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<h2>23</h2>
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<p>The baby impelled Kate Park and she picked it up, went through
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to the living room where the log fire was just beginning to burn
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itself out. She sat for a while staring at the glowing embers while
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the baby turned its face into her and felt its change come rushing
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on.</p>
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<p>Half a mile further north east, on the brow of the hill at Upper
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Loan farm, the old shepherd looked out of his window, wondering if
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Jackie Park had got the fox he was hunting a while ago. The two
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shots had not been repeated.</p>
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<p>Down in Barloan harbour, old Mrs Cosgrove wondered about the
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woman who had come limping, with the baby in the old pram. She had
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gone out in the afternoon, after paying for several nights board,
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and had not returned. It would be a few days, in this weather,
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before the old woman would venture round the back of her house to
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empty the trash. Until then she would be unaware of the old pram
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angled against the wall. She blinked behind her big glasses, eyes
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watering, and she whipped a huge handkerchief out to blow her nose
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vigorously. She always got a cold at this time of the year. Despite
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that, she was sure she could smell something. She wondered if maybe
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a bird had got in one of the vents under the eaves and had died.
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Oddly, she felt a wrench of cramp deep down between her hips, a
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pain she had not felt for a long time, and her old and sagging
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breasts tingled strangely. She wondered if her cold was turning
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into something worse.</p>
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<p>All of this happened on the day before Christmas, while the
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choir from St Fillan’s went round the doors of Barloan
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harbour, singing of peace on earth to men of goodwill and about a
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new infant, born in a manger, who would still save mankind from its
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sins.</p>
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<p>Two days later, on the night of Boxing Day, David Harper and
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Helen Lamont were discovering each other all over again.</p>
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<p>It had been a long day and a long night. He had brought the
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papers home with him after reporting their progress to Scott Cruden
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who was quite reasonable about the delay. He told David he could
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borrow another two patrols for some house-to-house inquiries the
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next day, once the shift patterns got back to normal. David
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wondered if that would do any good because Ginny Marsden was back
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in the city, she would be hard to find. He wondered if he should
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ask the public relations folk to put out an appeal in the press,
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maybe get a picture flashed on the tea-time news. It was still
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early days yet, he decided. He’d let Helen make an inquiry at
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Celia Barker’s bank. It was a long shot, but she’d done
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a fine job so far and he knew she had an instinct for this. They
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had picked up a pizza, both of them agreeing on a seafood topping
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(and he pleased to find they had something else in common) and went
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back to his place.</p>
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<p>June had left two messages on the answering machine and Helen
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felt herself bristle as he played them back. Both messages began
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with an apology and the first asked him to call her. The second
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almost demanded that he return her call. He didn’t, but while
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he re-heated the food, she rang again. The pizza was warm by the
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time he got of the phone.</p>
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<p>“Doesn’t she give up?” Helen wanted to know.
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He gave her an apologetic look and shrugged wearily.</p>
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<p>“It’s not easy for her. It’ been a while for
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both off us.”</p>
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<p>“But she claimed you and I were having an affair, and she
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half wrecked this place. Plus it was she who told you it was over
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and you were never to darken her doorstep again.”</p>
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<p>“And I’ve told her it’s over,” David
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said. “I don't like hurting her, that’s all, because
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she’d not a bad person. We just came to the end of a
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relationship and that’s the best thing. Convincing her of
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that is something else. It’ll take time.”</p>
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<p>“She’s just lonely at this time of the year, and she
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thinks she made a mistake.”</p>
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<p>“You bet she did,” Helen retorted, fire in her eyes.
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“But that’s over now.”</p>
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<p>He smiled awkwardly and busied himself with the plates. He knew
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June and realised there would be more telephone calls, more
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messages on the machine. She was stubborn, and when she was fixed
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on something, she wasn’t easily side-stepped.
