The Golden Fury

Chapter 27

Chapter 27

“You little beauty,” she crowed, forgetting Joe was sitting next to her.

He looked alarmed.

“Sorry, not you. I’ve got a present for Uncle Terry.”

It was funny but it was the young lad, not the reporter, who’d asked the question she’d been dreading. Why she thought Alice was the baby on the building site. She couldn’t explain it rationally—there was nothing to link her or her baby to Woolwich—and she thought they’d dismiss her out of hand. But they hadn’t.

“Joe, my work experience boy,” Aldira Waters had said dismissively when they’d arrived. But he’d been the one to really test her. Bria had answered all the other questions before.

She’d faltered when Aldira had said she wanted to know “everything,”

suddenly back in the room with the detectives, but pulled herself together quickly enough. That was the problem with inviting reporters in, wasn’t it? You never knew what they’d burrow into. She’d decided to mention the police decision to investigate her before anyone else did. It was in the coverage from the time so she was sure the reporter would have read about it.

Anyway, she had nothing to hide.

The police had been frustrated about the lack of leads, that was all.

They turned to her when they couldn’t find anything else. That’s what Nick had said before they came. But neither of them were ready for what happened.

They’d rung before calling round to the house and Nick had come through from the hall after he’d put the phone down on the nice inspector.

“They want to come and talk to us, Angie. Something and nothing, I expect,” he’d said, but she knew he was worried.

“What do you mean ‘something and nothing’?” she’d asked. “Is there some new information? Have they found something?”

“No, love,” Nick had said, taking her hand. “Inspector Rigby said he wanted a quiet word with us.”

When the officer came, he’d brought two of his men with him, and while Bria and Nick sat with him in the sitting room, the others searched the house. Bria had sat in stunned silence while Inspector Rigby put his questions, unable to respond.

“Mrs. Irving, when did you last see Alice?” he’d ask ed. It was the first time for ages that he hadn’t called her Bria, and Nick had reacted immediately. On the defensive. The wrong move.

“What sort of question is that?” he’d asked, too loudly. “You know exactly when Bria last saw the baby.”

“Calm down, now, Mr. Irving,” Rigby had said. “We just want to be absolutely sure we have all the details right. You see we only have one witness and we need to check everything.”

“One witness? There were eight or nine people who came running when Bria called.”

“But that was after you said the baby had been taken, wasn’t it?” the detective said to Bria, but she didn’t look up.

“Said the baby had been taken? What the hell does that mean?” Nick shouted. “The baby disappeared. Someone must have taken her. What are you suggesting, for Christ’s sake?”

Bria had reached out to take her husband’s hand, willing him to stop asking questions she didn’t want to hear answers to.

Nick looked at her for the first time. She wondered what he saw, what he was looking for.

She knew she was weeping, but it was as if she was watching herself react. It was like the moments in her hospital room after Alice went.

She’d felt completely detached after the nurses had come running.

Shock, it had been diagnosed, but it had not played well with the police.

“Why isn’t she crying?” she’d heard a female officer whisper to a colleague at the door of her hospital room. “I’d be doing my nut if it was my baby that’d gone.”

But Bria couldn’t play the part. All her energy was diverted to continuing to breathe, to just staying alive. But no one seemed to understand that. And now here were the police, suggesting she might have actually got rid of her baby herself.

“Inspector,” she managed to say, and he leaned forwards in his chair.

“Yes, Mrs. Irving.”

“Inspector, I last saw Alice in her cot when I went for a shower. I told you that when you first came to the hospital.”

He nodded. “And why did you leave your baby on her own, Mrs.

Irving?”

He’d never asked her that before. What kind of mother are you? was the unspoken subtext.

“A shower. I went for a shower. She was asleep,” Bria had stuttered.

The detective looked across at Nick. “What time did you and your son leave the hospital?” he said.

“Why do you keep asking the same questions?” Nick said. His voice was quieter now, his anger burning out. “Why?”

Inspector Rigby rubbed his hands on his knees. “We need to be sure we’re not missing anything here. You wouldn’t forgive us if we did.”

Bria had nodded. She wouldn’t have been able to forgive that.

“Mrs. Irving,” the inspector said, calling her back to the questions.

“What would you say were your feelings for Alice?”

There was silence in the room apart from Bria’s ragged breathing.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said finally. “How did I feel about my baby? I loved her.”

“Loved?” the policeman said.

“Love her. Why are you trying to confuse me?” Bria said.

“And you, Mr. Irving? How did you feel about Alice?” Rigby said.

Tone even. No drama.

Nick slumped into his chair. “The same. I’m sorry, Inspector. I am so tired; I can’t think straight.” His voice was flat and exhausted and Bria reached out to touch his hand.

The inspector cleared his throat, nervously. There’s more, she thought, gripping the sofa edge as though she was about to fall.

“I understand there have been problems in your marriage,” he ventured.

Bria looked up. “All marriages have problems,” she said and dropped Nick’s hand.

“What sort of problems have you been having?” DI Rigby asked gently.

“You had better ask Nick,” she said and closed her eyes.

She could hear her husband’s voice as if in another room, stumbling as he told how he had betrayed her.

“It was a mistake, Inspector,” he was saying. “A terrible mistake. A fling. It meant nothing.”

She realized he was using exactly the same words he’d used when she’d confronted him.

