booksnew/source/incubus-source/C15.txt

<h2>15</h2>
<p>"I found him," the ancient woman said. "And he was <em>mine</em>."</p>

<p>Her name was Greta Simon and she sat in the wheelchair in the corner of the room, out of the light. Her hair was grey and thin she had a shallow indentation, as wide as a tennis ball and maybe half an inch deep, on the side of her temple. It gave her face an asymmetric, somehow slumped appearance. Her left eye, on the same side of the dent, was turned inwards in a violent strabismic squint which made her look both cunning and imbecilic all at the same time.</p>

<p>She grinned widely, showing three teeth on the left side. The gaps gave her an odd, slavering hiss of speech as if she wore ill fitting dentures. Her hands hugged herself constantly as if making sure she was truly there.</p>

<p>"I loved him and I looked after him all the time," she said. David had to bend forward to hear. "Little Tim. <em>Little Tiny Tim</em>. He was mine you know. I had him and I fed him. All the time. He never stopped eating. Brought me out in bruises, he did, but I never minded that."</p>

<p>She looked up at David Harper, though with her improbable squint, he couldn't be sure exactly what she was looking at. He kept a fix on her right eye to be certain. It looked the most likely.</p>

<p>This was Greta Simon who had almost been killed by the lorry that day on Duncryne Bridge, the day Heather McDougall had decided to go up the valley to join her dead friend. She was old and frail and wandered, yet there was a strange life in her good eye, a peculiar, almost mischievous and somehow sly intelligence inside that deformed head.</p>

<p>"You can go and see her," Phil Cutcheon had told him. "I spoke to her once or twice after the case and she's wandered all right, but there's more to her than you'd think."</p>

<p>The former detective had poured neat cups of strong coffee in the heated conservatory that let in the weak winter sunshine which together with the greenery and the winter flowering blooms, made it feel like a warm day in spring.</p>

<p>"Still miss the job," he said. "Miss the cut and thrust. You get used to it and when you stop, it's as if you've had the feet cut from under you. Mark my words, you've a long way to go, but make sure you've got things to do by the time you're ready to take the pension. I've got my garden and the bowling club, but I miss the thinking, the real concentration."</p>

<p>He sat back and looked straight at David, much as Greta Simon would do later, though Cutcheon had the direct look that all policemen seem to develop. The power look.</p>

<p>"You've got yourself a mystery, same as I had. And there was an old beat man back in the forties who had the same thing. It's got me beat and it'll have you beat too, but there's no harm in you ploughing the same furrow. If you turned up something, I'd be glad of it. I always thought that driver should never have gone to jail. Not in a million years. But he had a cretin for a lawyer and there was nothing I could do but report the facts. From the looks of things, he was going too fast, from the skid marks anyway, but I would have said it was a borderline case. As far as the baby was concerned, we spent a lot of man hours looking for it and never turned up anything at all. What got me was that he was wrapped in a shawl when he went over the bridge and that never showed up neither. You'd have thought it would have got snagged in the bushes or the brambles down on the side of the valley. Take a walk up there and have a look, it hasn't changed in all those years."</p>

<p>"I already did," David said. The coffee was strong and thick and he could feel his pulse speed up almost instantly. "It's pretty steep."</p>

<p>"Yes. Right down to the Witches Pots. I used to play there as a boy, you know. Good place to swim, but damned cold, even in the summer. If the baby had fallen in there, it would have drowned and died of cold pretty quickly. But I always had my doubts, because even as a boy I knew that anything that landed in the pool tended to stay there, even when the river was in spate. Devanney, the driver, he was no use. He said the woman came running out into the middle of the road. There might have been somebody else there at the time, but he couldn't be sure and anyway he was in such a state of shock that we couldn't get a word out of him for hours. He worked for Carnwath Hauliers and there was a lot of bad feeling at the time. They were a cowboy outfit and they pushed their drivers too hard. There had been a couple of accidents before this and that was why it was easy to get a conviction, but as I said, it was a borderline case and to tell you the truth, the road up there's quiet enough for anybody to hear a truck coming a mile off. It was as much her fault, in my opinion, as his."</p>

