“Now you look as if you’ve gone eight rounds,” David told Helen as they went up the steps at the city station in the sharp cold of morning. He was tired too, but Helen looked as if she had some way to go before she’d be properly awake.
“Christmastime exhaustion,” she said wearily. “Family, food and fornicating.” Her words made breath billows on the frosted air and her cheeks were rosy with the cold. Her dark eyes sparkled with mischief.
“What, again?” he stopped, turning towards her. She laughed out loud, a natural explosion of mirth.
“No, silly bugger, not again.” Her mirth bubbled into the words. “You were enough, thank you ever so much. Aftermath and afterglow, and I’m suffering from two mornings after in a row. It’s good to get back to some semblance of sanity, if there is any sanity in all of this. I need the break.” She straight armed the fire door, giving it a surprisingly vigorous push, though he should not have been surprised for he’d felt the strength in her supple body, almost slammed it into a young policeman who was adjusting his cap, not paying attention.
“Have a good Christmas then?” she asked.
“I told you on the phone. It was fine. Quiet, friendly. My mother fussed over me and I loved it.” He gave her an appraising look in the empty corridor. “I could have used some other company though.”
“Me too. I just called to say,” she started to sing, then burst into laughter. “I just called to make sure you weren’t floundering in guilt and angst. I’m glad I did. My mother’s getting suspicious, naturally. She sees every man as a potential rescuer from spinsterhood, so we’ll have to be careful.”
He opened the door and held it. She walked past, did a quick visual sweep of the room, saw there was no-one there. She stopped then and gave him a very quick kiss, right on the ear, pursing her lips and smacking hard. He pulled back fast as his eardrum almost burst with the sudden vacuum.
“Be gentle for God’s sake,” he said. She laughed again and pushed past him, taking off her heavy jacket. He got to his desk sat down and the phone rang almost immediately. He snatched it up while Helen rummaged for change and went down the corridor to the coffee machine.
Phil Cutcheon the former CID boss from the east side apologised for calling so early. He exchanged brief seasonal pleasantries and then got straight down to business. The two of them talked for five minutes or more. Helen came back with two coffees, and placed one on the edge of his desk just as Phil was winding up. David said he’d see him in an hour.
Two other detectives came in, both broad and beefy men who just looked like cops in grey suit uniforms. They looked bloodshot and grizzled with festive overload. One belched loudly, apologised to the nearly empty office, wished David and Helen a merry Christmas and asked if they’d both spent the night in the office. David felt his ears begin to colour. Helen said she wished she had spent the night in the office.
David had turned from his desk with the hot coffee, opened a filing cabinet when the phone rang again. The big sergeant lifted the receiver in the passing, growled a word, listened for a couple of seconds then passed it to David.
“It’s your missus,” he said, winking.
Helen watched him over the rim of her plastic cup as he took the call. June’s voice had that broken, hiccup quality of someone who’s been crying for a while and might start again any moment. She apologised for her outburst and her ultimatum, told him how much she had missed him over Christmas, said she still had his present all wrapped up and how she had suffered such a miserable, blighted day. He listened, feeling his face colour now as Helen watched him closely. She narrowed her eyes in mock threat, while June babbled on the phone, cramming her words and sentences together. Finally Helen tilted her face, almost challenging and then, surprisingly, she mouthed him a silent kiss, not arrogantly, more in support. At least, so he thought. The other thought that occurred to him was the no-holds-barred status of both love and war.
“I’ll have to think,” he said flatly. “I really will.” He felt a sudden wariness, an odd sensation of being trapped and he fought against it. She was having second thoughts, no doubt exacerbated by the fact that she and he had not been together at Christmas, and she wanted to make up, get back together again. He did not want to hurt her, didn’t want to turn her down flat, but at the same time, he recalled the powerful relief and release of tension when she had walked out, telling him that she had done what he should have had the guts to do weeks, maybe months before. “No. I can’t right now. No. I’m too busy.”
It made him feel cruel and heartless, but right at that moment he wanted her off the phone. He’d need space to think. Already the complications had set in, and he’d had a full day to think about Helen Lamont and himself and, strangely, he did not feel any entrapment, any fettering there. He’d always considered it a mistake to get involved with colleagues, but that was the voice of reason. On Christmas morning he’d woken up thinking about her and he’d spent most of the day doing the same thing. She’d called to tell him the same story. He did not regret what had happened at all. Finally the phone went down. Helen came across, walking as casually as she was able. The two other men were at their desks, bent over paperwork.
