Expectant, page 9
‘But you had the baby anyway?’
And I’d thought he had scraped the bottom of the inappropriate-questions barrel. Whether or not she chose to have the baby was her decision and none of his fucking business.
Lena looked up at this point, clearly aghast at the question.
‘Of course I had her, why wouldn’t I have this precious gift from God? She is everything I have ever wanted.’
‘Wanted enough to steal from somebody else? To kill for?’
‘No, hell, no. I’m not some monster. How many times do I have to tell you, Isobella is my baby. You can ask my mother, you can ask my friends, you can ask…’
At this point I could hear what sounded like raised voices in the background, getting closer to their interview room. The Boss and Smithy’s heads swung around in the direction of the door just in time to see it fly open and a red-haired and what looked like matching-tempered woman storm into the room, very closely followed by a flustered constable.
The Boss leapt to his feet, chair tipping backward in the scramble, Smithy somewhat slower to stand.
‘Lena,’ the woman said, and strode over to her, placing her arm around Lena’s shoulders, giving her a squeeze.
‘Miriam,’ Lena cried, and twisted around, burying her head into the woman’s waist.
‘Who the hell are you, and what are you doing in here?’ The Boss roared. ‘Constable, what is this?’
‘Sorry, sir, I couldn’t stop her,’ the young man said. He looked all of eighteen, and I didn’t recognise him, so he had to be very new to the job. He looked mortified and frankly scared by The Boss’s reaction. But he also looked like someone who had enough sense not to get between a riled-up woman and her mission.
‘I am Miriam Hardcastle, and I am Lena’s midwife. And I want to know why the fuck you have this woman in here for questioning when she has just given birth two fucking days ago. Of course she didn’t do that awful thing to that woman and kidnap the baby, you fuckwits, and if you’d just bothered to check you would have known that. But no, you drag her down here and take her baby off her, and put her through all this trauma, making ridiculous accusations.’
The men in the room had frozen, The Boss’s mouth half open.
‘Get up Lena, we’re getting out of here.’
Lena stumbled up to her feet, still latched on to her rescuer. Miriam Hardcastle pointed her finger dead at The Boss and delivered a waggle that left no question as to how disgusted she was.
‘And I can personally vouch that, yes, Isobella came out of Lena’s fucking vagina, you muppets, and if she is not returned to us in the next five fucking minutes, I am going to be reporting you to the Human Rights Commission and the fucking prime minister, if necessary, and ringing every newspaper known to man. You will pay for this, you understand me?’
And with that she steered Lena in the direction of the door and left a room of gobsmacked men in her wake.
I found myself rising to my feet and actually applauding.
She was fucking magnificent.
CHAPTER 23
Even an hour later I was still chuckling at the grand entrance and rescue performed by Miriam Hardcastle. I couldn’t resist the urge to rewind and replay the expressions on The Boss’s and Smithy’s faces. If only I knew how to make a GIF.
I’d gone back to the two more recent abductions that had happened in Dunedin. Thankfully, in both cases the babies had been found, safe and sound, and both people responsible had been successfully prosecuted. Given that the guilty parties were still in jail, contemplating the foolishness of their actions, I didn’t think they were likely involved in the current situation. But it was still good to revisit them and see how the investigation had unfurled, follow the trail of breadcrumbs that had led to their arrest.
The first case was astonishing really. On a winter’s morning in July, two years ago, Anne-Marie Metcalff had walked into the main entrance of Dunedin Hospital wearing jeans and sneakers, a standard-issue, oversized, black puffer jacket, and a dark-green beanie. She’d walked through the foyer, past the cafés and main enquiries desk, and taken an elevator to the second floor and the Queen Mary Maternity Centre. There she had coolly walked down the corridor until she had come to the room occupied by Stephanie Graham and her day-old daughter, Katie. Unfortunately for all concerned, Stephanie was otherwise occupied in the bathroom at the time. Anne-Marie had exited the room with a much fuller, zipped-up puffer jacket and had calmly walked out of the hospital to the car she had parked in the five-minute parking space out front, then driven off into the sunrise. Stephanie had exited the bathroom to every mother’s worst nightmare.