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“She’ll be fine in a while,” he said, though he
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knew a while might be a while longer.</p>
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<p>They ate the pizza and had a beer apiece while changed the
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subject nd drew out the old and detailed report a long dead
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policeman had compiled.</p>
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<p>_______</p>
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<p>Greta Simon had disappeared in the middle of May, 1941. She had
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been a scullery maid in Overburn House, the dower house to the
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mansion in the valley behind Lochend, where the old Coleraine
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family had held their clan seat for centuries. At this time the
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dower house was owned by an English ironfounder who was rolling out
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tank treads and armoured panels for the war machine and would later
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be elevated to the House of Lords.</p>
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<p>She had been a skinny, plain girl, in her late twenties, with
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thin hair and large teeth. There had been a rumour that she had
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indulged in a passionate affair with a married man from Levenford,
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where she’d initially been raised, the only daughter of a
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widow who had died five years before. The un-named man, (known from
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her letters as Mars - she called herself Hesper, after the morning
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star, a fine play on words, linking the god of war with the goddess
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of love) the unknown lover, some folk believed, had been killed on
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the beach at Dunkirk. Greta Simon had gone missing from the dower
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house in 1941 and some folk believed she had killed herself. She
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had failed to turn up for work on the seventeenth day of May. The
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next time anybody heard of her in any official capacity, was in
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1967. Nobody knew how she had evaded official notice. There was no
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indication of how she had made a living. Her tiny apartment held
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only the bare essentials and another strange collection of toys and
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baby clothes, all of them hand-made. Her landlord said she had paid
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the rent in coins. A neighbour said there were always coins in the
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pram and she even recalled that she herself, the neighbour, had put
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money in for the baby several times, luck money, an old Scots
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tradition. That was a puzzle to her, Sergeant Ron McBean noted in
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his stolid hand. The tradition only calls for one donation of
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silver. The woman could not remember why she had been moved to be
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so generous. She could not recall what the baby had looked like. It
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had just seemed the right thing to do.</p>
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<p>Ron McBean had noted the strange, rancid smell in Greta
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Simon’s house. He had smelled it before.</p>
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<p>It had been routine work, more than two decades prior to this,
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when McBean had been a young constable in Lochend, he had stumbled
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onto the mystery. If he had not, five years later, taken a transfer
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for promotion to a town on the other side of the country, he would
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never have made the connection between Greta Simon and Harriet
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Dailly.</p>
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<p>The connections were laid out in a chart, on sheets of yellowed
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legal-pad paper which had been stuck together with glue. The glue
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itself was old and hard and looked like a fine amber. The rest of
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the report was written out in McBean’s clear, laborious hand.
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He had been a good, methodical policeman. What he had discovered,
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he could hardly believe himself and he had been unable to get
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anyone else to believe there was more than coincidence
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involved.</p>
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<p>Phil Cutcheon had been too busy with the murder inquiry to be
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concerned with myth and fable as he had called it then, but now,
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more than fifty years after Greta Simon walked away from her job
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(to her death, some thought at the time, suicide from a broken
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heart) Phil Cutcheon had changed his mind.</p>
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<p>Harriet Dailly had been a woman of sixty two when she jumped off
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the Pulpit Rock, an outcrop of slate which overlooked Loch Corran,
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famed in song and for the mythical creature said to swim under its
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dark surface, and its own connection to the low roads of the
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underworld. She might have drowned, but could possibly have been
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saved, because the teenage son of the ironfounder who ruled the
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Dower House was fishing for salmon nearby, in a boat rowed by his
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own bailiff. Unfortunately Harriet landed on a half submerged tree
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trunk and had caved her skull in. She died instantly and her brains
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and blood had spilled out into the clear water, colouring it pink
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for several yards around the body.</p>
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<p>There would have been no real interest, had it not been for the
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baby Harriet had been seen carrying in her old shawl on the path up
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to the rock. A few girls from the dower house, Greta Simon
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included, had been given the afternoon off to pick elderflowers for
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the season’s wine. The bushes near the pulpit were a
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traditional source. Two of the girls had seen Harriet jump. It was
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May 17, 1941. An immediate search for the baby turned up no sign at
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all. There was speculation that dogs or foxes might have taken it.