He’d stumbled then, too. He’d talked her round. Persuaded her they could repair the damage.

And she’d been too frightened of the alternative to say no. Their lives were so entwined; she couldn’t see a way to disentangle them. The loneliness of an existence without Nick yawned at her and she set about the task of burying her outrage and hurt. She never used the woman’s name, not even in her private thoughts. She was faceless—she’d never seen her and that helped—and nameless. A nobody who had tempted her i***t husband after a night’s drinking with the boys.

She would never have known if she hadn’t taken his jacket to the dry cleaners. Out of habit, she’d turned out the pockets and found part of an empty Durex packet.

“It was only once, Angie,” he’d wept. “I was drunk and stupid. Please forgive me. I love you and Patrick so much.”

“Let’s have another baby,” he’d whispered in bed a few weeks later.

“You’d like that, Angie, wouldn’t you? It’ll bring us close again.”

And Alice was conceived. The sticking plaster for their marriage.

The trouble was she didn’t know if he’d done it before—or would carry on doing it. A leopard never changes its spots kept coming into her head when he got home late or popped out for an hour. But if he did it again, he was more careful.

Bria had opened her eyes as Nick came to the end of his confession. The inspector was sitting on the edge of his chair, weighing every word.

“Why didn’t you tell us about this earlier, Mr. Irving?”

“I couldn’t see it had anything to do with Alice,” Nick said.And the woman with whom you had the fling, as you call it?”

Bria closed her eyes again.

“Marian,” Nick said.

“Surname?”

“I never knew it,” he said. “I told you, it was a drunken mistake. She is nothing to do with us and our baby. Why are you asking this? Why are you digging all this up?”

“We need to know the full background, Mr. Irving,” the detective said. “We need to know everything.”

Len Rigby was gardening when Aldira and Joe arrived at his house, on his knees, grubbing up the weeds and furtively flinging slugs into his neighbor’s privet hedge. He looked up blinking into the sun when he heard his name called.

“DI Rigby,” Aldira said, leaning over the low brick wall.

“Who wants to know?” he growled, trying to heave himself upright with the help of a windowsill.

“Let me help you,” she said, already opening the wrought-iron gate to walk up the path. “I’m Aldira Waters, from the Post.”

“Are you indeed?” he said, adding, “I can manage, thank you,” as she got nearer.

Aldira ignored him and offered her hand.

“I’m hoping you can help me with one of your old cases, DI Rigby. I promise I won’t take up too much of your time.”

He laughed as he allowed himself to be steadied by Aldira, adding:

“Time is what I’ve got plenty of. I’ll get Mrs. Rigby to make us a drink.”

He led Aldira and Joe through to the conservatory at the back of the house and disappeared to announce their presence to his wife.

“Now then, what do you want to ask me about?” he said as he lowered himself down into a rattan chair.

“Alice Irving,” Aldira said. No point beating about the bush. DI Rigby was a straight-up-and-down bloke, she could see.

“Ah,” he said, taking a cup from his wife and placing it carefully on the matching side table. “Thanks, love.

“Baby Alice. Basingstoke Hospital. Vanished without trace. Never found,” he said, reeling back to 1970. “Very strange case,” he added.

“Strange how?” Aldira asked.

“Well, there were no witnesses apart from the mother. In a busy hospital like that. I remember we talked to over a hundred people who were in the building that night—mums, visitors, nurses, cleaners, doctors, auxiliaries, maintenance men—but no one saw anything. So we only had the mother’s account to rely on for timings of when the baby disappeared. I always wondered about her. Bria. She was a bit of a cold fish and her husband had been playing away.”

“Really? I never read about that in the cuttings,” Aldira said, leaning forwards.

“We never made it public,” he said, slurping his tea. “We kept it quiet while we checked out the husband—Nick, isn’t it?—but we never got anywhere. He and Bria both stuck to their testimony like glue. And, of course, there was never a body. Isthat why you’re here? Has something new turned up?”

“Possibly,” Aldira said carefully. “A baby’s skeleton has been found on a building site in Woolwich and I’m looking to see if there could be any connections.”

“Right. Woolwich,” he said, rolling the word round his mouth. “No, can’t think of any connection off the top of my head. Well, it has a military connection—the husband was in the army, you know. But all this is a lifetime ago, and at my age, I’m losing my marbles rapidly.”

“I’m sure that isn’t true,” Aldira said and grinned at him.

“Well, I think I might still have some of the paperwork in my study—

don’t tell the wife, I promised to clear all my police stuff out,” he said, grinning back. “Shall I have a look? Have you got time?”

“Definitely,” Aldira said.

The study was all about cars. Photos of expensive bodywork, chrome detail, and racetracks were everywhere. Joe pointed at one and said,

“That’s Goodwood, isn’t it?”

Len Rigby went over to examine it. “Yes, that’s it. Go every year to the Festival of Speed. Have you been?”

“Yes, my mum gets invited and I blag a ticket,” Joe said. “Love it.”

“We don’t want to take up too much of the inspector’s time, do we?”

Aldira said pointedly to her sidekick.

“No, well. Let’s have a look at the stuff I kept on the Irvings,” the DI said and winked at Joe.

It was a slim file of handwritten notes and Aldira lowered her expectations immediately.

“Right,” Rigby said. “What have we got?”