It had taken a full week before the trail of crumbs had led to Anne-Marie’s home in South Dunedin. A week in which the Dunedin public had been howling for answers as to how someone could walk into the supposedly safe environment of a hospital and take a baby; a week in which it became abundantly clear how desperately understaffed the maternity centre was at the time. A week that was probably the longest of the Graham family’s life.
At the trial, under cross-examination, Anne-Marie’s partner, Jimmy, was asked why he hadn’t questioned her arriving home with a newborn, why he hadn’t reported it, done something about it? He had replied that she had really wanted a baby. They hadn’t been able to conceive, so when she’d said she was going to go get one for them, and then arrived home with a bundle of joy, he was happy and didn’t question it any further. That, more than anything else in the case, I found impossible to comprehend.
The second case was something you’d think could only happen in the movies. Brendon Edgar had popped down to the local corner dairy to get some milk and bread. He’d taken three-week-old Tiffany along in the car in the hope that that after half an hour of epic crying the ride would send her off to sleep, and give him and his frazzled partner some longed-for relief. The ploy had worked, as by the time he’d reached the dairy, via a fairly indirect route, the wee poppet had finally nodded off. Given the circumstances, he was loathe to wake her up just for the minute he’d be in the shop, so he took a chance and left her snoozing in her car seat in the back. Unfortunately for him, that minute was all it took for nineteen-year-old Clint Sutherland to steal the vehicle. Clint thought he was getting a Mazda Demio. What he was rather un-nerved to discover fifteen minutes later was he had scored a Mazda Demio with a bonus Tiffany Edgar. His panicked response had been to dump the car, complete with now screaming Tiffany Edgar, by the Marlow Park playground and disappear on foot into the relative anonymity of the streets of St Kilda. It didn’t take other parents making use of the park long to investigate the source the noise, and much to the relief of all concerned, the child was reunited with her parents pretty quickly. I didn’t even want to imagine the guilt that Brendon Edgar must have felt that day, and I vowed that I would never, under any circumstances, leave this poppet in the car alone. I was also pretty certain that if, when released, Clint decided to resume his former profession, he’d be checking the back seats from now on.
One of the hit-you-in-the-face things that connected all of the past cases and the Aleisha Newman one, was the baby concerned was a girl. The four cases were completely unrelated, but it did get me to thinking about what other things they had in common, so I could apply them as general filters when looking at the Newman case.
What were the patterns here? I asked myself. Although I had a disparate collection of material spread across my desk, there had to be some commonality, something I was missing.
Well, there was commonality in the obvious things. All of the babies were healthy, of good weight and robust. There was only one that had needed a little time under lights for jaundice, and that took care of itself quickly. They were all newborns, with the oldest being only two weeks. That meant looking into what was particularly special about newborn babies, other than them being gorgeous little bundles of joy. Were there any special characteristics only a newborn held? Yes, some babies came out looking overcooked and older than they were, or larger than the average, but on the whole, newborns had quite a distinct look. That whole squidged-in nose thing, and the way they seemed to have a ‘Who turned on the lights? What the heck is this place? When will I be fed next?’ expression.
What assumptions was I making that were pulling my focus in the wrong direction? The word ‘assumption’ make me smile. Dad’s catch phrase ran through my head: ‘When you assume you make an ass out of u and me.’ It was good to be able to replay his voice in my head and it bring a smile rather than tears. That milestone was only a recent development, and still somewhat tenuous. In the spirit of the old boy, I went analogue and pulled an A4 piece of paper out of the drawer and reached for a marker pen.
I wrote THE BABIES at the top of the page in careful block letters.
My pen wavered above the page. What was the grandest assumption I was making so far?