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Or perhaps that Harriet herself had killed the infant herself and
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then committed suicide. That part of the loch was searched by a
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team of navy divers in cumbersome suits, but the water dropped
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straight down from the edge to more than two hundred feet to
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blackness and nothing was found.</p>
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<p>Nobody knew where she had come from, not immediately. Constable
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Ron McBean was charged with finding her nearest and dearest. A
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perfunctory post mortem showed that the woman had a degenerative
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condition, a loss of bone tissue at her joints which would have
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made movement almost impossible, and at the very least, quite
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excruciating. Quite unbelievably, according to the young doctor who
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would soon be carrying out triage on the awful wounds of war, she
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was still producing milk and showed signs of menstruation. She had
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been chronically anaemic and her liver was grossly enlarged.</p>
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<p>It was not until a quarter of a century later that Ron McBean
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would read a similar report, by sheer luck or coincidence, in a
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similar town separated by the narrow width of the country, and he
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would start adding up the coincidences. Initially, he was driven
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only by curiosity, as he admitted in the summation of his report.
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It was to become an obsession.</p>
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<p>McBean almost by accident found a clue in Harriet Dailly’s
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shabby little house, down an alley at the west end of Lochend, a
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crumbling little shack tacked on to the end of an even older
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dye-house. It had a bed and a sink and the gutted remains of two
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rabbits, liver, kidneys and brains all gone, the rest substantially
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chewed. The place stank, possibly of the lye from the old dye
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works, or possibly from rot. There was a hardboard chest full of
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baby clothes and the bed was piled high with hand-crafted toys.
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McBean found a pile of bones in an old wooden barrel in an
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outhouse. Some of them had been chewed. There were rabbits and
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pigeons, a couple of cats. Nobody remembered the old woman having a
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dog. Everybody had seen the tightly swaddled baby and had believed
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it was a grandchild. They had taken her for an old tinker woman who
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kept to herself. People passing by gave her money for the baby.</p>
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<p>The young policeman, whose career would take a four year
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vacation during which time he would see more murder and mayhem in
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North Africa and then in France than he would experience in the
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rest of his life, discovered a photograph of a young couple, alike
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enough to be brother and sister, and an old letter to “Dear
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Harry” and signed “Yr Lving Bro, Chas.” The
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address on the envelope was faint, but legible. The letter told
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Harry that Chas would be coming home on leave in less than two
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weeks and he was looking forward to a break from all the square
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bashing. It was dated 1918.</p>
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<p>It was a fifty mile train ride to Lanark where Ron McBean found
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the Reverend Charles Dailly, a short, portly man with the ruddy
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cheeks of a committed drinker and the smile of a jester. McBean had
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taken sandwiches wrapped in a sheet of greaseproof paper and tied
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with string, just in case he got hungry, but the minister brought
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him into the manse and plied him with tea and home baking.</p>
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<p>When he saw the picture of himself and his sister, instant tears
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sparkled in both eyes and he had to dab them with his spotted
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handkerchief, blowing his nose vigorously, much as old Mrs Cosgrove
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would do more than half a century later. By sheer coincidence, if
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anything relating to this could be, the old woman who did
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bed-and-breakfast in her cottage in Barloan Harbour, had been one
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of those girls who had seen Harriet Dailly jump from the Pulpit
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Rock. She had been with Greta Simon that afternoon, both of them
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singing that old Gaelic song about the fairies who stole babies
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from their mothers, but McBean, who would have recorded such detail
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in his notes, was long dead by the time Ginny Marsden and her
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strange and deadly little bundle came to stay for a night.</p>
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<p>“I haven’t seen Harriet since the year the Great War
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ended,” Charles Dailly said when he composed himself.
