Also by Fiona Barton

The Widow

Acknowledgements

My husband, Gary, children, Tom and Lucy, and my parents, David and Jeanne, for their encouragement and love; my sister, Jo Wright, and friends Rachael Bletchly and Jane McGuinn, who have listened, read and cheered me on.

My experts: Colin Sutton for his invaluable guidance and humour on police matters, Dr James Walker, independent forensic DNA expert, and my brother, Jonathan Thurlow, who stopped me making a terrible footballing faux pas.

My wonderful agent and mentor, Madeleine Milburn, for the calm advice and occasional much-needed glasses of fizz.

And special thanks to my brilliant editors at Transworld and Berkley. Producing The Child has not been without its moments and Frankie Gray and Danielle Perez have urged me on, mopped my brow and stayed with me during the delivery of my difficult second baby – I mean book.

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First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Bantam Press
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Copyright © Fiona Barton 2017
Extract from The Widow copyright © Fiona Barton 2016
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For M & D

‘When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.’

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Chapter 1

Tuesday, 20 March 2012

Emma

MY COMPUTER IS winking at me knowingly as I sit down at my desk. I touch the keyboard and a photo of Paul appears on my screen. It’s the one I took of him in Rome on our honeymoon, eyes full of love across a table in the Campo de’ Fiori. I try to smile back at him, but as I lean in I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the screen and stop. I hate seeing myself without warning. Don’t recognize myself, sometimes. You think you know what you look like and there is this stranger looking at you. It can frighten me.

But today, I study the stranger’s face. The brown hair half pulled up on top of the head in a frantic work bun, naked skin, shadows and lines creeping towards the eyes like subsidence cracks.

Christ, you look awful, I tell the woman on the screen. The movement of her mouth mesmerizes me and I make her speak some more.

Come on, Emma, get some work done, she says. I smile palely at her and she smiles back.

This is mad behaviour, she tells me in my own voice and I stop.

Thank God Paul can’t see me now, I think.

When Paul gets home tonight, he’s tired and a bit grumpy after a day of ‘bone-headed’ undergraduates and another row with his head of department over the timetable.

Maybe it’s an age thing, but it seems to really shake Paul to be challenged at work these days. I think he must be starting to doubt himself, see threats to his position everywhere. University departments are like prides of lions, really. Lots of males preening and screwing around and hanging on to their superiority by their dewclaws. I say all the right things and make him a gin and tonic.

When I move his briefcase off the sofa, I see he’s brought home a copy of the Evening Standard. He must’ve picked it up on the Tube.

I sit and read it while he showers away the cares of the day, and it’s then I see the paragraph about the baby.

‘BABY’S BODY FOUND,’ it says. Just a few lines about how a baby’s skeleton has been discovered on a building site in Woolwich and police are investigating. I keep reading it over and over. I can’t take it in properly, as if it’s in a foreign language.

But I know what it says and terror is coiling round me. Squeezing the air out of my lungs. Making it hard to breathe.

I am still sitting here when Paul comes down, all damp and pink and shouting that something is burning.

The pork chops are black. Incinerated. I throw them in the bin and open the window to let out the smoke. I fetch a frozen pizza out of the freezer and put it in the microwave while Paul sits quietly at the table.

‘We ought to get a smoke alarm,’ he says, instead of shouting at me for almost setting the house on fire. ‘Easy to forget things when you’re reading.’ He is such a lovely man. I don’t deserve him.

Standing in front of the microwave, watching the pizza revolve and bubble, I wonder for the millionth time if he’ll leave me. He should have done years ago. I would if I’d been in his place, having to deal with my stuff, my worries, on a daily basis. But he shows no sign of packing his bags. Instead he hovers over me like an anxious parent protecting me from harm. He talks me down when I get in a state, invents reasons to be cheerful, holds me close to calm me when I cry, and tells me I am a brilliant, funny, wonderful woman.

It is the illness making you like this, he says. This isn’t you.

Except it is. He doesn’t know me really. I’ve made sure of that. And he respects my privacy when I shy from any mention of my past. ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ he says. ‘I love you just the way you are.’

St Paul – I call him that when he’s pretending I’m not a burden to him, but he usually shushes me.

‘Hardly,’ he says.

Well, not a saint, then. But who is? Anyway, his sins are my sins. What do old couples say? What’s yours is mine. But my sins … well, they’re my own.

‘Why aren’t you eating, Em?’ he says when I put his plate on the table.

‘I had a late lunch, busy with work. I’m not hungry now – I’ll have something later,’ I lie. I know I would choke if I put anything in my mouth.

I give my brightest smile – the one I use for photos. ‘I’m fine, Paul. Now eat up.’

On my side of the table, I nurse a glass of wine and pretend to listen to his account of the day. His voice rises and falls, pauses while he chews the disgusting meal I’ve served, and resumes.

I nod periodically but I hear nothing. I wonder if Jude has seen the article.

Chapter 2

Tuesday, 20 March 2012

Kate

KATE WATERS WAS bored. It wasn’t a word she normally associated with her job, but today she was stuck in the office under the nose of her boss with nothing to do but re-writes.

‘Put it through your golden typewriter,’ Terry, the news editor, had shouted across, waving someone else’s badly written story at her. ‘Sprinkle a bit of fairy dust on it.’