So far I had only considered that a man would have the wherewithal to cut open a woman to take her unborn child. Could a woman do that? Would a woman do that? Of course, the answer had to be yes. Women had committed astounding atrocities over the course of history. Violence and horror were not the domain of men alone.
I wrote a big MAN? and then WOMAN? on the page.
What else was I assuming?
I had only thought of the murder in terms of someone doing it for their own direct benefit. What if it wasn’t for them? What if they were in fact taking babies or getting something from babies to order?
Personal benefit and For a third party went down.
There would have to be a hell of a lot of dollars involved for someone to kill and carry the risk of being caught if it was babies for order. But then, history was full of accounts of people killing to supply a demand for everything from cadavers for medical dissection to organs for the transplant market – we’d all heard the urban myths about people getting blind drunk and waking up minus a kidney. The lust for money could make people go to extraordinary lengths.
What about the focus? Was this actually about the babies? What about the parents? Was there something special or distinctive about either of them?
The Mums and The Dads occupied the space in the middle of the page.
I thought back to Paul’s comments about someone taking care to match for physical characteristics such as ethnicity. How far would someone go to make a baby fit in, look the part? Would people hunt for blondies, or red-heads? Someone tall?
While I was at it a thought popped into my head. And I wrote the words planned and unplanned – referring to the crime, rather than the pregnancy.
The fact that the object used to remove the baby was extremely sharp suggested that there was a degree of planning involved. Most people didn’t just happen to carry around a finely honed knife or surgical scalpel. When in civilian mode I carried one of those little Leatherman multitools in my bag, because you never knew when you might need a little set of pliers or a pocket knife. Being an ex-girl guide the ‘be prepared’ motto was firmly embedded in my brain, but I didn’t think I’d be able to inflict that much damage with its four-centimetre blade.
My eyes drifted up to the clock on the wall. Not that I needed a clock to tell me it was lunchtime, my stomach had been doing its very best to remind me of its approach. One of the features of this pregnancy was an obsession with food. I was looking forward to the day when my life didn’t revolve around the next meal.
I was worse than a Labrador.
CHAPTER 24
‘I mean, how hard would it be to fake a pregnancy? I know it would be difficult, and certainly implies a large degree of forward planning…’ Paul paused to sidle an efficiently twirled spoonful of spaghetti carbonara into his mouth. We’d decided that a proper lunch was in order to shut me up, so had popped into the Italian in the nearby mall. There was a token salad sitting in a bowl in the centre of the table. Thus far it was ignored.
‘It would definitely be a taking the long-game approach,’ I said as I tried to match his pasta wrangling – bolognaise in my instance. It was being uncooperative.
‘When you think about it, it would be such a gamble. If people found you out before the baby’s arrival, they’d think you were a total nut job.’ He managed to eat his forkful without wearing it. I wasn’t quite as successful. In the process of twirling, a flick of sauce landed smack in the middle of my chest. This was why I never wore white.
‘Yes, I imagine there would be some mental-health evaluation, and a bit of attention from the police. Faking a pregnancy implies that you were either going to be acquiring a baby, one way or another, or were deceiving people for some gain, whatever that might be – money being the frontrunner.’
‘Money can be quite the motivator.’ He stabbed some salad onto his fork and waggled it in my general direction to make sure I’d noticed. ‘From a practical perspective though, what would you have to do? There’s the obvious – expanding your girth over time.’
‘Which begs the question of who you were trying to deceive? I mean, if it was me pretending to be up the duff, you’d cotton on pretty quickly.’
‘You’re right there. I’d figure out that your squidgy bits were fake squidgy as soon as I got your kit off.’
‘Unless I decided the playground was closed as soon as I was pregnant.’ Paul laughed at that one. I’d been one of those women who, aside from that unsettled period of morning sickness, had been rather partial to a preggers shag. Although that had waned somewhat now I was at the ready-to-pop stage.