“You’re still one of the good guys,” she said in a whisper. “I just want you to know that. Even if you do go back to her.”
She stopped, turned and looked him right in the eye, and that quick look conveyed a number of messages. One of them was that she didn’t give herself to everybody, that she had put her trust in him. Her voice was almost inaudible, even though she was right up against him. One of the other men looked up, noticed the closeness, grinned and looked away. “But I’d really prefer it if you didn’t. That’s the truth.”
The phone rang. The first man picked it up, listened then called over to Helen. “Transferring to you,” he said. “Some chick asking for you. Says you left a message on her machine. Lost her cat and her wallet.”
Helen picked up the receiver and spoke for the first time to Celia Barker.
________
In the corner of the barn, in the dark gloom of that cold Fhristmas Eve had been dimly aware of the mother’s racking cough, but his attention was focused forwards. She groaned, and for a moment it sounded like the wind through the eaves, but on this gloaming winter afternoon, there was no wind. Somewhere outside the barn, a dog barked, the high pitched, narking aggression of a small terrier. Beyond it, a cockerel bawled its hoarse territorial cry. Close by, a horse whinnied and jostled a stable door.
He was alone now and all of his instincts were wound up tight, all of his needs and hungers. He was afraid too, caught almost in the open while the mother was disintegrating. The sense of danger and vulnerability swelled inside him like a cancer. The skin on his back was peeling away, cracking into fissures while underneath the tender new skin protruded. He scratched at his back, twisting his oddly jointed limb round to hook a nail there to ease the dreadful itch.
Behind him the used-up mother was finishing. He could sense her glow diminish in his mind. Already he had released his grip on her. It had taken effort to bring her up this far, forcing her every step of the way, over the gate and up into the hay, while everything in her was shutting down. the muscles and the nerves. He had drained her even as she staggered upwards, stealing the last of her, emptying the store for his coming change.
It was not quite dark, not yet, but it would be soon. He would move then, when it was safe enough. Over in the corner, something squeaked. He considered it, sitting as still as stone but let the creature live, reaching out the merest tickle of thought to encompass its glow. He might need all of his energy for the next stage. He crouched there near the door, eyes closed, just sensing. The big beasts were nervous, somehow aware of his presence and not liking it at all. They skittered and banged on the stalls. He ignored them. They would taste bad, his own senses told him, but if necessary, if he had to, he would
change one of them if he could. He did not know if that was possible, but the intuition told him the creatures were big and warm and female. Instinctively it noted their presence.
The moon finally rose in the sky, dim at first in the fading of the day, but gathering brightness. The silver light did not hurt his eyes the way the day would, the way the street lights would burn. The moonlight was a cold balm on his dry and itching skin. He edged closer to the barn door, letting his eyes open slowly, taking in the new night. With equal care he moved out of the barn, a small, thin thing, scuttling on all fours, back arched and blunt face held low. The two flat eyes were red despite the silver of the moon, wide and alert, devoid of anything resembling humanity. The cold was intense here and automatically he speeded up, getting close to the stable wall. He rounded it, almost rat-like, keeping very close to the masonry. Here, the smell of horses was powerful, but there were other smells too, the dry scent of birds feathers, the bitter reek of cats and the flat odour of dogs. Over and above that, the real smell came, thin and far off. Enticing and intoxicating.
The smell of a mother.
He had scented her before, sensed her before, instinctively leading the old one up the hill towards the new.
He scuttled round the whitewashed corner of the tables, skirting the rain barrel, then round into the farm’s small courtyard. Here, the angle of the roof cut off the moonlight, throwing this part into inky blackness. He sat there, reaching out his thought, sending tendrils to probe ahead. He touched a trundling black beetle under a slate and it died with a click of its jaws, legs folding up under the carapace. Over in the dovecote the pigeons panicked again, taking to the air in a clatter of alarm. He saw them as warm, fluttering dots of light in his outreach.
He took two crab-steps, staying close to the wall, emerged into the courtyard proper. Two of his glands pulsed, audibly hissing as they expelled their payload into the air. He waited while it drifted away from him, revelling in his own scent. He reached out with his extra sense and paused for a few tense seconds, crouched in the shadow.