And so she did.

‘It’s like Mike Baldwin’s knicker factory in here,’ she complained to the Crime man, sitting opposite. ‘Churning out the same old rubbish with a few frills. What are you working on?’

Gordon Willis, always referred to by the editor by his job title – as in ‘Get the Crime man on this story …’ – lifted his head from a newspaper and shrugged. ‘Going down to the Old Bailey this afternoon – want to have a chat with the DCI in the crossbow murder. Nothing doing yet, but hoping I might get a talk with the victim’s sister when it finishes. Looks like she was sleeping with the killer. It’ll be a great multi-deck headline: THE WIFE, THE SISTER AND THE KILLER THEY BOTH LOVED.’ He grinned at the thought. ‘Why? What have you got on?’

‘Nothing. Unpicking a story one of the online slaves has done.’ Kate indicated a pubescent nymph typing furiously at a desk across the room. ‘Straight out of sixth form.’

She realized how bitter – and old – she must sound and stopped herself. The tsunami of online news had washed her and those like her to a distant shore. The reporters who once sat on the top table – the newspaper equivalent of the winner’s podium – now perched at the edge of the newsroom, pushed further and further towards the exit by the growing ranks of online operatives who wrote 24/7 to fill the hungry maw of rolling news.

New media stopped being new a long time ago, the editor had lectured his staff at the Christmas party. It was the norm. It was the future. And Kate knew she had to stop bitching about it.

Hard, she told herself, when the most viewed stories on the paper’s slick website were about Madonna’s hands being veiny or an EastEnders star putting on weight. ‘Hate a Celebrity’ dressed as news. Horror.

‘Anyway,’ she said out loud, ‘it can wait. I’ll go and get us a coffee.’

Also gone were the days of the CQ – the Conference Quickie – once enjoyed by Fleet Street’s finest in the nearest pubs while the executives were in the editor’s morning meeting. The CQ was traditionally followed by red-faced, drunken rows with the news editor – one of which, legend had it, ended with a reporter, too drunk to stand, biting his boss’s ankle and another reporter throwing a typewriter through a window into the street below.

These days the newsroom, now in offices above a shopping mall, had windows hermetically sealed by double-glazing and alcohol was banned. Coffee was the new addiction of choice.

‘What do you want?’ Kate asked.

‘Double macchiato with hazelnut syrup, please,’ Gordon said. ‘Or some brown liquid. Whichever comes first.’

Kate took the lift down, pinching a first edition of the Evening Standard from the security desk in the marble lobby. As she waited for the barista to work his magic with the steamer, she flicked idly through the pages, checking for the by-lines of friends.

The paper was wall-to-wall with preparations for the London Olympics and she almost missed the paragraph at the bottom of the News in Brief column.

Headlined BABY’S BODY FOUND, two sentences told how an infant’s skeleton had been unearthed on a building site in Woolwich, not a million miles from Kate’s east London home. Police were investigating. No other details. She tore it out for later. The bottom of her bag was lined with crumpled scraps of newspaper – ‘It’s like a budgie cage,’ her eldest son, Jake, teased her about the shreds of paper waiting for life to be breathed into them. Sometimes whole stories to be followed up or, more often, just a line or a quote that made her ask, ‘What’s the story?’

Kate re-read the thirty words and wondered about the person missing from the story. The mother. As she walked back with the coffee cups, she ticked off her questions: Who is the baby? How did it die? Who would bury a baby?

‘Poor little thing,’ she said out loud. Her head was suddenly full of her own babies – Jake and Freddie, born two years apart but known as ‘the boys’ in family shorthand – as sturdy toddlers, schoolboys in football kit, surly teenagers and now adults. Well, almost. She smiled to herself. Kate could remember the moment she saw each of them for the first time: red, slippery bodies; crumpled, too-big skin; blinking eyes staring up from her chest, and her feeling that she had known their faces for ever. How could anyone kill a baby?

When she got back to the newsroom, she put the cups down and walked over to the news desk.

‘Do you mind if I have a look at this?’ she asked Terry, waving the tiny cutting in front of him as he tried to make sense of a feature on foreign royals. He didn’t look up, so she assumed he didn’t.

Her first call was to the Scotland Yard press office. When she’d started in journalism, as a trainee on a local paper in East Anglia, she used to call in at the local police station every day to lean on the front desk and look at the logbook while the sergeant chatted her up. Now, if she contacted the police, she rarely spoke to a human being. And if she did, it was likely to be a fleeting experience.

‘Have you listened to the tape?’ a civilian press officer would ask, in the full knowledge that she hadn’t, and she would find herself quickly re-routed to a tinny recorded message that took her through every stolen lawnmower and pub punch-up in the area.

But this time she hit the jackpot. Not only did she get through to a real person, it was someone she knew. The voice on the end of the phone belonged to a former colleague from her first job on a national newspaper. He was one of the poachers turned gamekeepers who’d recently joined the safer, some said saner, world of Public Relations.

‘Hello, Kate. How are you? Long time …’

Colin Stubbs wanted to chat. He’d done well as a reporter, but his wife, Sue, had grown tired of his rackety life on the road and he’d finally given in to the war of attrition at home. But he was hungry for details about the world he’d left, asking for gossip about other reporters and telling her – and himself – over and over that leaving newspapers was the best thing he’d ever done.

