Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6

At dawn I sat in the kitchen, staring out at the grey pall of rain that hung over the city, misting the windows, clinging to the red brick of the houses opposite. I read the charity flier Devlin had given me. Clothes Wanted. Will collect. No donation too small. What had the policeman said? “He has no children.” Yet I had heard the child crying; it wasn’t just Karen’s imagination. There was a child in that house, looking for someone. Looking to be found.

I phoned the number on the flier just after nine o’clock. The man who answered sounded groggy. I told him I had a donation to make; suggested he call after eight that evening, gave an address far enough away to keep him out of his house for a good half hour. Long enough for me to search his house myself.

I watched his van leave at seven forty five, then went down the alley behind our houses, and climbed over his back wall. His house was like my own. A sash window at the back, the clasp so loose a bank card could flick it open. I slid the window up, the blistered paint flaking off on my hands. I stepped down into his sitting room. Black bags lined one wall. The settee was covered with clothes, labelled and priced.

To my right, the kitchen, dishes piled on the white work top, beer cans, bent doubled on the floor.

I crept out into the hallway and listened. The house sounded empty.

The staircase seemed to creak louder the more carefully I trod. The bathroom faced me at the top of the stairs, a toilet roll tube lying on the floor. There were no toys in the bath, no small tooth brushes in the scum-stained glass on the sink.

The other two rooms were likewise empty – no children, no toys, or clothes. One room was being used as a store. The other was the main bedroom. A duvet lay gathered on the floor, beside it an ashtray spilt butts onto the carpet.

The next set of stairs led to the attic room, filled with junk. The curtains were drawn, but the windows so dirty, the light from the street lamps made little difference. I scanned the room quickly. It was only when I turned to leave that I heard the soft thumping. It seemed to be coming from the cupboard. My stomach flipped as I approached the door, hand out. Hesitated. Opened the door.

The child had black hair. His blue eyes were wide, his mouth covered with brown parcel tape, a slit cut in the middle to allow him to breath. He looked up at me in terror. He kicked his foot against the bottom of the cardboard box in which he had been placed. It thumped softly against the inside of the wardrobe. He was the length of my forearm, maybe four or five months old. He reached out his arms to me, his small fists balled as I lifted him.

At that moment the door downstairs slammed shut, the window in the attic room shuddering with the force. I heard Conlon swearing as his footsteps thudded on the stairs. I tried to crouch down, hide behind the piles of lumber, but the child in my arms was squirming now, kicking to be free. He cried lightly; the sounds stopped below and I heard Conlon come to the stairs leading up to us.

“Who’s up there?” he shouted. I imagined his foot on the step. I heard thudding and it took me a moment to realize it was someone banging on the front door.

Conlon didn’t move for a second. More banging at the door, insistent. Finally I heard his footfalls as they retreated down the hallway.

I listened to the muffled conversation beneath us. Momentarily I heard someone mount the stairs.

“Just to keep you happy, Trevor,” a voice I recognized said. The policeman – Devlin. His bulk appeared in the doorway for a second.

“All empty,” he called without looking in.

Several minutes later I heard them leaving the house.

Weeks later we were at Sunday Mass. Afterwards, Karen stopped to light a candle for Michael, our stolen child. In the porchway I met Devlin again. He was waiting for us, a plastic bag in his hand.

“I saw you in there,” he said. “Thought you might be interested. We got a tip off a week or two ago. Saw someone breaking into your neighbour Conlon’s house. When we arrived, we arrested him labelling clothes from charity bags for his shop. He claimed there was someone in his house. When we went back later, we found birth certificates for a number of children. Turns out Trevor’s been smuggling children into Ireland for illegal adoption.”

Karen and I looked at him. He paused, as if waiting for us to speak, before continuing. “He brought in five children in all. We’ve traced four. One seems to have vanished.”

I had to swallow several times, before speaking. “What happened to him?”

“Well, I hope whoever has him will look after him a hell of a lot better than Conlon did. Or than the state would. Maybe he’ll be lucky.”

Karen placed her hand on my arm. “We need to go.”

Devlin nodded. “I understand.” He turned to leave, then faced us again. “I almost forgot,” he said, taking a small teddy bear from the plastic bag he was carrying. “I picked up this for your wee boy. Michael’s his name, isn’t that right?”

I could not respond. Karen, however, replied in a clear voice. “No. Paul’s his name. After his father.”

“Of course,” Devlin said, leaning into the pram. He placed the toy beside the sleeping child, rubbed his index finger against the child’s cheek. “You be sure to spoil him, now.” He straightened up, smiled mildly, scrunched the empty plastic bag into a ball which he stuffed into his coat pocket and walked away from us. He did not look back.

As Karen fixed Paul’s blanket, I dipped my finger into the water font and said a prayer to Michael. I prayed he would not mind our taking our second chance. I prayed he would not resent Paul’s place with us. I promised him that he still owned a piece of my heart that would never stop being his.

Then I stepped out into the sunlight with the rest of my family.

It had been a ghastly day. I’d decided to work at home so I could finish the proposal for our biggest client’s new campaign. The copy was urgent, you see, because they’d pulled back the meeting by three days. My boss and I were due to make the presentation at ten next morning, and the designers were waiting in the office to pretty up my text and sort out all the PowerPoint stuff for us.

The trouble was, I hadn’t expected the interruptions: far more at home than in any office; and worse because of having no receptionists or secretaries to fend them off.

First it was the postman. Not my usual bloke but a temp who couldn’t tell the difference between 16 Holly Road, where I live, and 16 Oak Court, Holly Road, which is a flat just opposite. Even so, I shouldn’t have shouted. It wasn’t his fault he couldn’t read much; or speak English, either.

And he wasn’t to know how many hours I’ve wasted over the past year redirecting all the mail I get that obviously isn’t meant for me. Letters and packages with all sorts of names. I never pay much attention to the names once I’ve seen they’re not mine, so I couldn’t tell you what they were now.

I opened one parcel by mistake, not having read the label before I ripped off the brown packing tape. Wondering why someone was sending me a whole bunch of phone adapters and wires and stuff, I turned the package over and saw it was meant for the flat. That was when I crossed the road and made my third attempt to introduce myself and sort it out. The funny thing was, you see, that in all the months I’d been dealing with their mail I’d never actually seen any of them. Once or twice, there’d been a hand coming through the net curtains to open or shut a window, but that was all.