Bedlam erupted.
On the far side, the wire door of a small brick chicken coop punched outwards as every bird went into a frenzy of hysteria. Feathers tumbled out into the cold air, wide snowflakes slowly swinging towards the ground. A tall cockerel came barging out from an outhouse doorway, crest erect, chest feathers bristling with instant outraged aggression. It stood on its toes, started to crow, harsh and brittle..
From the shadows nearby, a black cat came rocketing out, screaming in absolute fury. It clamped its jaws on the bird’s head. Bone crunched and the cock’s brains dribbled out of its skull. Instantly its wings thrashed in its death convulsion. The cat did not even stop. It crossed the courtyard, a black streak, heading straight for the corner.
He turned to it, touched hard with a pulse of thought. The cat went veering off and ran straight for the chicken coop, hitting the door with such a crash that it shook on its hinges. Its claws snagged the wire and it hung there, screeching like a demon while inside the coop the already mad chickens pecked ferociously at each other and whirled in crazed circles.
The two terriers, half asleep in their basket just inside the storm door where coats and boots were stored, came instantly awake and came bolting out, ears erect, sniffing at the air, growling in the back of their throats. He hardly needed to reach and touch them at all, such was their sensitivity to the powerful scent. One flopped to the ground, got up again, snarling, saliva already beginning to foam in its mouth.
Inside the byre, just through the wall from where he crouched, seven jersey cows, sheltered from the harsh winter, simultaneously began to leak milk in identical streams from each udder and inside their vast wombs, seven unformed calves died. Beyond that, two fillies began to stamp their feet in the stables and then, as one, began to lash out at the door with their heavy hooves, sending shards of wood whirling into the air. One of them, the lead horse on the way uphill, kicked so hard that a bone in its foot broke and burst through the skin. It bled until morning.
The second terrier jumped on the first, clasping it round the chubby waist and started bucking uncontrollably. The first one, still drooling saliva howled in protest as its brother mounted it and penetrated in two savage thrusts. It turned, fighting the weight and snapped hard, taking hair and flesh in its jaws, rending both. Blood flowed. Its teeth clamped on the carotid artery, bit through and blood fountained. Its brother, a white cairn terrier kept on bucking and thrusting even as its lifeblood drained away. It was unable to stop. It carried on in a frenzy as it died while the other tried without success to pull out of its locked embrace. After a short while, both dogs toppled over, the first one still twitching but dead, the second covered in blood and gasping for breath, bleeding from its ruptured anus.
Over at the coop the cat still hung on the wire, screeching like a banshee.
A flock of starlings, as ever susceptible to the emanations of the alien mind, were first startled by the howling of the cattle as their udders clenched of their own volition and expressed their milk onto the shit-bestrewn floor. Then the touch scraped over them. They took to the air in a whirr of wings, trying to find an escape. As one they wheeled and as one they crashed into the far wall of the byre and dropped with soft little plops to the ground.
The moon rose over the roof of the outhouse as he moved forward towards the door, all of his senses now sharp as fangs and his glands pumped up so hard he could feel the skin over them rip and tear.
Inside of him the hunger and the need was vast.
______
“I always thought he was a bit cracked, the old fool,” Phil Cutcheon said. “Now it could be me that’s been the fool all along.”
Between them sat a folder which bulged with papers. It was tied with an old fashioned piece of ribbon, like a lawyer’s brief.
“I dismissed old McBean way back in the sixties, but it might just turn out he was a better policeman than anybody ever gave him credit for. Way back then, before the Duncryne killing and the thing that happened to Greta Simon, old Ron had a theory. It became an obsession with him. He approached me in confidence round about that time, maybe the year after Heather McDougall went missing. I thought it was just an fixation with him, and it probably was, but he was certainly a methodical old beggar. This is his obsession box. I got it from his grandson, who was on the force. He left to start his own security firm.”
“And what is it?” David asked. The office was still half empty at this time on Boxing Day. All he could offer the retired policeman was a bitter coffee from the machine, but Phil smiled and told him it took him back to the good old days. “Coffee and ulcers. Sore feet and rain always dripping down the back of the neck. Good old days? I must be dreaming.”
He took a big swig of coffee and smacked his lips, relishing the nostalgia, then opened the file.
“It was when you came to see me that I remembered this. I hadn’t thought about it for a long time, and if I’d done my job properly, I would have made the connection.”
