A Dark Dividing, page 28
‘I’d have to let the GMC know,’ said Martin. ‘Because you and the twins are still officially my patients. But I don’t think they would object. We could let it be thought that Isobel’s a girlfriend of mine—that’s she’s helping you with the twins and I’m coming along partly in case they develop any problems en route. A working holiday. I’m due some leave anyway, and I think I can re-arrange my clinics. Isobel and I could drive to Dover with the twins, and you can travel down there by train. We’ll hand the twins back to you for the actual boarding so they can go through on your passport. They’re still below the age for needing their own, aren’t they?’
‘Yes. I could apply for passports for them,’ said Mel. ‘But I don’t think there’s time.’
‘Roz doesn’t drive, does she?’
‘No. So even if she finds out where we’re going she won’t be able to follow us, not at such short notice, and certainly not on the same ferry. And she couldn’t possibly track us across France and into Switzerland. I think it’ll work,’ said Mel.
‘So do I.’
It would have to work. Mel could not begin to think what she would do if Roz eventually found her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE SMALL NEWS item in the weekend paper was not very informative. It simply said that the conjoined Anderson twins had been taken abroad for the operation that would separate them: the family did not want the venue disclosed, but it was known that a team of specialists had been assembled, so presumably the operation would take place soon. Roz, reading this, knew at once that despite all her care, Melissa had slipped out of her grasp, taking the twins with her. Or had she…?
That night she began to weave her plans. She thought her aunt would have approved of what she was doing: God punishes where it is required, and rewards where it is deserved, she had said. Reward. The replacing of the child—the little lost thing—that had trickled sadly and despairingly out of Roz’s womb in that grey dawn.
The first priority was to find out where Mel had gone. It took a while for Roz to decide how to go about this, but after a night’s consideration she focused on Martin Brannan. Where was he in all this? In fact, where was he literally, because he was not at St Luke’s at the moment, that was for sure. He was where? On holiday? Until after the New Year? Well, how interesting.
Roz had kept up the lukewarm friendship with Martin’s secretary at St Luke’s, not because she particularly liked the woman, but because you never knew who might come in useful. The friendship came in useful now.
Mr Brannan was in France, said Martin’s secretary, and added, in the smug, I-am-in-the-know tone that always jarred on Roz, that he was not alone. A lady friend, said the secretary coyly. Well, they all knew what Mr Brannan was, of course. Quite a lot of girlfriends he had had over the years. But this latest trip had all been arranged in secrecy—a surprise for the lady apparently, wasn’t that romantic? A ferry crossing, and then a drive down into Southern France.
Roz did not care if Martin Brannan shipped an entire harem across the English Channel, or held orgies all the way from Dover to Provence and back again. What she did want to know was the identity of the ‘lady friend’. Could it possibly be Melissa?
But it was not. Roz was aware of a stab of disappointment because it would have fitted so well. Melissa and Martin would have driven quietly down to Dover to get on the ferry, the twins travelling on their mother’s passport. Two babies, well wrapped up in a carry-cot, would not have been especially remarkable.
She said, casually, to Martin Brannan’s secretary, that hadn’t Mr Brannan been seen with the French actress, Anne-Marie St Clair?
‘Has he?’ said the secretary, saucer-eyed and wholly unsuspecting.
‘Perhaps I got it wrong—But when you said France—’
‘Mr Brannan isn’t in France with Anne-Marie St Clair, that I do know,’ said the secretary, and then, unable to resist sharing the rest of the gossip about her boss, and remembering that Nurse Raffan, so quiet and mouselike, never gossiped, she said, ‘It’s a lady called Isobel Ingram. I know because the travel agent sent the ferry tickets here by mistake.’
Isobel Ingram. The name smacked across Roz’s consciousness. Isobel Ingram. Melissa Anderson’s closest friend. Roz had met Isobel at St Luke’s when she had visited Mel, and several times during her babysitting stints for Mel and Joe at the house. Isobel Ingram. The one person in the world whom Melissa would trust after Martin Brannan! Roz saw at once that what Mel had done was to give the twins into the temporary care of Isobel and Martin Brannan for the journey to France. Probably Melissa had followed them a day later, or had even travelled on the same ferry, but separately. Once in France it was anybody’s guess where they had gone, although Roz was inclined to think it was Switzerland where there were so many private clinics. Money again, you see! It smoothed all paths!
There was absolutely no way that Roz could follow Melissa and the other two even if she had known their destination. She would have to wait until they got back, but that was fine; waiting would help her to sharpen up the finer points of her plan. It would let her imagine for a little longer the culmination of the plan—it was remarkable how much pleasure she was deriving from that.
But the plan was going to be carried out, that was for sure. The balance had got to be redressed. Melissa would be trying to evade Roz from now on, which meant she might not return to her own house. Roz thought Mel would probably put it up for sale, and go to live somewhere else.
But where?
The phone book listed three Ingrams with the initial I. Roz rang all three numbers that same evening. The first was a man, and although the second was a woman she was definitely not Isobel. To both people Roz said, crisply, that she was a British Telecom operator checking the line for faults. The third number rang out a few times, and then an answerphone clicked on and Roz heard Isobel’s voice asking the caller please to leave a message. In case the machine had detected someone calling and maybe even recorded the number, Roz again said she was ringing from BT engineers’ department, checking the lines in the area. If there were any problems, please telephone fault inquiries between nine and five.
