Stolen (22 page)

‘Before I knew it she was making plans, drawing up ovulation charts and explaining how she’d have to take my temperature each morning so they knew when I was at my most fertile. I can’t tell you how freaked out I was, and I knew that I was going to have to make a run for it.’

‘Speaking of making a run for it,’ Dale said, ‘shouldn’t we try battering down the door?’

‘It’s impossible, I tried it.’ Lotte sighed. ‘It’s solid oak, only a chainsaw would get through it.’

‘Who do you think is up there?’ Dale cocked her head to listen.

‘I doubt anyone is,’ Lotte said. ‘Howard probably was there, but I think he’s gone away now. I can’t hear anything. I don’t think he’ll come back until he’s decided what to do with us. Even then he’ll probably send someone else to do his dirty work.’

‘Does that mean we won’t get any food?’ Dale asked, her voice faltering.

Lotte hesitated. ‘I don’t know,’ she said weakly.

Realizing that was Lotte’s gentle way of preparing her for starvation – after all, there was no point in feeding people you were planning to dispose of – Dale made a conscious effort to subdue the terror and panic rising within her.

‘Right, so we’d better make plans for how we are going to overcome the men when they come to collect us,’ she said, far more brightly than she felt.

‘I thought about that a lot when I was down here before,’ Lotte said. ‘What I came up with was that I’d pretend to be out cold on the bed. That way, whoever came for me would have to pick me up. I planned to stick my nail file in his eye, and hopefully as he was screaming and carrying on, I could rush out.’

‘But that didn’t work?’ Dale raised an eyebrow.

‘That wasn’t how I was taken. Do you want me to continue about what happened to me?’

Dale nodded. She needed something to take her mind off how serious their predicament really was.

‘They went out a couple of days after this stuff about wanting a baby had come up,’ Lotte said, sinking back against the bed rail as she recalled exactly what had happened.

She had woken to the sound of rain lashing against the window, and when she went to have a shower she was shivering despite it being the end of May. Later, as she put on one of the print dresses Fern had encouraged her to buy, all at once she saw how incredibly awful she looked. It was a defining moment, for suddenly she could cut through all the stuff which she’d seen as kindness and care, her own need to be loved, and realize that Fern and Howard had been playing a long game with her.

They had sucked her into their way of life by taking her to a luxurious hotel, giving her a wonderful time, and at the same time separating her from her old friends, under the guise of protecting her. They had even disposed of her old clothes and got her to buy new ones as a way of reinforcing her paranoia of men looking at her. Once down here she had the illusion of freedom – after all, she could walk out of the door whenever she chose. Yet they had actually been getting her into a state of mind where she was so indebted and dependent she had no will of her own.

But they hadn’t quite got her to the point where she was prepared to have a baby for them. And now she understood that was their plan, she knew she must get away from them as quickly as possible.

‘We’re driving up to London today,’ Fern said over breakfast. ‘Would you like to come with us?’

Lotte’s heart leapt. Not at being offered a trip to London, but the perfect opportunity to leave. They’d be gone for hours, and although it was cowardly not to tell them she was going, she couldn’t face Fern doing the emotional blackmail bit about how good they’d been to her.

‘I think I’d rather stay here, if you don’t mind,’ she said. ‘It’s such horrible weather, and if it’s the same in London I won’t be able to walk about and explore while you’re busy.’

Neither of them looked concerned at her decision, and they left about half an hour later, saying they doubted they’d be back before eight that evening.

Lotte washed up the breakfast things, swept and tidied the kitchen, and on an impulse decided to have a look through all Fern and Howard’s papers in the office before she left for good.

She wouldn’t normally poke into anyone’s private things. But she supposed that she’d feel less guilty about running off if she found something in the office which pointed to them not being quite the God-fearing, honourable people they purported to be.

There was nothing unusual in any of the desk drawers, just receipts for petrol and other expenses and a couple of invoice books for the sportswear company they owned in America.

