Second Opinion (49 page)

‘It mightn’t take as long as you think,’ George said with elaborate casualness. ‘Seeing I know how it was done.’

‘Eh?’ Gus stared at her with gratifying surprise, but she only smiled at him and leaned back in her chair as Kitty arrived to put a piece of plaice and some chips in front of her.

‘Thanks, Kitty. That looks lovely. A glass of water, too, please? Bless you.’

Kitty showed a decided tendency to linger and chat but Gus glared at her so she made a face and went to fetch the water. Gus demanded, ‘What does that mean, then?’

‘I’ve worked out how the scam was operated.’ She leaned forward, unable to hide her glee any longer. ‘I can see the whole story. Just you listen and see if you don’t agree. No interruptions, now!’

She speared some chips and began to eat, talking with her mouth full. Gus pushed his own plate aside and propped his chin on his fists to listen.

‘OK, I am a person — I’m not sure what sort of person — but a person who has access to people who want babies. At this stage I have to say I’m not sure how that access was obtained, but I have a strong suspicion. I’ll be working on that. Let’s just say for argument’s sake now that I am that person.

‘Right. I realize that a lot of money can be made by satisfying the wishes of these people who want babies. So I think about how to do it and I find out that there are a whole bunch of babies without parents in a foreign country. White babies, though some of them are dark haired and dark eyed, being of Gypsy origin, but the sort of babies the potential customers want. How to get them, however, from the country where they are, which is of course Romania — all that publicity about Romanian orphans a couple of years back, remember — how do I get them from Romania to the UK?’

‘I suppose —’ Gus began but she shook her head at him.

‘No, not a word till I’ve done. I know, as this person, that you can’t just go and select babies and take them to the airport and say to the officials there, “Oh, I’m just taking these babies to England!” You have to have them documented. Passports and so forth.

‘So, since there is no way I can get them on to passports — not every one of them and it’s my intention to bring in one hell of a lot — I need to smuggle them out of Romania into Britain. How? You can’t do it by packing them into cases or hiding them in luggage, can you? Babies breathe and move and cry. You can’t carry them through in hand luggage on account of all that has to go through security and is checked by X-rays. No good at all.

‘So …’ She stopped, triumphant. ‘So, I decide to carry them the way mothers carry babies before they’re born.’

He laughed at that. ‘Reverse birth, eh?’

‘As near as dammit. From time immemorial, to quote the cliché, mothers have bound their babies to their bodies and carried them that way. Look at this.’

She reached into her pocket and pulled out the postcard she’d bought at the souvenir desk at the Tate Gallery. ‘Can you see it?’

He looked at the copy of ‘The Last of England’ and
slowly a smile lifted his face. ‘I remember this. We had it in a book at school. The history master was keen on it.’

‘Then you know the details?’

‘Emigration in the 1850s,’ he said. ‘There was something else …’ He looked more closely and then smiled even more widely. ‘Of course. The baby. He used to talk about the baby.’ His voice died away and he stared and then looked at her. ‘Of course! It has to be the only way, doesn’t it? Why didn’t we think of it sooner?’

‘It was Vanny who made me realize. And Bridget who put the lid on it,’ she said and told him of her time at the Tate that day and he laughed.

‘That’s my dear old ladies! Going day after tomorrow, are they? Pity. You’ll miss ‘em.’ His eyes glinted then. ‘I won’t quite so much, as long as I can go on visiting your place to see where they were — being sentimental, like.’

‘If you leer again, I’ll hit you,’ George said amiably. ‘So, Gus, what do we do? Stake out the airport? Look for women wrapped in big upper garments, bigger than their faces and legs’d make you think they needed? Because I can’t see the scam stopping, can you? Why should it? Not when there’s money to be made.’

‘I’d already decided the airport was significant, of course. I’ve got men crawling round there, but I think we can be a bit more specific. We need to be sure these children are being brought in from Romania.’

‘I’m sure of it,’ she said. ‘The Oberlander baby, remember.’

‘Yes,’ he said and nodded. ‘AIDS. Not that it doesn’t happen in other countries, of course.’

