S Bolton - Sacrifice

I spent an hour on the wards, then decided to check on my appendix patient. He was awake but drowsy. His wife sat by his side, his young son, about fifteen months old, perched on the edge of the bed. His mother held him with one hand, his father with the other, and he bounced gleefully. It can't have been comfortable but if my patient wasn't objecting, neither was I. I checked him out, aware that something at the back of my mind was nagging me, and agreed he could go home the next day if he got plenty of rest.

I stopped by the canteen, bought a chocolate muffin and carried it back to my room. I made fresh coffee, sat down at my desk – and remembered.

The family group: the appendix patient, his wife and baby son. I knew who Alison Jenner was. She was Stephen Gair's second wife, the woman who was step-mum to his son by Melissa.

So why the hell was her name on the list of Shetland births? She hadn't given birth; Melissa had. Stephen Gair had admitted that his son, Connor, was Melissa's child. How could Alison's name be included on a list of women who had delivered that summer? And why did her entry include the KT reference?

I found the list and checked, just in case I'd been mistaken. There she was. Alison Jenner, aged forty, gave birth to a little boy, 81bs 2oz, on 6 June. Surely that couldn't be coincidence, it had to be the same woman. OK, think! The Gairs only had one child. So, either Stephen Gair had been lying about Connor being Melissa's – and why the hell would he? – or the entry must be referring to Melissa's son.

I double-checked the number of entries with the KT initials after them. There were seven that summer. I pulled up the corresponding list for the subsequent period, from September 2005 through February 2006. Couldn't see anything. Then I went back, to the previous winter. Nothing. I went back again, to the summer of 2004. No KT entries. I kept on going back until I spotted them again. In summer 2002 there were five entries with KT after them, born in various centres around the islands, all baby boys.

A tightness was forming in my chest as I went further back, examining whole years at a time. 2001 was clear; so was 2000. In the summer of 1999 there were six KT entries. Boys.

I wanted to switch off the computer, get into my car and drive home, collect the horses and ride for miles along the beach. Better still, run up to Kenn Gifford's office, lock the door and take off every stitch I was wearing. Anything to take my mind off what was now staring me in the face.

I stayed where I was and I brought up more screens.

I went back to 1980 and that was enough. The pattern was unmistakeable. Every three years, between four and eight baby boys had their deliveries recorded as KT.

Every three years, the female death rate on Shetland made a modest but unmistakeable blip. The following summer, some unusual little boys were born. KT; it had nothing to do with Keloid Trauma, that was a smokescreen, the condition probably didn't even exist. KT stood for Kunal Trow.

I flicked back, faster and faster, to the earliest year the computerized records showed. They began in 1975. I needed to go further back.

I stood up, on legs that felt none too steady, and walked as fast as I dared along the corridor to the service lift. It arrived within two minutes and – by some miracle – was empty. I pressed B for basement and went down.

The floor seemed empty. I followed the signs and walked down a corridor lit by occasional electric bulbs. Several had blown. As I walked, I looked out for switches on the walls. I did not want to find myself trapped in pitch-blackness down here, scrambling around for switches that didn't exist.

I reached the end of the corridor. Most hospital archives are a mess and these were no exception. They were housed in three basement rooms. I pushed the door of the first. Darkness. I felt around on the wall for a light switch. The room sprang into a grimy light. I could feel the dust in my throat. Everything was in large, brown cardboard boxes, stacked several high on steel shelving. The labels were mostly turned to the front. I walked along the shelves, keeping one eye firmly on the open door. I doubted these rooms were visited more than a couple of times a year. If a door slammed shut, locked from the outside, I could say Hi to a pleasant few days of starvation and terror.

I didn't find obstetrics and opened the door to the second room. Same layout as the first. This time I wedged the door open. In the third row I found them. It took a few minutes to locate the box I needed and pull it down. Inside were ledgers, handwritten records of births; the manual equivalent of the lists I'd been looking at on my computer. I found the year I was looking for, 1972, and flicked to July. On the twenty-fifth of the month, there it was. Elspeth Guthrie, aged thirty-five, on the island of Unst, a baby boy, 7lbs 15oz. KT.

I'd been crouching down over the box and I sank to the floor. I sat amidst years of accumulated dust and debris, getting filthy and not caring.

I could think of only one reason why birth records should be falsified to the extent of recording the adopting mother as the birth mother: something was so badly wrong with the real birth that it would bear no investigating. Duncan's birth mother had been killed. Just like Melissa had been; just like all the others had been.

Every three years island women were being bred in captivity like farm animals and then slaughtered. I wondered whether the legends of the Trows had given some maniac the idea in the first place, or whether the stories had sprung from real events taking place in the islands over the years; known about but never discussed, never openly acknowledged, because to do so would be tantamount to admitting you lived among monsters.

I'd intended to find the record of Kenn's birth too, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. Enough was enough.

I pushed myself to my feet, put the lid back on the box and lifted it back on to the shelf. I tucked the ledger under my arm and left the room, willing myself not to run; I switched off the lights and made for the lift. Then I changed my mind and went in the opposite direction, heading for the stairs, telling myself all the while to stay calm, act calm; no one knew what I'd found out, I was safe for a while. I just had to keep my head.

How the hell were they doing it? How do you spirit away a live woman, at the same time convincing all her relatives that she's dead? How do you hold a funeral with an empty coffin? Had no one ever taken a last peek and found a pink-lined casket of bricks?

I'd made the ground floor. I was ridiculously out of breath. I stopped for a second.

They couldn't use semblances – the equivalent of the dying Cathy Morton – for all of them. It just wasn't feasible that enough seriously ill women would be found. The Cathy/Melissa switch had to have been a special case. I was back to hypnosis and drugs, to the involvement of enough people to make sure the procedures were never questioned: the doctor would administer the drugs, pronounce death, comfort the family; the pathologist would fill in the forms, make out reports for corpses that didn't exist; relatives would be discouraged – under any number of pretexts – from viewing the bodies.

I was back on my floor.

Kirsten. Poor Kirsten, my fellow equestrian. I'd knelt by her grave, tidying the spring flowers and feeling a close empathy because of the way she'd died. But she hadn't been down there. She was still in my field, the real grave site, she had to be. The instrument sweeps had been a sham – even the most recent, carried out that very day. If Detective Superintendent Harris had been present… well, I'd be interested in finding out where and when he'd been born.

I wondered, briefly, if I'd found out where Stephen Gair had been getting his babies from. Except it still didn't add up. The numbers involved – an average of just two per annum – still seemed far too few to attract the sort of revenues Helen and I had found. Plus, the babies I could name – Duncan, Kenn, Andy Dunn, Connor Gair – had all been adopted locally. The chances were others had been too. Money might have changed hands but it couldn't explain the massive amounts – several millions each year – that were coming in from overseas. And it would be too big a risk, surely, to abduct women, keep them prisoner and murder them, just to be able to sell their babies to the highest bidder. No, whatever motive was driving these people, it had to be more than money. The babies being sold were coming from another source.