So far so good. She had Isobel’s phone number and also her address from the phone book. She consulted a street map, and then caught a bus to Isobel’s house. She had been careful to put on her dark raincoat, and to take with her a collecting box for one of the hospital’s many charities. She was an indefatigable helper for all of the various Support Groups. Good, dependable Roz. And nobody ever looked twice at someone going from door to door with a collecting box.
Isobel lived in part of a converted Victorian house—No. 22b, the phone book had said. It was a tree-lined street, rather quiet and fairly prosperous-looking. No. 22 was halfway along; it stood a little way back from the road, in quite large gardens. The house itself looked quite large as well. It would be rather nice inside: probably it would have those large high-ceilinged rooms. Roz glanced up and down the street, and then advanced cautiously through the gate and down the gravel path. No. 22b was the top half, of course. There was a main doorway which was plainly shared by both flats. It was closed and locked, but it had two oblong panes of coloured glass let into the oak and Roz managed to peer through one of them. Yes, there was the door into the ground floor flat on the right-hand side, and straight ahead was a staircase winding upwards. It looked as if the main hall was shared; it looked very clean, and there was a well-polished hall table with a large asparagus fern on it.
There were curtains at the downstairs windows but there was a deserted feel to the place, and when she peered through one of the windows she saw that there was no furniture in any of the rooms. The ground floor flat was empty.
‘It’s been empty for about three weeks,’ said the woman at No. 24, in response to Roz’s deliberately timid inquiry. ‘But I should think it will have to be sold. A youngish woman’s got the first floor—I think she’s away at the moment or I’d suggest you knock on her door to ask if she knows what’s happening. But the old chap at 22a died recently, I do know that. He was in hospital for a longish time so the place has got a bit neglected. His family will probably redecorate before they sell. So as to get a better price, you see.’
Roz explained that she was looking for a flat in the area. Someone had told her about 22a so she was taking a look from the outside. She thought it looked a bit small for what she wanted, but she might ask the agents about viewing it.
Martin Brannan was not expected at St Luke’s until after Christmas and the New Year holiday. He would be back by the fifth of January for certain because he had a clinic on that day. The paragraph about the twins had appeared in early December, so if they came back with Mr Brannan, or perhaps shortly afterwards, they would have had about a month in the clinic, wherever the clinic might be. Roz was not very knowledgeable about time scales for this kind of surgery, but she thought four or five weeks did not sound an unreasonable recovery time.
Just before Christmas she asked a large firm of estate agents about renting out her own house; she might be taking a job in the north for a few years, she said. No, she did not want to actually sell the place; she would most likely be returning to it. Could they arrange a tenancy—a furnished let for two or three years? She would want someone responsible who would look after the place, but she would take advice as to the amount of rent to charge. She would not be greedy about that, although she would hope for a reasonable income from the property.
The agents were sure they could find a suitable tenant on this basis, and probably without too much difficulty. There was the nearby school of languages, they said. Oh no, they were not suggesting renting to students, but there were very often foreign lecturers who came there on a one- or two-year contract. That might fit the bill very nicely. Such people quite often liked to bring their wives over with them, so they did not mind paying a reasonably generous rent. Yes, certainly the rental monies could be paid directly into a bank for her; that was a perfectly normal arrangement.
‘I’ll let you know in a couple of weeks if I get the job in the north,’ said Roz.
She had some leave due to her for Christmas, which she spent on her own. There was a nurses’ party at St Luke’s to which she could have gone—beer and fruit punch in the canteen, it was—and then one of the other nurses invited her to a New Year’s Eve party at her home, but Roz had never gone to any hospital parties in the past and she did not want to do anything out of pattern in case it drew attention to her. So she said she would be having a quiet family Christmas, thank you.
For most of the holiday she watched television and listened to the radio or did crossword puzzles, and when she was not doing that she was working out the details of her plan. At times she was awed at the vastness of it, but Rosie thought it was the right thing to do. It was a good plan; parts of it were flexible, and parts of it depended on other people and on events coinciding. But Roz thought—and Rosie agreed—that it would work.
She strung Christmas decorations in the front sitting-room window because people might notice if she did not, and on Christmas Day she cooked a turkey, eating part of it for her Christmas dinner, and slicing and jointing the rest for the freezer. The neighbours on both sides of her house were away, and it was very quiet indeed. Roz did not mind; she was able to focus all her attention on what was ahead. She was used to being quiet, and in any case Christmas was really a time for children.
Ah, but this time next year—
The agents dealing with the house where Isobel Ingram lived were a much smaller firm than the ones Roz had approached about letting her own house. This was fortunate, because it was important to keep all the different parts of the plan separate.
The agents were helpful and efficient. They would be more than happy for the quietly-dressed lady to view the ground floor flat. It was not strictly speaking on the market yet because they were still waiting for probate to be granted. But they had the keys, and if she was interested they could let her know the asking price when it was fixed. Oh, and she would have to allow for the current condition of the rooms, which were a bit grubby. But it was amazing what a lick of paint and a few rolls of paper could do to a place.