‘That’s great. Lucky you,’ Kate said, determinedly upbeat. ‘I’m still slogging along at the Post. Look, Colin, I saw something in the Standard about a baby’s body being found in Woolwich. Any idea how long it’d been there?’

‘Oh, that. Hang on, I’ll pull up the details on the computer … Here we are. Not much to go on and a bit grim, really. A workman was clearing a demolition site and moved an old urn and underneath was this tiny skeleton. Newborn, they say. Forensics are having a look, but it says here that early indications are it’s been there a while – could be historic, even. It’s a road in student land, towards Greenwich, I think. Don’t you live round there?’

‘North of the river and a bit further east, actually. Hackney. And still waiting for the gentrification train to stop. What else have you got? Any leads on identification?’

‘No, newborns are tricky when it comes to DNA, says here. Especially if they’ve been underground for years. And the area is a warren of rented flats and bedsits. Tenants changing every five minutes, so the copper in charge isn’t optimistic about it. And we’ve all got our hands full with the Olympics stuff …’

‘Yeah, of course,’ Kate said. ‘The security must be a nightmare – I hear you’re having to bus in officers from other forces to cope. And this baby story sounds like a needle-in-a-haystack job. Look, thanks, Colin. It’s been good to catch up. Give my love to Sue. And will you give me a call if anything else comes up on this?’

She smiled as she put down the phone. Kate Waters loved a needle-in-a-haystack job. The glint of something in the dark. Something to absorb her totally. Something to sink her teeth into. Something to get her out of the office.

She put on her coat and started the long walk to the lift. She didn’t get far.

‘Kate, are you off somewhere?’ Terry shouted. ‘Before you go, you couldn’t untangle this stuff about the Norwegian royals, could you? It’s making my eyes bleed.’

Chapter 3

Tuesday, 20 March 2012

Angela

SHE KNEW SHE was going to cry. She could feel it welling up, thickening her throat so she couldn’t speak, and went to sit on the bed for a minute to postpone the moment. Angela needed to be on her own when it came. She’d tried to fight it over the years – she never cried, normally. She wasn’t the sentimental sort. Nursing and living the army life had trained that out of her a long time ago.

But every year, March 20th was the exception. It was Alice’s birthday and she would cry. A private moment. She wouldn’t dream of doing it in front of anyone, like the people who stood there and wept in front of cameras. She couldn’t imagine what it felt like to be on show like that. And the television people kept on filming, as though it was some sort of entertainment.

‘They should turn off the camera,’ she’d said to Nick, but he’d just grunted and kept on watching.

It made her feel uncomfortable, but apparently lots of people liked it. The sort of people who tried to be part of the news.

Anyway, she didn’t think anyone would understand why she was still crying all these years later. Decades later. They’d probably say she’d hardly known the baby. She’d had less than twenty-four hours with her.

But she was part of me. Flesh of my flesh, she told the sceptics in her head. I’ve tried to let go, but …

The dread would begin in the days before the baby’s birthday and she’d get flashbacks to the silence – that bone-chilling silence in an empty room.

Then, on the day, she would usually wake up with a headache, would make breakfast and try to act normally until she was alone. This year, she was talking to Nick in the kitchen about the day ahead. He’d been complaining about the mountain of paperwork he’d got to deal with and about one of the new lads, who kept taking days off sick.

He ought to retire, she thought as she listened. He could have done it two or three years ago. But he couldn’t let go of the business. He said he needed a purpose, a routine.

He doesn’t give any sign that he knows what day this is.

He used to remember – in the early days. Of course he did. It was never far from anyone’s thoughts.

People in the street used to ask about their baby. People they didn’t know from Adam would come up to them, squeeze their hands and look tearful. But that was then. Nick was hopeless with dates – deliberately, Angela thought. He couldn’t even remember their other children’s birthdays, let alone Alice’s. And she’d stopped reminding him. She couldn’t bear the flash of panic in his eyes as he was forced to revisit that day. It was kinder if she did the remembering on her own.

Nick kissed her on the top of her head as he left for work. And when the door closed behind him, Angela sat on the sofa and let herself cry.

She’d tried to train herself to put the memories away. There wasn’t much help at the beginning. Just the family doctor – poor old Dr Earnley – who’d patted her shoulder or knee and said, ‘You will get through this, my dear.’

Then, later, there were support groups, but she’d got tired of hearing her own and other people’s misery. She felt they were just circling the pain, prodding it, inflaming it and then crying together. She upset the group when she announced that she’d discovered it didn’t help to know other people hurt too. It didn’t take away her own grief – just added layers to it, somehow. She’d felt guilty, because when she’d been a nurse and someone had died, she used to give the grieving family a leaflet on bereavement.

I hope it helped them more than it did me, she said to herself as she got off the sofa. Mustn’t be bitter. Everyone did what they could.

In the kitchen she filled the sink with water and started preparing vegetables for a casserole. The cold water numbed her hands so she found it hard to hold the knife, but she continued to scrape mechanically at the carrots.

She tried to summon up an image of what Alice would be like now, but it was too hard. She only had one photograph of her. Of Alice and her. Nick had taken it on his little Instamatic but it was blurred. He’d taken it too quickly. Angela braced herself against the kitchen counter, as if physical effort could help her see her lost baby’s little face. But it wouldn’t come.

