Grave Concerns (27 page)

She forced a smile at his question. ‘I’m sure you’ve done your best,’ she said. ‘I didn’t give you very much to go on, did I?’

Drew remembered Trevor’s words.
The bitch daughter
. From Gwen’s point of view, translated through Trevor’s friendship and grief, this might be evidence of selfishness or worse on Genevieve’s part. But, of course, that didn’t mean she’d murdered her mother. If she had, it would be sheer insanity to then pay someone to investigate the death.

And where was Willard?

‘I’ve seen Trevor Goldsworthy,’ he told her, in some trepidation. ‘He came to visit the grave yesterday.’

Genevieve frowned. ‘Who?’

‘He knew your mother in Egypt, and other places, apparently. Sounds as if they were quite close.’

She screwed up her face in a disarming attempt to recollect. ‘I don’t think I ever knew him. She had loads of peculiar people in her life. She met them on her travels. Most of them sound like losers. How did he know where to find her grave?’

Drew hesitated. There was no good reason for withholding information from Genevieve, especially as he was ultimately answerable to her, but something warned him it might be a mistake
to mention Henrietta. He chose compromise. ‘The place where your mother used to live – it seems Trevor called in there and they directed him to me.’ The over-simplification jabbed at his conscience, but Genevieve seemed satisfied. At least, she didn’t query his explanation. Instead she put a hand to the small of her back and groaned. Then she seemed to hold her breath, leaning forward and staring at the sofa cushion between her legs. ‘Oh God!’ she grunted. ‘I think I’ve wet myself. How awfully embarrassing.’

Drew recognised the sweet-sour smell that rose from the fabric. For a moment he was transported to the delivery room where Stephanie had been born, the sharp scary moment when the midwife had taken a long plastic instrument to Karen, and ruptured the membranes. He stared at Genevieve. ‘Your waters have broken,’ he said. ‘You’re in labour, aren’t you?’

She stared back at him. ‘Am I?’ she spat, looking frightened. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

‘Come on,’ he said more gently. ‘Remember your antenatal classes. Let’s keep calm. Where’s the phone number for the hospital? Is your case packed? I guess we should call an ambulance. That backache – it looks as if it might have been the first stage of labour. It happens like that sometimes. When did it start?’

‘Ages ago. This morning. It just got worse and worse.’ She put both hands across the bulge of her belly, fingers outstretched, and shook her head. Her eyes gleamed with anger and anguish.

‘Don’t worry,’ Drew soothed her. ‘This is going to be a nice quick delivery, I bet you. No time for any drugs or unnecessary interference. Just show me where you’ve put everything, and I’ll see you get to the Maternity department. I don’t think we should waste any more time, though.’ As he spoke, he watched her hold her breath again, as if seized by some inescapable outside force, and tuck her chin down on her chest. She was pushing, in the classic posture drummed into women at antenatal classes. ‘Very good!’ he said, automatically. ‘But if we don’t bustle, the baby’s going to be born on the sofa.’

She looked up at him, breathing fast, her eyes losing focus. ‘What?’ she said. ‘What’s happening? Everything’s horribly wet.’

‘Take your trousers off,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and find you something else to wear.’

He ran upstairs, locating the main bedroom without difficulty, and casting a hurried look around it. The bed was unmade, a jumble of duvet and newspapers and a rather grey-looking T-shirt. The dressing gown on the back of the door was far too flimsy to be of use. Flinging open the wardrobe door, he spotted some sort of
knitted coat, long and voluminous. He grabbed it, and ran back to Genevieve with it. He found her pushing again, having made no effort to undress as he’d instructed.

Taking a deep breath, he knelt in front of her. ‘Let me,’ he said, and started to pull the baggy maternity trousers down. She had to lift her bottom to help him, and for a moment, he thought she wasn’t going to cooperate. Then she heaved herself up, and the garment came away. The smell of amniotic fluid grew stronger, the strangeness of it sharpening his wits, forcing him to face what was happening. ‘Lie down,’ he told her. ‘I’d better try and see what’s going on.’

