Thirty minutes later, Maggie was one of four new mums on B Wing of the maternity ward. Families gathered, bringing tears, laughter, balloons, cards and babygrows. The ‘two visitors per bed’ rule was blatantly flouted — but there wasn’t a nurse in the hospital brave enough to make any relatives leave. Penny sat in a high-backed chair, with a pillow under her elbows and the baby in her arms. ‘She’s so interested in what the world has to offer,’ Penny whispered. ‘All the other babies are sleeping but look at ours... it’s like she wants to know what’s next.’ Jack always knew that Penny would be unable to stop herself from comparing her grandchild with every other baby; but he had done her the disservice of assuming that her comparisons would be silly. Now he found himself nodding at her words, feeling their rightness.
‘Do you have a name?’ Penny asked.
Months earlier, Jack and Maggie had each made a list of names and then compared to see how in tune they were. Maggie had gone a bit highbrow and literary with some, such as Orson and Agatha, while Jack, in contrast, had gone old-school, favouring names like Alfie and Alice. But there were several names common to both lists. ‘Charlie’ had been on both, of course, for a boy or a girl. Then there was James, Emily, William, Hannah, Max — and unexpectedly Elsie had appeared on both lists too. When Penny asked if they’d decided, the truth was that they hadn’t — but Jack now glanced at Maggie, giving her full permission to be the one to finally choose. ‘She looks like a Hannah,’ Maggie said.
Penny looked down at the sleeping little bundle in Maggie’s arms. ‘Hello, Hannah,’ she whispered. ‘You know, your name means “grace”. You’ve graced us with your presence, Hannah. That means you make us happy simply by being here.’
Over the next week, Penny went into overdrive with the cooking, cleaning and washing, while Maggie’s sole job was to keep Hannah happy. Jack’s job was to open all of the Amazon boxes and build whatever was inside. And Mario’s job was to design and create a woodland scene on the long wall of the nursery, using stickers that Maggie and Penny had chosen. They’d decided that Hannah should appreciate nature from a very early age, a decision that had come from reminiscing about living in Totnes. They had been so incredibly lucky to have had beaches and wilderness right on their doorstep. Growing up in London would be different for Hannah, but they still wanted her to learn about nature. And they’d take her back to Totnes when she was older, so she could see where she was truly from.
Within a week of being home, Jack couldn’t remember what life had been like without his baby girl, and having three generations of Warr women under the same roof felt like the way it was meant to be. He thought about Charlie every day but, the truth of it was that if Charlie were still alive, then he and Penny would be 200 miles away in Totnes. As Jack hung a little picture of Charlie on an unobtrusive corner of the nursery wall, he smiled. ‘Keep us right, eh, Dad.’
In the master bedroom, Maggie was sitting with Hannah on a V-pillow on her lap. Both of them were asleep. There was a milk-soaked pyjama top on the floor, along with three dirty babygrows and several wet muslin cloths. Two mugs of tea had been allowed to go cold on the bedside table alongside a blackening, half-eaten banana. Maggie’s right breast was out, and there was a streak of milk on Hannah’s cheek.
The scene was a strange mixture of blissful calm and utter chaos, and Jack felt certain he would never, ever tire of being a parent.
Chapter 4
It wasn’t long before Jack was desperate to go back to work. And it wasn’t as if he was even doing a third of the parenting, as Maggie and Penny had everything in hand, but, even so, Jack quickly found himself yearning for the peace and sanity of a murder investigation.
Quite how one tiny baby could run rings around three adults was beyond him. He was a smart man. He could manipulate the sharpest of criminals into a confession, so why the hell couldn’t he convince a clean, fed, winded baby to go to bloody sleep at three in the morning?
But lack of sleep wasn’t the real problem: the truth was he found the endless routine tasks mind-numbingly boring. Jack hadn’t been surprised by anything for as long as he could remember.
He’d been given the job of wheeling Hannah around the neighbourhood in her pushchair, because Penny insisted that she needed a ‘daily dose of fresh air.’ Jack knew this was probably just a ploy to get him out of the house, so that she could do all of the noisy chores such as vacuuming, but he didn’t mind as it was his opportunity to breathe too. He’d sit on a bench in the park and check his emails because even though he wasn’t involved in any active case, he sometimes got cc’d into the round robins. This at least gave him a welcome sense of the outside world he so desperately missed, but Jack didn’t dare say anything to Maggie about being bored, for fear of upsetting her. He would have been surprised to hear what she and Penny were saying back at the house.
‘Tell him!’ Penny giggled in her easy, matter-of-fact way. ‘If he’s getting under your feet, kick him back to work. He’s bored, Maggie. I never had this with Charlie, ’cos we got Jack once he was old enough to be interesting.’ Penny laughed. ‘Babies don’t do much, and the novelty quickly wears off.’
It was 9.30 p.m. and Ridley was in his office, arranging statements into chronological order for a court appearance later in the week. His obsessive nature came into its own when prepping for court and this showed in his track record. The very sight of Ridley taking the stand made defence lawyers tremble, because they knew they’d not be able to shake his testimony or him. He was rock solid.
Ridley’s satisfying evening of paperwork, however, was interrupted by a phone call from DI Joseph Gifford, from Chipping Norton. ‘Simon,’ Gifford boomed down the line. ‘Couple of minutes for me?’ Gifford didn’t introduce himself, nor did he need to. His deep, resonating voice had an upper-class tone, but his tendency to lengthen the last word of every sentence betrayed his Midlands roots which he was clearly ashamed of. ‘Got this bugger of a case, not unlike your Wimbledon Prowler and I’m after a bit of advice.’ Reluctantly putting his court case preparation aside with a sigh, Ridley listened.
‘Three years ago, there was a burglary in Kingham. Big house set back off the main through road, no CCTV.’ Gifford always used short, clipped sentences, leaving the listener to fill in the blanks. ‘These people, Simon... too much moolah. Losing the odd item of jewellery means nothing. Insured to the hilt. They just want to move on, you know. So, these bloody criminals are getting away with it. No one’s on my side, that’s the problem. Privacy, you see, that’s the currency here. The victims won’t even give statements half the time. Rentals as well, that’s another problem. Some bloody actor or singer or somesuch will hide away in a rental — top secret, like anyone gives a shit. They’ll tell me nothing, bring their own protection team, not let us do any security checks and then, when they get targeted, it’s my fault!’
‘This is still going on, then, is it?’
‘Every few months. And they’re just the ones we get to hear about. Could be more. It’s a political balancing act. Iron fist in a velvet glove was never more appropriate than right here, right now. But... things have just got more serious and something needs to be done. Fast.’ Ridley sipped his tea as Gifford described the scene at the last house that had been burgled.
Mick Arbrose needed just four hours sleep every night, starting at one and ending at five. He was a well-respected businessman living in the village of Churchill who, each morning, would walk his Labrador the twenty minutes into Chipping Norton to collect the morning paper before the newsagent’s had properly opened, and then walk back. Part of the walk had no footpath, forcing Mick onto the narrow road, but so early in the morning, he always felt perfectly safe. On this particular morning, however, when Mick walked down the oak staircase, his old Labrador, Jonty, was not sitting in the hallway waiting to greet him. Mick went straight into the kitchen and looked under the breakfast bar, where Jonty’s night-time bed lay empty. Jonty’s routine was as rigid as Mick’s, so now Mick was beginning to worry. The only other place the old Lab could possibly be was in his daytime bed, which was under Mick’s desk in the office.