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“Dead, you say? How, where?”</p>
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<p>The minister explained that his sister had grown up in his
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house, the old manse in Lanark where his father had been the
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incumbent before him. “Harry and John, that was her
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husband’s name you know, they had been hoping to have a
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family, but she couldn’t have babies. Something wrong with
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her innards you know. But she helped foster the youngsters from the
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orphanage, and she told me she would adopt as soon as Johnny came
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marching home. She had taken responsibility, she told me, for the
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child of a woman who had been admitted to the sanatorium down in
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Carstairs, a poor soul who had gone mad. That was on the same day
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she got the telegram that John had bought it in France. He was
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killed on the Somme, you know, just before the end of it all, poor
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soul. I never saw Harriet again after that. I went round to her
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house and she was gone. Someone said they had seen her at the train
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station, and somebody thought she might have been carrying a baby,
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but from that day to this, there’s never been a word, not a
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whisper. We reported her missing, of course, but that was under her
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married name of Burton. It was a log time ago, but we never thought
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she’d go back to her own name.”</p>
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<p>The red-faced minister gathered himself together.</p>
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<p>“In fact I had always had the notion that she’d
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killed herself all those years ago, from the grief of it all. She
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and Johnny were made for each other. The young folk would say,
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crazy for each other. He was a handsome devil, and quite a catch.
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His father had the strawberry farms down the valley, and they made
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a fortune out of preserves.”</p>
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<p>Ron McBean had not told the minister, feeling it was neither his
|
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business nor necessary information, that his sister had jumped into
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the loch. He did not elaborate, but left the bereaved brother with
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the idea that she had fallen accidentally. There was no harm in
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that.</p>
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<p>When he mentioned the possibility that the old woman (who local
|
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people had thought of as a tinker, possibly of Irish extraction, a
|
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wartime version of a bag-lady) had been carrying a baby, Charles
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Dailly said that was quite in character.</p>
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<p>“Loved them. She would have had a dozen if the Lord had
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blessed her. She was always looking after other folk’s
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children and it was a real shame that she was cursed to be
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barren.”</p>
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<p>“What happened to the baby she fostered?” McBean
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asked. It was only curiosity, as his older self would later write.
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Obviously the child was now a man of twenty three, unless he too
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had died in this new war.</p>
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<p>“Well, nobody knows. Who could know? She just disappeared.
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I didn’t know if she even adopted it. It was all very
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confused at the time.”</p>
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<p>“Who would know?” It was just a loose end, but
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McBean was a painstaking and thorough young policeman who was not
|
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ambitious as such, but would always do a job to the best of his
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ability. He turned down a sherry, but accepted another cup of tea,
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while the minister wrote down the address of the sanatorium at
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Carstairs. “It would be June 7, 1918. That’s when the
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telegram came. I remember because it was Harriet’s birthday.
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My mother had baked her a big cake. We gave it to the
|
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orphanage.”</p>
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|
<p>The place in Carstairs had been a madhouse at one time, and now
|
|
it just seemed like a madhouse, in the May of 1941. The three main
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wings had been given over to the wounded, the men of the Scottish
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|
battalions who had been blasted and broken on the shoreline in the
|
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dreadful retreat. Some of the men, young boys, hardly out of their
|
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teens, with dreadful injuries and missing limbs, were sunning
|
|
themselves on the grass or on benches, all of them smoking, and the
|
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ones that could see, staring into the distance with that long-range
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stare of men who still looked into the fires of hell and felt the
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heat.</p>
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<p>Ron McBean recorded in his personal notes how the dreadful
|
|
damage, both physical and mental, made the place look like an image
|
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of another hell. He would also later record in his personal papers,
|
|
after his own war experiences, how familiar that look became.</p>
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|
<p>Matron Ducatt, a squat, grim-faced woman with a transforming
|
|
smile, took him to the records office. She had been a nursing
|
|
sister back at the end of the Great War and remembered Harriet
|
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Burton. She had gone to school with her cousin. She could not
|
|
remember any adoption, though Harriet had taken several children
|
|
into her care, easing the burden of mothers whose husbands had gone
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to war. McBean gave the date and the elderly nurse checked the
|
|
records of admissions.</p>
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<p>“Oh, I remember that day,” she said when she looked
|
|
up the entry. “It was awful, and I shall never forget it as
|
|
long as I live. That was the day we brought Mrs Parsonage in. She
|
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had killed her husband with a coal scuttle. She said he’d
|
|
tried to kill her baby. She was quite demented of course and she
|
|
was sent away to Dalmoak when they made it a State Mental Hospital.