“But what is it?” David repeated. Helen had gone round to Celia Barker’s house, alone again, though she was hardly in any danger now the girl was home. He would have preferred to have gone with her but something in Phil Cutcheon’s tone had made him stay.
“It’s a list of connections, just like yours, only much older. I have to be honest, I probably rejected them because I was busy with a murder and because I didn’t have the balls even to consider the possibilities. Old Ron McBean came to me with a crazy story and I told him to shove it. I didn’t want anybody to think I was crazy.”
“What are the connections?”
Phil leaned forward and drew out an old fashioned police notebook. “You told me about Greta Simon and the McDougall woman and now this young girl from your neck of the woods. You’ve got a connection between Greta and Heather and now you’ve found a link between Heather and your girl.”
“Ginny. Virginia for long.”
“Yes. Her. Now this little lot takes your links and makes a daisy chain of the whole lot. You might be able to make some sense out of it, for what I think doesn’t make sense. Either there’s something getting passed on like a disease, or there’s something really crazy happening that I don’t want to think about.”
He leaned back and his brows gathered down, making his seamed and benign face look very grave. “Ron McBean stumbled onto something that he couldn’t let go. His grandson tells me it became a real obsession with him, long after he left the force. He died about ten years ago.”
He tapped the file, flicked open the flap and drew out a few sheets of paper. The top page was white except for a yellow border at the very top where it had been exposed to sunlight at some time. The writing was thick and blocky, a big man’s writing, slow and careful. Phil turned it so David could read it. He drew his finger down to the third paragraph, drawing David’s eyes with it.
There is no doubt in my mind now, none whatsoever, that the chain will continue. It confounds all reason and the Good Lord alone knows the why’s and wherefores of it all. I remember speaking to the divinity professor at Heriot Watt University who told me there was no historic proof that Herod sent out soldiers to slaughter the innocents. He told me that was from a more ancient Hebrew myth. He told me there have been many occasions in history, when baby boys were hunted and slaughtered without mercy. There are books in the library which confirm this. There is a necropolis in Ghassul, in the Holy Land, by the Dead Sea, where hundreds of infants have been uncovered, all of them with wooden stakes through their heads. In the mountains near Lake Titicaca, they have uncovered the dried remains of many baby boys, all of them murdered. The professor told me of this madness happening again and again all down through the years. Perhaps the hunt for a new-born baby was not a search for the King of Kings at all. They could have been looking for the devil incarnate.
The Simon woman does not have all of her faculties back yet and the doctors say she never will again. Dr Tvedt tells me it is a miracle that she is alive at all, though in all honesty, I am hardly minded to consider miracles. The opposite in fact. I only wish the records went back further, but they do not. 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 emerge again and anything that can do that, time and time again, is not natural.
Nobody is prepared to accept any of this research, and I can hardly blame any of them, even seasoned officers. They do not believe in the un-natural, but as God-fearing men, there is no shame in it. I have tried and failed, but I will continue to try. It will be seen again, with some other poor woman. All I am able to do is check the library for news of a sudden death and the disappearance of a child and I will know it is still alive. It may not be for many years and I don’t know how many I have yet allotted. God willing, and I pray every night that he is, I hope I am alive and I hope I can hunt it down.”
“A shade dramatic,” David said. “And pedantic.”
“He was a bit old fashioned, and a bit serious too,” Phil agreed. “He was an elder of the church, but not a Holy Willie. We all put him down as an obsessive but there was never any harm in him, so people, including me turned a blind eye. I kept it turned, most of the time, but I did go along to see Greta Simon every now and again and I was never sure why. I never told you that. I thought you should see her for yourself. Anyway, now I don’t have a pension to lose. Old McBean’s grandson says we can have this. He’s not interested. Thinks the old man was a bit wandered.”
“Sounds as if he was,” David said guardedly.
“Aye, there’s that possibility. But he was just following leads, and he was never even a detective, just a small town sergeant and a god-fearing man. Not sophisticated like you and me.” David recognised the irony in Phil’s voice. “But like you, he thought he was on to something and he dug away. Like you. You turned up at my door because you’re just doing your job, checking out the possibilities. Most folk would have got an I.D. on the dead woman and left it at that, but you stuck with it. You think there’s something odd going on here and when you mentioned this baby and the women involved, it gave me something to really consider. I wasn’t going to turn a blind eye like I did all those years ago.”