‘I’m not having it now, am I?’ she said stupidly. ‘I thought it was supposed to hurt.’

‘It is,’ he said. ‘But some people get lucky. You look to me to be in the second stage, already. You’ve had at least three pushing contractions. The hospital’s more than twenty minutes from here. The ambulance could take that long again to reach us. Sorry, but I think we’re going to have to cope on our own. Where’s your husband? I ought to phone him. And I’ll have to call the hospital. It’s illegal to deliver a baby without medical assistance – you do at least have to try to get somebody.’

Something he’d said seemed to get through to her, and she looked at him with wide-open
eyes. ‘Call Dr Jarvis,’ she said. ‘I want Dr Jarvis.’ And she recited a phone number. Drew went out to the phone in the hall, stretching the cord and propping the lounge door open, so he could watch Genevieve at the same time. He asked her to repeat the number, as he pushed the buttons.

There was no reply, after ten rings. ‘I don’t think he’s there,’ he told her, just as she began another unmistakable push. She’d swivelled round on the sofa, and was now much more horizontal. He wondered if he’d done the right thing, telling her to lie down; she looked a lot less comfortable than before. Dropping the phone, he went back to her, picking up the knitted coat and wondering how he’d ever get her into it.

‘Where’s your husband?’ he asked again.

She shook her head, and grimaced to indicate ignorance. ‘No idea,’ she managed eventually. ‘This is amazing,’ she added. ‘It hardly hurts at all. And I was so terrified.’

A suspicion began to dawn in Drew’s mind. ‘You have booked in at the hospital, haven’t you?’ he demanded.

A look of childish cunning crossed her face, followed by a parody of regret. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t,’ she admitted. ‘I did try to. I actually phoned them once, to ask what I ought to do. But I never got through to anybody who could speak any sense.’

‘But Doctor Jarvis would have done it for you. Has he been doing the antenatal checks?’

‘Not really. I told him my GP was handling everything, but that I’d like him to come with me, as a friend. The truth is, I haven’t got a GP. There was never any need. I’ve never been ill.’

‘But your husband? Didn’t he insist?’

‘I told him the same story. I said I’d arranged for a home birth, with midwives and everything. He washed his hands of it all. He knows he’d never get me inside a hospital.’ She gasped and held her breath for another dramatic push. Drew watched the changing shape of her belly as the baby prepared to make its entrance. Genevieve continued breathlessly, as if it was as important to expel her confession as to give birth to her baby. ‘I can’t go near hospitals, you see,’ she panted. ‘I’m phobic. Always have been. It’s like trying to make myself step into a furnace.’

Before another contraction could cut off any more revelations, Drew forced himself to look at her vulva. There was a segment of dark hair clearly visible, even between pushes. Another five minutes or less, and there’d be a third person in the room with them. He experienced a crystal-clear moment of decision. Either he could panic – rush round trying to gather up towels, scissors, hot water, dial 999, tell her to stop pushing. Or he could stay calm, give her the comfort and
support she needed, catch the baby as it arrived and use whatever came to hand for the aftermath. His training counted for nothing in that moment. Something much deeper took hold of him, some visceral confidence that babies get born regardless of circumstances. And it was exciting.

‘It’s nearly here,’ he told her. ‘We’d better just let nature take her course.’

But Genevieve had opted for a belated hysterical panic. ‘Help me!’ she cried. ‘I’ll die, I know I will. And the baby’s going to be deformed. I’ve known all along. It isn’t right. It’s a monster. I don’t want to see it, Drew. Take it away, will you, as soon as it’s out. Please!’ She gripped his hand, digging her nails into his flesh.

