William Trevor - Death in Summer

‘Did you expect to find something, sir?’

‘There seemed no reason why the ring shouldn’t be there. I asked her if she could let me have a telephone number. So that we could contact her in case anything came to light.’

‘But you didn’t think anything would.’

‘I’d no idea.’

‘And what number did she give you, sir?’

She didn’t give a number. If she had he would remember writing it down, and Mrs. Iveson interrupts to say that none of this makes sense. Why should a girl who’s hardly known to them tell lies about a ring? Why should she steal a baby?

‘It’s what we’re endeavouring to find out, madam. We can only find out by asking questions. There is no other way.’

‘We’ve told you what we can. We’re both of us beside ourselves with worry.’

‘I do appreciate that, Mrs. Iveson.’

‘My God, I wish you did. Thaddeus — ’

‘They’re doing their best.’

‘Thank you, sir. So the girl preferred to return in person when she might have left a number? That didn’t strike you as odd, sir?’

‘I assumed she wasn’t on the phone. She mentioned looking for her ring on the drive, and on the lane she’d walked along. She was uncertain about where she’d dropped it. She said she was sorry for being a nuisance. The ring wasn’t valuable, she said, but there was some sentimental attachment.’

‘And it didn’t strike you as unusual, sir, that she should want to search your drive for an object as small as a ring? A period of time had passed, after all. Cars presumably had come and gone.’

‘A needle in a haystack, I thought. I think I said it.’

‘Which you must have said again when she arrived out here. The same day was that?’

‘No, some days later.’

‘And what precisely occurred then, Mr. Davenant?’

‘We looked together, down the sides of the sofa. We went upstairs to the nursery.’

‘Why was that, sir?’

‘Because my mother-in-law had brought the girl to the nursery when she was here before.’

‘And the ring was nowhere in the nursery?’

‘No, it wasn’t.’

‘So the girl went away then?’

‘She looked again in this room. She asked if she might, just to be sure.’

‘And there was nothing?’

‘No.’

‘And then she examined the drive and the lane she had walked along? Or had she done that already?’

‘I honestly don’t know.’

‘I don’t think she was looking for anything very much after she left the house.’ Mrs. Iveson intervenes again, calmer now.

‘You observed the girl, Mrs. Iveson?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you were…?’

‘I was where I was yesterday when Georgina was taken. In the shade of the catalpa tree.’

‘Anything about the girl, Mrs. Iveson, when you took her up to the nursery the day she came to be interviewed?’

‘Only that she wouldn’t do. The day she came to look for her ring she stood on the tarmac staring at me.’

‘Staring at you, Mrs. Iveson?’

‘Yes, I do remember that.’

‘I see. And did she leave a description of this ring, sir? Just in case?’

‘Soapstone, she said. Grey soapstone.’

‘And this time she would have left you some means of contacting her before she went on her way, sir?’

‘No, she didn’t.’

‘So if at some point the ring actually did surface, you still wouldn’t have known what to do about it?’

‘By then I really didn’t believe it had been lost in the house. If it turned up anywhere else, no, we wouldn’t have known what to do about it.’

‘Didn’t cross your mind, sir, that for some reason this girl was making the whole thing up?’

‘No, it didn’t.’

Detective Inspector Baker — known for his doggedness in the force, recently promoted after eleven successful years in the vice squad — considers it extraordinary that a would-be employee came to this house, was interviewed for a position, answered questions as to suitability and background, and walked away again without a note being kept of her name. That she later telephoned with a story a child wouldn’t have fallen for, and ended up being assisted to search for a non-existent item of jewellery beggars all reasonable belief. In a brief wave of nostalgia, the inspector recalls the quick-witted pornographers and street pimps whose prevarications and deceptions were so often and so precisely presented to him. There is a measured helpfulness about the man he has been questioning, a clear determination not to become emotional. The old lady’s in shock and can’t, of course, be blamed.

‘Well, there seems no doubt that it was this girl.’ He nods at both of them, but when he is asked if the establishing of this identification is going to make the search for the baby easier, he adopts the stony-faced reticence of detectives in films, hoping to conceal the fact that he doesn’t know. The girl was confident. She walked into a garden and took a sleeping baby, in full view of anyone who might have been at a window. Without a shadow of a doubt, she had previously established the lie of the land and the routine of the household, had clearly waited until the dog was out of the way; and having successfully collected the baby, took the path through the fields and then by the canal in order to avoid being seen on the lanes or waiting for a bus. She’d timed the whole thing so that she could slip on to the four twenty-three, which yesterday had run only two and a half minutes late. The confident ones are often the most dangerous.

‘She was normal, would you say, sir? From your observation when she returned that day?’

‘Normal?’

‘Manner and that. Her behaviour odd or peculiar in any way?’

‘She talked rather a lot, I remember.’

‘You can’t remember what about, I suppose?’

‘To tell the truth, I didn’t really listen.’

‘Spoke about the baby, did she?’

‘I don’t think so. More about herself. There was something to do with a mother in Australia.’

‘Ah. And nothing else comes back, I suppose?’

‘She said that she’d put flowers on my wife’s grave.’

‘My God!’ Mrs. Iveson’s invocation is an anguished mutter, which seems to the detective aptly to sum up this whole extraordinary affair.

‘And do you think she did, sir?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yau didn’t think the girl was on anything, sir?’

‘Drugs, you mean?’

‘They sometimes are.’

‘She could have been. That didn’t occur to me.’

‘No reason why it should have, of course. With someone who was a stranger to you.’

There is a silent moment, incidentally there when the questioning ceases. The girl has taken her chance, the detective muses, attracted by the baby she saw when first she was shown the nursery. It could be something misheard, that she placed flowers on the grave of a woman she never knew. Most likely it is that, he speculates, but does not say so.

The local search that Maidment predicted is not carried out: the immediate locality is of less interest now. Again, for hours, the telephone does not ring. All morning there is silence. No breakfast is taken, no lunch. It is the afternoon of the day Thaddeus has dreaded when the news comes, preceding WPC Denise Flynn, who later carries the stolen baby from the police car to the house.

‘A shut-up building,’ Maidment says, ‘that used to be a home for unwanted children. A lad poking round found her.’

Aghast, Zenobia turns from the sink, a potato half scraped in her hand. She is hungry, and so must everyone else be. She has made sandwiches for the police who have returned yet again, feeling that they, too, are probably in need of food. The kitchen quarrel which brought a coolness in the night seems to belong to some distant time, and plays no part now.