David started to speak but Phil held up a hand.
“At the end of the day, there might be nothing in it, nothing at all, and I would rather like to believe that this is the case. But if you put what you know and what Ron McBean turned up, put them all together, then, I have to tell you I have my doubts. You’re on to something, and I don’t mind telling you that it makes my skin crawl.”
Something was wrong.
Kate Park heard the racket from the back of the house and for a moment she thought it was something on the television. The baby whimpered softly in its cot and she pulled back the coverlet. Her eyes were crinkled up tight and she was making little, blind sucking motions, even though she was fed and fast asleep. Kate’s cousin Jill who had baby-sat while she and Anne Collins had gone for a canter down on the bottom fallow, had got a lift home in Anne’s jeep, and while Kate herself had felt a pang of guilt about getting a baby-sitter less than a months after the birth, the easy ride had felt good, even if her muscles were unused to the exercise and even if the saddle stretched the tender skin where she’d been stitched. The hot shower had soothed the stiffness of muscles. Her hair was still damp, ringletted in dark chestnut curls. She was unbending when the racket started up out at the front of the farmhouse.
Instantly she knew something was wrong. The skin between her shoulderblades puckered, drawing over her spine in a creeping contraction. She moved out of the bedroom, closing the door slowly, aware of the tremble in her hand and unable to explain it. She shivered, pulled the dressing gown close.
Out beyond the front door the dogs were howling. Or one of the dogs was howling, or coughing. Two of the cockerels were squawking as if they were in a fight to the death. Behind her, in the baby’s room, little Lucy whimpered again.
Something wrong.
The slam of the horses hooves against the stable doors came like hammerblows, muffled only by the thick walls. The cattle were lowing, their cries, high and pained echoing out through the ventilation slits of the metal-roofed byre.
She stood in the hallway, undecided. The dogs were not howling, they were snarling as if they were tearing each other’s throats out. There were other sounds. The caterwauling of the cat, the frenzied clucking of the chickens.
What was happening out there?
Something wrong something wrong something wrong. The message came from deep inside of her, as clearly as a voice in her head. There was somebody out there. The dogs fought and slavered. Lucy whimpered again, a troubled little kitten-mew, faintly tremulous. Kate stood still, wondering what to do. Jack’s guns were in the front room cabinet. His cartridge belt was still hanging in the hallway stand, illegally of course for they should have been secured, but this was a working farm. She stood undecided, her heart tripping joltingly, breath held in. She lifted a hand to her brow to push back her short auburn curls.
A faint noise came from just inside the porch. Her eyes flicked to the door. The dogs normally sat there in the corner of the porch, out of the wind. The sound came again, a soft scrape of noise that was suddenly and incongruously loud, reaching her over the madhouse cacophony out in the yard and beyond.
Something made a faint whining sound, almost like a kitten, but unnervingly, terrifyingly alien. Her blood turned to ice. She backed off. The letter box rattled, the knocker rapped several times in quick succession against the plate. A faint squeal, the familiar sound the postman made when he delivered the mail, creaked out from the slot where Jack had always promised to oil the hinge and spring.
A hand and an arm came through. For an instant it looked grey and slender and somehow tattered. Her heart stopped, kicked, stopped again. Her vision swam.
A baby’s hand was scrabbling through the slit.
Oh my oh my...
Her mouth worked, no sound came out. She thought she would pass out and that thought seemed to shunt her heart back into life again, hammering against her ribs, suddenly louder and as violent as the horses hooves on the door.
The baby’s hand reached out into the hallway, the small pink fingers splayed. A baby whimpered, soft as a lamb and as insistent and she knew it was not Lucy. Behind her Lucy cried out, a shivery, pitiful little fearful cry. In that instant, Kate Park felt her soul wrenched one way and another. Yet her mind was suddenly frozen in abject and utter terror. She was here alone with her baby in a farmhouse, a mile above the town. The animals were going crazy out in the yard, whooping and howling and snarling as if they all had indeed gone mad.
A baby’s hand was reaching through the letterbox of her front door.
Poison, she thought. Jack had warned her about the sheep dip organo-phosphates that had caused a series of hill farmers no end of mental and physical problems. Had some of it spilled, sprayed from Upper Loan Farm and drifted down on the wind?