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|
We had the charge of her until then, and no matter what treatment
|
|
we gave her, she stayed in a strait-jacket for most of the
|
|
time.”</p>
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|
<p>“What happened to her?” Ron McBean wanted to
|
|
know.</p>
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|
<p>“Well, she killed her husband all right, but she never had
|
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a baby, not one of her own. She had adopted the child, some time
|
|
before, after its guardian died, some relative, an old washerwoman
|
|
from down in Dumfries. The baby was thought to be her
|
|
grand-daughter’s who’d had it out of wedlock. Mrs
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|
Parsonage’s husband, he was a planter in India and he was
|
|
never home from one year’s end to another. It’s all
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|
coming back now. Anyway, he came home and he never took to the baby
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|
at all. Even the minister</p>
|
|
<p>said he asked him to come down to the house to make his wife
|
|
give up the baby. He said it was possessed. Whatever the case was,
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|
she hit him with a coal scuttle and killed him and she was
|
|
completely deranged when she came here. They found her in the
|
|
garden of her house, all covered in blood, and with hardly a stitch
|
|
on. She was trying to feed the baby herself, poor soul, at her
|
|
age.”</p>
|
|
<p>“And what happened to the baby?”</p>
|
|
<p>The Matron looked at the old file, flicking several pages over
|
|
before turning back to him. “Mrs Burton, Harriet Dailly as
|
|
was, she was on the parish board at this time and she took the
|
|
child to their care, for adoption. I imagine she did. Didn’t
|
|
she?”</p>
|
|
<p>The old parish records showed no such admission. It was getting
|
|
dark by the time Ron McBean discovered this, apologising to the old
|
|
church clerk who got a box of redundant ledgers and records down
|
|
from the loft where they’d been untouched for many years. On
|
|
the way home, he pondered over what he had gleaned, but at that
|
|
time, he had nothing at all to make him suspicious. On the train
|
|
journey back to Kirkland, with one stop in the city centre, in a
|
|
station which would be later demolished and the site redeveloped
|
|
and renamed Waterside Shopping Mall, he passed over the very spot
|
|
where more than fifty years later a woman masquerading at Thelma
|
|
Quigley would drop to the ground, her heart burst asunder. He had
|
|
to avoid two porters with a stack of cases on an old trolley,
|
|
skirting the corner where Ginny Marsden would later be filmed
|
|
turning to take a baby out of a pram.</p>
|
|
<p>At that stage, he had nothing to be suspicious of. But McBean
|
|
was methodical and he was conscientious. He may also have had a
|
|
trace of the fey Highland <em>touch,</em> being from that
|
|
superstitious and shadowed area of mountains, and being the seventh
|
|
child of his family. Over the years, his notes revealed, he thought
|
|
about the strange case, wondering what had happened to the baby
|
|
that a demented, bloodstained woman had tried to suckle in the
|
|
garden of her substantial home.</p>
|
|
<p>As time passed, through correspondence mainly, he built up a
|
|
kind of picture which made no sense at all. He had, after speaking
|
|
with Charles Dailly, discharged some of his duties, but if
|
|
Dailly’s sister had adopted a child, now obviously a young
|
|
man, he had a further duty to try to trace him. While the parish
|
|
orphanage records showed no such adoption,</p>
|
|
<p>and though had been seen with the child, both by witnesses and
|
|
by her brother there was no subsequent record of the baby after she
|
|
had run away</p>
|
|
<p>That left him with a series of mysteries which nagged at him
|
|
down through the years. Who was the baby that Harriet Dailly had
|
|
cared for when she had died. Who was the first baby adopted by mad
|
|
Mrs Parsonage and then taken by Harriet? What had happened to them
|
|
both?</p>
|
|
<p>There was a possibility, he had to consider now, that Harriet
|
|
Dailly, crazy old lady that she seems to have been, had killed both
|
|
children..</p>
|
|
<p>Over the next two years after Harriet Dailly’s death back
|
|
in the war years, McBean discovered, with the help of a local