She knew from the photo that Alice had a fuzz of dark hair, like her brother, Patrick, but Angela had lost a lot of blood during the delivery and she was still high from the Pethidine when they put her baby in her arms. She’d asked Nick afterwards – after Alice was gone – but he couldn’t tell her much more. He hadn’t studied her as Angela would’ve done, memorizing every feature. He’d said she looked lovely, but had no details.

Angela didn’t think Alice looked like Patrick. He’d been a big baby and Alice had been so fragile. Barely five pounds. But still she’d studied Paddy’s baby photos, and the pictures they took when their second daughter, Louise, came along ten years later – ‘Our surprise bonus baby, I call her,’ Angela told people – willing herself to see Alice in them. But she wasn’t there. Louise was blonde – she took after Nick’s side.

Angela felt the familiar dull ache of grief round her ribs and in her chest and she tried to think happy thoughts, like the self-help books had told her. She thought about Louise and Patrick.

‘At least I have them,’ she said to the carrot tops bobbing in the dirty water. She wondered if Lou would ring her that night when she got in from work. Her youngest knew the story – of course she did – but she didn’t talk about it.

And she hates it when I cry, Angela said to herself, wiping her eyes with a piece of kitchen roll. They all do. They like to pretend that everything is fine. I understand that. I should stop now. Put Alice away.

‘Happy birthday, my darling girl,’ she murmured under her breath.

Chapter 4

Wednesday, 21 March 2012

Emma

THE BABY HAS kept me awake most of the night. I tore the story out of the paper and went to put it in the bin, but ended up stuffing it in the pocket of my cardigan. I don’t know why. I’d decided I wasn’t going to do anything about it. I hoped it would go away.

A small voice inside me whispered, Not like last time, then.

And today the baby is still here. Insistent. Demanding to be acknowledged.

Paul is dozing, almost awake and beginning to move his legs, as if he’s testing whether they’re still there. I wait for his eyes to open.

I dread it. I dread the disappointment and exhaustion I’ll see when he realizes my bad days are back.

It’s what we used to call them, so it sounded like it wasn’t my fault. It has been so long since the last episode and I know he thought it was all over. He’ll try hard not to show it when he sees me, but I’ll have to carry his anxiety, too. Sometimes I feel as though I’ll shatter under the weight.

People say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. They say that when you’ve been through something terrible. My mum Jude used to say it. But it doesn’t. It breaks your bones, leaving everything splintered and held together with grubby bandages and yellowing sticky tape. Creaking along the fault lines. Fragile and exhausting to hold together. Sometimes you wish it had killed you.

Paul wakes and fetches my pills and a glass of water from the bathroom without a word. Then he strokes my hair and sits on the bed, while I take them. He hums under his breath as if everything is normal.

I try to think All things will pass, but This will never end slips past my defences.

The problem is that a secret takes on a life of its own over time. I used to believe that if I didn’t think about what had happened, it would shrivel and die. But it didn’t. It sits in the middle of a growing tangle of lies and fabrications, like a fat fly trapped in a spider’s web. If I say anything now it will mean ripping everything apart. So I must say nothing. I have to protect it. The secret, that is. It’s what I’ve done for as long as I can remember. Kept it safe.

Paul is talking to me at the breakfast table and I’ve missed what he was saying.

‘Sorry, darling, what was that?’ I try to focus on him across the table.

‘I said we’re almost out of toilet paper.’

I can’t concentrate. Something about paper. Oh God, has he read it?

‘What?’ I say, too loudly.

‘Toilet paper, Emma,’ he says quietly. ‘Just reminding you, that’s all.’

‘Right, right. Don’t worry, I’ll do it. You get yourself ready for work while I finish my coffee.’

He smiles at me, kisses me as he passes and rustles around in his study for ten minutes while I throw away my breakfast and wipe the surfaces. I find myself cleaning more lately. Out, damned spot.

‘Right,’ he says at the kitchen door. ‘Are you sure you are all right? You still look very pale.’

‘I’m fine,’ I say and get up. Come on, Paul. Just go. ‘Have a good day, darling. Remember to be nice to the Head of Department. You know it makes sense.’ I brush some fluff off the shoulder of his overcoat.

He sighs and picks up his briefcase. ‘I’ll try. Look, I can call in sick and stay with you,’ he says.

‘Don’t be silly, Paul. I’ll have an easy day. Promise.’

‘OK, but I’ll ring at lunchtime. Love you,’ he says.

I wave from the window, as I always do. He closes the gate and turns away, then I sink to my knees on the carpet. It’s the first time I have been alone since I read the story and pretending that everything is fine has been shattering. The headline from the paper is like a neon sign everywhere I look. I just need five minutes to pull myself together. And I cry. Frightening crying. Uncontrollable. Not like English crying, where you fight it and try to swallow it. It goes on until there is nothing left and I sit quietly on the floor.

When the phone rings, I realize an hour has passed, and my legs are cramped and tingle with pins and needles when I try to pull myself up. I must’ve drifted off. I love the image that creates in my head, of lying in a boat and being carried by the current. Like Ophelia in the painting. But she was mad, or dead. Stop it. Answer the phone.