Yet she knew it was not poison. She was here alone with her baby and another baby, a mite hardly bigger than her own, was clambering on her door, reaching its hand inside, grasping mutely at the air, trying to get in at her, trying to come in.
It was the most ghastly, most terrifying sight. It was a scene from a mother’s worst nightmare, made more hellish because her own motherly instincts were so strong.
It was impossible. It was completely impossible, she tried to tell herself, but her eyes were watching the creepy waving motion as the pink arm reached and the small baby fingers grasped emptiness.
“Go,” she heard her voice blurt. “Go away. Get away.”
She backed up the hallway. The hand stopped moving. It stayed there, still and outstretched, completely and utterly incomprehensible, completely and utterly terrifying.
Lucy squealed and Kate’s heart kicked again as her mother-self recognised her baby’s fear and alarm. Lucy had somehow sensed the threat. She felt her knees give way just a fraction. He was a strong and robust woman, more muscular than slim, able to hold a rearing horse or help push a heifer into the stall. She was a farmer’s wife who could confidently do a man’s work on any day of the week.
Yet the sight of a baby’s hand reaching through the letterbox of her door had simply robbed her of strength.
Without warning, the hand withdrew. The letterbox lip slapped shut with a rattle of metal. A weight dropped to the tiles outside. Something scuttled. Kate leaned against the wall, willing her heart to slow down. She did not know what to do, what to think. The apparition had been so unnatural, so malignantly alien that her entire reasoning process was struggling to cope. In the room, Lucy was howling frantically and Kate wanted to turn towards her, but she was scared to take her eyes off the door, in case that impossible little hand came groping for her again.
Think, damn you, think.
She tried. There was something she should consider. She knew that, but her mind, fizzing and sparking under the enormity of the horror, wouldn’t let her think rationally. She kept seeing those grasping fingers reaching for her and that precluded real thought. She turned, bumping her substantial breast on the corner of the wall, ignoring the dull thud of pain.
There was something else. Some other danger. She heard the scuttle, imagined she heard the scrape of dog’s nails on the flagstones round the side of the house where she kept the kitchen garden. Imagined she heard the scurry of some small but heavy thing crunching over the smooth stones bordering the path. Imagined she heard the creak of the
Oh no it can get in through the cat flap.
The sound came from the back of the house. The cat flap opened, snicked closed with a whump of compression. Something moved, skittering on the red tiles just inside the door. She jerked around, an insane fear twisting up inside her, shuddering up the whole length of her spine. Lucy screamed. The sound of movement came down the back hall. She whirled to face whatever it was, every nerve glassy with tension, the hairs on her neck crawling with a life of their own.
Something dark came skittering around the corner of the back hall, moving with jerky speed. Its limbs pistoned, hit against the wall as the momentum carried it to the side, then surged down the narrow hallway. Kate Park saw it black and tattered, then grey and thin, altering, blurring as it moved towards her, turning into the pink form of a baby, still moving with spidery swiftness, its round face held up, eyes fixed on her. She gasped, tried to turn. Her heel caught the carpet, threw her off balance. She fell backwards, slamming against the door which whipped open to crack against the wall. Lucy screeched in shivery terror.
Kate tried to scream. She was tumbling backwards, unable to get her balance while the monstrous little baby scuttled towards her, the lines of its face wavering as if melted under heat. It was a baby, and it was a monster, a double-image monster which shrivelled out of the pink as if bursting out of a skin, to become a red-eyed, staring thing with a flat grey face and a circular, pouting mouth which opened and closed like a sphincter, showing a ring of glassy, needle teeth.
It moved like an awful insect.
She fell against the wall, spun, went clattering to the floor, feet scrabbling for purchase. Lucy was screaming, infected with the horror and the panic, her blank baby mind sensing some kind of threat. Kate rolled, got a hand up to fend the thing off, to slam it against the wall.
It came scrambling up her body, faster than she would have believed, a nightmare in motion. It clambered up, its nails digging into the towelling of the robe, snatching at the rough dry fabric, digging into her skin. It got there and its eyes opened, flat blank and fathomless red depths with the dry texture of polished stone. It looked right into her eyes, bored its glare deep inside her.
