MELANIE GOLDING is a graduate of the MA in creative writing program at Bath Spa University, with distinction. She has been employed in many occupations including farm hand, factory worker, childminder and music teacher. Throughout all this, because and in spite of it, there was always the writing. In recent years she has won and been shortlisted in several local and national short story competitions. Little Darlings is her first novel and has been optioned for screen by Free Range Films, the team behind the adaptation of My Cousin Rachel.

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019

Copyright © Melanie Golding 2019

Melanie Golding asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008293697

Praise for Little Darlings

‘Chilling story, beautiful prose. Little Darlings is stunning’

Clare Mackintosh, number one Sunday Times bestseller

‘Dark, richly evocative, tense and thought-provoking. Taps into every woman’s fear thath she will not be believed’

Mel McGrath, author of Give Me The Child

‘Melanie Golding tells the truth about motherhood like no other writer since Sylvia Plath … It delivers on all fronts and will continue to rattle you, long after you have put it down’

Felicity Everett, author of The People at Number 9

‘Deep. Dark. Utterly addictive … Be warned – you can’t unread this story. It will haunt you’

Teresa Driscoll, author of I Am Watching You

‘A story that is in turn enthralling, creepy and downright sinister, Melanie Golding turns fairy tales on their heads in Little Darlings … A brilliant, heart-pounding read’

Lisa Hall, author of Between You and Me

‘Little Darlings is brilliant – beautifully written, disturbing and deliciously creepy’

Roz Watkins, author of The Devil’s Dice

‘Riveting, terrifying and at times heartbreaking … Melanie Golding’s disturbing portrait of a new mother’s paranoia is superbly written, cleverly plotted and gruesomely beautiful in an unforgettable way’

Annie Ward, author of Beautiful Bad

Dedicated to the memory of Amber Baxter (née Fink)

1979-2012

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note

Quotes and Sources

About the Publisher

August 18th

Peak District, UK

DS Joanna Harper stood on the viaduct with the other police officers. On the far bank, across the great expanse of the reservoir, a woman paused at the water’s edge, about to go in, her twin baby boys held tightly in her arms.

Harper turned to the DI. ‘How close are the officers on that side?’

Dense woodland surrounded the scrap of shore where the woman stood. Even at this distance, Harper could see that her legs were scarlet with blood from the thorns.

‘Not close enough,’ said Thrupp. ‘They can’t find a way to get to her.’

In a fury of thudding, the helicopter flew over their heads, disturbing the surface of the reservoir, bellowing its command: Step away from the water. It loomed above the tiny figure of the mother, deafening and relentless, but the officers on board wouldn’t be able to stop her. There was nowhere in the valley where the craft could make a safe landing, or get low enough to drop the winch.

Through the binoculars, Harper saw the woman collapse into a sitting position on the dried-out silt, her face turned to the sky, still clutching the babies. Perhaps she wouldn’t do it, after all.

A memory surfaced then, of what the old lady had said to her:

‘She’ll have to put them in the water, if she wants her own babies back . . . Right under the water. Hold ’em down.’

The woman wasn’t sitting at the water’s edge anymore; she was knee-deep, and wading further in. The DS kicked off her shoes, climbed up on the rail and prepared to dive.

Chapter 1

The child is not mine as the first was,

I cannot sing it to rest,

I cannot lift it up fatherly

And bliss it upon my breast;

Yet it lies in my little one’s cradle

And sits in my little one’s chair,

And the light of the heaven she’s gone to

Transfigures its golden hair.

FROM The Changeling

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

July 13th

8.10 p.m.

All she cared about was that the pain had been taken away. With it, the fear, and the certainty that she would die, all gone in the space of a few miraculous seconds. She wanted to drift off but then Patrick’s worried face appeared, topped by a green hospital cap and she remembered: I’m having my babies. The spinal injection she’d been given didn’t just signal the end of the horrendous contractions, but the beginning of a forceps extraction procedure that could still go wrong. The first baby was stuck in the birth canal. So, instead of allowing herself to sink inside her glorious, warm cocoon of numbness and fall asleep – which she hadn’t done for thirty-six hours – she tried to concentrate on what was happening.

The doctor’s face appeared, near to Lauren’s own, the mask pulled down revealing her mouth and most of her chin. The woman’s lips were moving as if untethered to her words. It was the drugs, and the exhaustion; the world had slowed right down. Lauren frowned. The doctor was looking at her, but she seemed so far away. She’s talking to me, thought Lauren, I should listen.

‘Ok, Mrs Tranter, because of the spinal, you won’t be able to tell when you have a contraction – so I’ll tell you when to push, ok?’

Lauren’s mouth formed an ‘o’, but the doctor had already gone.

‘Push.’

She felt the force of the doctor pulling and her entire body slid down the bed with it. She couldn’t tell if she was pushing or not. She made an effort to arrange her face in an expression of straining and tensed her neck muscles, but somewhere in her head a voice said, why bother? They won’t be able to tell if I don’t push, will they? Maybe I could just have a little sleep.

She shut her eyes.

‘Push now.’

The doctor pulled again and the dreaminess dispersed as the first one came out. Lauren opened her eyes and everything was back in focus, events running at the right speed, or perhaps slightly too quickly now. She held her breath, waiting for the sound of crying. When it finally came, that sound, thin and reedy, the weakened protest of something traumatised, she cried too. The tears seemed projectile, they were so pent-up. Patrick squeezed her hand.

‘Let me see,’ she said, and that was when the baby was placed on his mother’s chest, but on his back, arse-to-chin with Lauren so that all she could see were his folded froggy legs, and a tiny arm, flailing in the air. Patrick bent over them both, squinting at the baby, laughing, then crying and pressing his finger into one little palm.

‘Can’t you turn him around?’ she said, but nobody did. Then she was barely aware of the doctor saying, ‘push,’ again, and another pull. The boy was whisked away and the second one placed there.

This time she could reach up and turn the baby to face her. She held him in a cradle made of her two arms and studied his face, the baby studying her at the same time, his little mouth in a trumpeter’s pout, no white visible in his half-open eyes but a deep thoughtful blue. Although the babies were genetically identical, she and Patrick had expected that there would be slight differences. They’re individuals. Two bonnie boys, she thought with a degree of slightly forced joviality, at the same time as, could I just go to sleep now? Would anyone notice, really?

‘Riley,’ said Patrick, with one hand gently touching Lauren’s face and one finger stroking the baby’s, ‘Yes?’

Lauren felt pressured. She thought they might leave naming them for a few days until they got to know them properly. Such a major decision, what if they got it wrong?

‘Riley?’ she said, ‘I suppose—’

Patrick had straightened up, his phone in his hand already.

‘What about the other one? Rupert?’

Rupert? That wasn’t even on the list. It was like he was trying to get names past her while she was distracted, having been pumped full of drugs and laid out flat, paralysed from the chest down, vulnerable to suggestion. Not fair.

‘No,’ she said, a little bit too loudly. ‘He’s called Morgan.’

Patrick’s brow creased. He glanced in the direction of possibly-Morgan, who was being checked over by the paediatrician. ‘Really?’ He put his phone back in his pocket.

‘You can’t stay long,’ said the nurse-midwife to Patrick, as the bed finally rolled into place. Sea-green curtains were whisked out of the way. Lauren wanted to protest: she’d hoped there would be some time to properly settle in with the babies before they threw her husband out of the ward.

The trip from theatre to the maternity ward involved hundreds of metres of corridor. Thousands of metres, maybe. Patrick had been wheeling the trolley containing one of the twins, while the nurse drove the bed containing Lauren, who was holding the other one. The small procession clanked wordlessly along the route through the yellow-lit corridors. At first Lauren thought that Patrick could have offered to swap with the nurse and take the heavier burden, but she soon became glad she hadn’t mentioned it. As they approached the ward it was clear the woman knew what she was doing. This nurse, who was half Patrick’s height just about, had used her entire bodyweight to counter-balance as the bed swung around a corner and into the bay, then, impressively, she’d stepped up and ridden it like a sailboard into one of the four empty cubicles, the one by the window. There was a single soft ‘clang’ as the head of the bed gently touched the wall. Patrick would only have crashed them into something expensive.

The nurse operated the brake and gave a brisk, ‘here we are!’ before delivering her warning to Patrick, indicating the clock on the wall opposite. ‘Fifteen minutes,’ she said.

Her shoes squeaked away up the ward. Lauren and Patrick looked at the babies.

‘Which one have you got?’ asked Patrick.

She turned the little name tag on the delicate wrist of the sleeping child in her arms. The words Baby Tranter #1 were written on it in blue sharpie.

‘Morgan,’ said Lauren.

Patrick bent over the trolley containing the other one. Later, everyone would say that the twins looked like their father, but at this moment she couldn’t see a single similarity between the fully grown man and the scrunched-up bud of a baby. The boys certainly resembled each other – two peas popped from the same pod, or the same pea, twice. Riley had the same wrinkled little face as his brother, the same long fingers and uncannily perfect fingernails. They made the same expression when they yawned. Slightly irritatingly, someone in theatre had dressed them in identical white sleep suits, taken from the bag Lauren and Patrick had brought with them, though there had been other colours available. She had intended to dress one of them in yellow. Without the name tags they could easily have been mistaken for each other and how would anyone ever know? Thank goodness for the name tags, then. In her arms, Morgan moved his head from side to side and half-opened his eyes. She watched them slowly close.

They’d been given a single trolley for both babies to sleep in. Riley was lying under Patrick’s gaze in the clear plastic cot-tray bolted to the top of the trolley. Underneath the baby there was a firm, tightly fitting mattress, and folded at either end of this were two blankets printed with the name of the hospital. The cot was the wrong shape for its cargo. The plastic tray and the mattress were unforgivingly flat, and the baby was a ball. A woodlouse in your palm, one that curls up when frightened. Patrick moved the trolley slightly, abruptly, and Riley’s little arms and legs flew out, a five-pointed star. He curled up slowly, at the same speed as his brother’s closing eyes. Back in a ball, he came to rest slightly on his side. To hold a baby, it ought to be bowl-shaped, a little nest. Why had no one thought of that before?

‘Hello, Riley,’ said Patrick in an odd squeaky voice. He straightened up. ‘It sounds weird, saying that.’

Lauren reached out and drew the trolley closer to her bed, carefully, trying to prevent the little ball from rolling. She used her one free hand to tuck a blanket over him and down the sides of the mattress, to hold him in place.

‘Hello, Riley,’ she said. ‘Yeah, it does a bit. I think that’s normal, though. We’ll get used to it.’ She turned her face to the child in her arms. ‘Hello, Morgan,’ she said. She was still waiting for the rush of love. That one you feel, all at once the second they’re born, like nothing you’ve ever experienced before. The rush of love that people with children always go on about. She’d been looking forward to it. It worried her that she hadn’t felt it yet.

She handed Morgan to Patrick, who held him as if he were a delicate antique pot he’d just been told was worth more than the house; desperate to put him down, unsure where, terrified something might happen. Lauren found it both funny and concerning. When the baby – who could probably sense these things – started to cry, Patrick froze, a face of nearly cartoon panic. Morgan’s crying caused Riley to wake up and cry, too.

‘Put him in there, next to Riley,’ said Lauren. The twins had been together all their lives. She wondered what that would mean for them, later on. They’d been with her, growing inside her, for nine months, the three of them together every second of every day for the whole of their existence so far. She felt relief that they were no longer in there, and guilt at feeling that relief, and a great loss that they had taken the first step away from her, the first of all the subsequent, inevitable steps away from her. Was that the love, that guilty feeling? That sense of loss? Surely not.

Patrick placed the squalling package face to face with his double, and, a miracle, the crying ceased. They both reached out, wrapping miniature arms around each other’s downy heads, Morgan holding onto Riley’s ear. All was calm. From above, they looked like an illusion. An impossibility. Lauren checked again, but as far as she could tell the rush of love still had not arrived.

The fierce nurse squeaked back down the ward at just after nine and began to shoo Patrick away home, which would leave Lauren, still numb in the legs and unable to move, alone to deal with every need and desire of the two newborn babies.

‘You can’t leave me,’ said Lauren.

‘You can’t stay,’ said the nurse.

‘I’ll be back,’ said Patrick, ‘first thing. As soon as they open the doors. Don’t worry.’

He kissed her head, and both babies. He walked away a little too quickly.

Chapter 2

After Patrick had gone, Lauren sat, dry-eyed in the quiet, knowing there was chaos to come. For the moment, though, they slept. From the bed she observed the twin cocoons that were the babies, swaddled in white, with a disbelieving awe: did I do that?

The hospital was not silent, neither was it dark, although by now the windows were made of black mirrors. Lauren’s reflection had deep shadowed holes where it should have had eyes. A vision of horror. She turned away.

The building had a hum of several different tones forming a drone, a cold chord that wouldn’t resolve. Lauren put her head on her pillow and realised that one of the singers was her hospital bed, which harmonised dissonant with the slightly lower, much more powerful hum of the heating. Then there was the hum of her bedside lamp, which had a buzzy texture that she actually found quite soothing. She closed her eyes, still propped in a sitting position with the bright lamp blasting through her eyelids. She breathed deeply in and out, three, four times. Sleep was coming. She’d waited so long for this.