The filing cabinet was locked though. Lotte had never seen it open, and for all she knew it could have stuff locked in it which belonged to the people who owned the house. But as she pulled down one of the box files on a shelf above the desk to see what was in there, a small key fell down.

The box file contained more correspondence, most of it recent letters pertaining to a commercial property the Ramsdens were buying in Southampton. Lotte had heard them discussing this openly on many occasions. It was a semi-derelict warehouse which they were hoping to pull down and build an office block in its place, but strangely all the correspondence was addressed to Mr and Mrs Gullick, not Ramsden.

She didn’t bother looking in any of the other box files for they’d all been here when they moved in – she supposed they all belonged to the landlord – and instead tried the small key in the filing cabinet. The key turned and she could open all three drawers.

There in the top drawer, sitting among several small boxes, was her old mobile phone.

It was unmistakable, for even though it was a common black Nokia Lotte had personalized it by sticking a row of crystals round the screen.

She felt as though someone had punched her in the stomach and winded her. Tears sprang into her eyes because they had lied when they claimed not to have seen it, called the car hire company to ask if they’d found it, and later, when she was upset at losing touch with all her friends, they’d suggested someone had picked her pocket at Southampton docks.

How easy it must have been for Fern to slip her hand into Lotte’s bag while they were in the car and take it. The perfect way of cutting her off from everyone she knew!

Doing such a thing proved their intentions had never been honourable.

After all this time the battery was completely flat of course, and sadly she’d thrown the charger away back at the Dorchester, but she was delighted to have found it anyway, and she could buy another charger in Chichester and access all her numbers again.

The second drawer of the cabinet held many suspended cardboard files, all of them with single names which meant nothing to her, but one was labelled ‘Drummond’, the name of the house, so she pulled that one out.

The letter on the top of the file was a completion statement from a solicitor in London. It was dated September 2000 and related to the purchase of ‘Drummond’, by Mr and Mrs Gullick, for the sum of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds.

Lotte thought the file belonged to the landlord and was about to put it back in the cabinet when she noticed a handwritten note stapled to the card file. It was merely a list of items, a filing cabinet, desk and bookcase among them, but this was in Fern’s writing.

Puzzled as to why Fern would be putting anything in this file if it didn’t belong to her and Howard, Lotte flicked through it. There among the papers was a photocopied handwritten letter to a Mr J. C. Wetherall about items Mr and Mrs Gullick wished to have included in the purchase of the house. It was unmistakably Fern’s writing, and even if it was signed by E. Gullick, there was no doubt of the writer’s real identity.

Lotte was stunned. Not just by the different name, for that could possibly be explained if Gullick was Fern’s maiden name and for some reason she and Howard found it more convenient for business affairs. But why had they pretended they were renting the house? What possible reason could they have for that?

Unnerved, Lotte pulled out the file next to ‘Drummond’, which was labelled ‘Farnley’.

This contained handwritten letters which were addressed to a Dr and Mrs Kent in Hartford, Connecticut, and sent from Marion Farnley from an address in Illinois. They appeared to have been sent on here by a third party, for there was a note to Fern attached to one, just saying, ‘I thought you’d better see these’, with an unreadable signature.

It seemed the writer of the letters, Marion Farnley, was pregnant, with her baby due in July, and indeed all the letters were about the progress of her pregnancy, her visits to the ante-natal clinic and how much weight she was putting on.

Lotte felt that the Kents were helping her financially, which suggested she could be a relative. The most recent letter, dated 12 May, seemed to confirm this, for Marion questioned whether everything was in place at the nursing home where the baby would be born.

There was a slightly curt tone to this latest letter. Marion wanted to know when the money would be transferred to her account. But a cold chill ran down Lotte’s spine as she read: ‘I expect this to happen before I hand my baby over to his new parents.’

Lotte stood there for a moment by the open drawer of the filing cabinet, her hand clasped to her mouth in shock. All at once she realized that Dr and Mrs Kent, like the Gullicks, were none other than Fern and Howard, and transferring funds in conjunction with a baby to new parents could only mean one thing.