‘Hello, Emma, it’s Lynda. Are you busy? Can I come for coffee?’

I want to say no to the appalling Lynda, but ‘Yes’ comes out instead. Ingrained politeness wins out again.

‘Lovely. Be there in ten minutes.’

‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ I hear myself say, as if I am in a play.

I rub my knees to get the feeling back and get a hairbrush out of my bag. Must look presentable or she’ll know.

Lynda’s husband teaches at the same university as Paul – different departments, but our two men often catch the same train in the morning. That, apparently, makes Lynda and me sisters under the skin.

But I don’t like her. She has those teeth that slope backwards, like a shark, and an insistent manner. She and the other WOTAs – Wives of the Academics, as I christened them when I joined their ranks – gossip about me. I know they do. But there’s nothing I can do about it. Ignore them. Keep calm and carry on.

Lynda breezes in as soon as I open the door. High energy this morning. Must be good news about Derek. I want her to leave immediately.

‘You look tired, Emma. Didn’t you have a good night?’ she says, my attempt at grooming totally wasted, and takes over the coffee-making process. She leaves me standing like a spare part in my own kitchen.

‘Hmmm. Tossed and turned a bit. Trying to work out a difficult bit in the book I’m editing,’ I say.

She bristles. She hates the fact that I have a job. Sees it as a personal insult if I mention it. Lynda doesn’t work. ‘I have too much to do at home to need a job,’ she says when asked. Usually with a brittle laugh.

Anyway, she decides to ignore the implied slight and plunges in with her news. Derek is getting a new title – with brackets, apparently. It will mean more importance and a bit of extra money. She is thrilled, the self-satisfaction coming off her in waves.

‘The HoD wants him to take on more responsibility. He’ll be Assistant Director of Student Welfare (Undergraduate) from next term,’ she says, as if reading from a press release.

‘Student Welfare? Goodness, he’ll be knee deep in drugs and sexually transmitted diseases,’ I say, relishing the idea of Derek, the most pompous man on earth, dealing with condom machines.

She stiffens at the mention of sex and I disguise my enjoyment of this tiny triumph.

‘That’s great, Lynda,’ I say. ‘The milk’s already out – on the draining board.’

We sit at the kitchen table and I listen to her chatter about the goings-on in the department. I know she will eventually broach the subject of Paul’s ‘little difficulty’ – his clashes with the head of department – but I’m not going to help her get there. I keep going off on tangents – world news, train delays, the price of coffee – in the hope it will exhaust her. But she is, apparently, inexhaustible.

‘So, is Paul getting on any better with the HoD?’ she says, trying to smile kindly.

‘Oh, it’s just a storm in a teacup,’ I say.

‘Oh? I heard Dr Beecham was taking it to the next level,’ she says.

‘It’s all a bit silly. Dr Beecham wants to cut Paul’s most popular course to make way for one of his own. He’s being a bit of an arse, to be honest.’

Lynda’s eyes widen at the word. Clearly not what she calls the HoD.

‘Well, you have to make compromises sometimes. Perhaps Paul’s course was getting a bit tired.’

‘I’m sure that’s not true, Lynda. Would you like a Ginger Nut?’

Placated, she munches through the plateful. We are now on her daughter, Joy – ‘She is our pride and joy, so that’s what we named her’ – and Joy’s children. They are a handful, it seems. I notice Lynda doesn’t refer to them as her grandchildren when she is listing their faults and misdemeanours. They are ‘too independent’, apparently, which in her closely fenced world is a terrible sin.

‘Josie told me to mind my own business the other day,’ she says, the outrage still rankling. ‘Nine years old and telling her grandmother to mind her own business!’

Go, Josie, I think, and say, ‘Poor you.’ Default position.

‘Of course, you haven’t got that worry,’ Lynda says, ‘not having any children.’

I gulp and cannot trust myself to reply. Instead, I look at my watch and mutter, ‘Sorry, Lynda, it’s been lovely catching up, but I’m on a deadline so must get back to work.’

‘Well, you working women,’ she says gracelessly. She looks disappointed, but smiles her Great White smile and puts her hands on my shoulders to kiss me goodbye. When she steps back, she says in an exaggeratedly caring voice, ‘You should go back to bed, Emma.’

I bat her and her faux concern away.

‘Tell the new Assistant Director of Student Welfare brackets Undergraduate congratulations from us,’ I say as I usher her out. ‘Have a good day,’ I add.

Stop it, I think. You sound like a shop assistant pretending to care.

I go upstairs to my office and sit with the baby in the paper in my head, in my lap and on my back.

Chapter 5

Wednesday, 21 March 2012

Kate

HOWARD STREET ON the edge of Woolwich was not looking its best. A herd of heavy machinery blotted out the houses, heaving clouds of smoke and dust into the air as it forced the transformation of this area of London.

Kate stood at one end, an escapee from the office.

She concentrated on picking out the houses that were still occupied. It looked as if there were only two or three left. She knew from the local free newspaper that the homes had been compulsorily purchased after a long planning battle. Now work had begun to tear them down, leaving the street looking like a retouched photograph from the Blitz. Kate counted herself lucky that her own corner of east London had largely escaped the notice of planners determined to re-imagine the capital as a series of villages, and her terrace remained untouched.