‘If that were sadly the case,’ he said, ‘if you suddenly came over all modest so you could hide it, I’d still know something wasn’t right from cuddling you. You’d feel all wrong.’
‘Basically anyone they were intimate with would know, which implies collusion. They’d have to be planning this together.’ I heard my midwife’s ‘eat healthy’ echoing in my head and reached for the salad. ‘Which again begs the question, who would you be trying to fool? You might get away with duping friends and relatives, unless they were the huggy-huggy type.’
‘You could fool employers.’
‘I suppose.’ I popped some of the token green stuff into my mouth. It didn’t resist capture as much as the spaghetti had. ‘Actually, simulating the physical side of pregnancy would be the most complicated part, because when it comes to the pregnancy care or the birth, you’re not legally required to have a midwife, or any medical assistance. You can completely go it alone if you are healthy and confident enough to do so. If you’d managed to convince everyone with your carefully planned expanding waistline, then you could just lie about going for check-ups, appointments, scans, that kind of thing.’
‘Yeah, but family would want to see the ultrasound. Mine did.’
‘True.’ They’d been quite insistent. ‘But it would be easy enough to find a picture of one online and do a copy and paste. You could slap it all over your social media: hey, look what’s coming, people. Keep everyone happy.’
‘They’d still badger you about the gender. God knows our lot have asked us to the point of nagging. And unless you’d planned far enough ahead to know who your victim was going to be, and knew whether it was a girl or a boy, then you’d be a bit hobbled there. And what’s with that whole gender reveal party thing. I really don’t get that.’
He wasn’t the only one.
‘Just an excuse for a party and a cute video clip for your Insta, I guess. I take it you’re not feeling mortally disappointed that we didn’t have one.’
‘Yeah, nah. Never in a million,’ he said.
‘So if you were faking a pregnancy you could just lie like we did about the gender, and tell people that you were taking the old-school approach and were looking forward to a surprise on the day.’ Maggie was the only person in the know when it came to our impending wee girl. We’d decided everyone else could wait.
‘Trouble with lying is you’ve got to remember what you said and to who. And then there’s the questions people would probably ask. Like, oh, who’s your midwife? Especially your girlfriends – they seem to care about stuff like that.’
Did they? I thought about it a second. ‘Yeah, they do. They want to know every last detail.’
‘And don’t forget Dunedin is pretty much a small town. Everyone knows everyone, so if you name-dropped a midwife, someone would be bound to say, oh, I know her, tell her I said hi, or, that’s funny, because she’s our midwife too. And then if they asked or commented to the midwife, questions might be asked, and you’d be sprung.’
‘Well, no, I don’t actually think that would be an issue.’
‘Why not?’
‘Patient confidentiality. No midwife would comment about another woman they were attending. They’re far too professional for that,’ I said. ‘And most people nowadays are familiar with the importance of confidentiality, so they would know not to ask in the first place.’
‘That’s a good point. Still, it all feels a very risky proposition. Wouldn’t it be easier to explain a sudden new baby as, hey, we’ve been on the adoption list for ages, and woohoo, a baby came up and we had seven hours warning, or something like that? Like your friends in Gore who had that happen. Crikey, imagine having that mad scramble to acquire all the stuff you need.’
‘Friends and neighbours rallied around with most things.’
‘I still can’t believe how much stuff a baby needs.’
‘Tell me about it.’ The room that was to be the baby’s, when we got our shit together, was chock to the gunwales with baby paraphernalia. Hopefully it would all fit in there properly when we finally got to arranging and assembling things. It certainly wasn’t going to be one of those showcase House and Garden nurseries, all colour co-ordinated and chic, with cutesy accessories. We didn’t have the time or inclination for that.
‘Logistically pretending an adoption would be easier, but you could still arouse suspicion if a baby had suddenly been reported missing at the same time, and with all the government family services involved in adoptions it would only take a phone call or two and you’d be found out.’