|
|
undertaker who was an unofficial historian down in Lanark, that Mrs
|
|
Parsonage had become a sort of recluse during the year before her
|
|
breakdown, since she had taken the baby into her home. The
|
|
unregistered adoption had come after the suicide of that distant
|
|
cousin, an impoverished washer-woman widow from Dumfries, some
|
|
forty miles south, whose death had caused a some notoriety, as she
|
|
had leapt naked from a stone bridge which spanned a narrow, rocky
|
|
gorge. When recovered, her whole body was found to be covered in
|
|
bleeding lacerations and bruises which a doctor described as very
|
|
similar to the sucking circlets caused by lampreys on salmon from
|
|
the nearby River Nith. McBean automatically noted the similarity in
|
|
the odd circular lesions uncovered in the autopsy on Harriet
|
|
Dailly.</p>
|
|
<p>It was to be almost fifty years after that strange suicide,
|
|
following the accident at Duncryne Bridge which took away most of
|
|
Greta Simon’s brain, that Sergeant McBean was moved to dig
|
|
further. The records by this time were sparse, but what had started
|
|
as a routine inquiry, gathered a mass and momentum of its own for
|
|
McBean as he counted up the coincidences</p>
|
|
<p>The cousin in Dumfries, an Emily Melrose, youngest daughter of a
|
|
hatmaker who had succumbed to the madness of mercury poisoning, had
|
|
left her home in Lanark to work as a seamstress, though she had
|
|
ended up in the parish workhouse in 1890. She had disappeared from
|
|
there, vanished from sight in fact, on the same day after a fire in
|
|
which an elderly woman and her baby grandchild had died. No trace
|
|
of the infant was ever found in the ashes of the poorhouse.</p>
|
|
<p>It was only after the Duncryne Bridge case when driver Brian
|
|
Devanney was sentenced for the manslaughter of a baby whose body
|
|
was never recovered, that Ron McBean’s personal investigation
|
|
became an obsession.</p>
|
|
<p>He listed, in his papers, his growing consternation and concern:
|
|
“<em>In all this time, I have never been able to identify any
|
|
one of the children alleged to have been involved. I can draw a
|
|
number of conclusions, but coincidence is not one I can honestly
|
|
infer, not any more.”</em></p>
|
|
<p>“Do you believe in coincidence?” Helen asked David
|
|
as she finished reading the old policeman’s account.</p>
|
|
<p>“Sure I do. But I’m with McBean. He was a
|
|
cop’s cop. And nobody believed him, the same way nobody would
|
|
believe us if we came up with the same idea. They’d lock us
|
|
up, wouldn’t they? Phil Cutcheon says he’s on the point
|
|
of belief, though he hasn’t a pension to lose. What I
|
|
don’t believe in any more is that there is any coincidence in
|
|
all of this.”</p>
|
|
<p>“Me neither,” Helen said. “The woman who died
|
|
in the fire, Agnes Lassiter, she had a baby with her, but after the
|
|
fire, nobody ever knew whose it was. Then Emily Melrose, who was in
|
|
her fifties, and was looking after a child, and she was long past
|
|
her sell-by date. She took a dive and killed herself, just like
|
|
Harriet Dailly.</p>
|
|
<p>“They’re all connected, in time and in space,”
|
|
David said. “Lassister, Melrose, Parsonage and Harriet
|
|
Dailly. Like a chain, down the years. They die or they disappear,
|
|
or they go mad. McBean did not discover until very late on, a
|
|
quarter of a century later, the connection between Dailly and Greta
|
|
Simon, but it was there. Nobody sees the obvious when it cannot be
|
|
explained in rational terms.”</p>
|
|
<p>“And how would you explain it?” Helen asked.</p>
|
|
<p>“I’ll show you something in a minute that
|
|
you’re going to think is very crazy, crazier than the idea I
|
|
had before. But let me get the sequence right. Greta was there when
|
|
Harriet jumped and she disappeared the same day. There was no sign
|
|
of the baby, though there were dozens of people who knew the old
|
|
woman had one. Twenty five years later, Greta gets hit by a truck
|
|
and her baby disappears, presumed dead. On the very same day,
|
|
Heather McDougall does a runner, turning up nearly thirty years
|
|
down the line, and once again, she has a baby which, very strangely
|
|
disappears, taken by a woman who, as far as we know, is acting well
|
|
out of character.”</p>
|
|
<p>He tuned to Helen, counting on his fingers, much as Mike
|
|
Fitzgibbon had done. “Look at the conditions in
|
|
Harriet’s house. Exactly the same as Greta’s place.