She and Steve had bought their ex-council house in Hackney in the early nineties, the first professional newcomers to the street. The night they moved in, next-door Bet had brought round a liver casserole in a flowered Pyrex dish, like the one Kate’s gran used to have. Bet had hovered in the kitchen, taking it all in – their matching kettle and toaster, the witty magnets on the fridge – and asking all sorts of nosey questions, but their worlds rarely collided after that, beyond a warm ‘Hello, how are you doing?’

When they’d invited their friends to noisy barbecues or boozy dinner parties and popped corks in the garden, they felt rather than heard the sucking in of the neighbours’ breath. But, gradually, others of their kind had arrived, lured by the affordable prices, and the street saw its first glossy black front door with a bay tree in a pot on the doorstep. The bay tree was nicked the second night, but its message remained.

Now, only next-door Bet and an old couple at the end of the street survived, surrounded by a rising tide of topiary and roman blinds. The recent arrival of a Marks and Spencer food emporium, on the corner where the video rental shop used to be, seemed to be the final straw for the old neighbourhood.

Thank goodness we don’t have to put up with this, Kate thought as she surveyed the scene. Here, the interiors of three-storey houses gaped like life-sized dolls’ houses, curtains flapping miserably. The only sign of human habitation was a light in a front kitchen, shining through the industrial gloom.

Kate walked up to the door and rang the bottom bell of three. The name written in biro beside it was Walker.

An older woman opened the door, peering round it nervously. ‘Hello. Mrs Walker?’ Kate said, in performance mode. ‘Sorry to bother you, but I’m doing a piece for the Daily Post on the changes around here.’ She’d decided not to bring up the baby immediately. Easy does it.

The woman looked at her carefully, weighing her up, and then pulled the door open.

‘It’s Miss. Come in then. Quickly. I don’t want to let all that dust in.’ She led the way into her ground-floor flat, shifted a moth-eaten Jack Russell off the sofa and nodded at Kate to sit down.

‘Sorry about Shorty. He’s shedding,’ she said, brushing the hair off the cushion. ‘Which paper is it, again?’

‘The Daily Post.’

‘Oh, I buy that one. That’s nice.’

Kate relaxed. A reader. Home and dry.

The two women chatted about the work going on just outside the window, raising their voices when a lorry thundered past, revving hard to get up the incline.

Kate nodded her sympathy and gently led Miss Walker round to the subject of the building-site grave.

‘I heard the workmen found a body where they’re working,’ she said.

The older woman closed her eyes. ‘Yes, a baby. What an awful thing.’

‘Awful,’ Kate echoed, and shook her head in sync with Miss Walker. ‘Poor man who found it. He won’t get over that for a while.’

‘No,’ Miss Walker agreed.

‘It makes me wonder about the mother,’ Kate went on. ‘Who she was, I mean.’ She’d put her notebook down beside her, to signal to Miss Walker that they were ‘just talking’.

The woman was not as old as Kate had first thought. About sixty, she guessed, but she looked worn down by life. There was something of the fairground about her: bright colours distracting from a tired face. Kate noted the ginger patina of home-dyed hair and the make-up pooling in the creases of her eyelids.

‘Do you have children?’ she asked.

‘No,’ Miss Walker said. ‘No kids. Just Shorty and me. We keep each other company.’

She stroked her pet in silence, the dog shivering with pleasure.

‘He’s a lovely dog,’ Kate lied. She loathed dogs. She’d had too many confrontations on doorsteps with ravening beasts, snapping and lunging against their collars as their owners restrained them. They always said the same thing: ‘Don’t worry. He won’t bite.’ But the look in the animals’ eyes said they would if they got the chance. This one was eyeing her up, but she tried to ignore it.

‘Well, they don’t know when it was buried, do they?’ Miss Walker said. ‘Could be hundreds of years old, I’ve heard. We might never know.’

Kate hmmed and nodded, head on one side. Not what she wanted to hear. ‘When did you hear about it? You’re only over the road – you must notice everything,’ she said.

‘I’m not some old busybody,’ Miss Walker replied, her voice rising. ‘I don’t poke my nose in where it’s not wanted.’

‘Course not,’ Kate soothed. ‘But it must have been hard to miss the police cars and things. I know I’d have been dying to know what was going on if it happened across from my house.’

The older woman was suitably mollified. ‘Well, I saw the police come, and later, one of the workmen, John, who runs the site, told me what they’d found. He was very upset. Terrible to find something like that. A horrible shock. I made him a sweet tea.’

‘That was nice of you,’ Kate said. ‘Perhaps your friend John will know more about when the baby was buried. Maybe the police said something?’

‘I couldn’t say. John saw it – the baby, I mean. He said it was just tiny bones. Nothing else left. Terrible.’

Kate picked up her notebook while Miss Walker went to make a cup of tea and wrote down the name of the workman and the quote about the tiny bones.

Twenty minutes and a tea with two sugars later, she was walking down to the site office, a first-floor Portakabin in a stack, with a panoramic view over the mayhem.

A stocky man in jeans cut her off at the door. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Hi. Are you John? I’ve just been talking to Miss Walker down the road and she suggested I come to see you.’

The foreman’s face softened slightly. ‘She’s a lovely woman. She used to be a model or something, you know. Long time ago now, obviously. She walks past with her dog every day and has a chat. Sometimes she brings me a cake or something else nice. Must be a bit lonely for her with pretty much everyone else gone.’