A whimper from one of the babies struck through her thin slumber with an urgency that felt physical. Her eyes were forced to open, but every time she blinked she could see a backdrop of red with dark streaks where a map of the veins in her eyelids had been burned onto her retinas. She batted the lamp away from her face with a clang.

Perhaps he’ll go back to sleep, she thought, with a desperate optimism. Riley’s whimper became a cluck, and then a cluck cluck cluck waaaa, and then she had to take action. One crying baby was enough.

She pulled the trolley as close as it would come, but found she couldn’t lift him. She needed one of her hands to stop her numbed useless lower half falling out of the bed as she leaned over, but two to lift the baby, with a hand under his head and one under his body, as she had been shown. Riley’s mouth was open, his eyes screwed shut, legs starting to stretch out and arms reaching, searching trembling in the air for some resistance, finding none.

Lauren thought about the womb and how it had contained them both, fed them and kept them warm. She felt bad for them, that nature had taken away their loving home and put her there in its place; that they’d been pulled from her uterus and placed in her arms, where she was the only thing standing between them and oblivion, them and failure, them and disappointment. She, who couldn’t even pick up her boy and fill his little tummy, which was now, face it, her only purpose in life.

Morgan heard his brother’s crying. He was shifting in his sleep, not quite awake but he would be soon. Lauren reached out and gathered up the front of Riley’s sleep suit in her fist until he was curled around it tightly in a storks’ bundle. She held her breath and lifted him one-handed, worrying about his head dangling backwards on his elastic neck for the second it took to transport him to her lap. But then she figured, two hours ago during the birth he’d been gripped with metal tongs and pulled by the head with great force on the confidence that that neck, seemingly so fragile and delicate, would bring the rest of him along safely.

As she struggled to feed Riley, Morgan woke up properly and cried with hunger. She listened, helpless, the sound an alarm she couldn’t turn off, a scream wired directly into her body, taking up all of the space in her brain so that she could think of nothing but feeding him, of doing what was necessary to soothe the boy, to make it stop. After a few agitated minutes, she found herself sliding a little finger into the corner of Riley’s mouth to unlatch him. With difficulty, she placed him back in the cot, one-handed, straining crane-like to swap him over with his hungrier brother. For a while there was only the sound of little lips smacking, one baby feeding and the other contemplating until Riley remembered he hadn’t finished his meal and thought that his heart might break.

She fed one while the other demanded to be fed, and went on in this way like Sisyphus, thinking there had to be an end to it but finding that there was not. She pressed the buzzer for help, but when the midwife came she seemed so irritated and abrupt that Lauren didn’t feel she could call again. The night stretched out and jumped forward as her shredded brain tried to doze, to rest and recharge after the labour, the day and night and day of not sleeping and then this night, this long night of lifting and swivelling and feeding and sitting in positions that hurt for scores of minutes too long, her back complaining and her arm muscles torn and her nipples cracking and bleeding and drying out only to be thrust into the hard, wet vice of her baby’s latch. And then, as the drugs from the blessed injection wore off, there was the pain from the destruction of her pelvic floor. Where they had cut her and sewn her, where her mucus membranes had been stretched to the point at which they tore.

She lost track of whether she slept. It seemed to Lauren that she did not, yet she found herself setting one baby down gently in the cot, blinking once and noticing that most of an hour had passed.

The curtain between her bay and the next had been drawn across. The nurses must have brought in another new mum. The twins were quietly dozing, inverted commas curling towards each other, peaceful.

From the other side of the curtain she could hear a cooing, a mother talking to a baby. The voice was low, muttering, somehow unsettling. Lauren couldn’t work out why it sounded odd. She listened for a while longer. Just a woman, murmuring nothings to her baby – why was it troubling her? There were baby sounds too, though this baby sounded like a bird, squawking softly, quacking, chirping to be fed. Then something else, another sound, more like a kitten. Lauren let her eyes close and drifted, dreaming of a woman with a cat and a bird, an old woman all skin and sinew, holding an animal in each hand by the scruff and feeding them worms from a bucket. Both hands full, the old woman used her long black tongue to encircle and trap each worm, pulling the wriggling thing free of the squirming tangle before trailing it into the mouths, the open beak of the bird and the gaping jaws of the kitten. The kitten’s needle teeth nipped at the membrane skin of the creature and it recoiled, panicked, in a futile effort to escape before it was dropped, falling from the mother’s black unfurling tongue across the beak and the jaws of the bird and the cat, each snapping at the fat wet worm until they tore it in two and turned away from each other, mouths working with smacks and gulps, sulkily satisfied with half. The old woman was telling the animals something as they fed, some urgent legacy, the details of which Lauren couldn’t quite catch, whispering, pressing on them the importance that they remember everything she said to them, that their lives depended on it. In the dream, the animals listened for as long as they could, but then they cried out because they needed more food. And as they cried out, the sounds became less like a bird and a cat and more like human babies, a squawk became a cry, the kitten’s meow trailed off to a soft baby whimper. In the dream, the woman held the animals and shushed them as they transformed, rocked them gently as their human forms emerged and then she laid the twin babies gently in the hospital cot.

Lauren’s eyes flew open. The dream lingered – there was a smell of something animal in her nostrils and she shook her head to rid herself of the disturbing images. All was silent except the breathing of her twins and the nearly imperceptible sounds of another set of twins in the next bed. Another set of twins. The woman in the bed next to hers had twins too, she was suddenly sure of it. She listened carefully – two babies snuffling, definitely. What were the chances? The dream forgotten, Lauren was pleased – she wanted to peek around the curtain and say hi but she couldn’t have reached. Besides, it was still the middle of the night. She’d have to wait until morning. Two sets of twins in one day. Maybe that was a hospital record.

Stuck in the bed, her body weakened by the spinal injection, sleep-deprived, sore and exhausted, Lauren consoled herself. At least she’d have someone to talk to now, someone who’d been through something similar. The sun was creeping into the edges of the windows, lending its peach to the white and yellow of the electric light on the ward. Behind the curtain, all fell quiet; the other mother of twins must have fallen asleep. Lauren shut her eyes again, but the moment her eyelids met she could hear the breathy swoosh of her baby’s cheek rubbing up and down on the cot sheet as his little head moved left to right, searching out a nipple. She forced her eyes open, pushed her body into an upright position, braced herself for the pain in her arms as she swivelled and lifted the child to feed.

Chapter 3

Come away, O, human child

To the waters and the wild

With a faery hand in hand

For the world’s more full of weeping than

You can understand

FROM The Stolen Child

BY W.B. YEATS

July 14th

One day old

9.30 a.m.

The nurse swished the curtain back against the wall, jolting Lauren awake. There was nothing behind it, only an empty space where a bed could be parked.

She had shut her eyes between feeds and the world jumped forward three hours. The sun was up and getting on with things, drowning out the electric lights and transforming the room, from a cave to an open space. From the window there was a view of the car park three floors down, and across the way she could see the main entrance to the A&E department. The wide sky was a shade of bright grey but it would be hot, as it had been every day for all of July. Fresh now, clammy later. The heatwave had been going on for a week, and the forecast was more of the same. It was set to break records.

The nurse was removing a catheter bag filled with yellow fluid from below the bed. She dropped it in a bucket and reached for an empty one.

‘Where’s the woman who was brought in last night?’ asked Lauren.

‘Who – Mrs Gooch, over there?’

The bay diagonally across from Lauren was occupied. Mrs Gooch seemed to be asleep, a serene baby tucked into the bed with her. The mother had long red hair arranged artfully across the pillow and pale bare arms – the effect was akin to a Klimt painting.

‘No, I don’t think so. I thought there was someone next to me. I was pretty sure.’

Riley was awake. His windmilling arm smacked his sleeping brother across the head and Morgan’s eyes opened in shock, then screwed up shut in sorrow, his mouth a little zero of injustice. There was a pause while Morgan inhaled expansively, a comprehensive gathering of breath that would certainly be used for something loud. The long wail, when it finally came, hit Riley’s face and crumpled it. Riley, in turn, inhaled at length and soon the anguish was doubled. Within a few seconds the sound built into a crescendo of indignation that interrupted their mother’s thought pattern like scissors through ribbon. Lauren flapped her hands, struggling to know what to do, where to start, who to tend to. Both of them crying, and only one of her. She knew she had to be quick – she’d read so much about attachment disorder and rising cortisol levels in the brains of babies in pregnancy and early childhood. You couldn’t leave children to cry. It had damaging effects and might do radical things to brain development, causing terrible long-term consequences. Already they seemed so angry.

‘Please,’ she said to the nurse, feeling her eyes filling up, ‘can you help me?’

‘Hey petal, no need for that.’ The nurse whipped three thin tissues from the box by the bed, pressed them into Lauren’s hand and turned to lift baby Morgan, a furious, purple-faced wide-mouthed thing from which came forth a sound that made you want to cover your ears. ‘There’s enough crying round here already without you joining in.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Lauren, wiping her eyes and blowing her nose, then uncovering herself ready to feed. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’

In what seemed like less than half a minute the nurse plugged Lauren firmly into the twins. She manoeuvred Lauren’s body, lifting the weight of her breasts, helping her get into a position to feed both at once, a rugby ball baby under each arm with pillows holding them in place. The nurse was so efficient, so quick and practised. It made Lauren wonder how she would ever manage on her own.

‘There. Snug as bugs.’

She started to stride away, but Lauren stopped her.

‘That woman over there,’ she said, ‘has she got twins?’

Mrs Gooch had opened her eyes. She looked as fresh and unlikely as Sleeping Beauty. Even as Lauren spoke it was obvious that there was only one child contained in the idyll – baby Gooch was with her in the bed and there was no sign of any other.

‘No,’ said the nurse, ‘just the one. Yours are the only twins we’ve got at the moment.’

Patrick brought vegetable sushi, fruit and dark chocolate. ‘Thanks,’ she said, without gratitude. She didn’t fancy anything but white-bread toast.

‘You need something with nutrients in,’ he said.

She stuck her lip out. She ought to be able to eat whatever she felt like. ‘All food has nutrients in. Sugar is a nutrient. So is alcohol.’

‘Alright, clever clogs. You need something with vitamins. Tell me what you want, I can go to the supermarket and bring you something else this afternoon at visiting time. Avocado?’

The thought of avocado made her nauseous. She wanted crisps.

Patrick took photos of Lauren holding the twins as they slept, and then turned the screen for her to see. In the images she was both gaunt and bloated, her smile weak and her hair greasy.

‘Don’t put that online. I look terrible.’

Patrick looked up from his phone. ‘Oh, I, sort of already did.’ The phone started pinging with notifications as comments came in. He tilted the screen to show her:

Congratulations!

Glad you are all well!

Hope to see you soon!

Soooo beautiful!!!

Wow well done you guys can’t wait to meet the boys Xxx!

Later she took matching photos of him, holding the twins while he sat in the vinyl-covered armchair next to the bed. His appearance was just the same as always. Maybe he seemed a bit tired, perhaps as if he had a mild hangover, but there was no radical change. He’d lost a tiny bit of weight recently and people – friends of theirs – were saying how much better he looked for it. Where was the justice in that? They were both parents of twins now but it was her body that had been sacrificed.

Patrick put both babies back into the cot. He was handling them with less trepidation than before, putting them down as if they were fruits that bruised easily rather than explosives that needed decommissioning. He sat down but he kept one hand in the cot with them, counting fingers, self-consciously trying out nursery rhymes he could only half remember.

‘Round and round the garden, like a dum de dum. Like a . . . what is it like?’

‘Like a teddy bear,’ said Lauren.

‘Is it?’

‘Yes. I think so.’ She pictured her mother’s finger, tracing circles on her palm. The anticipation of the one step, two steps, tickle you under there. More rhymes came to her then: Jack and Jill, Georgie Porgie, a blackbird to peck off a nose. It was like lifting the lid on a forgotten box of treasure. These gifts, not thought of for years, there in her memory all this time, waiting for her to need them, to pass them on.

‘Teddy bear?’ said Patrick, still sceptical. ‘Well, that doesn’t make sense.’

Lauren put her hand in the cot, too. She stroked Morgan’s cheek and for a few seconds there was peace. It was such simple joy to feel the grip of a miniature hand around your thumb.

‘Are they breathing?’ said Patrick.

A sudden panic.

‘Of course they are.’ Were they? They both stared hard at the boys’ chests but it was difficult to tell. She tickled them in turn until they cried, voices twining together, so similar to each other, the two sounds in parallel like twisting strands of DNA.

‘Yes, they’re breathing.’

They laughed nervously, relieved, as if they’d come close to something unspeakable but not close enough to say what it was. The ground was shifting under them. What would life look like, now?

The anaesthetist came and poked Lauren in the swollen ankles with a pointy white plastic stick. She dangled her legs so he could test her reflexes with the hammer end. She could feel it fine. It was a relief to be paraplegic no longer.

‘You should be able to get up now,’ he said. ‘The nurse will come along soon to remove your catheter.’

She’d miss that catheter. For months she’d been up seven or eight times in the night to empty her oppressed bladder. She quite liked not having to think about it – not being at the mercy of yet another uncontrollable bodily function.