‘Yes, of course I’ll take that into account. What about the keys? The thing is that I’m a nurse at St Luke’s and my current shift means I don’t finish until half past eight in the evenings. I couldn’t really get out there until nine.’
The firm’s rule these days was that all viewings had to be accompanied, but there was no furniture in this particular flat, and surely to goodness a nurse ought to be trustworthy. And nobody in the office really wanted to turn out for a nine p.m. viewing of an empty flat on a winter’s evening. If they let her take the keys for viewing the place tonight, could she bring them back the following morning?
‘What I could do,’ said Roz, pretending to think about it, ‘is put the keys through your letter-box later tonight, after I’ve had a look at the place. That way you’d have them first thing the next morning. Would that do? And I’ll be very careful about locking everywhere up.’
This was all quite acceptable. The electricity was still on, because of leaving a bit of heating in the place during the cold weather—frozen pipes, you know—so perhaps Miss Raffan would make sure that all lights were switched off when she left?
There were no problems about any of it. Miss Raffan even telephoned the next morning to make sure that the keys had been found. No, the flat was not quite what she had been looking for, after all. But you had to check, hadn’t you?
As the year gradually died, the small flutter caused by Simone and Sonia Anderson’s birth died as well.
Shortly before Christmas there was a brief announcement that the operation to separate them—the operation their father had considered against God’s wish—had gone ahead. Hard on the heels of this came a second announcement that the younger twin—Sonia—had died from respiratory arrest on the operating table. This was followed by a slightly different announcement in another newspaper that it had been renal failure, and that Sonia had not died until nearly a week later. There was next a report that Mrs Anderson would not be returning to England, and although one or two feature-writers optimistically requisitioned travelling costs and booked half-page spreads, as one editor gloomily pointed out, the world was a big place and even if you narrowed it down to Switzerland, which was the likeliest country, there were any amount of private, discreet clinics in Switzerland, and where did you start?
Martin Brannan, recently back from a holiday in France, was tracked down and questioned, but he gave no help at all. In any case he might be leaving gynaecology altogether, he said; he had been offered a research fellowship in Canada, which was a very attractive prospect. Yes, certainly he had seen the reports that Sonia Anderson had died somewhere abroad, but he knew no more than anyone else. No, he had not been involved in the operation to separate the twins; it was a very specialized field of surgery, wholly outside his province, and in fact the twins and their mother had ceased to be his patients for quite some time. Yes, of course he had recommended one or two specialist paediatricians to Mrs Anderson after the twins’ birth, but it would be a breach of medical ethics and patient confidentiality for him to disclose any of those names. No, he did not know where Melissa Anderson and the surviving twin might be now. His tone said that even if he had known he would not have divulged it.
The journalists ferreted around for a further week or two; some of them ferreted longer than others and some of them ferreted deeper than others, and a young man called Clifford Markovitch, who was trying to raise the finance to start his own gossipy, celebrity-slanted magazine and who considered himself more far-seeing than many of his colleagues, added the name of the Anderson family to the rather complex card-index he was compiling.
But in the end, since nothing is so stale as yesterday’s news, and nothing is so saleable as tomorrow’s scandal, by the third week of January the twins and their story had more or less faded from the public’s mind.
In the mind of one person it had not faded at all. Roz did not believe these rather contradictory reports of Sonia Anderson’s death. She had a very good insight into the twists and turns of the bitch’s mind, and she believed that these reports about Sonia were false, partly intended to throw journalists off the scent, but mostly intended to fool Roz herself. She kept watch on both Isobel Ingram’s flat, and on the bitch’s house. Just as she had thought, in the week following Christmas, a ‘For Sale’ board appeared in the garden of Mel’s house, with a sticker saying that viewing was strictly by appointment with the estate agents. As with Isobel’s flat, Roz took careful note of the position of curtains, and saw the mail pile up on the other side of the glass-panelled front door, although she did not think Melissa would come back here.
But on the second Saturday in January the curtains of Isobel’s flat were pulled all the way back, as if someone had wanted to let in light and air. Two of the little top windows were open, and a car—a smallish hatchback, the kind that a lot of women drove—was parked on the drive. In the back of the car was a child’s safety seat.
Just one child’s safety seat.
The agents’ keys to the empty flat in Isobel’s house had, of course, only fitted the ground floor. Roz had not expected otherwise. But on the key-ring had been a key that unlocked the main door of the house. It could not have been otherwise, of course; the occupants of the two flats would need to secure the outer door against prowlers and cats, and they would each need their own key to it. Roz had duplicates of all the keys made in one of the big, while-you-wait, key-cutting places in the town. It was a busy lunchtime, and nobody would be likely to remember the small, ordinary transaction.
As for the other transaction—
You did not work in a large hospital without getting to know a bit about all the other departments. Roz had been on the staff of Martin Brannan’s maternity clinic for two years, but she had worked in the men’s surgical ward before then, and she had also done a stint in Casualty—what was beginning to be called Accident & Emergency.
