“I understand that,” I replied. “You have other children at home that you need to look after. A baby would mean losing your job, however understanding your employers are, and you wouldn’t be able to send money home to them.” I looked at her and saw I was still offtrack. “Or couldn’t you bear to leave another child behind while you came to the UK to work?” She met my eye, a tacit confirmation.
Why could I understand Hattie when you could not? Because I understand shame, and you’ve never experienced it. Hattie stood up. “Is there anything else you’d like to know?” She wanted me gone.
“Yes, do you know who gave you the injection? The one with the gene?”
“No.”
“What about the doctor who delivered your baby?”
“It was a caesarean.”
“But surely you still saw him or her?”
“No. He wore a mask. When I had the injection. When I had the operation. All the time in a mask. In the Philippines there’s nothing like that. No one’s bothered that much about hygiene, but over here …”
As she spoke, I saw those four nightmarish canvases you painted, the woman screaming and the masked figure over her. They weren’t a record of a drug-induced hallucination but what actually happened to you.
“Do you have your hospital notes, Hattie?”
“No.”
“They got lost?”
She seemed surprised that I would know.
“Yes, if that’s okay.”
We go out into reception together. Mr. Wright sees the bunch of daffodils on his secretary’s desk and stops. I see her tensing. He turns to me, eyes reddening.
“I really like what Tess told you about the gene for yellow in a daffodil saving children’s sight.”
“Me too.”
I go up to him and we hesitate a moment, as if we may kiss on the cheek as friends rather than as—what? What are we to each other? He was the person who told me it was you they’d found, you in the toilets building. He was the man who’d taken my hand and looked me in the eye and destroyed who I was up until that moment. Our relationship isn’t cocktail-style pecking on the cheek, nor is it simply that of policeman to relative of a victim. I take his hand and hold it as he once held mine; this time it’s my hand that’s the warmer.
“I wanted to say sorry, Beatrice.”
I am about to reply when a waitress pushes between us, tray held aloft, a pencil stuck businesslike into her ponytail. I think that we should be somewhere like a church—a quiet, serious place—where the big things are talked about in whispers, not shouted above the clatter of crockery and chitchat.
We sit down at a table and I think we both find it awkwardly intimate. I break the silence. “How is PC Vernon?”
“She’s been promoted,” he replies. “She’s working for the domestic violence unit now.”
“Good for her.”
He smiles at me, and ice broken now, he takes the plunge into a deeper conversation. “You were right all along. I should have listened to you and believed you.”
I used to fantasize about hearing exactly that kind of a sentence and wish I could whisper to my earlier self that one day a policeman would be telling me that.
“At least you had a query,” I say. “And acted on it.”
“Much too late. You should never have been put in jeopardy like that.”
The sounds of the restaurant suddenly mute, the lights are dimming into darkness. I can just hear DS Finborough talking to me, reassuring me that I’m okay, but then his voice is silenced and everything is dark and I want to scream but my mouth can’t make any sound.
When I come round, I’m in the café’s clean and warm ladies’ room. DS Finborough is with me. He tells me I was out for about five minutes. Not so long then. But it’s the first time I’ve lost sound too. The staff at Carluccio’s have been solicitous and call me a taxi to get home. I ask DS Finborough if he’ll accompany me and he willingly agrees.
I’m now in a black cab with a policeman sitting next to me, but I still feel afraid. I know that he’s following me; I can feel his malevolent presence, murderous, getting closer. I want to tell DS Finborough. But like Mr. Wright, he’d tell me that he’s locked up on remand in prison, that he can’t hurt me again, that there’s nothing to fear. But I wouldn’t be able to believe him.
DS Finborough waits till I’m safely inside the flat, and then takes the taxi on to wherever he is going. As I close the door, Pudding bends her warm furry body around my legs, purring. I call out Kasia’s name. No reply. I dampen down flaring sparks of anxiety, then see a note on the table saying she’s at her antenatal group. She should be home any minute.