‘When can I go home?’ She was sweating in the dry heat, the skin on her lower limbs stretched shiny with the swelling. Why was the heating even on in the summer? The hottest summer Sheffield had seen for forty years. Apart from anything else, what a waste of money.

The anaesthetist looked at her notes.

‘Well, I can safely discharge you once you’ve moved your bowels.’

‘Moved my—’

‘Bowels?’ The doctor smiled indulgently at her.

She’d understood, but the term was unfamiliar. Not much mention of bowels in her former life sculpting moulds for garden ornaments. No one ever ordered bowels cast in concrete with a fountain attachment for their garden pond.

Though the talk was of catheters and bowels, she bathed in the doctor’s easy confident manner and was sad when he went away again, leaving her trapped in her little family unit, her perfect four. Patrick made a little whistling sound at Lauren as she gazed moonily at the doctor’s retreating back.

‘What?’ she said.

‘I thought you went for tall men.’

She laughed darkly. She was thinking of that moment again, when the needle went in and the pain went away and the anaesthetist carved a place for himself in her heart, made of gratitude and respect and a little bit of girlish adoration.

‘You should have a walk around now, check that everything’s working fine.’

The nurse had taken out the catheter only ten minutes before and Lauren felt slightly aggrieved by the abruptness of the suggestion – one moment a bed-bound dependent, the next dragged out and forced to march around, quick smart hup-two-three. She hadn’t used her legs at all in twenty hours. They needed time to think about it. No part of Lauren liked being expected to perform at short notice.

She planted her two fat bare feet onto the cool vinyl floor, feeling the many specks of grit on its surface. The nurse gestured to Patrick to take the other arm.

‘Oh Jesus,’ said Patrick as he helped her stand up.

She twisted to see. A puddle of blood on the white sheet almost the width of the bed, a red sun. Oh, thought Lauren, it’s just like the Japanese flag. And then she felt it, rivulets down the inside of her legs, pooling on the floor, red and black and hot like the fear.

After the birth, Lauren was convinced that nothing could be as awful. But towards the end, when they’d decided forceps would be needed, the worst of it had been performed behind a screen of drapery and anaesthetic. She’d not seen or felt the whole of it, not even a significant percentage of it. Where was the lovely anaesthetist now, now that she had a further stranger, a medical person (who could actually be anyone at all, some goon off the street in a costume and how would she even know) inserting a whole hand into her and squeezing her womb until it stopped bleeding? One blue-gloved hand (‘Gloves, Mr Symons?’ ‘Do you have Large?’ Oh God.) on the inside, one pushing down from the top and nearly disappearing into the spongy mass of stomach flesh created by the absence of the babies.

‘Just try to breathe,’ said the person (a doctor, she hoped). An older man this time. ‘This shouldn’t hurt too much. Tell me if you really need me to stop.’

‘I really need you to stop.’

The person/doctor did not stop. A nurse gave her nitrous oxide. Lauren bit down on the mouthpiece and spoke through her teeth, ‘Please stop.’

‘Just relax if you can. I need to carry on applying pressure for a few minutes longer. The bleeding has nearly stopped. Breathe slowly. Try to relax your legs.’ He was grunting with the effort.

‘Oh,’ said the nurse, as a sharp pain distracted Lauren momentarily, a hot feeling of flesh unzipping around the man’s forearm. ‘We’ll have to do those stitches again.’

‘Please—’ Her voice caught in a sob, but there was no energy for crying. ‘Please. I can’t. It really hurts.’ The hand inside her shifted horribly. She cried out.

‘Just a minute longer.’

And she kept the terrible silence for as long as she could, unable to fight or fly, a strange man’s hands compressing parts of her body that she would never see or feel with her own. Not just in her but through her, further inside than felt natural, or right. She was a pulsating piece of meat full of inconvenient nerve endings and un-cauterised vessels. No intrigue here, no mystery, no power. She’d been deconstructed by nature, and then by man, then nature again, and finally by man – the two forces tossing her hand over hand, back and forth like volleyball. Where was Lauren in this maelstrom of awfulness? Where was the person she had previously thought herself to be? Intelligent, funny, in control, that Lauren. She’d been hiding as best she could, sheltering in the back of her psyche somewhere, allowing the least evolved part of her instinctive self to be the thing that was present in this trauma. Disassociation, the word like a mantra within her silence as the older man withdrew his hand with exaggerated carefulness, the nurse took away her gas and air and inserted a needle for a drip in the back of a hand so pale she barely recognised it as her own. She was flaccid, weak, beaten. She was all shock and pain and sorrow.

Patrick was waiting, trying to comfort the screaming twins by poking his pinkie fingers in their mouths.

‘You scared me for a minute there,’ he said, his voice only decipherable over the din because of its low register.

She couldn’t think with the crying – the interference caused her mind to fill with white noise. She made an effort to form a sentence, her language processors struggling uphill in the wind against her reptilian brain.

‘You were just afraid I’d leave you alone with these two.’

He looked at her. His eyes were glazed in a film of tears. ‘Well, yeah,’ he said, ‘that too,’ and he kissed her.

Immediately a midwife started to arrange pillows, propping her up so she could feed the babies.

‘You should feed as much as you can now,’ she said. ‘It helps your uterus to contract.’

Feed as much as you can, she thought. As opposed to the meagre efforts I’ve been making so far.

As the midwife stuffed a tender nipple into the mouth of one twin and then the other, Patrick turned away. He shuffled around looking for change for the vending machine and headed off to get them both a cup of tea. By the time he came back and sat down, the midwife had left. He picked up a magazine but didn’t open it. His hands were shaking.

‘It’s six o’clock,’ he said.

‘Right,’ said Lauren.

‘I should go, before I get kicked out.’

‘I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if you stayed for a while.’

‘OK.’ He breathed in loudly through his nose. She waited for what he would say next. ‘But I’ve got to get to the shops, and everything.’

She wanted him to take her home and look after her. He’d done that once, early on. Only the second time Lauren had gone to his flat. In the night she’d started having terrible stomach pain, food poisoning most probably, from a bad takeaway. The next day he’d boldly insisted she stay with him until she was better. She didn’t want to stay – it was early days and they were still being polite, seeking to impress each other. Neither had yet heard the other fart. For a week she vomited near-constantly and her bowels had never moved faster. If this doesn’t put him off, she’d thought, and it hadn’t. He set up a bed for himself on the couch and tended to her every need. He did it all without complaint, and yet even then there’d been signs that he wasn’t a natural caregiver. She heard him, unable to prevent himself from gagging on the smell when he entered the bathroom after her, twice or three times that week. Also, he cooked with a certain undisguised reluctance (always did, she would discover), huffing when required to alter anything at all during the process. It didn’t really matter then because she ate almost nothing that week anyway. And it meant she loved him all the more, for doing what he did, making such an effort to override his natural inclinations. It proved without question that he loved her.

The erosion of enthusiasm for self-sacrifice can happen fast in those for whom it’s an effort to start with. It can be like dropping off a cliff: I care, I care, I care, I don’t care; for how long exactly are you planning to be ill? Patrick must have used up all his caring that week. When she was ill in the early months of pregnancy, he’d seemed more irritated than sympathetic. She found ways of coping. She would list all his good points, in between retches.

He fidgeted in his seat for a few more seconds, then looked at his phone and got up. He kissed all three of them on the head and said he loved them, the new names sounding less strange now but still out of place somehow. ‘Bye-bye Riley, I love you. Bye-bye Morgan, I love you. Bye-bye Mummy, I love you.’ The word Mummy jarred. It took a moment before she realised he meant her.

Patrick walked the short distance to the corner of the bay, turned and gave a weary wave.

‘See you in the morning,’ he said.

He earns enough so I don’t have to work, she thought. My mother liked him, when she was alive. He’s funny. He’s got lots of friends. He’s really good looking, in my opinion.

With a son on each breast she watched the tendrils of steam diminish as her tea went cold in its brown plastic cup on the bedside table. The sun sank beyond the car park but the electric lights held back the darkness. Home seemed like a different country, one to which she might never return.

Chapter 4

Night fell outside, and the babies seemed to know it: they were awake.

‘Sleep when they sleep,’ the nurse had said, Patrick had said, her mother-in-law had said many times when she was pregnant. Sleep when they sleep: neat, and as far as unsolicited advice went, sensible enough. I would do that, she thought, if I could, but they were asleep all day in between crying and being fed. Now they were awake and she wanted to watch them discovering themselves and each other and the edges of their little world but her eyelids were heavy, her head throbbed. If she closed her eyes she knew she’d be dragged under in an instant. She felt she should be awake for them, that she was duty-bound. This and the pain helped to keep her conscious at first. Her nipples were torn and raw, and the pain in her uterus was dulled only slightly by the co-codamol she had recklessly taken despite the implied threat of further confinement (‘Are you sure? It might make you constipated, flower’).

Coos and snuffles turned into cries and she fed them, both together for the first time without the midwife’s help, managing to balance one while positioning the other with one hand. Riley, the smaller of the two, seemed to find it harder to get started and she had to reach around Morgan and slip her little finger between him and the nipple, repositioning him twice before he was able to feed. She wasn’t watching the clock. Hours started stretching out into lifetimes when she did that. Feeding time went on and she thought it might go on all night but then they each dropped off the breast, asleep, like ripened plums from a branch, and she set them down. The moment both twins were in the cot she let her eyes shut and her brain shut down and her body melted into the bed. She entered a kind of sleep in which she was poised, a part of her remaining on high alert, jerking her out at the slightest snuffle. A meagre kind of rest, but all she could afford.

And then she woke when there was no sound: why was there no sound? Had she done something wrong, were they suffocating? Were they breathing, had they died? She placed a hand on each baby and waited for the rise and fall, the sound of air being drawn in, a sign of life. Under the harsh light, under her two hands they breathed, they moved, they lived.

Lauren’s heart slowed by degrees. She thought of all the people that would be heartbroken if she let them die. Her gran, his mother, his father and hers. Patrick’s sister Ruthie and the cousins, Sonny and Daisy. The funeral, how she did not want to go through that or watch Patrick go through it. Was this the love, this fear of them dying? Perhaps it was. She lay with her eyes open, unable to stop a series of appalling ideas from flashing in her mind. Dropping them on their heads on the hospital floor. Crashing the car with them in it. A plastic nappy bag on the face, obscuring the airways in seconds while her back was turned. These things were so easy, so quick, and they actually happened, they were real. She was right to be scared. She looked at the babies, fixing them in her memory, their personalities emerging already – Riley frowning in his sleep, dissatisfied with something. Morgan, abandoned to it, relaxed and satiated. I will never forget this, she thought.

They were asleep. Sleep when they sleep. And she wanted to watch them to make sure they kept breathing but she clicked off like a light.

She dreamed of the bird and the cat again and awoke drenched in sweat and dread. How long had she slept? Impossible to know. The curtain between her bed and the next had been drawn across once more. This time there was no mistake: there was a woman in the next cubicle. The lamp inside was lit; she could see a silhouette on the curtain, long thin shadows stretched out to the ceiling. A creaky voice began to sing an unfamiliar song.

As she was a-walking her father’s walk aye-o

As she was a-walking her father’s walk,

She saw two pretty babes playing the ball

Lay me down me dilly dilly downwards

Down by the greenwood side-o

And the woman had two babies, Lauren was sure. There, the sound of two together, both cooing and grunting, as if they were singing along with the strange lullaby.

She said pretty babes if you was mine aye-o

She said pretty babes if you was mine

I’d dress you up in silken fine

Lay me down me dilly dilly downwards

Down by the greenwood side-o

Lauren felt an urge to visit the toilet, a sudden pressure on her bladder strong enough for her to answer it with a movement a bit too fast for her body. She swung her legs out of bed. Her knees buckled as she stood, but she held herself up with both hands on the bed rails. She perched there, testing herself. She could walk; she was just a bit unsteady. There was no sunburst of blood on the sheet. The muscles in her pelvic floor, cut and torn and sewn up, held her in place for now and she took her hands from the bed, allowing her feet to take their burden back. She checked the babies, still breathing, feather breaths on her cheek. Blood rushed from her head to serve her limbs and she waited for the feeling to pass, the floor to cease shifting under her like the deck of a sea vessel.

The clock read 4.17. The windows, black mirrors.

She took a penknife long and sharp aye-o

She took a penknife long and sharp,

And pierced the two pretty babes to the heart

Lay me down me dilly dilly downwards

Down by the greenwood side-o

Maybe Lauren would ask her to stop. The singing might wake Mrs Gooch. Plus, it was a horrible song, the words were creepy and the tune was weird, sort of sad and angry. She’d been pleased, initially, when she’d realised there was another woman on the ward with twins but she wasn’t sure she could be friends with someone who had no consideration for others.

The curtain had been pulled all the way around the cubicle, boxing it in. There was a gap of a few centimetres at one corner and Lauren widened it, peering through. The lamp was angled at her face, she was caught in the glare. She held a hand up to shield her eyes.

‘Excuse me,’ she said. The woman did not respond, kept humming the strange old tune. She tried again, a bit louder. ‘Excuse me?’