Kate nodded. ‘Must be,’ she said. ‘Hard to be old these days, when everything is changing around you.’

The chitchat had gone on long enough and Kate thought the foreman might make his excuses and leave.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Kate Waters.’ She stuck out her hand to shake his. Difficult for people to be rude if they’ve shaken your hand.

‘John Davies,’ he said back automatically. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I’m a reporter, doing a piece on the body found on your building site,’ Kate went on and the foreman started to turn away. ‘It must have been a terrible shock for you, you poor thing,’ she added quickly.

He turned back. ‘It was. Sorry to be rude, but we’ve had the police coming and going on the site. Taping off their crime scene, stopping us working. The men are all spooked and we’re falling behind schedule.’

‘Must be a nightmare,’ Kate said.

‘It is,’ Davies agreed. ‘Look, I shouldn’t be talking to the press. The boss would have my balls if he knew.’

Kate smiled at him. ‘I’ve got a boss like that. Come on, I’ll buy you a pint in the pub up the road – it’s lunchtime and it’s just for a bit of background. I don’t have to quote you.’

Davies looked doubtful.

‘I just want to get to the bottom of who the baby is. Awful for a child to be buried without a name. Like some Victorian pauper.’

‘OK. But just one drink,’ he said, and padlocked the site gates behind him.

‘Brilliant,’ Kate said, turning on a full-beam smile.

He walked awkwardly beside her past Miss Walker’s and Kate waved to her new friend, standing watching at the kitchen window.

Chapter 6

Wednesday, 21 March 2012

Kate

THE PUB WAS already full of site workers, the sharp smell of wet cement mixing with last night’s beer slops, and Kate fought her way to the bar with a ten-pound note already waving in her hand.

‘White-wine spritzer,’ she ordered. ‘What are you drinking, John?’

‘Pint of bitter shandy, please.’

The landlord, his eyes hidden behind heavy-rimmed spectacles, pushed the full glasses forward and gave Kate a handful of change without a word.

‘He should get a refund from the charm school he went to,’ she said, plonking the drinks down on a ring-stained table.

‘He’s all right,’ John said gruffly, taking the first long gulp of his pint. ‘His pub is next to go if the second phase is approved. Must be hard, serving us, the forces of destruction.’

‘Yeah, must be. How long has the work been going on?’

‘Months. Feels like years.’

Kate sipped her drink. The bastard landlord had used lemonade instead of soda and its sweetness was setting her teeth on edge. ‘It sounds like hard work all round.’

‘And last week didn’t help. Awful thing.’ John put down his glass and looked into its depths.

‘It must’ve been. Was it you who found the body?’

‘No, one of the labourers. Poor lad. He’s only nineteen. Been off since.’

‘What happened?’

John Davies emptied his glass.

‘I’ll get you another,’ Kate said.

When she returned, he was peeling the design off his beer mat, in a world of his own.

‘Peter was clearing rubble behind where the houses were so the machines could get in there,’ John said without looking up. ‘He was trying to move one of those old concrete urn things. That they plant flowers in. He said he disturbed the ground shifting it back and forth. And he saw this little bone. It was so small, he thought it was part of an animal and went to pick it up to see. But there was more. When he realized what it might be, he screamed. I thought he’d cut his leg off or something. Never heard a scream like it.’

‘He must have been so shocked. You all must,’ Kate murmured, encouragingly.

Her companion nodded wearily. ‘He’s very religious, Peter. Eastern European, you know. Always going on about spirits and things. Anyway, I went and looked. It was so small. Looked like a bird. It’d been wrapped in something and there were bits of paper and plastic stuck to it. I called the police and they came out.’

‘Where was this?’ Kate asked.

‘Behind the terrace we pulled down a couple of months ago. Big, run-down old houses – four floors, some of them. Bedsits and flats. The whole terrace looked like it would fall down by itself if we hadn’t given it a shove.’

He stood up. ‘Anyway, back to work. Thanks for the drink, Miss. Remember, no quoting me.’

She smiled and shook his hand. ‘Of course. Thanks for the chat, John. It’s been a big help. Do you think Peter would talk to me? I just want to check some details.’

‘Doubt it,’ John said.

‘Look, could you give him my number in case he wants to contact me?’ she said, offering her business card.

John Davies put the card in his trouser pocket and nodded his goodbye. The rest of the workers followed him out.

Kate sat in the suddenly hushed bar and began writing up her notes. The peace and quiet didn’t last long; the landlord ambled over to collect the glasses and interrupted her thoughts.

‘Heard you were a reporter,’ he said.

She looked up at him and smiled. ‘Yes, I’m Kate, from the Daily Post,’ she said.

‘Graham,’ he said, suddenly matey now the lunchtime crowd had gone. ‘What are you reporting on, then?’

‘The baby’s body found on the building site.’

The pub landlord straddled the leatherette stool opposite her. ‘Oh. I see. Shocking thing, burying a baby in the garden,’ he said. ‘Makes you wonder what happened to the poor little thing. I mean, did someone murder it?’

Kate put down her pen and looked at him. ‘Exactly what I thought,’ she said. ‘Who could kill a baby? It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

They sat for a moment in silence.

