Simon Beckett - Where There's Smoke

Kate tried not to react to it. “Not really. Just because I don’t think it’s a good idea to ask someone who’d see me — and the baby — regularly, it doesn’t mean I’m going to settle for someone I’ve never even met.”

Lucy gave a snort. “Well, if you don’t want anyone you don’t know, and you won’t ask anyone you do know, there’s not a great deal left, is there?”

Kate was about to respond, hotly, when Jack spoke. “Why don’t you advertise?”

“Oh, don’t be stupid,” Lucy snapped.

“I’m not being stupid,” he said, equably.

“Well, where’s she going to advertise? The post-office window?”

Jack gave Lucy a stark glance before turning to Kate. “Have you thought about putting an ad in the personal columns?”

“Oh, come on!” Lucy exclaimed. “You can’t advertise for a sperm donor in a newspaper!”

“Why can’t you?”

“Because you can’t!”

Jack ignored her. “You can word the ad to specify the sort of bloke you want,” he said to Kate. “You know, intelligent, professional, good-looking. Not ginger-haired. Whatever.”

“For God’s sake, Jack!” Lucy protested. “I can’t believe you’re suggesting this!”

“Why not?”

Kate thought he was enjoying his wife’s outrage. “It’s only like advertising for a job. What’s the difference?”

“What’s the difference? The difference is you don’t have to masturbate at a job interview! I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my life! You could get anyone answering!”

“So you check them out. And you’re careful which newspapers you place the ad in. Go for something like the Guardian or The Times rather than a tits ‘n’ bums tabloid.”

“Or I could place it in professional journals,” Kate said, fired by the idea. “Target specific groups I know are going to be fairly responsible and intelligent. Like teachers or lawyers.”

“I dunno about lawyers,” Jack said.

She laughed. “Doctors, then. I could advertise in a medical journal. I can’t see a doctor being easily shocked or offended. And they’d be more likely to take it seriously.”

Lucy was looking at her, horrified. “You’re not really considering it!”

“Well,” Kate said, “it’s worth thinking about.”

She batted at a moth that had blundered into her face. It fluttered off into the growing darkness, towards the still-glowing barbecue.

Kate received her first reply on the same day that Paul Sutherland’s case was heard at the magistrates’ court.

There was a delay on the Underground line, and she was late reaching the court building. A light drizzle was falling when she arrived. Too fine to merit an umbrella, it salted her hair with fine beads of water, misting on her cheeks like sweat in the clammy, windless morning. A middle-aged man and woman stood outside on the steps. She was crying, leaning against the man’s chest. He stood with one arm around her, staring at nothing over the top of her head. Kate hurried past and went inside.

She was late, and the case had already been called when she found Josefina and Clive waiting in the corridor outside the courtroom. Only Caroline hadn’t been called as a witness, and Kate hoped that the girl would cope at the office by herself.

She sat next to Clive on the padded bench, torn between begrudging the wasted time and dreading the moment when she would have to go in and testify.

Predictably, Paul had pleaded not guilty. He had been charged with actual bodily harm — in addition to assault and criminal damage — when the wound to Josefina’s arm turned out to be less serious than it had appeared. Until that point, the police had wanted to charge him with GBH, which could have carried a custodial sentence. Kate was glad it hadn’t come to that. Despite everything, she didn’t want to see him sent to prison.

She had been resigned to a lengthy wait, but after only ten minutes a clerk emerged from the courtroom and approached them. “Josefina Mojon, Kate Powell and Clive Westbrooke?”

Kate felt her stomach knot as they gave obedient nods. The man was thin, in a crumpled suit and mismatching tie. He gave a flickering smile that quickly switched off.

“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid we won’t be needing you after all,” he said. “Mr Sutherland decided to change his plea to guilty at the last minute.”

Paul had been fined two hundred pounds and ordered to pay a hundred and fifty pounds’ compensation to Josefina and three hundred pounds’ damages to Kate, the clerk told them. He gave details of how the payments would be made and then left. They remained where they were, trying to adjust to the anticlimax. Clive spoke first.

“Well, the bastard managed to make us all waste a morning. And I bet that wasn’t deliberate.”

Kate didn’t bother to dispute it. “I suppose we might as well go,” she said. They stood up, but before they got any further the courtroom door opened and Paul Sutherland came out.

He glared at them. His face was sullen and accusing, the flesh under his eyes swollen. Kate tensed, waiting for him to say or do something. But he just stared at her before turning on his heel and walking away. She let out her breath, slowly.

“Not the type to forgive and forget, is he?” Clive said.

“No,” she agreed.

The magistrates’ court was in walking distance of King’s Cross. Neither Josefina nor Clive made any comment when Kate said she would see them back at the office, but she still felt like a truant as she left them and went into the Underground.

There was a fault on the Victoria line, so Kate took a tube to Piccadilly Circus. The post-office depot was only a few minutes’ walk from there, and Kate left the station with the now customary sense of anticipation. The feeling wasn’t as intense as it had been the first few times she had been, but it still made her quicken her step as she drew near.

She had always supposed that a post-office box would be like a safety-deposit box, a small locker to which she would be given the key. Some were like that but they were more expensive, and Kate had decided there was no real need for one. She went to the counter and handed her security card to the unsmiling, uniformed woman, who took it without speaking and disappeared through a doorway.

Kate tried not to build up her hopes as she waited. The advert had been running for two weeks now. She had spent hours agonising over its wording before finally settling for a simple, bare statement of fact. “Professional woman seeks donor for artificial insemination.”

Kate had placed it in a variety of different medical journals, from psychiatric to gynaecological. Some had flatly refused to run the ad, and she had felt a hot flush of embarrassment at each rejection. But most had accepted it without comment, and Kate had begun calling into the depot regularly to check for replies. So far, though, her PO box had remained mockingly empty.

The woman seemed to be gone a long time. When she came back, the white rectangle of the envelope was bright against the blue of her uniform.

Suddenly clumsy, Kate signed for it with a scribbled signature that only faintly resembled her own. Part of her noted that the envelope was thin and floppy, the handwriting untidy, but her excitement overwhelmed the awareness. She resisted the urge to open it until she was outside the depot, and then she stopped and tore open the flap.

There was no letter. Her first impression was that the envelope was empty, but then she saw something crumpled in the bottom. She realised what it was just in time to stop herself from pulling it out.

The condom had been unrolled, and before she snapped the envelope shut Kate saw that whoever had sent it had first cut off the teat. Bile rose high in her throat, from humiliation as much as disgust. Her eyes stung as she walked to a nearby waste bin and dropped in the envelope. She wiped her hands thoroughly on a tissue and dropped that in after it.