Second Opinion (44 page)

‘I understand from my wife that you are a doctor?’ he said as she shook hands. ‘Are you perhaps from the same people as — I mean, where from?’

‘Yes, I’m Dr Barnabas,’ George said. ‘From Old East Hospital. In Shadwell.’

The room seemed to become so quiet that even the traffic in the road outside was silenced. He stood and stared at her, her hand still in his, and his wife, clinging to his arm, was transfixed also, her face actually paling as George looked at her.

‘Old East,’ he said, his voice thinner than before. ‘In Shadwell. I’m not sure that I know it.’

‘Oh, I think you do,’ George said, and then somewhere deep inside herself gathered up all her courage and rolled it into a hard ball to throw at him. ‘You can’t have forgotten the place so soon, Mr Oberlander.’

The woman threw back her head and howled. It was a dreadful sound, a deep baying note of utter misery, and
George started forward, driven by an instinctive need to hold her, to help her, as her husband pulled on her arm and half dragged, half led her across the room to the sofa, at the same time as the woman in the nylon overall appeared at the drawing-room door, her face now showing more than a hint of expression.

‘It’s all right, darling. Please, it’s all right,’ the man was murmuring as he made his wife stretch out on the sofa. ‘Sylvia, sweetie, do stop, please. It won’t help. Please, darling, please Sylvie, choochie, please don’t cry so.’

But the thin woman was now in an ecstasy of tears and George stood there still and silent as he fussed over her, sitting beside her and mopping her streaming eyes. It went on for some time, until at last the loud sobs lessened and slowed and she seemed too exhausted to weep any more.

‘Come and look after her, Olive,’ David Hillman said after a while. ‘I have to speak to — to this doctor here. You look after Sylvie. We won’t be long.’

He got to his feet and looked at George. The light from the lamp Olive had switched on behind the sofa glinted on his spectacles and blanked out the lenses, so that he looked anonymous and strange, and George felt a moment of fear herself. What had she walked into here? Was this man intending to do her some harm?

But then her common sense returned to her and that was a comfort. David Hillman was somewhat shorter than she was herself and for all his bulkiness unlikely to be particularly fit. There was no physical threat here, she told herself, and was able to nod politely when he said, ‘Please come to my study, will you? We can talk quietly there,’ and followed him to a door on the far side of the drawing room.

She looked back as she reached the door, and saw the woman Olive on her knees beside the sofa, stroking Sylvia Hillman’s forehead. She looked resigned and a little angry; but then Olive looked up and, catching her eye, lifted her brows in a sort of ‘Honestly, some people!’ message, friendly
and conspiratorial, making of George and herself a pair. How very odd, George thought, and followed the round man into his room.

He sat down at a desk, ensconcing himself behind it, and George recognized what he was doing: putting a guard between himself and her, with some pomp, and the last shreds of her fear vanished. He was as nervous about her as she was about him, clearly. So she smiled at him when he indicated the chair facing him on the other side of the desk and sat down, relaxing without difficulty.

‘This is a lovely room,’ she said conversationally, as if she’d been at a cocktail party. ‘Leather is so very beautiful, isn’t it?’ The space was as leathery as a harness store, she thought privately, deep buttoned chairs and sofa, a desk with leather inset into the top, leather-handled paper knives and pens on it; everything that could be covered in dark green skin had been. It looked like a shop window in Tottenham Court Road.

He brushed the comment aside. ‘Why are you here?’ he demanded.

‘I told your wife. Didn’t she tell you when she phoned? It was about the advertisement I placed. About babies for adoption.’

He was silent for a moment and then seemed to stiffen himself. ‘Why did you address me by — what was it you called me? Is it because … Well, why?’