There was no hospital bed. The woman was sitting in the chair, the same as the one of pale green vinyl next to her own bed, next to all the beds on the ward. The scene was too small for the cubicle – without the bed there seemed too much floor space. The distance between Lauren and the woman was as wide as a river. The woman was leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and a large basket between her bare feet, feet dirty enough to stand out black against the floor. Rags from the woman’s dress were long fingers trailing against those feet, against the floor, forming a fringe over the basket. The glare from the angled lamp meant that Lauren couldn’t see the babies in the basket but she could hear them, ragged phlegmy breaths and two – definitely two – high-pitched voices murmuring. She took a step inside the cubicle, moving to get a better look, more from curiosity than anything else because she could see at once that this woman shouldn’t be there. She must be homeless. She wore several layers of clothing, as if she were cold even though it was oven-hot in the hospital. But when Lauren stepped closer she began to shiver. She was at once aware of the thinness of her hospital gown, cold air surrounding her, whispering around her exposed legs and entering the gown from below so that she wrapped her arms across herself to stop it. There must have been an air-conditioning outlet right there above them. It was a damp cold and there was a muddy, fishy smell which must have been coming from the homeless woman. Lauren sensed that she had been noticed, she knew it, but the woman hadn’t moved at all, not a millimetre. She was singing again.

She throwed the babes a long ways off aye-o

She throwed the babes a long ways off

The more she throwed them the blood dripped off

Lay me down me dilly dilly downwards

Down by the green-

‘Listen, I don’t mean to be rude but can you stop singing, please? You’re going to wake everyone up.’

The woman stopped singing with a sharp intake of breath. She raised her eyes from the basket. Lauren heard a high whining sound, another layer of hum but getting louder. It came from nowhere but inside her own ears. Run, it told her, leave, go, now. But her feet were rooted. Heavy as lead.

It took a long time for the woman’s eyes to meet hers and when the moment finally came Lauren had to blink away cold sweat to see her. She was young, perhaps eight or ten years younger than Lauren, but her eyes seemed ancient. She had hair that had formed itself into clumps, the kind of hair, a bit like Lauren’s, that would do that if you didn’t constantly brush it. The woman’s face was grimy, and when she opened her mouth to speak the illusion of a rather dirty youth who could even be beautiful if given a good scrubbing was destroyed. She seemed to have no teeth and a tongue that darted darkly between full but painfully cracked lips. There was something about the way the woman eyeballed her. What did she want?

‘You’ve twin babies,’ said the woman.

‘Yes.’ The word had tripped out, travelling in a cough. Lauren wanted it back.

‘Ye-es,’ the woman drew the word out lengthily, ‘twin babies. Just like mine, only yours are charmed.’

Lauren couldn’t think what to say. She knew she was staring, open-mouthed at the woman but she couldn’t not.

‘Mine are charmed too,’ said the woman, ‘but it’s not the same. Mine have a dark charm. A curse. You are the lucky ones, you and yours. We had nothing, and even then we were stolen from.’

She must have had a terrible time, this woman. And those poor little mites in the basket, what kind of life would they have? There were people who could help her, charities dealing in this kind of thing. She must be able to access something, at least get some new clothes. The long dirty hair hanging in dog’s tails each side of her face was doubtless crawling with infestation. It wasn’t healthy.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Lauren, ‘shall I see if I can get someone to help you?’

The woman stood up and took a few steps around the basket, towards Lauren. The muddy smell became stronger and the air, colder. It seemed to come out of this woman, the cold. There was an odour of rotting vegetation stirred up with the mud and the fish. Lauren wanted to look into the basket but the woman was standing in the way. Closer now, she lowered her voice, breathy, hissing.

‘There’s no one can help me. Not now. There was a time but that time passed, and now there’s more than time in between me and helping.’

The woman moved slightly and Lauren could see that the basket was full of rags, a nest of thick grey swaddling and she couldn’t see a face, not even a hand or a foot. She hoped the woman’s babies could breathe in there.

‘Maybe social services could find you somewhere to stay,’ said Lauren. ‘You can’t be alone with no help, it’s not right.’

‘I’ve been alone. I’ll be alone. What’s the difference?’

‘But the babies.’

They both looked at the basket. The bundle was shifting, folding in the shadows. One of Lauren’s boys sneezed from behind the curtain and she was unrooted.

‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to go, my baby.’

She leapt away from the woman, out of the cubicle, into the dry heat.

‘Your baby,’ said the woman. And she lunged, crossing the space between them in an instant. A bony hand gripped Lauren’s wrist and she tried to pull it free but she was jerked bodily back inside the curtain walls. They struggled, but the woman was stronger.

‘Let’s deal,’ hissed the horrible woman, bringing her face up close to Lauren. ‘What’s fair, after all? We had everything taken, you had everything given. Let’s change one for another.’

‘What?’

‘Give me one of yours. I’ll take care of it. You have one of mine, treat it like your own. One of mine at least would get a life for himself, a taste of something easy. What’s fair?’

‘You must be mad, why would I do that? Why would you?’ She pulled against the woman, their arms where they were joined rising and falling like waves in a storm. Nothing could shake her off. Lauren felt her skin pulling, grazing, tearing in the woman’s grasp, filthy nails scoring welts that she was certain would get infected, would likely scar. ‘Get off me,’ she said through gritted teeth. She would bite the woman’s fingers to make her let go. But they were disgusting.

‘Choose one,’ said the woman, ‘choose one or I’ll take them both. I’ll take yours and you can have mine. You’ll never know the difference. I can make sure they look just the same. One’s fair. Two is justice done.’

The sound that came out of Lauren was from a deep place. It burst from the kernel at the centre of her, the place all her desires were kept, and all her drive. It was the vocal incarnation of her darkest heart, no thoughts between it and its forceful projection into the grimacing face of the woman. A sound of horror, and protection, a mother’s instinct, and her love. The shape of the sound was No.

And in that moment the sound took her arm from the iron grip of the woman, her body away to the trolley where her babies lay, her feet to carry her and the sleeping twins into the hospital bathroom where she swung the handle into place to lock the door.

Chapter 5

July 15th

7.15 a.m.

Police Headquarters

Jo Harper parked her white Fiat Punto in the underground car park. The place was almost deserted, only a few civilian vehicles dotted about and a line of sleeping patrol cars against the far wall. A cool early-morning breeze flowed down the ramps from outside, shivering around her knees and elbows, and she hugged herself as she walked across to the doors. The outfit she wore was too brief for the current temperature but she knew she’d appreciate the light cotton knee-length skirt and short-sleeved shirt later on in the day when she was out and about in the full force of the sun.

She stood in the lift, nostrils full of the smell of the sun cream on her skin and the car park’s oily, mechanical odour, waiting for the four-digit security code to register. A long beep, the lift doors slammed shut and a second later she stepped into the foyer.

The uniformed desk sergeant looked up as she walked towards him. ‘Morning, Harper, early again I see.’

‘Just very, very diligent, Gregson, you should try it one day,’ she replied, with half a smile.

‘Ha ha. I’m here too, aren’t I?’

‘Yes you are, mate. And where would we be without you? We’d have to get an automatic door, for a start.’

Phil Gregson was probably ten or twelve years older than Harper, fifty or so, but the years had been less kind to him than they had been to her. Or perhaps he’d been less kind to himself. Either way he looked easily old enough to be her father.

‘What on earth are you wearing?’ He leaned over the desk to point at her feet.

She wiggled her toes. ‘Trainers.’

‘They are not trainers. They’re gloves. Rubber gloves for feet. They’re the weirdest things I’ve ever seen.’

‘They’re good. They’re for running better. Your feet are unrestricted, see?’ She wiggled her toes again.

‘Urg. Stop doing that. You won’t get away with those if Thrupp sees them.’

Harper curled her lip. She knew the five-toes trainers were a bit far out for work. She’d brought her shoes in her bag to change into before the boss arrived but she wanted to spend as much time ‘barefoot’ as possible. It was meant to improve your technique; she was competing in a half Ironman in a few weeks.

‘You can swim in them, too, you know.’

‘Fascinating,’ said Gregson, miming a big yawn.

Though the time Jo Harper spent outdoors had added wrinkles to her face, her body was lean and strong. Whereas Gregson looked as if he was gently melting into his swivel chair. Admittedly there may have been an element of genetic advantage – she had her mother’s great cheekbones and her father’s naturally not-yet-grey hair. Harper had slept with men older and greyer than Gregson, back when she’d thought she only liked men, but the desk sergeant elicited nothing more than a fond daughterly reflex in Harper that he no doubt would have been upset to be made aware of: she wanted to get him a haircut, feed him a salad and some peppermint tea, take him on a nice long walk and make sure he got an early night. Poor old Gregson, with his slowly broadening middle section held in by the wide black police utility belt, and his ear-length hair swept across the emerging scalp. Harper thought he could go up a size in shirts. Maybe two.

Harper made herself a bad coffee in a mug with a joke about dogs on it, the bottom of which got stuck to the tacky surface of the kitchenette that she shared with a hundred or more other officers, none of whom – from the evidence – knew how to work a cloth. The mug jerked as it came away, causing it to spill a little and scald her hand. She was still cursing when she reached her desk, but there was no one there to hear her; at that time in the morning the building was quiet, just the way she liked it. She took a sip of the too-hot liquid and grimaced, then fired up the system for her usual early-morning perusal of the overnight incidents. This was not technically part of her job as detective sergeant. It was a habit, a form of work-avoidance that she could just about justify because sometimes it threw up something interesting, something that hadn’t been handed to her by the DI.

The list from the previous night included the usual stuff – two calls from some angry people between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. about noisy neighbours. Three kinds of drunk people: one who called by accident, asking for a taxi; one who called on purpose, because they’d lost their mates in a nightclub and they wanted the police to help find them; and one exceptionally drunk person calling because there really was an emergency – his friend had been assaulted, then he’d collapsed and stopped breathing. This was where the skill of the operator was crucial, because it was so hard to tell the difference with drunk people. There were also several calls from stupid people (who were sometimes drunk, too, which didn’t help): one calling because the cat hadn’t come back, one because someone had refused to make tea when it was their turn.

Some of it was funny, but much of it was deadly serious. The list itself might have been indecipherable to a civilian at a glance, just columns of lingo dotted with police code and numerical data. But Harper could see that, hiding in the midst of the crank calls, were those entries heavy with the weight of human tragedy. The cold record of the moment a person decided they were not strong enough to deal with whatever was in front of them. These were genuine cries for help.

At the top of the last page, one of the items caught her interest. In the early hours there had been a call from a mobile phone located in the Royal Infirmary Hospital. It was marked as 4 – the lowest possible priority, judged to be a false alarm. But the description read ‘Attempted Child Abduction’ so she clicked on it. Reading the notes, her breath quickened.

Time: 0429: 999 report from a mobile phone

Details of Person Reporting: Lauren Tranter, address (unable to obtain)

Detail of Incident: reported intruder in maternity ward of Royal Infirmary, reported assault, reported attempted abduction of newborn twins. Reporter is calling from inside locked cubicle, both babies inside cubicle with reporter, intruder outside door attempting to breach

Opening Incident Classification: 1 (URGENT)

Action: hospital security alerted by telephone as first-on-scene

Action: mobile patrol officers alerted by radio e.t.a. 16 minutes

Time: 0444: contact by telephone from hospital security: false alarm: picked up by MHS

a. Action: Mobile Patrol cancelled by radio

6. Closing Incident Classification: 4 (NO ACTION REQUIRED)

MHS stood for Mental Health Services. So, whoever had called, the mother of the twins, was seeing things. Those with mental health issues often called the police, and it was quite often ‘picked up by MHS’. All seemed to be in order, in this case. The dispatcher had probably been correct in ranking it 4. Harper went back to the main screen, looked at the rest of the list. Drunk people, stupid people, Road Traffic Incidents. Nothing that needed her attention. Her cursor hovered over the red button in the corner of the programme window. Better be getting on with planning that training session I’m delivering later, she thought.

But she didn’t click the incident reporter shut and open PowerPoint, as she knew she ought to do. The call from the hospital was bothering her. A sliver of dread crept into her stomach, and she tried to dismiss it as ridiculous. But there it sat, black and heavy. Between the lines of text on the screen she read the mother’s fear, her sure knowledge that someone wanted to take her babies away. Harper couldn’t help but feel it herself, that threat of separation. Unthinkingly, she placed her hand low on her belly, where the skin had never quite tightened over the hard muscles beneath.

Perhaps she’d just make completely sure it was nothing, then she could forget about it and get on with her day. One phone call, that’s all it would take. Harper dialled the security service at the hospital.

After the introductions, the guy was nervy.

‘Oh, no, nothing to worry about, officer. The lady in the toilets? Maternity? She was just having a bad trip.’

‘She was on hallucinogenic drugs?’ Harper used a stern, alarmed tone.

‘No, no. No. She was, I dunno, spazzing out.’

‘She was . . . what?’

This what, delivered quietly but ripe with pointed incomprehension, implied a need for Dave, the security guy, to explain himself pretty quick and stop using such offensive out-dated language. Harper could pack a lot of meaning into one word. She was rather enjoying herself.