‘Come on,’ he adjured her. ‘Don’t be silly.’ He stroked the hair back from her brow, looking into her eyes. As if a button had somewhere been pressed, his own body began to take an active part in the proceedings. He was hot, flushed with the drama, and physically responding. He almost laughed out loud when he realised. Childbirth was famously non-sexual, a universal turn-off to husbands and partners. Some men, by all accounts, couldn’t face sex with the woman again for months, after witnessing the gross ravages to the genital region wrought by the birth process. Drew had felt no such excitement with Karen during her labour. He wondered what Genevieve
would make of it, if she knew, and resolved firmly that she was never going to find out.

She pushed again, and the sliver of head became much larger. ‘Fantastic!’ he encouraged her. ‘It’s almost here.’

On the next contraction, she cried out, a sound full of despair and terror, and flung her head from side to side. Almost no progress was made. ‘You have to help,’ Drew told her. ‘This is the crowning. It needs your cooperation.’

‘I can’t,’ she whimpered. ‘I’m too frightened.’

‘You must,’ he said sternly. ‘There’s no going back now.’

Afterwards, she told him that there was nothing he could have said more guaranteed to convince her than that. Closing her eyes, gritting her teeth, with tears sliding down her cheeks, she screamed her way through the great final push. The baby surged into the world, twisting and turning to free its own shoulders, and landing glistening on the unprotected sofa cushions with a brief splutter.

As Drew grasped it, with the intention of placing it in Genevieve’s hands, the front door slammed. As he looked up, he met the eyes of a tall, gaunt, elderly man in the doorway.

‘Willard!’ gasped Genevieve.

Genevieve’s husband was much less substantial than Drew remembered him. In two years he seemed to have aged considerably. It took him a long, long moment to grasp what was happening. The baby coughed, and squeaked; the room was flooded with the smell of blood and fluid and sweat. Drew grabbed the forgotten coat and tried to drape it over Genevieve to keep her warm. His over-riding emotion was one of guilt. Kneeling on the floor, bending over another man’s wife in an attitude of acute intimacy, he felt he’d been caught in an act of the most flagrant adultery.

Willard took two steps towards the sofa, his face a ghastly grey-white, and then crumpled,
in an unreal slow-motion faint. ‘That’s bloody typical,’ Genevieve squawked.

Drew felt a rising hysteria. He’d walked into a madhouse, occupied by people who made insanely light of death and birth equally. All it needed now was the nephew, Stuart, to stroll in wearing full biking regalia.

The baby, almost forgotten, lay quietly on Genevieve’s bare belly, its arms spread out, pressing into the warm skin. ‘You’ve got a daughter,’ Drew observed, almost casually. ‘She looks perfect to me.’ Examining the infant’s face, he saw the lips flush red, and then the whole body change from lifeless pewter to a rosy pink. ‘I’ll have to find something to wrap her in,’ he said. ‘It isn’t very warm in here.’

Genevieve ducked her head awkwardly, the flesh under her chin pleating as she tried to see the baby. ‘Help me sit up,’ she demanded. ‘I can’t see her properly.’

Drew put a hand under her arm and hauled her into a better position. Her T-shirt had ridden up until he could see the bra underneath. ‘You should put her to the breast,’ he said. ‘It helps expel the placenta. I’m going to have to cut the cord in a minute, too.’ He looked around distractedly, wondering where he might find a suitably sterile knife.

Genevieve looked from the baby to Drew and
then to Willard, who was evidently regaining consciousness. ‘Blistering festering hell!’ he muttered. ‘Shit-scattered sodding cunt.’ Genevieve looked back at Drew, her face a caricature of disbelief.

There was a moment’s silence, and then she burst out in a shriek of laughter, making the baby flinch with alarm. ‘Did he say what I think he said?’ she spluttered. ‘He must have gone mad. Willard never swears.’

Drew’s head was whirling. Somebody certainly seemed to have gone mad, and he was beginning to wonder whether it might be him. But once a nurse, always a calm influence in a crisis. ‘People often curse when they come round from a faint,’ he said. ‘It’s as if their inner censor has been disabled.’

‘Inner censor!’ Genevieve echoed, still giggling. ‘Oh!’ she added abruptly. ‘Something’s happening.’