<p>"So what do you think happened?"</p>

<p>"Christ alone knows. I was never completely sure there was a baby on the bridge, though Greta Simon did have a kid at some stage, at least to look after. There were enough witnesses testifying to that, but nobody knew <em>whose</em> baby it was. She was in a coma for weeks and once she came out of it she was as mad as a hatter. She'll still tell you she had a baby boy and half of the time she still thinks she's got one. But it's a mystery all right and it's not one of my clearest memories of my time on the force. Devanney should never have gone to jail on the basis of the evidence. That baby was never found, and there was no clear proof that it was there, despite the wreck of the pram on the road at the bridge. Greta was a bit crazy before the accident anyway. The court decided there must have been a baby and it must have died and that was that. We searched her place from top to bottom and found plenty of new kiddies clothes and toys, and a cot that had never been used. To me that wasn't conclusive, but I had to go ahead and make my report</p>

<p>"That's what we found at Heather McDougall's place."</p>

<p>"And it stank to high heaven too, as if she'd been keeping cats or some kind of animal. There was a smell that would have burned your eyes out."</p>

<p>"Snap."</p>

<p>"We didn't hear about McDougall until the following day, if my memory serves me. To tell you the truth, I never linked the two cases, for there was never any pointers to show she'd gone up to Duncryne. I think maybe it's a coincidence."</p>

<p>"There's plenty of them, that's for sure. That's why I came to have a chat. Mr Bulloch sends his regards by the way. He says you and he worked together."</p>

<p>"More years ago than I care to remember. He's done well for himself, young Bulloch. Got some distance to go too, I believe." The big ex-policeman sat back with his coffee, looking over the cup at David, his grey and grizzled eyebrows drawn down. He was tall, but broad enough to disguise his height. He must have been a formidable policeman in his day, David thought. The blue eyes were still clear and bright. They measured everything.</p>

<p>"Anyway, what you tell he has got me interested again, though I promised Maisie, that's my wife, that I wouldn't open any more cases. After I left, there were still one or two loose ends to tie up, but after a while you just sit back and let other people get on with it. That's what they're paid for, and the last thing they want is an old has-been breathing down their necks."</p>

<p>He grinned widely. "But you do need something to keep the brain cells alive, so any help you need, I'm your man."</p>

<p>"It's the coincidences that puzzle me," David said. "From what I understand, we've got two missing babies, yet nobody knows where they came from. If the McDougall women's diaries are accurate, there's probably more than two. Maybe as many as four, because the diaries span a long time. I can't tell you if these kids were begged borrowed or stolen, but I do know that Heather McDougall never gave birth.</p>

<p>"And neither did Greta Simon. When you go down to Blairdyke Hospital they'll tell you that. She'd never had a child of her own, so she was looking after one for somebody else or she'd done some sort of fostering deal that nobody knew about. That used to happen now and again. I went through all the records at the time to find out if maybe a child had been reported missing but even then that would have been big news. You have to remember, the pressure was on me at the time to clear up the Quigley murder. Back then, a murder took precedence over an accident, no matter how serious, and I was pretty thinly stretched at the time and so were my team. The Quigley case was a mess from start to finish. No matter though, we did our best to find the baby, but nothing turned up."</p>

<p>"And you think there was no baby?"</p>

<p>"Oh, there was a baby at some stage. Nobody knew whether it was a boy or a girl. Later on Greta said it was a boy, but by that time she was howling at the moon. There was a baby, but I am not convinced it went over the parapet and down the ravine. We would have found something. People said they saw somebody else on the bridge. We never got an identity, but there could have been somebody with Greta Simon. Who knows?"</p>

<p>"Somebody said maybe a fox had taken it. That or a dog."</p>

<p>"We had tracker dogs all over there. They'd have picked up something, but there was nothing. All we could do was make a report and the prosecution decided to take it all the way. It was a railroad job, but I'm a policeman, or I used to be. I don't make the rules. There was nothing I could do."</p>

<p>He sat back and steepled his thick fingers together. "I spent a lot of time thinking about this later, and I can see you'll be doing the same. What I came up with was something I couldn't fathom. It's always been at the back of my mind, but I never really took it further. I think maybe I made a mistake, from what you've told me. I might owe somebody a posthumous apology. Later on, if you want, I can get you more information, but I have to tell you, it's a case of history repeating itself, and that's something I don't like to see."</p>

<p>"I'm not with you," David admitted.</p>

<p>"From what you've told me, you've an almost identical case and it's come too close to this old one. Heather McDougall came from here and she disappeared at the same time as the baby. Now there may be a gap of thirty years or so, but it's too weird. You didn't know that Greta Simon herself disappeared as well, way back in the forties, did you?"</p>