‘Look, officer, ma’am, I dunno what happened.’ Dave started talking too fast, about how ‘your lot’ had called him and said there was an intruder on the ward so he got up there sharpish. ‘I couldn’t understand how an intruder would get in – there’s a security door, and I hadn’t seen nothing on the monitor. I ran there, fast as I could – it’s about a mile from my office, you know. I made in it five minutes.’

Five minutes. The triathlete in her couldn’t help but think, not a bad time if it’s true, but he wasn’t about to get a medal from Harper for that. And, she didn’t put much stock in the fact that Dave hadn’t seen anything on his monitor. He sounded very jumpy. Very jumpy indeed. If she had to guess, she’d say he’d probably been asleep when the dispatch controller had rung him, when he should have been awake and alert for such emergencies.

When he’d got there, nothing. Just a ‘crazy woman in the toilet’. No intruder. ‘So I rang your lot back. I said, nothing doing here, the psychiatric team are dealing with it. Whoever I spoke to, they said they’d tell you, that they’d cancel it. Didn’t you people get the message?’

‘We got the message. I’m just following up on a few things, that’s all,’ said Harper.

Harper told Dave to get together the relevant CCTV on a disk for her, and that she would be there later today to pick it up.

‘Aw, man. I clock off in an hour, that’s going into my own time—’

‘Dave, I’ve asked you nicely. Please.’

She had a way with pleases. Dave capitulated, sulkily.

So, Dave the security guy said it was nothing. There was no one there, trying to abduct anyone’s baby. But the feeling of dread remained. If she was going to the hospital to get the disk anyway, she might as well have a chat with a few people at the same time. No hurry, of course. Maybe she’d go up at lunch time.

She glanced at the pile of notes she’d collated for the training she was supposed to be delivering, and then back at the incident on her screen. Then again, she thought, no time like the present.

Fifteen minutes after she’d first sat down she was up again, leaving her disgusting coffee to progress from undrinkably hot to undrinkably cold without her.

‘You off already, Harper? Not as diligent as all that then, are we?’ said Gregson as he buzzed her out of the building.

‘Oh fuck off, Gregson,’

He winked at her and she mimed making herself puke, then she stood in the lift again waiting for the long beep, the slamming doors, to shoot back down to the car park.

Chapter 6

The maternity ward doors were locked. Harper pressed the intercom. Enough time passed to make her consider pressing it again, but just as she reached for the button there was a burst of static and a flinty voice barked, ‘Yes?’

She gave her name and rank, and was buzzed through without another word.

A length of harshly lit corridor led to the central nurses’ station, which surveyed the openings to several bays. Each was designed to hold between four and six beds, but none of them were fully occupied. New mothers were here and there, sitting in chairs, sleeping. A bleary-eyed man walked past gingerly, wearing a blank expression, holding a pink flowery wash bag.

There was the sound of crying babies and a strong smell of antiseptic. The ceilings seemed very low. Harper got a sense that there was not enough air to breathe comfortably, and the strip lights were giving her a headache. For a fleeting moment, she was cast back to her own brief time in a different maternity ward, back to another life that no longer seemed like her own.

Harper had been nearly fourteen when she’d discovered she was pregnant, and by then it was too late to think about abortion. Her parents were shocked, but they never said an unsupportive word to her. As for the baby, she was kept in the family, adopted by her parents who themselves had tried and failed for years to conceive a second child. Her ‘sister’ Ruby was twenty-six now, and though her biological origins were not a secret, the four of them kept to the script. On the surface they were just like any other family: Mum, Dad, and two kids. It wasn’t talked about, and they rubbed along fairly well. The scars didn’t show. At least, Harper thought they didn’t. She kept a lid on it, good and tight, and it was only in moments like these that it all came flooding back. She remembered the maternity ward, where she’d been given a private room. The pain of the labour, and the kind eyes of the nurses who cared for her. She tried to forget the boy she had loved, who had been lost to her completely from the moment he found out about the pregnancy. His closed, childish face, his total rejection. She remembered her mother’s face when she held the baby for the first time, the gratitude and the love in it. She tried to forget her instinct to snatch the baby back and run away, somewhere that she could be a mother properly, not a child, not a sister.

Harper checked herself. She allowed herself one deep breath and pushed the surfacing feelings back in the box, where they belonged.

When she reached the sweeping semicircle of desk, she flashed her warrant card at the uniformed woman behind it, and noted that the woman’s name badge read: Anthea Mallison, Midwife.

‘Yes?’

It was the same sharp ‘Yes’ that had shot from the static at the door.

‘I’m here about Lauren Tranter,’ said Harper.

‘Bay three, bed C,’ said Anthea. The ‘Yes’ had gone up at the end, a demand for information. ‘Bed C’ went down, with a strong sense of conclusion. Anthea Mallison, Midwife was done here. Her eyes had barely left the screen.

Over at Bay three, a man in a grey shirt was leaving. He fixed his eyes on the ward exit doors and headed straight towards them, radiating busy. Harper stood in his way.

‘Excuse me,’ said the man, meaning get out of my way. He wore an ID on a lanyard. Harper caught the word psychiatrist as he stepped sideways to go around her.

She stepped sideways with him as if in a dance, blocking him, holding up her warrant card. ‘Hello, I’m DS Harper. I won’t keep you. And you are?’

Irritated, by the look of you, thought Harper. And tired. Very, very tired.

‘Dr Gill. I’m the duty psychiatrist. And I’m afraid I’ve just had an emergency call, so I really must leave, I’m sorry.’

There was a time, probably only ten or so years ago, when DS Harper’s delicate stature and artfully messed-up blond ponytail caused people to utter that line about police officers getting younger every day. The comments trailed off as the years passed, and now they didn’t seem to happen anymore, ever. She was thinking about what it might mean for her, that not only had people stopped saying she looked young for her profession but that this doctor – this fully qualified, adult doctor standing in front of her now, looked about twelve.

Dr Gill tried to side-step her once again, but she went with him. He sighed in frustration.

Harper spoke quickly. ‘This won’t take long,’ she assured him, ‘no need to worry. A patient, Mrs Tranter, called 999 this morning. Is there anything you can tell me about that?’

‘Yes,’ said Dr Gill, apparently pleased to be able to provide a speedy answer, ‘it was a medical emergency, not a police matter. I had hoped someone would contact you about it.’

‘They did, but I wasn’t quite clear about the circumstances.’

‘Well, that’s standard, you wouldn’t be. It’s confidential. All I can tell you is that the patient in question, when she called you, was experiencing problems relating to a temporary impairment of her mental health.’

‘So, nothing to do with an intruder?’

A flicker of incredulity crossed the face of Dr Gill, before the curtain of professionalism dropped down. Very tired indeed.

‘In my field, officer, patients often see things that are not there. And a lot of the time they call the police about it, believing what they see to be real. I’m surprised you haven’t come across it before.’

Harper gave the child-doctor a long look. She wondered how old she would have to be for him not to talk down to her. But then, maybe that was it. Maybe she was already so old at thirty-nine that he saw her as a geriatric, losing the plot.

‘Can I talk to her?’

As he shrugged a don’t-see-why-not, something vibrated in Dr Gill’s pocket and he pulled out a small device, checking its screen. ‘Look, I’ve really got to go. You go ahead though, officer. On the left, by the window. She’s a bit sleepy because we gave her a mild tranquilliser to calm her down. But she’ll talk to you. I’m sure you’ll find there’s nothing to worry the police with.’

As Dr Gill strode away, Harper flipped open her notebook and wrote the words: Dr Gill: sceptic. 8.07 a.m. Royal Infirmary Hospital.

In some areas of the police service they had devices with note-taking apps, but nothing could beat a paper notebook. It meant that Harper could burn her notes if she needed to. The fact you could no longer erase things properly from computers or phones meant her job was easier in a way and harder in another, depending on which side of the fence one stood and whether or not one had anything to hide. She herself didn’t usually have things to hide, of course. But it was nice to have the option.

The bay had four cubicles, but only two had beds in them. In cubicle A there was a red-haired woman, her baby’s hair even brighter than her own. Diagonally across, by the window, the woman in cubicle C sat in bed holding two sleeping infants, one in the crook of each arm. Brown hair, very curly, long enough to cloud around her shoulders. Late twenties, light brown skin, silver wedding band. Harper couldn’t tell height and weight with any accuracy while Mrs Tranter was sitting but she seemed average, perhaps a tad taller than average. Her face was slack, motionless. The babies were paler in complexion than their mother, and both had wisps of curly blond hair. One was dressed in a green sleep suit and the other in yellow.

There was a spot of blood seeping through a bandage on Mrs Tranter’s left wrist. She was dressed in a hospital gown. On the floor between the bed and the wall there was an open suitcase spilling its contents – baby clothes, nappies and what were presumably Mrs Tranter’s own clothes. She’d dressed the babies, but not herself.

Something about her face reminded Harper of a photograph she had of her own mother as a young woman; the large brown eyes rimmed with sadness, gazing softly into the distance, unreachable. Harper was gentle when she spoke.

‘Lauren Tranter?’

The woman turned her head towards Harper’s voice. As the seconds slipped by, she gradually came to focus. It seemed a gargantuan effort. Lazily, her eyelids dropped shut and opened again, the slow blink of the drugged.

‘Yes.’

‘My name’s Jo Harper. I’m a police officer. I’m here to talk to you about last night.’

‘Oh.’

Lauren’s gaze drifted down towards the baby in yellow, and then across to the other. They were identical.

She said, ‘I thought they called you. I thought they told you not to come.’

‘They did,’ Harper smiled, gave a little shrug, ‘but I came anyway. It’s my duty to investigate when there’s been a report of a serious incident. You called 999 at half past four this morning, or thereabouts? The report mentioned an attempted child abduction.’

Mrs Lauren Tranter’s face crumpled. Tears cleaned a path to her chin. ‘I did call.’

Harper waited for her to go on. A machine was beeping in the next bay. The sound of footsteps in the hallway, a door banging.

Awkwardly, Lauren wiped her nose with the back of a hand, getting a bit of wet on the yellow-dressed baby’s arm. ‘But they said it wasn’t real. It didn’t happen. They said I imagined it. I’m so sorry.’

‘It must have been very frightening for you,’ said Harper.

‘Terrifying.’ The word out came out on a sigh. Lauren searched Harper’s face, looking for an answer to some unasked question.

‘You were right to call.’ Harper laid a hand on the younger woman’s arm, not making contact with any part of the baby she held there, but the mother flinched at the touch and the sudden movement shocked the baby, whose eyes flew open, its arms and legs briefly rigid before they slowly drew in again as Harper watched. The baby in green on the other side rubbed the back of its head on its mother’s arm, side to side, yawning and rolling its tongue into a tube. The little eyes remained closed.

‘Sorry,’ said Lauren, ‘I’m a bit jumpy.’

‘Don’t worry. You’ve been through a lot, I get it.’

‘I’m really tired. I didn’t get much sleep, not last night, not since I had them. I’m not complaining though. It’s worth it, right?’

‘Right,’ said Harper, ‘they’re beautiful. When were they born?’

‘Saturday night.’ She nodded to the one in yellow. ‘Morgan was born at 8.17. His little brother came out at 8.21. He’s called Riley.’

‘Lovely,’ said Harper. She scrabbled for a platitude to fill the silence. ‘Well, you’ve certainly got your hands full there.’

Lauren turned her eyes on Harper. ‘Do you have children?’ she asked.

Harper didn’t know why she didn’t answer immediately. All her life she’d been answering immediately, giving the same almost stock response, No, not me, I’m not the maternal type, said in a way that made it clear she didn’t want any more questions. Today was different somehow; Lauren wasn’t making small talk. She wasn’t implying, like some people did, that Harper’s biological clock was all but ticked out. She was asking Do you understand what just happened to me? Standing there in front of Lauren Tranter, so devoid of artifice, not just hoping but needing the answer to be Yes, yes I do, the truth was on her tongue. But she swallowed it.

‘No, not really,’ she said, immediately hearing how stupid that sounded. Not really? What did that mean? Lauren made a small frown but didn’t say anything more. Harper went on, ‘I’ve got a little sister. A lot younger than me. So I guess I sometimes think of her as my kid. But no, I don’t have any children of my own.’

Lauren’s eyebrows went up and she seemed to drift away, unfocussed. Newly etched lines mapped the contours under her eyes, the topography of her recent trauma.

After a moment Harper said, ‘What happened to your wrist?’

The spot of blood on the bandage had grown from the size of a pea to the size of a penny in the time Harper had been standing there.

‘Well, she, the woman, she . . .’ Lauren seemed confused. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Did someone hurt you?’

Lauren turned her head towards the window. Across the car park people were shuffling in and out of the big glass doors, needlessly high doors that dwarfed the people below. The doors were opening, shutting, opening, shutting, reflecting the morning sun as they met and flashing, leaving orange spots in Harper’s eyes. Lauren kept her eyes wide open into the blinding light.

‘That man, Dr Gill. He said I did it to myself.’

‘And what do you think, Mrs Tranter?’

‘I think . . . ’ She looked down at the babies and up at the detective sergeant. Big, sad, frightened eyes, streaming tears. ‘I don’t think I can trust what I think right now.’

