The Meddlers (40 page)

She heard the busy repetition of creaking and slamming doors from outside and relaxed. Busy places were the best every time. She’d be able to stay here a long while, long enough to get him fed.

And after that, maybe, she’d be able to think of somewhere to go where she could sleep. Maybe.

“What makes you think I can help you?”

“You’re the only Norma Gould in the book. The only doctor, that is. She mentioned your name once. You do know her, don’t you? And if you’re her doctor, you should know what’s going on. So why not tell me?” He frowned irritably as she stared at him, doubt on her face.

“Look, what’s the mystery? The woman in the flat below here told me she’d gone in an ambulance.” His voice sharpened. “What happened? Did she—what did she do to herself?”

  “What makes you think she did something to herself? I’m sorry to seem uncooperative, but you must see I can’t just—wait a moment.
What
did you say your name was?”

“Bridges. I—”

“No. Your first name.”

“Michael. What—”

“Ah! Mike. We’ve got nothing out of her since she was admitted, but she did say—yes. Mike. How long have you known her?”

“For God’s sake, what is this? I go to see a girl, no one seems to know where she is, just that she was taken ill, and I come to you because you’re the only lead I have, and now you—look, what is it? Did she do something to herself?”

“No. But I’m interested to know why you should think she might have done. I’m not just being unnecessarily curious. We need to know, you see. It would help in her treatment. The thing is, she’s had a breakdown, for want of a better word. I admitted her to a psychiatric unit. It would be a considerable help to get some background information about this illness. And you might be able to provide some of it. So, before I can decide whether or not you should be allowed to visit her, I’ll need to talk to you. Later, the psychiatrist looking after the case will want to interview you too, if you’re willing to help. But I’m an old friend of hers, you see, so I’d like to talk to you first. So, could you tell me please, how long
you’ve known her? And then how she has behaved in recent weeks? It really would be a great help.”

  “It’s completely beyond me. The woman can’t have disappeared into the ether! With all the fuss there’s been, the television appeals, the newspaper publicity—pictures of both of them have been plastered everywhere for the best part of five days. How inept can your people be not to have found them yet?”

“The pictures aren’t all they might be, Dr. Briant. You admitted that yourself. Taking stills from a video tape recording, you don’t get the definition, you see. And a baby—well, you know how one baby looks very like another! I remember, when my second was in hospital, and we went to see her. Three months old she was, and do you think I could easily pick her out of a wardful?” The Inspector shook his head. “No, Dr. Briant, you can’t say my men aren’t doing their damnedest, because they are. If there’s one thing really gets my boys going it’s a baby case. And this woman—Quinn—she’s so damned
ordinary
! You walk into any supermarket any time today and you’ll see a dozen who could be her. I keep telling you, we’re doing our best. We can’t do more.”

George stood up and walked across the room fretfully to stand staring out of the window at the courtyard. “It’s not as though the woman were all that bright, for God’s sake! I may have misjudged her bloody emotional state, but I know I didn’t misjudge her mental capacities. She hasn’t the wit to evade a really determined search, she’d walk straight into trouble the first—”

“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong, Dr. Briant, quite wrong. The dimmer they are, the more likely they are to get away with it. Give me your clever villain and I’ll nail him. But your daft ones, the ones who plan nothing, walk off the street into the first likely looking crib, bash the back door in and help themselves—they get away with it. The harder they try to plan things, the more they use their heads, the more likely it is they leave a trail as wide as … as the M-One. But the dim ones—it’s because they don’t see trouble coming that they avoid it so easily—walk right through it, really. We’ll catch ten smart embezzlers for every stupid shoplifter we
manage to nobble. It’s like I said, Doctor. We’re doing our best. We can’t do more. But now we’ve got your people involved, it may speed up. So far your Miss Hervey’s covered the North London area hospitals and nurseries and the like; we’ll take her across the water this afternoon. And with your other people—well, we should have made a direct check on every abandoned baby in the country within the next week—”

“The next week! I tell you frankly, Inspector, unless we get him back sooner than that, the whole thing will have been a waste of time. I’m already very doubtful about the possibilities of salvaging much out of the—oh, God damn it all to hell! Two years, two years to end like this! It’s more than—”

The Inspector paused at the door and stared back at him, a faint frown on his face. “You do want to find him, no matter what, of course?”

