Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note
Quotes and Sources
About the Publisher
August 18th
Peak District, UK
DS Joanna Harper stood on the viaduct with the other police officers. On the far bank, across the great expanse of the reservoir, a woman paused at the water’s edge, about to go in, her twin baby boys held tightly in her arms.
Harper turned to the DI. ‘How close are the officers on that side?’
Dense woodland surrounded the scrap of shore where the woman stood. Even at this distance, Harper could see that her legs were scarlet with blood from the thorns.
‘Not close enough,’ said Thrupp. ‘They can’t find a way to get to her.’
In a fury of thudding, the helicopter flew over their heads, disturbing the surface of the reservoir, bellowing its command: Step away from the water. It loomed above the tiny figure of the mother, deafening and relentless, but the officers on board wouldn’t be able to stop her. There was nowhere in the valley where the craft could make a safe landing, or get low enough to drop the winch.
Through the binoculars, Harper saw the woman collapse into a sitting position on the dried-out silt, her face turned to the sky, still clutching the babies. Perhaps she wouldn’t do it, after all.
A memory surfaced then, of what the old lady had said to her:
‘She’ll have to put them in the water, if she wants her own babies back . . . Right under the water. Hold ’em down.’
The woman wasn’t sitting at the water’s edge anymore; she was knee-deep, and wading further in. The DS kicked off her shoes, climbed up on the rail and prepared to dive.
The child is not mine as the first was,
I cannot sing it to rest,
I cannot lift it up fatherly
And bliss it upon my breast;
Yet it lies in my little one’s cradle
And sits in my little one’s chair,
And the light of the heaven she’s gone to
Transfigures its golden hair.
FROM The Changeling
BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
July 13th
8.10 p.m.
All she cared about was that the pain had been taken away. With it, the fear, and the certainty that she would die, all gone in the space of a few miraculous seconds. She wanted to drift off but then Patrick’s worried face appeared, topped by a green hospital cap and she remembered: I’m having my babies. The spinal injection she’d been given didn’t just signal the end of the horrendous contractions, but the beginning of a forceps extraction procedure that could still go wrong. The first baby was stuck in the birth canal. So, instead of allowing herself to sink inside her glorious, warm cocoon of numbness and fall asleep – which she hadn’t done for thirty-six hours – she tried to concentrate on what was happening.
The doctor’s face appeared, near to Lauren’s own, the mask pulled down revealing her mouth and most of her chin. The woman’s lips were moving as if untethered to her words. It was the drugs, and the exhaustion; the world had slowed right down. Lauren frowned. The doctor was looking at her, but she seemed so far away. She’s talking to me, thought Lauren, I should listen.
‘Ok, Mrs Tranter, because of the spinal, you won’t be able to tell when you have a contraction – so I’ll tell you when to push, ok?’
Lauren’s mouth formed an ‘o’, but the doctor had already gone.
‘Push.’
She felt the force of the doctor pulling and her entire body slid down the bed with it. She couldn’t tell if she was pushing or not. She made an effort to arrange her face in an expression of straining and tensed her neck muscles, but somewhere in her head a voice said, why bother? They won’t be able to tell if I don’t push, will they? Maybe I could just have a little sleep.
She shut her eyes.
‘Push now.’
The doctor pulled again and the dreaminess dispersed as the first one came out. Lauren opened her eyes and everything was back in focus, events running at the right speed, or perhaps slightly too quickly now. She held her breath, waiting for the sound of crying. When it finally came, that sound, thin and reedy, the weakened protest of something traumatised, she cried too. The tears seemed projectile, they were so pent-up. Patrick squeezed her hand.
‘Let me see,’ she said, and that was when the baby was placed on his mother’s chest, but on his back, arse-to-chin with Lauren so that all she could see were his folded froggy legs, and a tiny arm, flailing in the air. Patrick bent over them both, squinting at the baby, laughing, then crying and pressing his finger into one little palm.
‘Can’t you turn him around?’ she said, but nobody did. Then she was barely aware of the doctor saying, ‘push,’ again, and another pull. The boy was whisked away and the second one placed there.
This time she could reach up and turn the baby to face her. She held him in a cradle made of her two arms and studied his face, the baby studying her at the same time, his little mouth