Chapter 7

A beam of the slant west sunshine

Made the wan face almost fair

Lit the blue eyes’ patient wonder

And the rings of pale gold hair

She kissed it on lip and forehead

She kissed it on cheek and chink

And she bared her snow-white bosom

To the lips so pale and thin

FROM The Changeling

BY JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

Ten o’clock, visiting time. From her hospital bed Lauren observed a column of fuzzy colours approaching her and tried to focus. The fuzz resolved into the familiar shape of Patrick. It felt like years had passed since she’d last seen him.

‘My God,’ said Patrick, ‘what have they done to you?’

‘It’s fine, everything’s fine,’ said Lauren, but all that came out were broken sobs, the incoherent hupping yowls of an injured creature. Soon it subsided, trickled to whimpers. He stroked her hair.

‘Shh, lovely,’ said Patrick, keeping his voice low. On the other side of the bay, a jubilant party of assorted family was gathering around Mrs Gooch’s bed. Chairs were pulled across for older Gooches. Two smallish ginger children each possessively gripped ribbons attached to shiny silver balloons that trailed near the ceiling, announcing in bubblegum-pink lettering: It’s a Girl! One of the balloon-bearers stared slack-jawed at Lauren so that the lolly dangling from his open mouth nearly fell out.

‘Shh. I know,’ said Patrick, unaware of the gaping child at his back.

Another version of Lauren would have stared back until the boy looked away. This new, broken Lauren just shut her eyes.

Patrick said, ‘They left a message on my phone, but I didn’t get it until this morning. What happened?’

Lauren couldn’t respond to that immediately. She was floored by another wave of sobbing. A red-haired man – perhaps a new uncle of Mrs Gooch’s baby girl – cheered loudly as he rounded the corner into the bay, holding aloft an ostentatious bunch of lilies. Mrs Gooch glanced pointedly at Lauren and the cheering man said, ‘What?’ and ‘Oh,’ as he looked in their direction. Patrick turned and briskly pulled the curtain around, giving everyone the relief of the impression of privacy. After a time, words pushed through Lauren’s swollen throat in bits.

‘I don’t know why I keep crying. I’m fine, I’ll be fine. Nothing happened. I think I’m going mad, that’s all.’

She gave a mirthless laugh, holding on tightly to her husband, making dark patches of wet and snot on the shoulder of his shirt. Patrick smelled of tea tree shampoo and his own slightly smoky scent. He smelled like home.

‘Lauren, my heart,’ said Patrick as he held Lauren’s face between his hands and smiled down at her. ‘You were mad before.’

That made her laugh for real, and the bad spell was broken. They both laughed, and then Lauren was crying again, and Patrick wiped her eyes with a wad of the cheap hospital tissues from the box by the bed. At that moment, the babies were almost as serene as Mrs Gooch’s. She really didn’t know why she kept crying. It didn’t make sense, when she saw what she and Patrick had made.

Patrick moved towards the cot. ‘Morning, boys,’ he said. ‘I hope you’ve been kind to your mother.’ He turned back to Lauren. ‘Did they keep you awake?’

‘Of course they did. They’re babies.’

Her vision began to swim and sway, her eyelids felt heavy.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, but his voice was muffled and far away. Sorry for what, she thought.

When she opened her eyes he was on the other side of the bed. Odd, she thought, I don’t remember falling asleep. A few seconds had gone, snap, a filmic scene change.

‘I spoke to my mother this morning,’ he was saying. ‘She sends her love. She wanted me to tell you, you did really well, you know, most women would have gone straight for a C-section.’

Lauren would never stop wishing that she had done just that. She couldn’t go back now, nothing would change what had happened during the birth, her stupid decisions, her worthless birth plan. But the regret was heavy on her. She felt like a fool for defying the consultant, even as she blamed him for planting the doubts in her mind, about whether she was capable, whether she would succeed. Perhaps if he’d believed in her from the start, she would have been fine.

‘If it was me giving birth to twins,’ the consultant had said, ‘I’d have a C-section.’

Ridiculous. He was a man. How could he know what it was like to give birth?

‘Thanks,’ she’d said, ungratefully. ‘I’ll think about it.’

My body knows what it’s doing, she thought. I’ll let nature take its course. I think I can trust in myself to be able to push these babies out on my own. People have been doing this since people have existed. How hard can it really be? Everyone has to be born, right?

Idiot. She hadn’t done well. She’d been washed through the birth, powerless, on a tide of modern medical intervention. They’d done well, the numerous, nameless nurses, midwives, doctors – without them she would have died, and the babies, too. But Lauren? She didn’t feel that she’d done anything but fail.

‘You’re a hero, honey,’ said Patrick. ‘You deserve a medal.’

I do not, thought Lauren. But she smiled, pasting it thinly over her pain.

After a moment, Patrick asked, ‘When are you coming out?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Lauren. ‘I don’t know when they’ll let me.’

‘They don’t have to let you. You can discharge yourself.’

The idea seemed absurd. Lauren had assumed they were in charge. ‘Can I?’

‘Of course. It’s not prison.’

Home. She could go home.

‘I want to go home,’ said Lauren.

‘Let’s go.’

Lauren gaped at him. ‘Really?’

‘Yeah. Why not? I brought the car seats. I’ll go and get them.’

‘Honestly Patrick, I don’t think they’ll let me. What about the bleed, when they took me back into theatre—’

‘Of course they will. You’re OK now, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Well then.’

‘And there’s the other thing,’ she said, ‘the tranquilliser. I’m still a bit high, to tell the truth.’

Patrick examined the size of Lauren’s pupils.

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Better.’

‘The hospital didn’t say what it was, in the message, only that you became very upset and needed some medication. Did something happen to you?’

Yes, thought Lauren, someone tried to take our babies. I escaped. No one else saw. But then, it wasn’t true, everyone said so. They said it was a hallucination. And yet it seemed so real.

‘Lauren?’

She’d been gazing, blurry-eyed, into the middle distance. For how long? She tried to remember what Patrick had asked her.

‘What did you say?’

‘I said that you can tell me, whatever it is. Did something happen last night?’

A flash of cold, a blinding light. Lauren’s nostrils filled with that muddy fish smell. Goosebumps, as all the hair on her arms stood up. Could it have been real?

‘No,’ she said, ‘not really. I thought I saw something. I thought there was someone here who couldn’t have been. Doesn’t matter now.’

‘Of course it matters,’ said Patrick, leaning in, all concern. ‘It sounds scary, you mean like a waking dream or something?’

‘Yes, I think so. I wasn’t asleep though – I hadn’t slept, I haven’t slept properly in three days—’

‘Well, that’s it then, isn’t it? You’re not crazy, you just need some sleep.’

Yes. That was it. So obvious.

Patrick went on, ‘No one can sleep in hospital, it’s so hot and noisy. You know, I read an article about sleep deprivation, it’s more important than you think, to get good rest. No-brainer, really.’

Fatigue rolled over Lauren, pressing her down into the hard mattress, pulling on her eyelids, stinging her eyes.

‘I feel like I’ll never sleep again.’

‘Oh, but don’t worry. It’s not forever, it’s only for a few weeks. Then the sleep gets better.’

This seemed impossible. ‘Really? Only a few weeks?’

‘That’s what Mother said. I slept through the night at six weeks, apparently.’

‘You did?’

‘And, if you come home, you’ll have all our own bedding, our own loo. I’ll be there to help.’

Lauren felt the tantalising pull of normality, but she was a patient now. It was her duty to lie there and be treated. She’d been institutionalised, in two days flat.

‘I want to. But I’m not sure I’m ready. I think, maybe I should stay, just for a few more days . . . ’

Patrick took hold of one of Lauren’s hands, where a drip needle attachment was taped in place. ‘Lauren, honey. It’s a big deal, having a baby. Having two at the same time is huge. But. You’ll be better off at home. I don’t like the idea that you were here, all alone, seeing things and losing it in the middle of the night. You need to be where I can make sure you’re OK.’

Lauren was thinking about the emergency, the bleed. If she’d been at home then she might have died. A tear dropped onto her front. They seemed to come so easily. ‘I think I might need to stay here,’ she said, thinking: near the drugs. Near the doctors.

‘You hate hospitals. And, no offence but, you stink. No one’s looking out for you here. Has anyone even offered to run you a bath?’

She hadn’t thought about the bathroom. She couldn’t go back in there. Just hearing him mention the bath caused the fear to rise again. It put her straight back to the night before, when she’d been sitting in the bathtub, rocking her two babies under the strobing strip-light as the locked door was opened from the outside and a dark figure came towards her. No no no no get away get away from me. She’d screamed and screamed. But it wasn’t her, it wasn’t the disgusting black-tongued woman, it was a nurse and behind her a man in a green uniform, then there were others, crowding into the small room, more nurses, and a doctor, but she kept screaming, searching the shadows behind and between them. Where is she? Where’s that woman, the one with the basket? Get her away from me, I’m not going back out there, I’m not, I’m not—

‘There’s no one there,’ someone kept saying. ‘Look, see for yourself.’

The crowd opened up, various people stepped aside so there was a clear view. She looked and looked, through the open door into the bay. Things kept happening in her peripheral vision. Near the ceiling, something was hanging from sticky feet, reaching long fingers to curl through the gaps in the air vent, but when she looked straight at it there was nothing there, only a shadow, a cobweb. A pedal bin became a squatting demon when she looked away, then became a bin again when she looked back. She knew she was breathing too fast because the nurse kept saying, ‘Breathe slowly, Lauren,’ and her heart, her racing heart, she thought it might burst.

The man she later learned was Dr Gill held a white paper cup to her mouth and tipped in two blue pills, then held up another of water to wash them down.

‘What did you give me?’ she asked, holding the pills behind her teeth.

‘They’ll help you to calm down and think straight,’ said the doctor.

She swallowed hard, the pills sticking in her throat despite the water, a dry, bitter taste. But the panic was lifting. The woman had gone.

‘You’re safe, Mrs Tranter. Come out of the bath now.’

She wasn’t going to hand the babies over to anyone so they pulled her up as best they could and helped her step down from the bath onto the floor. Through the open bathroom door, she could see that the curtain, which had been drawn around the cubicle where she’d seen the woman, was back against the wall, exactly where it had been all day. The dawn had bloomed and bathed the room in buttercup yellow.

Everything was clean, surfaces spotless but nevertheless she thought she could detect a damp smell of mildew. Strong hands led her back to bed, past the chair where the woman had been sitting. No, where she thought she’d seen the woman sitting. As she shuffled past, with a baby son gripped in each arm, the nurse and the security guard holding her upright, she saw, she thought she saw, three silverfish spiralling out from the centre of the pale green vinyl seat in an almost synchronised wheel. She heard a clattering, a rapid tick-ticking sound of hundreds of tiny insect feet, which she surely must have imagined, and they disappeared over the edges of the chair and into its crevices.

‘Lauren? Are you OK?’ Patrick’s voice was distant, as if heard through a wall. The ward and the people in it had dissolved slightly, back into blocks of smudged colour.

A thought occurred to her. If the woman with the basket was real, she might come back again. No one had stopped her, no one saw her. Not the nurses, not the patients. After DS Harper had left this morning, Lauren had asked Mrs Gooch, tentatively, if she’d seen anyone on the ward in the night who shouldn’t have been there. The other woman had shaken her head slowly and given a long and ponderous ‘no’, implying that even the question was insane. ‘I heard you, um, shouting,’ said Mrs Gooch. ‘That was what woke me up. I couldn’t really see what was going on, because the curtain was pulled across, but there wasn’t anyone suspicious here, I’m quite sure of that. This is a secure ward. Are you . . . OK now?’

‘I’m fine,’ Lauren had said, hearing the tremor in her own voice, smiling to cover it up. Mrs Gooch had cleared her throat nervously, and although Lauren wanted to ask her about whether she heard the singing, she sensed that any more questions would only make Mrs Gooch more uncomfortable.

So, the creepy woman was sly. She knew how to get past security, how to make sure she wasn’t seen by anyone. Therefore, Lauren should go home, where the woman would not think to look, and wouldn’t be able to come after her. That was the answer.

That’s if it was real. But the drugs, and the daylight, had created a distance, allowed her to look at what happened from both sides. It had seemed real, but really it couldn’t have been, because if it were then someone else would have seen the creepy woman. The singing would have woken Mrs Gooch, before the shouting did. Security was tight on the ward – the woman would have had to get herself buzzed through the locked doors, then walk right past the nurse on the desk. So it couldn’t be. But if it wasn’t real then it was inside her head and it would be there inside her head no matter where she went, wouldn’t it? And, at home, there were no blue pills.

Everything snapped into sharp focus. She gazed into Patrick’s worried face. ‘What if it happens again?’ said Lauren, ‘What if I start seeing things, or . . . ’

Patrick was shaking his head, making a shh sound, and he said, ‘Take each day as it comes. You can’t stay here until you’re sane. You won’t ever leave.’

The joke was delivered deadpan, as usual, and took a moment to register. A mischievous smile played on his lips as he waited for her to laugh. But she couldn’t, not this time. It was too close to the truth. Maybe they would keep her here until they thought she was sane. Perhaps she ought to leave now, while she still had the chance.

Chapter 8

Harper sank into the swivel chair in her office and flipped her notebook open on the desk.

‘Where the bloody hell have you been, Jo?’