<p>David shook his head.</p>

<p>"Well, it's true. She came from somewhere across the other side of the country. Kirkland, Levenford, around that neck of the woods. Back then, during the war, there was a lot of movement, and there was plenty of bombing down there on Clydeside, so people went missing all the time. It wasn't until we really looked into the case that we found her name on the files and in her bag she still had her old wartime identity card. Until then, nobody really knew who she was or where she was from. Now you've got the same thing. Greta Simon, Heather McDougall, and now your Marsden girl. It's a hell of a set of coincidences, isn't it?"</p>

<p>"What do you mean?"</p>

<p>"I'm not the first to come up with the notion that it was all too pat. I heard something like this before, a long time ago, before your time. Before Donal Bulloch's time in fact, but I never gave it any credence before. Now I wonder if I was wrong. Maybe there's some sort of virus that makes women steal children."</p>

<p>"I'm still not with you."</p>

<p>"No. I didn't think you would be," Phil Cutcheon said, sitting back in his seat and running a hand through his grizzled hair. "Tell you what. You go down to Blairdyke Hospital. Mike Fitzgibbon, he's the senior man there, I'll give him a call and he'll let you talk to Greta Simon. You can see for yourself what she'd like. Once you've done that, come back to me and I'll see what I can do. You've whetted my appetite and there's bugger-all to be done in the greenhouse at this time of the year."</p>

<p>Dr Fitzgibbon was tall and spare, with receding ginger-coloured hair cut very short and wearing octagonal glasses which gave him a hard and heartless look, but he'd a wide and friendly smile which transformed the initial impression. He had narrow shoulders from which a while coat drooped. It flapped behind him as he walked down the straight corridor which was painted in that shade of green they save for public institutions as if it's a legal requirement to be as dismal and depressing as possible.</p>

<p>"Old Phil Cutcheon called me," he said. "It's a shame he's not still on the force. He knows more psychology than some of the dough-heads and wide boys here. He can spot a faker a mile off. Don't ever tell him a lie or he'll have your guts."</p>

<p>David promised he wouldn't. Mike Fitzgibbon insisted on using first names and led David to a small, neat office with views over a regimented garden.</p>

<p>"Greta Simon. One of our enduring mysteries is old Greta. I've been here for fifteen years and I still haven't a clue, but you're welcome to talk to her. She can be friendly when she chooses, and then again, she sometimes doesn't say a word for weeks. It depends on the moon or whether it's raining, or if she heard a blackbird after dinner. I know her case bugged the hell out of Superintendent Cutcheon and I can quite understand that."</p>

<p>He crossed to the wall and opened the second drawer of a grey filing cabinet and brought out a thick folder. "These are just the basics. There's a bundle of case notes going way back, but there's no harm in giving you the brief history."</p>

<p>Mike opened the file and took out a sheaf of official looking papers. To David they looked very much like police report forms.</p>

<p>"Greta Simon. Presented July 27 1967 at Blane Hospital, aged approximately sixty. Suffering multiple fractures and a massive depressed fracture of the skull following a road accident. That much you know already."</p>

<p>"Badly injured?"</p>

<p>"Appalling. She'd got twenty pins in her legs. Pelvis was compacted and both knee-joints shattered. The surgeons considered amputation, but because of the head injury they thought she might not survive. It was a miracle that she did." The doctor went down the list. "The coma lasted approximately five weeks after which she needed intensive therapy. The damage was to the left side of the head, affecting the temporal lobe. She suffered paralysis of the right side, facial distortion and speech dysfunction which is quite common in injuries of this nature as well as in stroke and haemorrhage victims."</p>

<p>Mike looked up. "Those were the injuries. She didn't talk for six months, maybe seven. But there were other interesting aspects to the case. We had her aged approximately sixty. To all outward appearance, from bone structure and composition, she was that age. It turned out she was nearer fifty, but that's by the way. What did surprise the team at Blane was the fact that she was still lactating."</p>

<p>"Lactating?" David asked. The word made him sit up straight in his seat.</p>

<p>"Yes. Producing milk."</p>

<p>"Yeah, I know. I was just surprised." In fact he could hardly believe what the doctor had said. It was another coincidence. A huge coincidence. Another one was about to fall his way.</p>

<p>"And menstruating." Mike Fitzgibbon said, reading from the notes. "Very unusual. Dr Tvedt made particular reference to both. He'd have loved to have done a post mortem, I can tell from his notes. Just a shame she didn't die." Mike gave a grin, wide and natural. "He was an old bugger. Horrible swine of a man. Somebody did a post mortem on him last year. Liver failure. Too much arm bending. He liked his brandy."</p>

