'He's got two teeth,' she said, 'and not a bit of trouble-cutting them.'
'A fine boy,' said Wexford. He took the child from her and talked to him as he had talked to Alexandra Dearborn, but James responded less happily and his shining dark eyes grew uneasy. An adopted child, Wexford thought, might well show signs of insecurity, handled as he must have been since leaving his true mother by stranger after stranger. 'He's a credit to you,' he said, and then to his shame he found his voice thick with an unlooked-for emotion. It was out of his power to say more.
But he had said enough, or his expression had told what he couldn't say. Mrs Clements beamed. 'I've waited fifteen years for this.'
Wexford handed the boy back. 'And now you've got fifteen years of hard labour.'
'Years and years of happiness, Mr Wexford.' The smile died. Her full, rather dull, face seemed on an instant to grow thinner. 'If if they'll let me keep him.'
'She's signed an affidavit, hasn't she?' said the sergeant fiercely. 'She's promised to give him up.'
His wife gave him a wifely look, part compassion, part gentle reproof. 'You know you're as worried about it as I am, dear. He was more worried than me at first, Mr Wexford. He wanted to well, find out who she was and give her some money. To sort of buy James, you see.'
'I don't know much about adoption,' said Wexford, 'but surely it's illegal for money to pass in the course of these transactions?'
'Of course it is,' said Clements huffily. He looked put out. 'I wasn't serious.' His next words rather belied this remark.
'I've always been a saver, I daresay I could have raised quite a bit one way and another, but I . . . You don't think I meant it, sir?'
Wexford smiled. 'It would be a bit too risky, wouldn't it?'
'Breaking the law, you mean, sir? You'd keep the child but you'd always have the fear of being found out hanging over you.'
Clements was never very quick on the uptake, Wexford
thought. He said, 'But would you have the child?
'Of course you would, sir. You'd have brought it from the natural mother, in a manner of speaking, thought it doesn't sound very nice put that way. You'd offer her a thousand pounds, say, not to oppose the making of the order.'
'And suppose she took the money and agreed and opposed the order just the same? What redress would you have? None at all. You couldn't ask her to sign an agreement or enter into a contract as any such transaction in matters of adoption would be illegal.'
'I never thought of that. An unscrupulous sort of girl might even engineer it so that she could get hold of money to support her child.'
'She might indeed,' said Wexford.
13
But in Utopia every man is a cunning lawyer . . .
HE too had had a baby . . . During the past year Loveday Morgan had had a baby. If Loveday Morgan was Louise Sampson, Louise had had that baby. A good reason, added to the other good reasons, for not letting her mother see her until Christmas when she might have been fully recovered from the child's birth.
Now that birth must have been registered, but not, apparently to a mother called Morgan. Surely Louise wouldn't have dared register the child in a false name? The penalties for making false registrations were stated clearly enough, Wexford knew, in every registrar's office. They were more than sufficient to daunt a young girl. She would have registered it in her own name.
This, then, was what he just had to check on before he went any further. This might mean he need go no further. But his plan was doomed to postponement, for he was no sooner in his own office when Howard phoned through to request his presence at a house in Copland Road.
'Mrs Kirby?' Wexford said. 'Who's she?'
'Gregson was mending her television at lunchtime on February 25th. She's just phoned to say she's remembered something we ought to know.'
'You won't want me.'
But Howard did. He was very pressing. When Wexford joined him at the car and noted the sullen presence of Inspector Baker, he saw it all. Tactful pressure had been brought to bear on Baker to include the chief inspector in this visit. A king-size sledge-hammer, indeed. to swat a fly, unless the fly itself had suddenly developed into a far larger insect. Evidently Baker didn't like it and not on these grounds alone. He gave Wexford a cold penetrating stare.
And Wexford himself was annoyed. He would have been far happier making his own private researches. Howard had arranged it to avoid hurting his uncle and Wexford was there to avoid hurting his nephew, but all they had succeeded in doing was to upset Baker thoroughly. The nape of his neck, prickly with ginger bristles, had crimsoned with anger.
Wexford wondered about his private life. the solitary existence he must lead somewhere, perhaps in a trim suburb in a neat semi-detached which he had furnished for the young wife who had deserted him. He could hardly imagine a greater humiliation for a middle-aged man than that which Baker had suffered. It would dig into the very roots of his manhood and shake what should, at his age, have been a well-adjusted personality.
He was sitting beside the driver, Wexford in the back with his nephew, and since they had left the station no one had uttered a word. Now Howard, trying to ease the tension, asked Baker when he would be moving from Wimbledon into the new flat he was buying in north-west London.
'Next month, I hope, sir,' Balder said shortly. He didn't turn his head and again the dark flush had appeared on his neck.
The mention of Wimbledon reminded Wexford of Verity Bate who had said that her parents and, at one time, the Sampsons had lived in that suburb. So it was there that the inspector's trouble had come upon him. Not discouraged, Howard pressed the point, but Wexford had the impression that Baker only replied because Howard was his superior officer. And when the superintendent spoke next of the week, terminating on February 27th, that Baker had taken off to consult with solicitor's and arrange with decorators, Baker's shrug was almost rude.
'I'm afraid you're one of those people who never take a proper holiday, Michael,' Howard said pleasantly. 'Even when you were supposed to be off you were hanging about Kenbourne Vale nearly every day. Is it such an attractive place?'
'Filthy hole,' Baker said abruptly. 'How anyone could live here beats me.'
From the tensing of the driver's shoulders, Wexford guessed that he was one of those who did. Here was another instance of the inspector putting people's backs up, literally this time. A gloomy silence fell. Howard deliberately avoided catching his uncle's eye and Wexford, embarrassed, looked out of the window.
It was a damp, raw day, and although it was still early afternoon, lights showed here and there behind long sash windows, making pale bright rectangles in the grey facades. The air itself seemed grey, not dense enough for fog but laden with a damp which blackened the pavements. Kenbourne Vale wore the colours of a snail shell, glimmering faintly in a snail's pallid, dull hues, under the ashen sky which seemed to have dropped and to lie low and sombrely over it. Church spires, a stadium, sprawling factories loomed before the car, took solid shape and then dissolved again as they passed. Only the new office blocks, strident columns of light, had a positive reality in the thickening gloom.
They entered Copeland Hill, that district which, nearly a week before, had been Wexford's gateway to his nephew's manor. Much had happened since then. He asked himself how he would have felt on that bus last week if he had known that today he would be riding in a police car with Howard, honorary yet treated by Howard with honour, to interrogate an important witness. The thought cheered him and, viewing Copeland Road with quickening interest, he resolved not to let Baker deter him or damp his ardour.