They were selling babies!

Lotte went through all the other files one by one and to her horror she found she was right. Not just one isolated case, but dozens of mothers in almost every state in America, and most had handed over their child some time ago.

It was all there in black and white for there were records of payments to the mothers, most of whom received a thousand dollars for handing over their baby. Then there were itemized accounts for the new parents, not just the Ramsdens’ fee of twenty-five thousand dollars, but also the costs for the mother at the nursing home.

From what Lotte could gather there was someone else involved in this too, staying at the address in Connecticut and presumably running it while the Ramsdens were away. Yet it seemed that both Fern and Howard were in the habit of going back there on a regular basis, for there were several references in the correspondence to the patients seeing Dr Kent, including the date in March when they’d left the Dorchester to return fleetingly to America.

There was nothing to tell Lotte how the Ramsdens found these women in the first place. Some, Lotte felt, had been pregnant when they first met, but certain remarks in some of the handwritten letters, many written by women who clearly had had very little education, suggested some of them had agreed to become pregnant with donor sperm.

With all this appalling but riveting correspondence to go through, Lotte forgot the time. She wanted to read everything, and see the whole picture of how Fern and Howard had managed to keep this extremely lucrative business running for so long without detection. She guessed they had false passports to go with their aliases, but she wondered how they found couples desperate enough to pay thousands of dollars for a baby. It wasn’t as if they could advertise such a service.

There was a thank-you letter from a couple in Dallas who had enclosed a photograph of a very pretty baby with dark curly hair. ‘We bless the day Muriel at Birthright slipped us your number,’ they wrote. ‘We had been given the run-around by them for over two years, we felt they were never going to help us. You took us seriously immediately, you fulfilled all our dreams for us. Bless you.’

Lotte wondered if Birthright was a bona fide adoption society and this Muriel who worked there took kickbacks from the Ramsdens for every desperate couple she sent their way.

The more information Lotte turned up, the angrier and more horrified she became at what Fern and Howard had been doing. She wondered how they had the nerve to pose as devout Christians when they were making a fortune out of childless couples. Lotte knew real adoption societies checked every last thing about the couples they gave babies to, but she guessed the only check Fern and Howard made was to be sure that the couples they intended to supply with a child could afford their charges. They wouldn’t know or care if they were sick, mentally ill or sexual deviants.

And what of the natural birth mothers? Any woman who would agree to have a baby for money was suspect. They could have drink or drug addiction problems, sexually transmitted diseases, and possibly very low IQs. She wondered if any of the babies were given a thorough medical examination before they were passed over.

Lotte’s heart was racing now, for she realized that what she had discovered was dynamite and she must get away quickly and inform the police. She went back to the files and removed a particularly incriminating letter from each folder which she tucked into a large manila envelope. Then, after shutting the drawers and locking the cabinet, she replaced the key where she’d found it, and ran upstairs to get her things together to leave.

Lotte came out of the front door carrying her red suitcase and put it down to turn and lock the door with the mortice key. She’d just taken the key from the door when she heard the car turning into the drive.

Her heart sank and a tremor of fear ran down her spine. It was too late to unlock the door and run in again and there was no escape. There was a gate to the side of the house but it was padlocked, and the fences and thick hedges on both sides of the house and drive ruled out escaping that way.

The black Mercedes glided to a halt and Howard got out, keeping the driver’s door open, virtually barring the way to the narrow drive between the high hedges and overhanging trees. Fern got out on the passenger side and walked over to Lotte where she stood transfixed with fear on the doorstep.

‘Going somewhere?’ Fern asked.

Her face was as cold as a January day, her green eyes almost black now. She was as always beautifully dressed and groomed, with a leopard-print scarf at the neck of her cream trenchstyle raincoat and makeup as flawless as when she’d left the house earlier; even her hair, which Lotte had swept up into a French pleat that morning, was still perfect.