Melanie Golding - Little Darlings

‘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)