The Golden Fury

Chapter 24

Chapter 24

Aldira. She’d giggled, she remembered, because he looked happier than she’d seen him for ages. Maybe having Alice would help them rebuild their relationship, like Nick said. Perhaps they were turning a corner, she remembered thinking as she struggled down the corridor.

The reporter was looking at her.

“Sorry,” Bria said. “It just hurts so much to remember.”

Aldira stroked her arm. “Take your time, Bria,” she said. “I know it must be very hard for you.”

“The thing is, I can’t remember if I looked at my baby again before I left her in the room,” Bria said, and her voice faltered.

Aldira Waters looked up from her notebook and met her eyes.

“Did you see anyone in the corridor, Bria?” she said gently.

“I think there were a couple of visitors—people on their way out of the ward—but I didn’t take much notice. I wanted a quick shower before Alice woke for her feed.”

She’d stood under the hot water for what felt like two minutes, but the police said was more like ten minutes. Time did strange things in hospitals. Sometimes it stretched minutes into hours and sometimes it vanished altogether.

And when she trudged damply back to her room, the baby had gone.

By the time the nurses arrived, skittering down the linoleum of the corridor at the sound of her howl, the cot was cold.

Her kitchen was silent. All she could hear was the tick of the electric clock. Bria looked down at the table. She could feel the surge of panic as if for the first time, the hot prickling of her skin, the sudden nausea, the paralysis. She clenched her fists into her lap and went on, desperate to get to the end without collapsing.

“I was telling myself that a nurse must have taken her. I was trying to stay calm. I remember saying out loud, ‘She’s been taken back to the nursery.’ I thought I called out, ‘Nurse!’ But the staff told the police that they heard me scream and came running.”

“The baby,” she’d said to them. “Where is the baby?” and she’d known from their pale faces and the way they turned to each other, as if lost, that they didn’t know. No one knew. Except the person who’d taken her.

She told Aldira about the frantic search of all the rooms and wards, which produced nothing but general terror. No one had seen anything. It was evening and the first-time mums had been curled against their stitches and cramps, gazing fearfully at their new sons and daughters while the old hands gossiped and clucked with each other on the subject of childbirth. Curtains between the beds in the wards had begun to be drawn to allow some sleep, and the visitors had almost all been ushered out.

“And while all that was going on, someone came into the room. Just walked in and took her.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Aldira

MONDAY, APRIL 2, 2012

Aldira wrote quickly, jotting it all down in shorthand, while never taking hereyes off the woman across the table. She hardly needed to ask a question, just the occasional nudge when more details were needed. Bria’s narrative started to slow when the story reached their return home from the hospital.

“It must have been very hard to come back to an empty nursery,”

Aldira said.

Bria nodded, dumbly. “We stood in Alice’s room for a long time.

But she wasn’t there. She’d never been there. There was just a cot and a mobile of zoo animals. I felt so empty inside.”

“What were the police doing to try to find her, Bria?” Aldira said.

“All the usual things,” Bria said, her voice exhausted by the tale.

“Searches, news conferences, chasing all over the country.”

“No real suspects?” Aldira asked. “There must have been loads of people walking about the hospital.”

“There were, but no one saw anything,” Bria said. “It was like she’d disappeared into thin air.”

She waited a beat and added: “You know, of course, they came to the house after a couple of weeks and asked about my feelings towards Alice.”

“Your feelings? Why? What was that about?” Aldira said, knowing full well what it was about. “How awful for you.”

Bria looked grateful for the comment and nodded. “I thought so, too. But I think one of the nurses must have said something about me. I was so drugged up after the birth I didn’t know what I was doing, really.

Maybe I didn’t appear maternal enough. The police kept asking why I had left her alone.”

“What did you say?” Aldira asked.

“I said she was asleep and I thought she was safe.”

“Of course,” Aldira said. “God, if your baby isn’t safe in a maternity hospital, where would she be?”

Tears were running down Bria’s face and Joe fished a packet of tissues from his bag and offered them to her.

“What do you think happened to her, Bria?” Aldira said.

The older woman wrapped the tissue round her knuckles and closed her eyes. “Someone took her. In the ten minutes I was out of the room, someone came in, lifted her out of her cot, and took her away.”

“Who do you think would have done such a thing?” Aldira asked.

“I don’t know,” Bria breathed. “You hear about sad women and evil men taking children. But I don’t know who took her. I would give anything to know.”

The two women sat in silence for a moment, focusing on their drinks.

To Aldira’s astonishment, Joe suddenly spoke.

“Why do you think the Building Site Baby is Alice, Mrs. Irving?”

Aldira bit back her annoyance. She’d wanted to ask that question but she couldn’t say anything to Joe in front of the interviewee. She tried to give him a look, but he was staring at Bria intently, mirroring Aldira’s approach. And Bria was looking at the youngster kindly.

“Did you have any links to Woolwich?” he continued. “People who knew you?”

“I wish I could say yes, Joe,” Bria replied. “But I have never been to Woolwich. All I can say is that I had a feeling when I read the story in the newspaper. A strong feeling that this was about Alice. I know it sounds a bit crazy, but there it is,” she said.

Aldira groaned in her head. No connections, no leads. It didn’t sound likely that this was the baby in Howard Street.

But she didn’t want Bria to see her disappointment. She touched her arm again. “It doesn’t sound crazy at all,” she said.

It’s been two weeks and no one has come to my door. I spend a lot of time—far too much time—looking out of the window, watching for my accusers to arrive. The police, I suppose, but there are other possibilities. Funny, when I think about the police, I have an old-fashioned image of a bobby, striding up the path, an arrest warrant in his hand. Like they were then.

Sometimes I wish they would just come. Put me out of my misery.

But no one has. I stand by the window and try to force myself to go back upstairs to work. My body won’t obey. I am rooted to this spot. My place of shame. Back to the beginning.

Raul is worried about me. I can see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice.

“When did you last see Dr. Gorgeous?” he asked me this morning.

Our little joke. Dr. Gorgeous is Dr. Brenton—my wonderful GP—but giving him a funny nickname makes it easier to talk about my

“condition.”