She flipped the notebook shut again and turned to smile sweetly at Detective Inspector Thrupp, who filled the doorframe with his grey-suited form. His blue tie was askew, as usual. He tugged at it now, loosening it further – by the end of the day it was usually completely undone and flung over one shoulder like a very thin decorative scarf.

‘Sorry, boss, just following up on a lead.’

‘Phil Gregson says you came in at seven and left again at twenty past. Now it’s nine forty. I’ve been waiting.’

‘That’s right, sir. There was a report overnight of an attempted child abduction at the hospital, so I went down to take a statement from the complainant.’

‘What child abduction?’

‘Turned out to be nothing really, sir. The woman was having some kind of psychotic episode.’

‘Couldn’t the hospital have told you that? Wasn’t it marked as low priority on the system?’

‘I thought it sounded odd, sir. Something a bit off, maybe. Worth a visit anyway, just to make sure.’

Thrupp was frowning. ‘I’ve told you before, Jo. You need to wait for my instructions before you go off interviewing people on a whim. There’s a pile of paperwork to get through, and no time to do it. Plus there’s the training session later on, which I trust you will be fully prepped for. You could have sent a uniform.’

He was right, of course. She should probably have sent a patrol officer to take the statement – then if anything needed to be followed up on, she could have opened an investigation. But so much was lost in the transcription. She liked to be able to look into the faces of complainants, to see the things they chose not to say. The length of pauses. The guilty glances. Lauren Tranter wasn’t guilty of anything, but Harper could have filled a notebook with the things she did not say.

Giving an innocent smile, she tapped the pile of papers in her in-tray. ‘I’m on it now sir, don’t you worry.’

She swivelled to face her computer monitor, which lit up at a flick of the mouse. From the corner of her eye she observed the senior officer as he stood in the doorway, before sighing deeply, shaking his head and then walking away.

The instant he was out of sight she searched in her satchel, found the disk she’d picked up from security at the hospital and pushed it into the computer. After a few seconds, a grainy image of a hospital corridor appeared. The clock at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen read 03.38. There was the nurse’s station, and there was the midwife, Anthea Mallison, in the exact same pose she’d been in when Harper had met her in person, hunched in front of the monitor. The green and white hue of the CCTV footage showed her face illuminated behind the desk by the glow from the computer screen.

She watched for a while. Nothing happened except the clock slowly marking the minutes.

Harper forwarded the video to 04.15. There. Something ran across the floor, taking the same route that Harper herself had taken earlier in the day, towards the bay where Mrs Tranter and Mrs Gooch were installed, bay three. She backed up the video and ran it again. A flash of something, rodent-like, blink and you’d miss it. The midwife kept her eyes on the screen and didn’t flinch. There seemed to be a streak of them, whatever they were – more than one, anyway, flowing past the nurse’s station. They’d have been right in her eye line. On the screen, Mallison made no reaction whatsoever.

Harper examined the section frame by frame, stopping it where three blurred smudges swam across the floor. The way they flickered, caught between two frames, they looked like big black fish. Shadows of fish. Maybe they were shadows, something flying across the light above rather than on the floor – that might also explain why Mallison didn’t react. They might have been moths, or big flies or something. Harper watched it again, in real time. She shook her head, watched it once more. It could easily have been a blip; a digital anomaly, nothing at all. So why did she feel the hair rise on the back of her neck?

Mallison had said she was in the staff loo just before Lauren’s crisis, which is why she didn’t notice anything unusual happening in the bay – Mrs Tranter would have made quite a bit of noise when she panicked and pulled the babies with her into the bathroom. Sure enough, on the tape, the midwife left her post to go to the loo at 04.21, and was still absent from the frame at 04.29, when Lauren’s 999 call was made. Harper stared hard at the screen and wished she could hear what was happening, but there was no audio. The midwife did not return to her post for another six minutes, when she sat down and started typing again. One minute after that, at 04.37, Dave appeared in his security guard’s uniform, using the desk to brake as if he’d been running – so he did in fact make it there in about five minutes, if you allowed him a minute or two to be on the phone with dispatch. Dave almost head-butted Mallison as the momentum carried his top half forward, and then the two of them rushed towards bay three, disappearing out of the camera’s view, to get Lauren out of the bathroom where she’d locked herself before dialling for help. Harper was frustrated that the camera didn’t cover the bay. If it had, she could have seen exactly what happened in there between 04.15 and 04.29. That poor woman had seemed deeply traumatised by whatever it was.

But why was she so curious about what couldn’t be seen by the camera? After all, according to the nurse, Lauren’s real trauma had happened in the two days before: the birth, the haemorrhage, the lack of sleep. If Harper could have seen what was happening in the bay it would have been a film of a woman losing her mind. No one needed to see that.

But those shadows. She shivered. Something about this case didn’t feel right.

She took an investigative materials envelope and filled in the details on the front, before burning a copy of the CCTV footage and slipping the disk inside. She had to know what the shadows were, and Forensics would be able to tell her. Hesitating over the funding authorisation box, Harper looked over her shoulder to check no one was coming before she signed an expertly practised facsimile of DI Thrupp’s signature, adding his officer number.

Turning back to her screen she opened the email from Records with the mp3 recording of the 999 call Lauren had made from inside the bathroom. Harper hadn’t been able to get much out of Mrs Tranter at the hospital, and it wasn’t just because the woman had been medicated up to her eyeballs. Mrs Tranter was holding back, certainly. Maybe there was something Harper could learn from hearing exactly what Lauren had said to the emergency operator. Maybe the mp3 would stop the internal detector from twitching.

She didn’t like to call it a hunch. Hunch sounded clichéd, like something out of a bad detective novel. What she had was a keenly developed sense of intuition, one that wasn’t always based on hard evidence, but that she’d learned to trust over the years. Her bosses didn’t trust it, however: Harper’s intuition, while it sometimes resulted in arrests, never seemed to have a warrant, or a decent evidential paper trail. DI Thrupp was particularly sore about a recent case in which some evidence had been gathered in a less than orthodox fashion.

Harper had been driving home from the office when something suspicious caught her eye. The disused warehouse could be seen from the road and she drove past it every day, but on this occasion the car parked in the usually empty lot stood out: the distinctive yellow Mercedes belonged to a suspect in a fraud case she was working. Harper had parked out of sight and approached covertly – alone and without back-up. When she got close enough, she overheard a conversation within the warehouse, which she had recorded, despite not having the correct permission to do so. Then, without shouting the standard police warning, Harper had kicked down the door, discovering two men who had just been discussing how much to pay for the huge container of counterfeit cigarettes they were standing in front of. Harper was acutely aware that the growing tobacco black market had links to organised crime and helped to fund terrorism. The people involved in it – the men she had caught – didn’t care that the product was often contaminated with asbestos, rat droppings and mould, or that the smokes were frequently made in overseas factories that used forced child labour. It was easy money; often easier than smuggling drugs, as even if the lorries were stopped, the dogs at the ports weren’t looking for tobacco.

One of the men, the fraud suspect, they’d been tracking for almost a year. The other one was a local businessman, very well connected, with no police record despite several extremely close calls and an intelligence file back at the station nearly an inch thick. The arrest was a huge bonus for the force, more so when they examined the truck and found that several of the cartons right at the centre of the stack didn’t contain cigarettes but raw cocaine – more than ten kilos of the stuff. But. There was no previous evidence trail, no warrant. The conversation, however damning, had been recorded without the go-ahead from any senior officer.

With both men cuffed in the back of her car, Harper had rung Thrupp.

‘I need verbal authorisation for a surveillance operation,’ she’d said.

‘You’ll need to speak to Hetherington. I don’t have the rank for that.’

‘I think you might, in extreme circumstances, if a superintendent isn’t available, if authorisation is needed urgently, sir.’

‘How urgent is it?’

‘How can I put this. It’s kind of . . . retrospective.’

The bollocking she’d got was immense. At first, he’d outright refused to help her, was prepared to let both the case and Harper’s career suffer the consequences. But eventually she’d talked him round. Hetherington would certainly have given the go-ahead, she’d said, only there hadn’t been time to contact him. There were literally one or two seconds between discovering the crime and her decision to act. The authorisation issue was only a case of delayed admin, if he could just see it that way. If she’d left it any longer, the shipment would have been shipped, they’d have lost the ringleader for another six months, and maybe never have caught the other guy at all.

So, through gritted teeth, Thrupp had logged a written authorisation for the surveillance, citing that Hetherington had been temporarily uncontactable. He had tweaked the timecode in the report to make it look legit so it could be used as evidence in the court case, where both of the suspects received custodials. Harper was sure that the DI would be pleased after that. But no. He could barely look her in the eye. During the process for submitting evidence, the super had questioned the report, but had signed it off because it was Thrupp, his old pal and golf buddy. It was embarrassing, though, for both men, and Thrupp was still angry about having to ask a favour in a way that made him look unprofessional. She reckoned he planned to stay angry until the end of time. Once everyone had stopped congratulating Harper, she’d been punished, restricted to desk duties for eleven weeks, and only escaped a disciplinary by a whisker.

She wasn’t sorry, though. Even after all of that, she knew she’d been right to do what she did, and what’s more she knew she’d do it again, or something similar, if her intuition was strong enough.

The babies, though. The babies muddied the waters, and she knew it. So much so, that she wasn’t certain she could read the signals properly. She couldn’t tell if she felt so strongly about this case because a criminal needed to be apprehended, or because there were babies in potential danger.

‘Jo, get your stuff.’ It was Thrupp.

‘What’s up, sir?’

‘There’s an incident down at Kelham Island. Uniform have been dealing with it but they need our input. You can drive.’

‘What’s going on?’ It was unusual for a DI to be summoned to an incident. It only happened when there was something high level, like a hostage situation, or something to do with organised crime, where strategic leads were required on the ground.

‘Some kiddie on the roof of one of the disused factories. Reported initially as a suicide attempt. Apparently it’s escalated.’

‘Escalated how?’ said Harper.

‘It’s not enough to kill yourself, is it? Not when you can take out a building and a whole load of members of the public, too. Couple of police officers, maybe, for extra points. He says he’s got a bomb, and he wants a bloody helicopter.’

‘What’s the helicopter for, sir?’

‘I don’t know, do I? Sounds to me like he wants to blow one up. Jesus. I don’t have time for this.’

Harper pocketed her notebook and swung her bag over a shoulder before jumping up and heading for the door.

‘Wait,’ said Thrupp.

‘What is it?’

‘Change those ridiculous bloody shoes. Now.’

‘Sorry, guv.’

‘Did you go out in those this morning?’

‘Um,’ said Harper, slipping the rubbery five-toes trainers off and her sensible shoes on. ‘No?’

Thrupp shook his head almost all the way to the lift. She started to jog to keep up with him, his enormously long legs giving him an advantage when it came to striding.

As Harper and Thrupp buzzed across town, down into the valley to quell disaster and keep the peace, the computer in Harper’s office blinked and went to sleep. The email from Records containing Lauren’s 999 call shuffled unnoticed into the ‘read’ section of her inbox, pressed down by the weight of the unread, soon to be consigned to the oblivion of Page Two.

Chapter 9

The man lay half on the pavement, limbs twisted, head smashed. Blood pooled darkly, forming tendrils that crawled towards a drain. Harper started walking towards the body but was stopped by a uniformed officer.

‘Sorry, Jo. We need to wait for bomb disposal to finish.’

The jacket the dead man wore was made of black nylon, and clung to what was left of him like a second skin. However, procedures were important. It was a further fifteen minutes before the bomb squad could safely confirm what could be plainly seen: there was no explosive device in the man’s jacket. There never had been. At the all-clear she stepped forward to close the staring eyes, then helped to cover the body before it was bagged and transported to the morgue.

The first journalist on the scene was also a friend, Amy Larsen, veteran of a great many of Harper’s crime scenes over the last three years and chief reporter for the big local weekly, the Sheffield Mail. Amy, who as usual was fully made up, chic and elegant in a pencil skirt and heels, held her recording device in front of Harper’s mouth. The sergeant frowned at it and tried to move away but Amy followed her.

‘Tell me about the kid. What brought him to this?’

Harper said, ‘We don’t know much about him at the moment. He’s young, probably in his early twenties. That’s all we’ve got.’

‘A tragic suicide? Nothing more ominous than that?’ Her ironic tone implied she didn’t believe that line for a second.

‘We’re investigating the circumstances, the identity of the victim and so on. But at this moment we don’t think there’s anyone else involved.’

‘So why did the police decide to bring in the armed response team?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.’

Amy rolled her eyes and huffed. ‘What can you tell me?’

‘Only that we are treating the death as unexplained, but not suspicious.’

Harper would have said more, but she was trained to minimise potentially inflammatory lines of questioning when dealing with the press. She was supposed only to release the very blandest of information. Amy knew this. It was a game they played: a gentle volley of questions and responses, the journalist trying for the topspin, the police officer stoically returning straight lobs.

‘Come on, Harper. This wasn’t just a suicide, was it? The police don’t behave like that, shutting the roads, evacuating buildings – not for a jumper. I’m sure I saw a bomb-disposal unit. Did you think he had a bomb?’