<p>The young doctor went back to the notes. "Anyway, she wasn't expected to live, not with her injuries. The worst of all was the skull damage and naturally there was collateral brain injury. She had three clots under the surface of the cerebrum, one of them quite massive. That's what caused the speech dysfunction of course and the lateral paralysis. The neuro team managed to partially raise the depressed fracture to remove some of the pressure on the meninges, that's the membrane covering the brain."</p>

<p>David nodded. He'd read enough post mortem reports, or listened to them in murder trials, to have a fair working knowledge of the terminology.</p>

<p>"And on the brain itself. What was remarkable was that the clots dissipated very quickly, without the use of anti-coagulant. Normally we'd try to break up a major blockage and hope it dissolved before further damage is caused to the blood supply. Nobody was sure of what caused that spontaneous dissolution, but Tvedt was convinced it had something to do with the presence of unusual antibodies in her blood.</p>

<p>David raised his head. "What was unusual?"</p>

<p>Mike quickly scanned through the notes, though it was obvious he'd read them a dozen times or more. "There was quite a range. They couldn't make out whether they were defences against bacteria or virus, and remember this was back in the sixties. Things have moved on since then. It seemed that she'd been exposed to some infection, some invasion before the accident and her body had either produced antibodies, or these large protein structures had been introduced from the outside."</p>

<p>"So what were they?"</p>

<p>Mike shrugged. "Nobody knows."</p>

<p>"Haven't they been checked recently? You said things have moved on since then."</p>

<p>"Sure they have. We're mapping the human genome and we've techniques to identify specific antibodies, even down to their protein coats. But that was then and this is now. About six months after she arrived in Blane, there was no sign of them at all. Tvedt had thought there was a never-ending supply in Greta's bloodstream, but he was wrong. Oh, he should have kept samples, but he didn't and there was no way his people could induce her to produce the antibodies."</p>

<p>"What made them disappear?"</p>

<p>"Who knows. Some believe that we've got every antibody to every disease since life crawled out of the swamp, a sort of biological array of defences that are triggered into production to counter every threat. What really kills us is the emergence of new varieties and there's new ones coming along all the time. More and more since man in his wisdom is getting down to serious genetics. Anyway, Greta, it would seem, had produced these complex molecules as a defence, or as an inhibitor. When the threat was gone, her body simply turned off the supply. It's unusual for the human immune system to leave no trace once the defences are switched off, but not impossible. Tvedt just couldn't recreate the conditions because he didn't know what had switched them on in the first place."</p>

<p>Mike closed the file. "After about five weeks, she woke, which came as a surprise to everybody, and her injuries started to mend. They did a radio-opaque scan of her brain and found the clotting gone, though there was still scarring at the source of impact. Her speech aphasia was apparent for a year or more, though she hardly talked at all. She had motor dysfunction and severe pedal handicap because of the muscle and bone injury to the pelvic area. Apart from that there was nothing much wrong with her except...."</p>

<p>David nodded him on.</p>

<p>"Except the brain damage was not merely confined to motor and speech function. It left her permanently disabled, and that's why she's here at Blairdyke. She's been variously diagnosed, but in a nutshell, he's got the mental age of a girl of seven. That's just one aspect of the brain injury.</p>

<p>"From time to time she exhibits varying symptoms of catalepsy, grand and petit mal."</p>

<p>"She throws fits?"</p>

<p>"As you say. She throws fits." Mike smiled, but not condescendingly. "While there is no clinical evidence, either chemical or hormonal, she displays evidence of schizophrenia, which could be attributed to new synapse pathways forming but not connecting properly. She talks to herself. She believes she is possessed. She occasionally believes she has a baby."</p>

<p>David sat back. Coincidence was piling upon coincidence.</p>

<p>"Does anybody know whether she ever <em>had</em> a baby?"</p>

<p>"I'm no pathologist. I'm a psychologist. But no, she never did. Her clinical notes show that she presented with adhesions on both fallopian tubes. One of these turned out to be a tumour which was removed in the early seventies. Initially her ovaries were grossly distended and fully functional. In fact they were unnaturally active, even for a woman half her age. They were producing vast amounts of hormone when she was first admitted and there was some suspicion that this had been caused by damage to the pituitary gland, though there was never any proof. What I'm saying is that she was hormonally fertile, but physically sterile."</p>