The muscles of her now flaccid belly had visibly contracted, and she involuntarily held her breath. ‘Oooh,’ she sighed. ‘This sofa’s never going to be the same again, is it?’ The placenta, huge and purple, glistened between her legs. A substantial amount of watery blood came with it.

‘I’ll have to clean the baby up – and get her something to wear. You ought really to go up to bed.’

‘I will in a minute,’ she said. ‘Put that coat thing over us for now. You’d better see to Willard. Sorry, Drew,’ she added. ‘This must be a hell of a lot more than you bargained for.’

Forcing himself to be methodical, Drew quickly established a degree of order. The baby was obviously in good condition, opening her eyes and staring with interest at Genevieve’s face. Willard stared at the baby with a similar fixed attention. He was now sitting up on the floor, long thin legs sticking out in front of him, his face an entertaining mixture of a score of emotions. Suddenly he said, ‘She’s got my ears. Look!’

Drew collected bowls, buckets, water and a knife from the kitchen. Then he ran upstairs and found a warming cupboard well stocked with towels and blankets. He told Genevieve he was going to dial 999, so she could be taken to hospital for a proper examination, and lifted the receiver.

‘No!’ she said loudly. ‘Absolutely not. Try Dr Jarvis again, if you like, but I’m not going to hospital.’

‘She’s phobic,’ said Willard conversationally. ‘Hasn’t been near a hospital since she was twelve.’

‘So I gather,’ said Drew, too busy to consider the full import of this information, but he hesitated, the phone in his hand. Then he pressed the Redial button, hoping Dr Jarvis would answer
this time. As he did so, he glanced at his watch. It took several seconds for the hands and numbers to make sense. ‘Half past
seven
?’ he said stupidly, listening to the ringing tone in his ear. ‘It can’t be.’

‘It is,’ Willard confirmed. ‘It’s nearly dark outside, look.’

Dr Jarvis answered the phone, just as Drew was about to put it down. He promised to be there in fifteen minutes. Drew phoned Karen, who was almost hysterical with worry about him.

Genevieve embarked on a struggle to attach her daughter to a nipple, and when it finally worked, shed tears of belated emotion. She rummaged clumsily in the pocket of the dressing gown for a hanky, and brought out a handful of objects. A crumpled tissue, a tampon and two ticket stubs were scattered on the floor beside her. ‘Oh look,’ she said to Willard. ‘These are our tickets for
West Side Story
. We went to see it in London and stayed the night in the Regent Palace Hotel. I can’t have worn this thing since then. Remember us complaining about it being freezing cold in August?’ She squinted at one of the scraps of card. ‘Twelfth of August,’ she read. ‘Why does that date ring a bell?’

‘Glorious twelfth,’ said Willard inanely.

Drew closed his eyes for a moment. ‘I think you’ve just given your husband a cast iron alibi
for the murder of your mother,’ he said. After what he’d been through, he no longer cared about betraying any secrets.

Dr Jarvis arrived as promised, and Drew handed over to him with minimal ceremony. They’d broken practically every rule in the medical handbook anyway – let the doctor, retired or not, sort it out. There was obviously no cause for medical concern, apart from Willard, who continued to look very grey and shaky. Mercifully he’d been so preoccupied by events in his living room that he hadn’t even looked at Drew long enough to recognise him as the rival housebuyer encountered on the Bradbourne doorstep two years previously.

Drew himself was shaking as he drove home in the van. His sexual stirrings at the climax of the birth continued to cause him severe pangs of guilt and self-disgust. Although his lust had physically abated, he still felt hot all over at the memory of Genevieve half-naked in front of him. He reran the whole experience, savouring the various thrills and shocks, finding moments to chuckle over, alongside the feeling that he’d disgraced himself. He hoped he’d be able to convey to Karen just how hilarious the returning husband had been. That, he decided, was going to be the most prudent angle on which to focus. She’d
understand why he’d forgotten to phone her, how he’d managed to lose three hours in the whirl of activity. She’d laugh when he described Willard’s faint and his creative curses when he was coming round. She’d be moved by the easy birth, in the face of Genevieve’s terror of the medical aspects of becoming a mother. Wouldn’t she?