‘Oh, come on! You know perfectly well I called you Oberlander. And it meant something to your wife, didn’t it? I’m sorry if I upset her. I didn’t want to, believe me. But I do have to find out what happened. The baby’s death was —’

‘The baby’s what?’ He was so stiff now that he seemed to George to be made of board. She lifted her brows at him, never taking her eyes from his face, trying to assess the truth of every hint of expression there. His round face served him well, however. There was little to see in it but a sort of blankness.

‘The baby’s death,’ she said again. ‘We — the police and I — have been investigating that death. I am the pathologist at Old East, Mr Oberlander — or Hillman. Whichever. I did the post-mortem and …’

He was no longer blank. His face too had crumpled and tears had appeared behind the glasses. She watched with horror as, slowly, they began to trickle down his soft cheeks. Behind her, through the door to the drawing room, she could hear his wife still sobbing. What on earth had been done to these two people to have this effect on them?

32
  
  

The sky outside the windows that looked down into Sloane Street slid from grey to charcoal to a deep indigo that vanished into blackness when Olive, fetching yet another pot of fresh coffee, switched on more lights. Still Sylvia was sobbing softly. It was as though she had a bottomless pit of tears locked inside her pathetically thin body from which she would never cease to draw.

David sat close beside her on the sofa, holding her hand, and George, watching them as they told their story, felt her belly taut with pity. People shouldn’t be like this, so despairing and desperate, so
hungry
. She tried to put herself in their shoes, to feel the need as urgently as they did, and failed, despite the fact that she had herself thought often enough over the past few years of the way time was rolling on and her own chances of parenthood were becoming slimmer with each year that passed. To want children, yes, that made sense; but to ache for them, need and yearn and long for them to the point of utter desolation as these two had for so many years, that couldn’t be right. It had become for them a form of obsession. Not a normal wanting, but a pathological despair. And someone had made a lot of money out of it. There was a great deal of anger deep inside George as she listened to the slow building up of the story, sentence by painful sentence.

‘We thought it’d just be easy, at first. Well, you always do, don’t you?’ David Hillman looked down at his wife at his side. ‘Twenty years now. It doesn’t seem possible, does it? I was twenty-five and my Sylvie here was twenty when we married. The first two, three years we weren’t that interested. We even used something so we wouldn’t — Do you remember, Sylv?’

She lifted her chin to look at him and the tears still ran down her face as she essayed a smile; it was a gut-wrenching thing to see and George looked back at David quickly.

‘But then things got better. I made a few bob, we moved here and it had everything. There’s the park and the Square so near, lots of fresh air, and we thought, right, now we’ll start our family. Once we have three we’ll get a big house in the country …’

His voice trailed away and he looked down at his wife’s hand held closely in his. After a moment he patted it with his other hand and then went on. It was clearly not easy.

‘We went to ever so many different people. The top specialists. Here and in America too. I can’t tell you what we spent. Tried everything. They never could find out what was wrong with us. They said I’m all right, said Sylvie was, but we still never started a baby.’

‘If I’d even had a miscarriage it wouldn’t have been so bad.’ Sylvia spoke so unexpectedly that George almost jumped. ‘I mean it would have proved it was possible, you know? But I never even had that.’ Her voice was thick and rusty, as though she’d forgotten how to use it in the flood of tears that had engulfed the afternoon.

‘At first, we didn’t want to even think of adoption. It was our own babies we wanted, ones that looked like us. We’ve got pictures of our grandparents, even our great-grandparents, and it’s marvellous to see the way people look like each other and we thought … But after a while that stopped being so important. Just to have a baby of our own to care for …’

‘We tried the donor thing, you know,’ Sylvia said. Her voice was still thick and choked but she seemed a little less tearful. ‘David wasn’t keen but he said, for me, he said it’d be —’ She stopped, shook her head and wept again.