<p>"Was she a virgin?"</p>

<p>"No. But she never had a baby, not one of her own. Shortly after admission, at least within the first six months, the overpoduction of progesterone and oestrogen slowed and then failed completely. She entered menopause almost overnight. That possibly didn't help her mental condition, but again, that was before my time. I was still in school."</p>

<p>"Me to," David said.</p>

<p>"So what's your interest in our Greta?"</p>

<p>"I don't know," David said honestly. "I'm following a list of coincidences that have me beat, There was a similar case to hers in my neck of the woods, somebody who would have interested you, but she died."</p>

<p>"Phil Cutcheon said you might want to speak to her?"</p>

<p>"Yes. I would," David said. "I don't know what I'm looking for, I have to admit, but I'd like to check everything out."</p>

<p>"You'd make a good doctor," Mike Fitzgibbon said. He stood up and opened the door. They went back down the dismal green corridor which echoed like a cave, amplifying their footsteps and making them reverberate in a shadowy back-beat. At the far end, a narrow stairway led down to a lower level where, oddly, the corridor was brighter and the windows let on to a small, neatly tended garden where winter roses sparkled under a sugaring of frost.</p>

<p>Half way along, Mike opened a white door. He went in first, and beckoned to David to come through. Inside, the spartan room was clean and shaded. A pull-down blind came almost to the sill. For a moment David's eyes were unaccustomed to the shade but there was enough light coming in through the open door for him to see a tiny, emaciated woman sitting in a wheelchair, hugging herself tight. She shivered in a palsied tremor, the kind of motion he'd seen on Heather McDougall's old and ruined father. The eyes at first were just as vacant, focused into the far distance or into the far past.</p>

<p>This old woman had lost her mind on the same day that old Callum McDougall had lost a daughter. There was a strange symmetry in that, an uncanny similarity.</p>

<p>"Hello Greta," Mike said brightly, walking towards the window. He raised the blind, not fully, but enough to let light in so they could both see without straining. A shaft of brightness caught the old woman's eye and David saw a gleam that could have been anger or mischief or complete insanity. She turned her head, still shivering slightly, away from the glare. Her hair was faded and sparse, showing a pale, mottled scalp. The light cast a shadow that focused attention on the shocking depression in the side of her head and cast a glint in the eye that was violently turned inward.</p>

<p>She lifted her head. In the silence of that moment, David heard the creak of bone against ligament.</p>

<p>"Shhh," the woman said, fixing that one eye on the doctor while the other one glared madly at the wall on the other side. "You'll wake him."</p>

<p>"Wake who Greta?" Mike Fitzgibbon asked, turning towards David, one eyebrow raised.</p>

<p>"You'll wake the baby, Doctor. You know he needs all his sleep, poor wee thing. You'll waken him up again and then we'll never get any sleep."</p>

<p>"What's your baby called, Greta?"</p>

<p>"Tim. You know that. He's Tiny Tim." She leaned forward and then pushed back, rocking slowly. Her wizened, slumped head seemed to waver and twist in the half-light. It gave her a gnome-like cast, as if her face was trying to change into something else. Despite her frailty, it gave David an eerie shiver.</p>

<p>"I found him you know." She leaned back and the chair quivered. "Before. I found him. He wanted me, you know. He cried to me and I saved him. He needed me and I needed him."</p>

<p>The old woman jerked in a sudden start, blinking rapidly, three times in succession. She turned round, her good eye wide, bewildered, scanning the room. Mike looked at David again.</p>

<p>"This is what to expect. The alterations between her states are inexplicable and very rapid."</p>

<p>"Where is this place?"</p>

<p>"You're in the hospital Greta. You know that. And this is David who's come to see you."</p>

<p>The old fluttery hands rubbed up and down against skinny arms, sliding scratchily over shoulders that were fleshless and bony.</p>

<p>"David," she said, voice tremulous and weak. "David. Can you find him? I lost him and I can't find him." Greta Simon's mouth was twisted to the side and the words were floppy and unfinished. "She took him. She took my baby and I can't find him any more and he needs me."</p>

<p>"Who was that?" Mike asked.</p>

<p>"She did. She came and took him. I saw her." She stiffened and twisted her head, making a circling motion that made her look even more imbecilic. For a moment there was a silence in the room and then the old woman began to hum softly. It was almost inaudible at first, like a vocal shudder, low and quavering. Then it came louder, not quite in time, but not far out. Hmm-hmm. Hum Hum. Dee da. <em>Dee da</em>...</p>