‘Did you know the people who lived in those houses?’ Kate asked. ‘The police must be busy tracking them down.’

‘They’ll have a job. Tenants mostly and they changed every five minutes,’ he said. ‘The usual story: the owner didn’t live here – he had loads of property round here, rented out cheap. Those rooms were revolting inside. The sort of places people leave as soon as they can. Anyway, the baby wasn’t buried recently. A copper told me when he was asking around. It could have been put there forty or fifty years ago.’

‘Really? I wonder how they know that? Long before your time, then?’

The landlord smiled, trying not to be flattered by the outrageous compliment. ‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘Do you want another one of those?’ He pointed to the sticky remains in Kate’s glass.

‘Thanks. Can I have a soda straight up, this time? I’m driving.

‘Anyway,’ she added as she followed him back to the bar, nose to the trail, determined to keep his attention, ‘who was running the pub back then? In the seventies and eighties? They’d have known the people living in the street, wouldn’t they?’

‘Actually, it was my better half’s mum and dad,’ he said. ‘We took over from them. Toni might be able to help, but she’s at work.’

‘Don’t worry, I can come back,’ Kate said.

Chapter 7

Thursday, 22 March 2012

Emma

IT’S LUNCHTIME AND I’m still in bed, where Paul left me this morning. The happy pills are working their magic and I am beginning to feel comfortably numb, so I force myself up. I can smell the stink of stale sheets on me so I stand in the shower until my fingertips start to prune, then pull on a loose jumper dress to hide my body.

I’ve put the tranquillizers back in the bathroom cabinet and closed the door on them. I hate the pills – they mean I’m failing. I’d like to put them in the bin, but what if I can’t cope without them?

Maybe I’ll try to get a different sort of help this time – look beyond the chemical route. I almost laugh as I think it. It would mean talking, wouldn’t it? Telling someone my thoughts. Why I’m such a mess. What lies at the bottom of it all. It would mean brushing the loose dirt away and then excavating the thick clay packed deep around my memories.

My mum Jude once suggested talking therapy – back when the bad days had only just begun – but I refused to get in the car when she tried to take me to see a counsellor. There was a terrible scene in the street, with her screaming at me to get in and me bracing myself against the car door. God, was that me? The thing was, I knew then that silence was – is – the only option.

I know I won’t do anything different now. It’s too late. I’ll just put it all away, take the pills until I get everything back under control, and get on with my work. Fill my life with other things to blot out the dread, like I normally do.

My normal.

Anyway, I’m going to go to the butcher’s to get some meat for Paul’s dinner – to make up for the burnt offerings and frozen food. The word ‘meat’ sticks in my head. Flesh and blood. I want to throw up.

Stop it, I tell myself, twisting the skin of my stomach through the dress.

At the butcher’s, I can smell blood as soon as I enter the shop, metallic and coating my throat. I can feel panic rising so I stand quietly in the queue practising the breathing technique from yoga. In through the right nostril, out through the mouth. Or is it out through the left nostril?

‘Mrs Simmonds,’ the butcher says quite loudly. ‘What can I get for you today?’

Startled out of my meditation, I blurt, ‘Er, steak, please. A sirloin steak.’ I’ll have a salad.

He looks unimpressed. ‘Just the one? Eating alone tonight?’ he laughs, all red-faced under his stupid straw boater.

I give him a look, then try to laugh it off to show the other women in the shop that I’m in on the joke. But it sounds fake. ‘Yes, George Clooney’s let me down again,’ I say.

I shove the parcel in my carrier bag, pay the king’s ransom demanded and go home to try to get some work done.

It’s five o’clock and Paul will be home soon. The thought makes me type faster. I’ll carry on for another hour then resume domestic duties. Can’t stop yet. Must keep going. If I stop I’ll be back with the baby. Distract, distract, distract.

I thank God for work most days. I got into editing about ten years ago. A good friend was working at a publishing house and one weekend, when she was landed with an emergency re-write, she asked me to help. I’d always written for myself – and at college – but this was sleeves-rolled-up writing, translating some fairly adolescent scribblings by a footballer into heart-wrenching prose. It appeared I had a talent and she got me more work.

Today, I’m in the midst of a marriage break-up, navigating the sorrow, guilt and relief of a young actress over her parting from her ‘childhood’ husband and her optimism (misplaced, as it turns out) for her first ‘industry’ marriage. I never meet the subjects. That’s the ghost writer’s job. If it’s a big star, they spend hours – sometimes weeks – with them, teasing out their stories and feelings. I’m not in that league. I’m more X Factor winners, that sort of thing. From what I gather, most of it is based on cuttings about them from magazines and newspapers, and I tinker and polish until it reads like a fairy story. It’s never very satisfactory, but when it’s a rush job for an unexpected news hook – death, scandal, success – it has to be done that way.

It’s hard work and sometimes, when I’m sweating over every word, I curse the millions of people who buy celebrity memoirs just to look at the photos.

But it pays well enough and it’s my own money. Paul thinks the work is beneath my talents, but I can do it from home and I am anonymous.

No one knows who Emma Simmonds is, even though my words are sold all over the world, in dozens of languages. My name never appears on the cover of the book. And that’s how I want it to stay. Paul says I ought to be acknowledged, but I just laugh it off.