The Golden Fury

Chapter 23

Chapter 23

“Go through,” she called from behind them. Aldira could hear Joe breathing through his mouth behind her and cursed the fact that she’d brought him with her.

In the kitchen, Aldira’sarticle had been laid out center stage on the table. Around it were piles of neatly folded cuttings, letters, and an official-looking file.

“Please sit down,” Angela said, stiff and formal as she moved around the room, adding a third cup to a prepared tray of coffee and biscuits.

“I got some of my stuff out to show you. In case you were interested in seeing the history . . .”

Aldira immediately picked up an article to show she was willing, but she didn’t read it. It was one she’d already scanned through at the office, and she needed time to think.

When Angela Irving had cried on the phone, Aldira thought it was going to be an easy job. She thought she would be leading the conversation, but Angela’s tears had dried and Aldira felt she was on the back foot. What she had misjudged was the fact that Mrs. Irving was an old hand with reporters. There had been a number of interviews in the years after the disappearance—and that could play two ways. It could move things along if the interviewee knew what was expected and they could come quickly to the point.

But Aldira preferred virgin territory to sloppy seconds. New subjects didn’t speak in clichés or repeat well-worn quotes. And with a newbie, Aldira could control the interview. She liked to listen and coax, leaning forwards and maintaining eye contact when things threatened to get difficult. But Angela Irving sounded as though she had already prepared what she wanted to say.

Aldira pretended to read the cutting while she watched the woman bustling around behind the breakfast bar. It all looked very businesslike, but she noted the tremble in her hand that betrayed the nervous energy crackling just below the surface. She’d manage

“Mrs. Irving . . .” she started.

“Please call me Angela. ‘Mrs. Irving’ sounds like you are talking to my mother-in-law,” Angela said with a ghost of a smile.

“Now,” she added as she poured the coffee, “what do you want to know?”

Aldira smiled at her apologetically and tried to match her matter-of-fact tone.

“Everything, Angela. If that’s all right.”

“Of course,” the older woman said quietly and sat down. When she didn’t speak, Aldira leaned forwards and asked: “Are you okay, Angela?”

She shook her head.

“Sorry, I thought you would ask me a question and I’d answer it, like the other reporters did,” she said. “I thought I’d be fine. But, it’s just that

‘everything’ sounds so overwhelming. I’m not sure where to begin now.”

Her eyes filled with tears and Aldira reached out to touch her arm in sympathy and relief.

“I’m sorry, Angela. I didn’t mean to overwhelm you. Let’s just take it a bit at a time. Why don’t you tell me about your nursing? My mum was a nurse. Where did you train? In Hampshire?”

It was not information that Aldira reallyneeded, but she wanted to get Angela talking and relaxed before they broached the minefield of the a*******n. The early stages of an interview were crucial. Get it wrong and you risked being shown the door with a notebook full of nothing.

Angela smiled properly for the first time, perhaps thinking she was being let off the hook.

“It was all I ever wanted to be, a nurse. Used to run doll hospitals for my friends’ toys. I trained not far from here, in Basingstoke. Where I had my babies . . .”

She faltered, then squared her shoulders. “Well, two of my babies.

Louise was nearly born in Germany, where we were stationed in the seventies. Nick was in the army—but you knew that. But we came home for her birth.”

Aldira nodded, urging her on.

“Where were you in Germany, Angela? Was that after Alice disappeared?”

The name hung in the air between them.

“Yes. We went after the police stopped asking their questions,”

Angela said. “Nick said we needed a new start and there was a posting offered by his regiment. Compassionate grounds.”

Aldira took a sip of her coffee to allow Angela a moment to collect herself.

“That must have been incredibly difficult, leaving your home and families at a time like that,” Aldira said gently.

“It was,” the older woman said. The anguish of those weeks had clearly never dimmed. Aldira could see the pain on her face. She was ready to talk.

“Tell me about that day, Angela. Tell me about the day that Alice was taken.”

Angela

She’d been waiting for this moment. Dreading it but wanting to tell her story again. The pain of experiencing that moment of loss made Alice seem more real to her.

She told Aldira Waters how quiet the evening had been, how Alice had been brought into her private room by a nurse to have a feed and then Nick had taken Patrick home, when their toddler son got tired and started whining.

“We’ll leave you girls to it,” Nick had said, kissing them both and hoisting Paddy onto his shoulders.

The kiss and her brother’s wails had made Alice stir, and Angela had picked her up and brought her back to bed. She’d tried to feed her, but the baby had refused to latch on to her breast, fussing and snuffling before going back to sleep.

Angela hadn’t worried too much—Alice was her second baby and there were none of the first-timer fears to deal with. She knew that the drugs she’d had for the delivery were probably still making her baby drowsy and that she’d feed later, when she was ready.

She re-swaddled her new daughter in the soft white hospital sheet to keep her warm and secure, put her back in the cot by her bed, and gathered her soap bag and towel. She’d padded down to the showers, walking slowly and deliberately.

“Nick said I looked like John Wayne when I’d got out of bed earlier,”

she told55