<p>"<em>I left my baby lying here</em>," the words were wet and almost drooling, but comprehensible enough. "<em>I left my baby lying here and went to gather blueberries</em>." David recognised the song. His own grandmother had sung it to him when he was a child. The melody had stayed in his head, buried under his experience, under the games and the growing. He hadn't heard the tune for twenty years or more. As soon as he recognised it, an image of his own mother's face came back to him somehow, not as she was now, robust and motherly, but young and red-haired, the way she must have been when he was too young to notice her own youth.</p>

<p>The plaintive unmelodic tune shivered out between those few stumps of teeth. "I left my baby lying here."</p>

<p>David recalled the words of the old song. The baby was taken by fairies. They stole babies in the old Gaelic myth. The woman stopped rocking. She stopped singing.</p>

<p>"I left him for a moment. Just a moment on the bridge. I left him and she came and took him."</p>

<p>"Who was that?" David asked. Mike Fitzgibbon leaned against the table, his chin cupped in his hands.</p>

<p>"<em>She</em> did. It made her. I turned round to look at the water and she came and took him out of the pram. I tried to stop her. I knew what she was doing and I had to get him back."</p>

<p>"And what happened then?"</p>

<p>The old woman's good eye went still, seemed to fog over. Her brow lifted in an expression of bafflement. Her head twisted to the side, as if listening for something, but the bewildered gaze remained.</p>

<p>"She's got no recollection of the accident," the doctor said. "That's normal of course. Most of her short term memory is gone anyway. Ten minutes from now, she won't remember who you are. Or me."</p>

<p>Greta Simon's palsied, slumped face turned down again very slowly and the eye fixed on David again. The fog seemed to clear from her eye, as if intelligence of a sort had fled and then returned.</p>

<p>"Where did the baby come from," David tried a different thrust.</p>

<p>"He's mine," she hissed. The life came back into her, though there was an eerie mischief in the glint of the eye. The twisted pupil caught a shard off light and glittered grotesquely. "He's mine, Tiny Tim, Little <em>tiny</em> Tim. That's his name, you know. He's so small and perfect and he loves me."</p>

<p>"Your baby?"</p>

<p>"He loves me and I feed him." The hands were fluttering back on her thin, fleshless shoulders again, hugging herself tight, as if she held something close to body. David could imagine a mother clutching a child.</p>

<p>"I found him," she said. "He called to me and I took him. Long ago it was." The glitter shone in her eye and her mouth widened to a grin. "He called to me and I took him, for he needed me. It was in the trees, beside the water. I saw her fall down and he called to me. You couldn't refuse a baby, could you? No. Not at all."</p>

<p>"Saw who?" David asked, but she was somewhere else.</p>

<p>She hugged herself tighter. "You don't know, do you? Nobody knew. But I could look after him and Tim wanted me. He said <em>take me.</em> So I took him and he's mine."</p>

<p>"Who did you take him from?"</p>

<p>"The lady died. She fell down and she died. She made a noise when she hit. It was by the water, where we were picking the flowers for the wine. I couldn't help her, though I tried, you know." The voice became tremulous here. "She fell down and the baby called to me and he needed a mother. I look after him and I feed him. He's so hungry all the time. He could suck you to death, but he needs me."</p>

<p>"And when did this happen, when you found the baby?"</p>

<p>The old woman squinted at David.</p>

<p>"You can't have him. He's my baby. She can't have him neither. Bitch. Wants to steal my Timmy. Wants to take him away and mother him. That's what she wants. But she can't." Her voice started to rise.</p>

<p>"Nobody wants to take him away," David said soothingly. What he was hearing was bizarre. He'd hoped for something more from the old woman since Phil Cutcheon had told him she was still alive. He'd only been following his instincts, at least his curiosity. But Greta Simon was simply wandered. The dent in her skull showed up in the slanted light like a crater on the moon.</p>

<p>Again on instinct, David asked one last question.</p>

<p>"How old are you Greta?"</p>

<p>"I'm twenty six."</p>

<p>David looked at Mike Fitzgibbon. The doctor gave an almost imperceptible nod.</p>

<p>"And what year is it?"</p>

<p>"It's Forty one. Middle of May. Don't you know there's a war on, silly?"</p>

<p>She grinned again and for an instant her face took on a sly expression. The twisted eye gleamed. She bent her head and began to hum a tune again, very faintly. She curled her hands and shifted her arms, as if once again she really was cradling a baby.</p>

<p>"Oh, not so hard Timmy. You'll empty me right out, so you will."</p>