|
|
Kids clothes, toys; hardly anything else. Same with Heather. McBean
|
|
mentions the smell in the house in Lochend. Probably the same as
|
|
the stench that’s been getting up our noses since this whole
|
|
thing started. I don’t think it’s poison. And I don't
|
|
think it’s a disease.”</p>
|
|
<p>“So what do you really think?”</p>
|
|
<p>“I think it’s what McBean believed.” David
|
|
reached down into the side of the box and found the thin envelope
|
|
that had been jammed down the lining. He took out the thin sheets
|
|
of paper. The top one had the yellow band at the edge where
|
|
sunlight had dulled its whiteness. He read beyond the first page of
|
|
this separate letter which was undated and unaddressed. He drew
|
|
Helen’s attention to the part near the end, the few
|
|
paragraphs Phil Cutcheon had showed him that morning.</p>
|
|
<hr />
|
|
<p><em>“All I know is that it appeared on record some time in
|
|
the past century. It will appear again, but where and when, who
|
|
knows. All I can say, with absolute clarity and conviction, is that
|
|
it will appear again and anything that can do that, time and time
|
|
again, is not natural.</em></p>
|
|
<p>“<em>When I was a boy, my mother used to sing a song, the
|
|
same one that Greta Simon and her friend were singing back in 1941
|
|
while picking elderflowers. You could say my mother was an old,
|
|
uneducated Highland woman whose first language was the Gaelic, and
|
|
who clung to the old ways.</em> Hovan Rovan<em>, was the song,
|
|
about the fairies who would steal a mother’s baby and leave
|
|
another of theirs in its place. The infant was a goblin, a thing
|
|
they called the Tachara. The mother felt the pain and loss of her
|
|
child, but the goblin had the power to make it love it and nurture
|
|
it and raise it as her own, and the woman was damned for ever and
|
|
her own child was gone. An old wives tale from the highlands, but
|
|
somehow, it rings a chord now.</em></p>
|
|
<p>“My mother would have said that the Tachara had stolen
|
|
these mothers. She would have said that somewhere in the past, a
|
|
real baby had been spirited away and this goblin put in its place.
|
|
They called the thing a changeling. It is possible they were
|
|
right.”</p>
|
|
<p>As Helen read, her eyes widened. Finally, very slowly, she put
|
|
the sheets of paper down on the table and turned to him.
