Michael Robotham - The Night Ferry

She looks on the radiator shelf. “I’ll get you one.”

Molly waits in the hallway, still holding the door. “Do you want to see one of my paintings?”

“I’d love to.”

“I’ll get one.” She dashes upstairs. Mrs. Gallagher is in the kitchen. She finds an old envelope and returns, looking for Molly.

“She’s gone upstairs to get one of her paintings,” I explain. “A budding artist.”

“She gets more paint on her clothes than on the paper.”

“I have a boyfriend like that.”

“I thought you said you were married.” She fixes me with a stare. There’s steel behind it.

“We’re engaged. We’ve been together so long It feels like we’re married.”

She doesn’t believe me. Molly yells from the top of the stairs.

“Mummy, Jasper is crying.”

“Oh, you have another one.”

Mrs. Gallagher reaches for the door. My foot is faster. My shoulder follows. I have no right to enter. I need a warrant or I need proper cause.

I’m at the bottom of the stairs. Mrs. Gallagher yells at me to get out. She grabs my arm. I shrug it away. Above the noise, behind it, in spite of it, I hear a baby crying.

Taking the stairs two at a time, I follow the sound. The first door I come to is the main bedroom. The second door is Molly’s room. She has set up a painting easel on an old sheet. I try a third door. Brightly colored fish spin slowly above a white cot. Within it, swaddled tightly, a baby is unhappy at creation.

Mrs. Gallagher pushes past me, scooping up the boy. “Get out of my house!”

“Is he yours, Mrs. Gallagher?”

“Yes.”

“Did you give birth to him?”

“Get out! Get out! I’ll call the police.”

“I am the police.”

Wordlessly, she shakes her head from side to side. The baby has gone quiet. Molly is tugging at her skirt.

Suddenly her shoulders sag and she seems to deflate in front of me, folding from the knees and then the waist. Still cradling the baby, refusing to let go, she lands in my arms and I maneuver her to a chair.

“We adopted him,” she whispers. “He’s ours .”

“He was never available for adoption. You know that.”

Mrs. Gallagher shakes her head. I look around the room. Where is she? The girl. My heart skips between beats. Slow then fast.

“There was a baby girl. A twin.”

She looks toward the cot. “He’s the only one.”

Worst case scenarios haunt me now. The baby girl was so small. She struggled to breathe. Please God, let her be safe!

Mrs. Gallagher has found a tissue in the sleeve of her cardigan. She blows her nose and sniffles. “We were told he wasn’t wanted. I swear I didn’t know—not about the missing twins. It wasn’t until I saw the TV news. Then I began to wonder…”

“Who gave him to you?”

“A man brought him.”

“What did he look like?”

“Mid-fifties, short hair—he had an Irish accent.”

“When?”

“The Sunday before last.” She wipes her eyes. “It came as a shock. We weren’t expecting him for another fortnight.”

“Who arranged the adoption?”

“Mr. Shawcroft said a teenage girl was pregnant with twins but couldn’t afford to look after both of them. She wanted to put one of them up for adoption. We could jump the queue for fifty thousand pounds.”

“You knew it was against the law.”

“Mr. Shawcroft said that twins couldn’t legally be split. We had to do everything in secret.”

“You pretended to be pregnant.”

“There wasn’t time.”

I look at Molly who is playing with a box of shells, arranging them in patterns.

“Is Molly…?” I don’t finish the question.

“She’s mine,” she says fiercely. “I couldn’t have any more. There were complications. Medical problems. They told us we were too old to adopt. My husband is fifty-five, you see.” She wipes her eyes. “I should phone him.”

I hear my name being called from downstairs. “New Boy” must have witnessed the doorstep confrontation. He couldn’t stay put.

“Up here.”

“Are you OK?”

“Yeah.”

He appears at the door, taking in the scene. Mrs. Gallagher. Molly. The baby.

“It’s one of the twins,” I say.

“One?”

“The boy.”

He peers into the cot. “Are you sure?”

I follow his gaze. It’s amazing how much a newborn can change in under ten days, but I’m sure.

“What about the girl?” he asks.

“She’s not here.”

Shawcroft made two phone calls from the golf club. The second was to the Finsbury Park address of a Mrs. Y. Moncrieffe, which doesn’t cross-reference with any of the names from the New Life Adoption Center files.

I can’t leave. I have to stay and talk to Forbes (and no doubt peel him off the ceiling).

“Can you check out the other address?”

Dave weighs up the implications and ramifications. He’s not worried about himself. I’m the one facing a disciplinary hearing. He kisses my cheek.

“You make it hard sometimes, you know that?”

“I know.”

DI Forbes storms through the house, his face hardened into a mask of fury and cold hatred. Ordering me into the rear garden, he ignores the muddy lawn and paces back and forth.

“You had no right!” he yells. “It was an illegal search.”

“I had reason to believe—”

“What reason?”

“I was following a lead.”

“Which you should have told me about. This is my fucking investigation!”

His rectangular glasses bobble on his nose. I wonder if it annoys him.

“In my professional judgment I made a necessary choice, sir.”

“You don’t even know if it’s one of the twins. There are no birth records or adoption papers.”

“Mrs. Gallagher has confirmed that she is not the biological mother. The baby was delivered to her by a man matching Brendan Pearl’s description.”

“You should have waited.”

“With all due respect, sir, you were taking too long. Shawcroft is free. He’s shredding files, covering his tracks. You don’t want to prosecute him.”

I think he might explode. His voice carries across the neighborhood gardens and mud sucks at his shoes.

“I should have reported you to the PCA when you went to Amsterdam. You have harassed witnesses, abused your authority and disobeyed the orders of a senior officer. You have failed at almost every opportunity to conduct yourself in a professional manner…”

His foot lifts and his shoe remains behind. A sock squelches into the mud up to his ankle. We both pretend it hasn’t happened.

“You’re suspended from duty. Do you understand me? I’m going to personally see that your career is over.”

Social Services have been summoned, a big woman with a backside so large that she appears to be wearing a bustle. Mr. and Mrs. Gallagher are talking to her in the sitting room. They look almost relieved that it’s over. The past few days must have been unbearable, wondering and waiting for a knock on the door. Being frightened of falling in love with a child that might never truly be theirs.

Molly is in her bedroom showing a policewoman how she paints flowers and rests them on the radiator to dry. The baby is sleeping. They called him Jasper. He has a name now.

Forbes has peeled off his sock and thrown it into the rubbish bin. Sitting on the back step, he uses a screwdriver to scrape mud from his shoes.

“How did you know?” he asks, having calmed down.

I explain about the phone calls from the golf club and cross-checking the numbers with the adoption files, looking for a match.

“That’s how I found the Gallaghers.”