, savouring the smoky ancient taste of peat damping down the fire of the liquor. Still, the whisky couldn't take away the strange taste that the diaries imparted.
There had been something wrong here. He couldn't put his finger on it although there were glaring omissions. They weren't what gave him the creepy fingers up and down his spine. It was beyond those omissions (that he would have to check out in any case) way beyond them. He sensed something that was just wrong. Not criminal, though there was a distinct possibility, not criminal, but simply wrong.
The diaries gave him a puzzle that he would have to solve and some of that would be easy, just a matter of record. Thelma Quigley had been murdered. It was clear from the pages of the diary that she'd been stabbed to death and her body buried in a shallow grave and that it hadn't been found for some time. This knowledge was already making the faint memory stronger. Thelma Quigley. He had heard the name before. Once he ascertained who Thelma Quigley had been, he would find out the dead woman's identity.
He closed his eyes and tried to get to sleep. Outside the wind picked up, driving shards of hoar-frost against the pane in a winter whisper. Out in the dark, a cat screeched and David recalled the blurred motion when he and Helen Lamont had leaned out of the window in the dead woman's house.
There had been something wrong with that place, more than just a foul and musty smell and the collection of children's clothes and toys that had never been used. His thoughts jumped from the dingy flat to the black and white video unreeling on the screen in John Barclay's office. He recalled the woman's shivering body, then the jerk as she tried to raise herself up. He hadn't heard the words, but Jenny McGill from Rolling Stock had said she had said something about a baby and that was also confirmed by the paramedics. The dead woman had been carrying a Mothercare bag, long gone now, but the shop specialised in infant care .
It snagged at his mind. Hardingwell's laugh when he'd said she'd been a virgin, but then his puzzled observation about the woman's condition. She'd been well into her sixties and leaking milk like a newly delivered mother.
Finally David drifted off to sleep and in a jumbled series of dreams he saw the black and white video of the woman's collapse unreel, though this time it had sound and the camera zoomed in on her stricken face and she was screaming for her baby, mouth wide to show stained, discoloured teeth and amazing breasts ballooning out on grotesque swellings, each of them dribbling a viscid mess that could have been anything at all. In the blink of an eye he was back in the unkempt little apartment, surrounded by a dead silence. He was alone this time, turning from the window, his vision sweeping past the narrow little door and towards the rumple of bedclothes that were knotted and twisted into the shape of a nest. He turned again, listening for a sound he thought he'd heard, aware that he was no longer alone. A slight, scraping sound came from under the bed and he tensed, expecting something to come leaping out at him. In the dream he crouched, still jittery with tension and the sound changed. It came the way things do in dreams, without reason, without warning. It changed from the scraping sound of a mouse to the shivery cry of a newborn baby. David got to his knees and scanned the darkness under the bed and the sound changed again into a gurgle of laughter. He turned away from it, suddenly drenched in fear and as he did so the pile of cuddly toys, now a pyramid in the corner where two walls met, collapsed down on top of him and he found himself under an avalanche of soft toys which rained down until he was completely smothered in him and his breath was backed up in his throat.
He woke up gasping for breath and slick with sweat. The shivery aftermath of the dream stayed with him until he got up and made himself a coffee, drinking it down hot and sweet. Outside it was still dark and a light snow was blowing in against the window. No creature stirred out there.