|
|
“That’s just what you said. What kind of baby would
|
|
steal a mother.”</p>
|
|
<p>“He thinks it’s been going on a long time,”
|
|
David said. “I know it’s hard to believe, but I’m
|
|
very close to going along with the old guy on this.”</p>
|
|
<p>He put the file back in the box and put it away, not wanting to
|
|
read the dead man’s words again. Helen was about to say
|
|
something else, but he motioned her to silence with his hand while
|
|
he reached for a video cassette.</p>
|
|
<p>“I spent a couple of hours compiling this lot. I just want
|
|
you to look at them and tell me what you think.” He jabbed
|
|
the starter and the screen flickered to life. The bird in the
|
|
burning bush glared wide eyed and desperate over the rim of the
|
|
nest, while the naturalist explained the unbreakable conditioning
|
|
that made it sit on the eggs until she was consumed by flames.</p>
|
|
<p>The screen blurred, danced then focused again as the scene
|
|
switched to another shot of a baby cuckoo in the next, blindly
|
|
ejecting its rival foster brothers from the pipits nest, arching
|
|
its back to roll the eggs up and over the rim. A commentator
|
|
described the hollow in the naked little bird’s back, an
|
|
evolutionary design which allowed the bird to carry an egg and
|
|
eject its rivals forever.</p>
|
|
<p>“The cuckoo,” the narrator said, “is a
|
|
successful brood parasite, driven by instinct, because it obviously
|
|
cannot learn this behaviour from its parents. Within an hour of
|
|
hatching, helpless and completely blind, it gets rid of all
|
|
competition by killing its rivals. It is an efficient little
|
|
murderer, and now it will reap the benefits. The pipits will feed
|
|
it, unaware that they have adopted a killer, and it has adopted
|
|
them.”</p>
|
|
<p>Another flicker, pause, another scene.</p>
|
|
<p>A <em>Pepsis</em> wasp battled with a tarantula spider, forcing
|
|
the curving fangs away from its thorax while it manoeuvred its
|
|
abdomen right underneath the poison needles to plunge its sting
|
|
into the arachnid.</p>
|
|
<p>“This is a pendulum battle, win all or lose all,”
|
|
the voice-over informed. “The wasp risks death, driven by its
|
|
procreative imperative. If she wins, then her genes will carry on
|
|
to the next generation.” On screen the insect paralysed the
|
|
spider and dragged it into an underground chamber where it laid an
|
|
egg inside the former foe. “Alive, but motionless, the spider
|
|
is now a food store for the emerging grub. It will be eaten from
|
|
within.”</p>
|
|
<p>Helen shivered. “I hate spiders,” she volunteered.
|
|
The screen flicked.</p>
|
|
<p>A baby looked directly into its mother’s eyes.</p>
|
|
<p>“Humans, like animals are programmed by their own
|
|
genes,” the well known anthropologist intoned,
|
|
“programmed to recognise a human face. That is why we see
|
|
faces in patterns and in rock formations, in the craters of the
|
|
moon. We first recognise our mother, both by smell and eyesight and
|
|
later, by voice. It is a two-way process. The human infant, like
|
|
the young chimpanzee, like the nestling bird is dependent on the
|
|
mother for food, for shelter, for protection and the mother is
|
|
made, genetically programmed, to respond to its demands. A human
|
|
baby’s cry is pitched at a level which causes her distress
|
|
and impels her to rush to its defence or its aid. The smell of a
|
|
baby, human or mammal, imprints upon the mother, increasing the
|
|
flow of hormones from the pituitary and other glands, reinforcing
|
|
the mothering instinct. If this system had never existed, then
|
|
higher mammals, primates, the human race, would never have existed.
|
|
You could say, that the most powerful force on the planet, the
|
|
controlling influence, is the power a baby exerts on its
|
|
mother.”</p>
|
|
<p>David switched the machine off. “There’s plenty
|
|
more, but that should do for now.”</p>
|
|
<p>Helen gave another exaggerated shudder.</p>
|
|
<p>“That,” she said. “Is the creepiest thing I
|
|
have ever seen in my life.”</p>
|
|
<p>“Ah, but does it really apply?” They looked at each
|
|
other, both wondering. Both on the cusp of belief in the
|
|
impossible.</p>
|
|
<p>Sometime in the night, he woke with a start, drenched in sweat
|
|
and shaking in the aftermath of a surreal dream where an unseen
|
|
baby whimpered and cried while he searched for it in the dark of an
|
|
old and derelict house, following its high echoing cry through the
|
|
nooks and crannies and cobwebbed hollows, all the time knowing that
|
|
it was trying to lure him into danger and that if he set eyes upon
|
|
it, it would ensnare him in a dreadful, hypnotic power.</p>
|
|
<p>Helen held him tight in her arms until the aftershock of the
|
|
dream faded.</p>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</div>
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</body>
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