“What? Oh, I suppose you’ll have to go on. But unless you get him back here very soon, my own feeling is”—he shrugged—“there won’t be much point in it.”

“I thought you were worried about him. The baby, I mean. If he were mine, I’d be—well, I don’t know much about the science of it all, but he’s a baby, after all, isn’t he? I’m a father myself, and I know how I’d feel in your shoes.”

“Yes. Yes, of course,” George said. “But soon. That’s the whole point of the operation.
Soon
.”

The Inspector looked at him for a moment and then said, “Yes, sir,” and his voice was flat with dislike.

  George woke suddenly as the light hit his eyes, and he blinked stupidly into the glare, aware of the stiffness of his neck, the pins and needles in the arm that had lain crumpled beneath the weight of his body in the chair.

“Who—what is it? Have you got him?” he said thickly and tried to focus his eyes on the shape of the figure by the door.

“It’s me.”

“What? Hilary! What are you—I’m sorry, I fell alseep. I haven’t had much sleep these past days. What is it?”

She stood sullenly beside the door, her hands in her coat pockets,
her head down so that she need not meet his eyes. “I didn’t want to come but she made me.”

“What? Oh, I’m sorry. I can’t think straight. I’m still disorientated. Give me a moment or two.” He stood up and crossed the room to the basin in the corner and began to wash his face in cold water.

“What time is it?” He dried his face roughly and turned to look at her.

“Half past nine.” And this time she looked up at him and her face changed. “Oh, Dad, you look awful! As though—”

“I’ve been— well, you know what’s happened, I suppose.”

“Yes. I know.”

“Is that why you came?” He smiled thinly at her, suddenly glad to see her standing there. “You must be as distressed as we are here.”

“I didn’t want to come. She made me.”

He frowned. “Your mother? She sent you?”

“She’s been trying to phone you, for days, ever since Ian went. They wouldn’t put her through.”

“We’ve refused all calls except official police ones. Ian—what’s that about Ian?”

“The cable came this morning. He… got a job of some sort— in San Francisco. That’s where he cabled from, anyway.”

“San—what? How the hell did he get there?”

“I don’t know.” Hilary sounded sullen again. “I don’t much care. I don’t care about anything. I just want to be left in peace.” She looked away from him, her mouth held in an ugly line as she tried not to let the crying start again. “I don’t care about anything any more.”

“Look, my dear, I know how distressed you were the… the evening you left the Unit. I’ve wanted to talk to you about it, but you weren’t here, were you? Your mother told me—well, I know you’ve been made very unhappy about things, but—”

“I don’t want to talk about it!” she said violently. “Not now or ever. I wouldn’t have come, only she made me.”

“My dear child. I’d be as content to say no more about an unnecessary and unfortunate incident as you. I would never force you
to do anything against your will, and I—well, I assumed you wanted to stay with your mother. But if you would prefer to return here to me, well, then we’ll forget all about it.”

“I came because she made me,” Hilary said again, mulishly.

He frowned. “She wants you to come back to the Unit?”

“She wants you. She doesn’t care about me.” She looked at him and then at the floor. “No more than you do.”

“That’s most unjust! You know I do.”

“It doesn’t matter. Nothing about me matters. You’ve got… her. And she—” She swallowed. “I won’t talk about it. I’ve told you what I was sent to tell you, and”—again she swallowed—“so I’ve told you. She says you’ve got to come right away.”

“Your mother?”

“Yes! I told you. She wants you. She’s ill.”

He looked at her for a moment and then walked back to his desk and sat down heavily.

“Ill. I see. That was her exact message?”

“Yes. She’s ill, and you’ve got to come.”

“I see. Now, you tell me. Is she ill?”

“I said so!”

“No, your
mother
said so. I—one doesn’t want to be harsh, my dear, but you know as well as I do your mother has been… well, using her health as a weapon for a long time. I would be the first to admit that once she was ill, but her kidney disease has been under control for a long time now, and there have been so many times when I—when she has caused me to be anxious about her health when there was no just cause. So I’m asking you, is she ill, or does she merely say she is?”