‘But in Romania it’s endemic among babies. Orphaned babies — or rather babies in orphanages. Not all of them actually have dead parents, of course. But yes, I think we can be certain. These babies are brought from Romania —’

‘So we stake out flights from there.’

‘Remember that they needn’t all be direct flights.’

‘I’m well aware of that. Don’t teach me my job. OK, we stake it out, and when we get whoever is shipping the babies in —’

‘That should lead us to who is behind it all,’ George ended triumphantly. ‘I don’t imagine the prime mover does the actual fetching and carrying.’

‘But I suspect he or she did the killing of Harry Rajabani,’ Gus said. ‘That’s obvious.’

‘Because Harry had worked out what was going on?’ George frowned, and then her face cleared. ‘I was about to say how, but of course. I know now who it was who — at least, I think I do.’

‘Who killed Harry?’

‘Probably. Certainly who’s behind it all,’ George said. ‘It has to be! It can’t be anyone else. For a moment I wondered about Susan Kydd — the consultant on Paediatrics. She travels to Romania often, but then I realized who it
had
to be.’

‘Is this a private conversation, or can anyone join in?’ Gus asked plaintively.

‘Listen, Gus, don’t interrupt!’ She was sitting bolt upright, staring at him with her eyes glittering. She was so excited she could hardly get her words out. ‘She told me herself how much she cared about those childless people. She’ll do anything for them — and she also wants money, wants it badly. To improve the service, to make herself independent of the hospital. It all makes perfect sense to me.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’ Gus was acerbic. ‘Let me know when you’re ready to make some sort of sense as far as I’m concerned.’

‘Julia Arundel,’ George said. ‘It has to be! She was the one who knew who the people were who’d be open to the idea of adopting. She knew which of them had money. No one knew them better than she did.’

‘For Gawd’s sake, you daft ‘aporth, who
is
she?’ Gus bawled and some of the people at adjoining tables turned to
stare and snigger. Kitty, on the other side of the restaurant, called out, ‘She’s the cat’s mother!’ and giggled too.

George dropped her voice and leaned closer. ‘Julia Arundel. The consultant in charge of the Fertility Unit. It all fits so perfectly, Gus. It has to be her. She has access to the names of people who want babies. She promises them babies, takes money from them, like she took it in advance from the Hillmans, and then she imports the babies. She gets someone to smuggle them in tucked inside a shawl or a jacket and gets them drugged so that they don’t wake up — Valium, like Bridget said, maybe. Then one day one arrives dead, and she has to be really frantic, doesn’t she? Money has changed hands and — and then she remembers the Maternity Unit just down the corridor. She takes the dead baby and swaps it for a live one and passes it on.’

She lifted her chin then and went on softly, ‘And Gus, that means if I’m right, those bereaved parents are going to be able to get their babies back, doesn’t it? Though God knows what that’ll be like for the people who adopted them.’ She closed her eyes for a moment, all excitement and enjoyment gone. This was a horrible tangle. But she was certain she was right. She opened her eyes and went on talking, eagerly.

‘She does that three times — even to one of her own fertility patients, so she has to be a hard bitch, doesn’t she? And Harry, who spends a lot of time hanging around Fertility because of his girlfriend Cherry, he finds out. Gets suspicious anyway, and starts to make notes. In code. Using the Matty typewriter where he has to be so often when he sees the neonates. It all fits. He probably got the idea from accidentally shifting the key on the typewriter. People are always making mistakes with keyboards — I’ve had some awful tangles in my own department because of computer errors caused like that. There was a great fuss over some blood sugars for the Diabetic Clinic. Anyway, Harry gets this information, and Julia Arundel realizes he knows. Maybe he
confronted her? Who can say? And she kills him — runs over him. What car she used and where it is we can’t know, but maybe if you hunt around for her car in particular, you might get a surprise.’

‘I’ll look,’ he said tersely. ‘Go on.’ He hadn’t taken his eyes from her face all through her recital.