‘I didn’t care by then. I wouldn’t have cared if they’d said chop your finger off, we’ll grow it into a baby for you.’ He sounded more weary than determined now. It was as though in telling the story he was reliving the long exhausting years. ‘But that didn’t work either. They told us they couldn’t help us, to go away and forget about it, to make the best of nephews and nieces and godchildren and so forth.’ He went pink suddenly and sat very straight. ‘Those bastards knew it all, telling us that! Like that’d be any use to us! Like it’d be any use to anyone! When it’s your own home you want your own babies in it, not to borrow someone else’s for an afternoon. Bloody patronizing bastards!’

There was a silence for a while and George let it stretch as much as it wanted to. She would put no more pressure on them.

It was Sylvia who spoke first. ‘Then I met this woman at a charity thing. She said she’d met another woman who’d adopted a baby from Romania. No questions asked, beautiful child, she said. So I looked into it. I — er — I didn’t tell David at first.’

‘We’d gone away on a holiday, one we’d planned to do when our children grew up,’ David said. ‘Round the world, you know? Over the Pole and everything. We were away four weeks. Stayed in all the best hotels, saw lots, but it made no difference. I know that. We said to each other that from now on we’d live for ourselves and forget all about babies, but I knew she wouldn’t rest that easy.’

‘He’s wonderful, isn’t he?’ Sylvia said and looked appealingly at George. ‘Isn’t he the best husband a woman could have?’

‘Yes,’ George said and smiled at her. She meant it.

‘So when Sylvie told me she knew someone who’d get us a baby from Romania, I said all right, go for it. But she said it’d cost.’

‘I felt bad about that,’ Sylvia said. ‘Afterwards. This — The business hasn’t been all that wonderful lately. He doesn’t tell me, but I know.’

David went pink now. ‘I don’t bother you with business things,’ he said gruffly. ‘I never have and I never will. You want to spend, you go ahead, it’s your money as much as mine.’

‘I know,’ Sylvia said. ‘When you’ve got it. But it’s tighter than it was, you can’t deny, and here was I wanting twenty thousand pounds to —’

‘Twenty how much?’ George said.

‘It didn’t sound such a lot to me. I thought … Well, to have our own child after so many years, a thousand a year, really, that was what I thought, not a lot, and anyway I thought that’d be all there was. It wasn’t, of course.’

‘What happened?’ George ventured, for now they were both silent, looking down at their laps, clearly lost in memory.

‘Mmm?’ It was David who went on. ‘Oh yes. Well, it went on and on. This woman kept phoning, saying next week, next week. I thought we’d been conned, to tell you the truth, but there it was. The cheque had been paid. It was for cash to bearer so I never could find out who it was. There wasn’t anything I could do.’

He seemed to rouse himself suddenly, to become aware of how much he was saying, and he looked at her sharply, his round eyes shining like ice crystals behind his glasses. ‘Look, I’m — we’re telling you all this, but how do we know you aren’t the same people? That you don’t know anyway and are up to some trick or other? We’ve only got your word for it that you’re not.’

‘I showed you that letter to me,’ George said. ‘And my credit cards and so forth. It’s the only ID I have with me.
Please, do believe me. I’m involved only as the police pathologist. No more. Do please go on. Then maybe we can — Well, maybe we can track down these horrible people who treated you so badly and deal with them. Maybe even get some money back. Though I can’t promise that, of course,’ she ended hastily, suddenly hearing Gus expostulating at her for making impossible-to-keep promises.

‘Money back?’ David said. He laughed, an oddly mirthless little bark of sound. ‘That’ll be the bloody day.’

There was another pause, and then George spoke, carefully, needing to move them on but not alarm them. ‘So then what happened?’

David looked at her. His eyes were still sharp but he seemed to reach a decision. He put up both hands in a helpless gesture. ‘Then one day she phoned and said he was here.’

Sylvia was sitting very upright now and had taken her hand out of David’s and was holding it to her cheek as she stared at George.

‘Here?’ George said.

‘In London,’ Sylvia said. ‘It was ever so late. About half past nine, it must have been. David was at the office.’

‘We were up to our eyes in an MBO,’ David said, as though it explained everything.

‘A what?’ George was mystified.