“I don’t know. How can I know? She says she feels ill, and she seems—oh, don’t ask me. I was sent to tell you, so I’ve told you.”

“Please, Hilary, try to be adult about this. You aren’t a child any more. You know the situation between us. I wish it hadn’t happened, but it has, and there it is. I must tell you I have made up my mind that I won’t suffer any more at your mother’s hands. I’m sorry for her, deeply sorry. I know she’s unhappy, but there is nothing I can do about it. I can’t change the situation an iota, not in any way that would satisfy her. And for that reason I am not prepared
to be—I won’t let her confuse my life any further. And I suspect that she’s… using a threat of illness to confuse me now. Can you understand that?”

“When people tell me I’ve got to be an adult about something, it usually means I’ve got to say what they want me to, and not what I really think. I suppose you want me to say she isn’t ill. Well, she said I had to be an adult too, and she wanted me to tell you she is. I just want to be left in
peace
. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say—I wish you’d both leave me alone.”

She was crying now, painfully, her face red and creased, and he put his hand out toward her, but she shook her head furiously and sniffed heavily, turning her head to wipe her cheek roughly against her coat collar.

“Oh, Hilary, I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have to—I’m sorry.” He stood up and came around the desk toward her and put an arm across her shoulders, and for a moment she resisted. But then she relaxed and turned her head and rested it against him and abandoned herself to her tears, weeping noisily and luxuriously.

He let her cry for a while and then gave her a handkerchief from his pocket and led her to a chair before going back to his own and leaning across the desk to smile carefully at her. “Better now? Good girl. Now, listen, my dear. Just let me sort things out, and then we’ll say no more. You’ll stay here, just as you used to. And when”—he frowned then for a moment—“when we get the baby back, and it can’t be long now before they find him, we’ll go on as before, hmm? But just tell me—
is
she really ill? Or is this just another of her… usual episodes?”

She looked at him and then wiped her eyes again before sitting staring at the desk, her forehead slightly creased. She thought of Marjorie, of the awfulness of the way she had lain for hours on the sofa alternately crying and moaning, and then sleeping heavily. She thought of the bleakness of the uncared-for house, the loneliness of it, of the misery of the past few days compared with the way things had been when she had lived here in the Unit.

“Well?” George said, and she looked up at him and smiled a little waveringly and closed her mind to the memory of Marjorie’s puffy red face, the way she had so often vomited with horrifying
noisiness in the lavatory, the way she seemed to have aged ten years in a few days.

“I think she’s been drinking rather a lot,” she said, and George nodded heavily.

“I can quite see she would turn to that. But that’s all? I mean, if she’s drinking a lot, it would account for—oh, damn it, how could you know? If she has genuine symptoms, you wouldn’t be able to tell. Well, either way, she’s not fit to be responsible for a child of—”

Hilary made an odd sound, half giggle, half sob. “Now I’m a child again, so it doesn’t matter what I say, does it?”

“What? Oh, well, that was fair, I suppose. I am trying to have it both ways.”

“Well, I
am
a child. I
am
. I’m no good at all this business. I can’t tell people what they ought to do, or what’s true or what isn’t. I’m no good at working things out. I want to do what I want, not what other people keep saying I ought to.”

She began to cry again, and he felt a momentary twinge of irritation, and then an immediate surge of guilt. She was quite right, of course; how could she cope with so complex a situation? It was cruelly unjust of Marjorie to use her as a go-between in this way. Drinking, and letting the child see it—it was outrageous. Ill or not, it was outrageous. And of course she wasn’t. It was just another of her wretched play-acting ploys, and he couldn’t, he wouldn’t, suffer it any longer.

He rubbed his face, suddenly aware again of his deep fatigue, and said heavily, “It’s all right, Hilary. Forget it. It’s not your problem. You go on up and make yourself a hot drink and go to bed. I’ll deal with this.”

He sat for a long time after she had gone and then picked up the telephone. He began to dial a number and then, with sudden petulance, slammed down the phone. To hell with her. If she was genuinely ill, she could call a doctor for herself. He had enough to worry about right now. From here on, Marjorie was her own problem.