Lucy, she tried to say. Oh Lucy its got me
It clung there. The eyes fastened on her. Some dark and foul touch scraped across her mind, poked and probed, snagged like black and poisonous thorns. The thing flexed, arched its back. The swellings down its side seemed to expand and then deflate. For an instant a watery, unpleasant hiss seared the air. Then the scent hit her.
She opened her mouth in a soundless scream. The eyes began to close, rippling down from red. The scent invaded her pores. The room spun crazily and the baby on her chest looked into her eyes with its own which were turning from red to black and then to blue, now were closing very slowly. It held her tight, fingers digging into her skin while the scent, at once bitter and rancid and somehow sweet as honeydew, flowed into her. Instantly her breasts ached. Her nipples swelled to painful tautness. A shudder of some desperate need swelled deep inside her and an awful warmth spread down in her tender womb.
Behind her Lucy screeched in fear, but Kate never heard the sound of her own child. The baby on her chest looked in her eyes and stole her away.
“I knew we should have checked,” Helen said. David had waited until he came back, unsure of what to tell her. He had read the papers Phil Cutcheon had dropped on his desk and what they contained had set up a powerful resonance, an oscillation of thought. They had brought back the conversation he’d had with Helen, the day after he’d phoned her in a blur of alcohol and confusion.
What kind of baby would steal a mother?
He had not been the first to consider that possibility, however impossible, however unearthly. It was all in the laboriously written pages in the file, compiled by the careful hand of an old policeman who had got a glimpse of the unusual and had followed its trail. The dead hand of old Ron McBean led him down through the years.
Was it real? Was it true? David had asked himself the question over and over again,, always coming up with the same answer. It was a history, a strange and continuing history, of lives touched, lives affected, and by the looks of it, lives distorted and destroyed. Where McBean had broken off, David Harper had started, linking the past to the present. There was now no doubt in his mind that this was real and that something dreadful was repeating itself over and over and over.
“I knew we should have checked,” Helen repeated when he looked up from the papers. “Celia Barker confirms that Ginny Marsden was supposed to look after her pets. She had a key to the place. She’s just back from holiday, lucky little bitch, and she finds out her bank card’s missing. Ginny Marsden has her pin number.”
Helen was flushed, most likely with sudden heat inside the office, but she looked elated. “We should have checked to find out where she was staying and contacted her direct.”
“But she wouldn’t have known the bank card had gone missing.”
“Or about the dead cat and goldfish. You’d think she’d stumbled across the bullet-ridden bodies of her parents the way she’s going on. I told her the cat probably starved because nobody fed it. She found it in the bin.”
“That’s where I put it,” David said. “The flies were at it. Its eyes were gone, poor thing.” Even as he said that, he realised there was something wrong there, something he’d missed. He tried to reach for it, but his mind was full of other matters to consider. It wasn’t that important.
“Anyway, all we have to do now is get to the bank tomorrow. They’ll tell us what branch the Marsden girl’s been dipping and we’ll find her.”
“Assuming that she’s used the card,” David said. He was itching to show Helen the old McBean file. She turned on him, telling him not to be such a pessimist, her dark eyes flaring just a little but more theatrically than in anger. “So what did you tell her?”
“Who?”
“The girl who wants to kiss and make up and come back.”
“I told her no,” he said, not quite truthfully, wishing he had, now determined to make it the truth. The smile Helen gave him made the small lie worth while. All was fair in this war, and it was that smile that finally made his mind up completely. It conveyed a feeling so powerful, and something so welcome, that he wondered at the strength of it, and the instant effect it had on him. He only wondered why he hadn’t felt its power before.
They both went back, at his request to David’s place when they finally cleared their desks. One of the other detectives said something, leaning across to his colleague who sniggered. Helen stopped at the door, turned back and leaned over the desk, putting her face right up against his.
“I can hear the slither of your grubby little mind,” she whispered, quite softly, almost seductively. “You should go back to vice squad where you can get free rides any day of the week. It’s better than playing pocket pool with yourself and letting your imagination run riot.”
“But I...” the other man started to say.
“But nothing,” Helen said, very slowly. “I hear any rumours and, I’ll be back, big boy. Got me?”
The man, who dipped the scales at twice what Helen weighed, nodded. She had a reputation for taking no prisoners.
“What was that all about,” David asked. His mind had been on other things and he hadn’t noticed the exchange of looks and the laugh.
“Nothing I can’t handle,” she said. “Girl talk.”