Harper put her hand over the top of the recording device. ‘I can’t tell you anything more about the incident. We don’t even know his name yet. I’m sorry.’

Amy rolled her eyes, turned off the recorder and put it in her handbag. She placed her fists on her hips.

A car drove past, the passenger staring, fishlike, at Harper and Amy. The fire service had cleared off an hour ago, and most of the patrol cars had gone too. Once the ambulances had driven away, there wasn’t much to look at. Of course, the fact that there was nothing to see didn’t stop people’s natural curiosity; they wanted the full story, with details, the juicier the better. That was where Amy came in, to dig out the facts and relay them to the public via the Mail. Unfortunately for her, this time Harper wouldn’t be the one to tell. That alone wouldn’t stop her, though: Amy was resourceful. Harper had learned that much, since the journalist had first appeared, notebook in hand, at the scene of a suspected murder up in Attercliffe, brandishing her Mail ID and picking through the debris-strewn back alley in a pair of unsuitable shoes. The dead woman in that case, a heroin user, turned out to have taken an accidental overdose, but the police couldn’t identify her. All they found on the body was a silver heart necklace, probably left behind by whoever took her wallet and phone because of its unusual engraving, which would have made it tricky to shift on the black market. On the back of the heart was a date, and the name Holly-May.

The name didn’t match any missing person’s report. Accidental death, not being a crime, didn’t come under police budgets for investigation, and the DI reassigned Harper the moment the coroner’s verdict was reached. The dead woman might never have been identified if the frustration of being pulled from the case hadn’t still been on Harper’s mind the next week, when she’d bumped into Amy at a crime scene.

‘They won’t let me investigate, because of budgets. Ridiculous. The body will just stay in the morgue indefinitely.’

‘Can I see the necklace?’

Harper didn’t see why not.

She’d almost forgotten about it by the time the journalist came swinging into the office in her heels, handing over the address of the dead woman’s parents with a flourish.

‘How did you get this?’

‘Persistence,’ said Amy, shrugging. Then she told Harper how every day, for twenty minutes, she’d sat down with a list of jewellers and called them, one after another until she found the one who had engraved the necklace. It had taken four months. ‘You owe me a drink,’ she’d said, smiling in a way that made Harper wonder about what she meant by ‘drink’. A drink between friends? Colleagues? Or something else? There’d been a pause, a moment, when the two women had locked eyes and something had passed between them. Harper had felt it, a low, melting sensation in her belly. She could have reached across, touched the other woman’s hand, said, Sure, let’s meet up later, and that would have been that, one way or the other. But something stopped Harper from following her usual script.

Every time they’d met since, Harper had thought about making the date. But she hadn’t done it, and it hung between them, an unspoken thing that Harper thought about more often than she felt she ought to. She thought about it now. She wasn’t sure what she was waiting for. She only knew that she liked Amy. Probably too much. It felt dangerous, that feeling, something she couldn’t control, that got bigger even as she tried to banish it, to tell herself that these were the feelings that hurt you eventually, that destroyed lives, that needed to be ignored. She’d followed her heart once, when she was too young to know how completely a heart could be shattered. She wasn’t going to do it again. Besides, they had something good going, professionally, and it would be a shame to spoil it.

Amy glanced towards the uniforms loading the van, and Harper could tell she was already checking them out, trying to discern who might be likely to fall for those charms and spill the beans.

Then Amy looked back at Harper and frowned. She stepped up closer, close enough that Harper could smell her perfume. Her eyes sharpened as she examined Harper’s face. ‘What is it?’

‘What’s what?’ said Harper.

‘There’s something the matter. Tell me.’

‘I’ve just had a bit of a shitty day, I suppose.’

‘Oh? You mean, apart from this?’ She gestured over her shoulder at the two council workers hosing the road.

Harper nodded. She pondered how much she ought to tell Amy about the Lauren Tranter case; she didn’t want her thinking it was a story she could report in the newspaper. ‘Can we speak as friends?’ said Harper.

Amy said, ‘Of course.’

‘First thing this morning, there was this attempted abduction at the maternity ward. Identical twins.’

Amy scrabbled in her bag for the recording device. ‘Now, this is news. Tell me everything.’

Harper grabbed hold of Amy’s arm. ‘No. I can’t. I mean, it was a false alarm. There’s nothing to report.’

‘So why are you telling me about it?’

She had a point. ‘I don’t know.’

Amy looked down at where Harper held her by the wrist. She gave a half smile, raised her eyebrows. Harper let go, her cheeks flushing. Amy’s skin was warm and soft, and Harper’s grip had left a small pink mark that she wanted to stroke. Maybe even to kiss it better. Harper said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and searched Amy’s face, wondering what was happening, if anything was happening. But the moment, seemingly, had passed.

‘Come on, Joanna. You’re usually so pragmatic about the job. Just now, you went right up to that poor dead guy and closed his eyes. With your bare hands. I couldn’t have done that.’

‘I guess we all have our soft spots. Suicides, I can just about handle. But anything to do with babies being abducted, well. It gets to me.’

They held each other’s gaze for a moment, and Harper thought, this is it. She’s going to ask me the question, right now. And I’ll spill it, every bit. She’ll say, why does it get to you, Joanna? You don’t have any children, do you? And I’ll say, I did once, but I lost her. I was too young to know what it would mean, or that I even had a choice. I let them take her, and it was like part of me had been taken: a limb, or half of my heart. After that I stopped thinking about it, because I had to, in order to survive. But sometimes I forget to not think about it, and it’s like it happened yesterday. It’s like I have to get her back, and the feeling won’t go away until I do. Even though it’s twenty-six years too late to change anything.

Behind them the van doors slammed shut. Only a couple of officers remained, and they were heading towards their vehicles, speaking into radios, off to the next thing.

Amy said, ‘Look, I just need to have a quick chat with one of these guys before they disappear. How about we meet up for a coffee? Tomorrow? Next week? I’ll be in touch.’

‘Great,’ said Harper, watching as Amy scooted across the road after one of Harper’s colleagues, already clutching the recorder. ‘Text me?’ said Harper, but Amy was too far away to hear.

Chapter 10

Those who are carried away are happy, according to some accounts, having plenty of good living and music and mirth. Others say, however, that they are continually longing for their earthly friends. Lady Wilde gives a gloomy tradition that there are two kinds of fairies – one kind merry and gentle, the other evil, and sacrificing every year a life to Satan, for which purpose they steal mortals.

FROM Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland

BY W. B. YEATS

July 19th

Six days old

Mid-morning

The house was one of a thousand two-up-two-down stone terraces lined up on one of the city’s eight hills, built a hundred years ago for the families of the steelworkers and the miners. Now it was all students, couples and young professionals, those with a modest budget looking to buy in a nice bit, not in the centre but not too far out.

When they moved in together, Patrick and Lauren had been lucky to bag a house in the area that didn’t face another row of houses; opposite the front window was a cluster of trees and bushes, beyond which the land fell steeply away before levelling out to a small playing field, then dipping down again to a basketball enclosure. Upstairs, the main bedroom had far-reaching views of the other side of the valley, where the derelict ski village dominated the landscape. A pity, but the beauty and variety of the sky made up for it.

From her position on the low couch under the windowsill in the front room, the sky was all Lauren could see, a wild blue, fading dusty at the edges, swept with wisps of white cloud and etched with vapour trails.

The tide of visitors had ebbed away with the passing of time – a flood on the first day to a trickle yesterday, and this morning, no one. It was quiet in the house. The babies dozed lightly, side by side in their shared Moses basket placed in the middle of the carpet. Flawless, beautiful creatures; the way their lips pursed and smacked as they slept thrilled her, so that she was glowing with pride and adoration. She felt sorry for all those other mothers she’d seen in the hospital whose babies were so average and unremarkable. They were probably jealous. It made sense, when you saw Morgan and Riley, how perfect they were, how desirable.

Exhaustion flooded her then. She allowed her mind to drift, her eyes to drop shut. Though she could have slipped easily into sleep, Lauren forced her stinging eyelids apart. There was danger in falling asleep, especially when the babies were quiet: a silent thief could seize the opportunity to sneak in, lift the basket and be away, with nothing to alert her as she slumbered, peacefully unaware. Then, when the boys opened their eyes it would be to a stranger, and when she opened her own it would be to a blank space where her heart once was. She heaved herself from the couch and up the step to the kitchen, over to the back door to check again that it was locked. For good measure, she took the key out of the lock and placed it in a cupboard. Then, she went back into the front room and checked the bolts on the front door before sitting down again. Her thoughts roamed the windows of the house. None were open downstairs. What about upstairs – was the bathroom window ajar? Could a person, should they go to the trouble of using a ladder, even fit through it? Lauren attempted to have a word with herself. You’re safe now, she told herself. You can sleep. Patrick’s upstairs, anyway. Just a few minutes’ nap. No one can get in. She lay down on the carpet and draped an arm over the Moses basket. Her wrist throbbed where the wounds she’d got in hospital still hadn’t healed, but her body settled. The throbbing receded. Her eyes closed.

Footsteps approached along the pavement outside, and Lauren sighed, knowing she’d soon be making small talk with a neighbour, or accepting gifts from one of Patrick’s office buddies’ wives. She didn’t want to be ungrateful but she really did not feel like being sociable; maybe she’d just ignore the door this time. She stayed very still, listening to the twins breathing, not quite at the same time, in-in, out-out. The footsteps slowed and stopped, and Lauren heard the crinkling of paper. Then, whoever it was must have turned and hurried away; she heard hasty percussive heels on concrete and by the time she unbolted and opened the door there was no one to be seen. Only a gift-wrapped parcel on the step, which she picked up and brought inside.

Patrick appeared and began fussing in the kitchen, looking for something among the mounds of detritus.

‘Have you seen my phone charger?’ he said, finding it a second later under a pizza box.

‘Weird thing just happened,’ said Lauren. ‘Someone left a parcel but didn’t knock. I heard them running away.’ She held up the package, with its blue dinosaur-patterned paper.

‘Let’s see,’ said Patrick, taking it and turning it over, finding a card taped to the underside. While Patrick opened the card, Lauren opened the present.

‘Well,’ she said, examining the gift, ‘that’s, um, different.’

In her hands, there was a model that appeared at first glance to be of the kind her grandmother favoured: a supposed-to-be-quirky scene in which a family of animals dressed up like people were all sitting around a little table having tea. Taking a closer look, she recoiled, held it away from her; the surface of it was tacky with something, and gave off a faint, upsetting smell she thought might have been urine. The modelled animals were rodents, with long sinister faces: rats. The mother-rat wore a pinny with a scalloped edge while the father wore a business suit and smoked a pipe. The mother was caught in the act of serving the father a slice of cake as the child-rats looked on. Matching child-rats. Twin boys. All of them were grinning with sideways eyes, as if they were planning something nasty and were very much looking forward to it. The thing was cast in resin, and the sticker on the bottom had been signed by the artist who’d hand-painted it. A limited edition of one hundred. Not limited enough, thought Lauren.

Patrick was on a chair, reaching up to add the card to the others, arranged like bunting, strung on lengths of fishing line across the far wall.

‘Let me see the card,’ she said, and he sighed with annoyance as he got it down again. The card also had a rat motif, but this was a photograph of the inside of a nest of baby rats. They were wrinkled and downy, just opening their eyes, cupping their tiny noses with pink paws. Inside, no message, just a name.

‘Who’s Natasha?’ said Lauren.

Patrick frowned, as he thought about it. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘she’s a new girl at work. Only been there a few weeks. I suppose she must think we like mice.’

‘Rats,’ said Lauren. ‘I think they’re meant to be rats, Patrick. I think she’s a big fan of rats, looking at this.’ Lauren laughed nervously, but Patrick didn’t seem to find it very funny. ‘I wonder why she didn’t knock, though?’

‘She’s shy, I guess. And sort of weird, actually.’

‘I can see that.’

Just then, someone knocked on the door. Lauren put the model on the countertop and went to answer it, expecting to see the shy weird girl from Patrick’s office, but finding instead Cindy and Rosa, two of the other mums from their antenatal class. Both Cindy and Rosa were still pregnant – hugely so. Their due dates were imminent. She invited them in for a cup of tea, and to her slight dismay, they accepted. Patrick swept away a pile of papers and washing from the couch so that they could sit. He then made tea for them all and said he was going for a lie down, ‘to let you ladies catch up’.

‘Before you do,’ said Cindy, ‘could you look outside and see if I’ve left the presents somewhere? I was holding a gift bag when I got out of the car but I must have put it down.’

Patrick opened the front door. On the step, to the side, was a green foil gift bag.

‘That’s the one,’ said Cindy. ‘I’m so forgetful these days. It’s only a small thing, something for each of them. And a little thing for you, too.’ Patrick handed the bag to Lauren, then disappeared upstairs, firmly closing the bedroom door. Inside the bag were two wrapped gifts, and tucked in next to them, what looked like an old book, the pages edged in gold.

‘You didn’t have to bring a present,’ said Lauren. ‘Thanks so much.’

She put her hand in the bag but Cindy said, ‘Don’t open them now. It’s really only a couple of small things. Embarrassing, really.’

‘Don’t be silly, it’s so kind of you to give anything at all. I’ll open them later, when Patrick comes down.’

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