‘She dresses in anonymous clothes to do it. Woolly hat, jeans, trainers — so they thought she was a guy, the people at the Rag and Bottle.’ George wrinkled her nose in concentration. ‘Yeah, that was it. They just assumed it was a man, but it was Julia Arundel. And then she gets a frantic message from one of her clients. The baby she gave them is sick — very sick. She knows she’ll have to see him, and arranges for him to be brought here to Old East. Was she planning to kidnap the baby that night and get rid of him? Who can say? Anyway, she couldn’t for some reason. But she did manage to get her hands on him later with that tale about seeing the Harley Street consultant. And she killed him because she was afraid what would happen if he was investigated and searches made for the origin of his illness. You can see it all, can’t you? Christ, she must be the hardest of women — can you imagine behaving so —’

‘We can’t be sure,’ Gus said. ‘It’s a seductive theory, but there’s still your Dr Kydd idea, mind you. But this one’s good too.’ He looked at her with his head on one side. ‘OK, Detective Barnabas. What next?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘You’ve obviously taken my job off my hands. So tell me what to do next.’

She reddened. ‘Stop that damnfool nonsense, Gus Hathaway. If the idea stands up, you know perfectly well what happens next.’

He was silent for a while, thinking, and then nodded. ‘It stands up,’ he said. ‘OK. This is no time for me to get the hump over you being so bleedin’ clever. Well done. You’re a real smart cookie, ain’t that the phrase? Ta for your help.’
He smiled at her a little crookedly. ‘You’re good for a fella’s self-esteem, and I don’t think! But I’ll get over it. Right, we get a picture of Julia Arundel and show the Hillmans. We stake out the flights from Bucharest. We look in the register at Swansea for a car registered to Arundel and see if we can track it that way and check it for evidence of Harry’s murder — though it’s getting unlikely after all this time that there’ll be any traces left. And then — then we see what we have in the way of firm evidence. Because all this is just guesswork, hmm? Good guesswork, but not a shred of proof.’ And he looked a little happier as he said it.

36
  
  

‘I’ll try to come in the fall, Ma,’ George said. ‘I’ll be due for a few weeks’ holiday by then and I’ll be able to stay a while. It won’t seem so long, you’ll see.’

‘Of course it won’t,’ Vanny echoed. ‘Not long at all.’ But it was clear she didn’t believe it.

Bridget, with elephantine tact, had gone wandering off round the shops, leaving them to share a last cup of coffee, and George sat close to her mother looking at her as though she wouldn’t ever see her again. It was absurd, she told herself deep inside, to be so melancholy; there was nothing new about the situation, after all. She’d left the States over ten years ago, and had visited back and forth a few times (though this was her mother’s first trip to Europe to see her), and never before when they’d parted had she had this keen sense of loss hovering over her. Yet this time she did. She studied her mother’s face, the fine lines outlining the eyes, the faint rim of pallor round the irises, the papery cheeks, wondering whether she’d ever see them again, and felt a childish desire to weep. But she controlled it by pushing her attention sideways, making herself aware of the bustle of the coffee shop, the anxious people with their piles of luggage and the noise of the announcer’s voice calling messages for lost passengers and details of flights.

‘Don’t you fret about me, George,’ Vanny said unexpectedly, reaching up and touching George’s cheek. ‘I know I’ve been a bit vague and I know Bridget thinks I may be sick. I thought I was, too. But what the hell! You’ve got to think positive, right? So I do. Maybe I am getting a bit worn out here and there, but that’s the way of things. It always has been. Take a look at
Hamlet
again some time — Act One Scene II, lines seventy-two to seventy-three, as I recall. Gertrude’s speech to her son.’

She laughed, a fat chuckle that was so reminiscent of her younger self that for a moment George was transported to her childhood. ‘Remember how I used to make you read things by giving you quotes and not telling you what they were so you had to look them up? Here I go again. But like I say, don’t fret, honey. I’ll be OK for a while yet. I’m better at home, you know. I get a bit bewildered when things are new, that’s all.’ Again she touched George’s cheek and then looked over her shoulder at Bridget who was coming towards them with a carrier bag that was bulging cheerfully.