Genevieve’s hospital phobia was something Drew still hadn’t fully taken on board, and he gave it some belated consideration. He was appalled that she had never intended to present herself to the Maternity department when the time came. It was one thing for a terrified teenager to deny her pregnancy to herself and the world, but for an educated woman in her forties to behave in such a way seemed incredible. Presumably she had lied to everyone concerned, going through the motions, listening to instructions, while all along planning to sit tight and let things happen, to go it more or less alone. Was such a thing possible in the present day? An elderly primagravida such as she was would never have been allowed to arrange for a home birth. And if she had been strong – or stupid – enough to simply let all the best advice go over her head, what did that imply about other areas of her life?

What, above all, did it imply about the things she had told Drew concerning her mother?

He tried to put himself in Genevieve’s place,
assessing what her priorities must have been. Her evasions and sly looks, the childishness and petulance – they could all be attributed to the pregnancy. Strange behaviour on Willard’s part was hardly surprising, being on the verge of retirement and then landed with a first baby whose mother was prepared to risk the lives of both herself and her child.

The wretched woman must have been tormented by conflicting needs: to discover the truth about Gwen; to keep her marriage intact; and to get through the ordeal of childbirth, which was very likely to result in her being taken to hospital however horrifying the prospect might be. Drew shivered with compassion. No wonder Genevieve had seemed half crazy at times.

He remembered the couple as they had seemed two years earlier. Willard so ruthless and determined to get his way, Genevieve placatory, maintaining a veneer of good behaviour, befriending Drew as her softer strategy for getting the house. It hadn’t worked, because he’d put Karen’s wishes above Genevieve’s – but she’d got to know him in the process. She must have felt a sudden surge of hope when she realised that he had a connection with the disappearance of her mother. It must have felt like a gift from heaven.

She hadn’t been trying to seduce him, or destroy Willard, or obscure a murky undiscovered
truth. She hadn’t been in cahoots with Dr Jarvis. Genevieve, lost, lonely and more than a little unbalanced, had simply offered him payment for services rendered. Seeing her and Willard together in that living room, the new baby throwing their pretence of normal married life into turmoil, had convinced Drew of that. Having him investigate the circumstances surrounding Gwen’s death had been a way of convincing herself that she really cared – and a way of giving her life purpose as she waited in limbo for the birth of her child.

‘She’s mad,’ said Karen emphatically, later that night, having heard the story. ‘There’s no other explanation.’ She was in bed, and Drew was about to join her; but her manner was so uninviting, he hesitated, wandering barefoot around the bedroom, tidying clothes and putting socks in the dirty washing basket.

He resisted the urge to defend Genevieve.

But he thought again of the teenage girls who somehow hoped that if they didn’t say anything their pregnancy would just go away. That the whole thing must be some ghastly delusion, because the reality would be too much to deal with. He wondered, belatedly, whether there was any baby equipment in the Slaters’ house. Surely Willard would have had the sense to see that at least some basics were standing by? Otherwise, it
would involve poor old Dr Jarvis in some hasty summoning of district nurses and social workers to provide the necessities. And wouldn’t that be appallingly humiliating for two professional people more than old enough to cope with parenthood?

‘We all have moments of madness,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose she can help it.’

‘All I can say is – trust you to get involved,’ Karen grumbled. ‘If you hadn’t been there, what would have happened?’

‘It would have been pretty much the same. It was the easiest delivery you can imagine. She never even realised she was in labour. It proves a point – they say labour hurts so much because women expect it to. If she’d known what was going on, she’d probably have rolled around in agony all day. And yet she said she was totally terrified of the whole thing, beforehand.’

Karen pulled a face, envy, disapproval and grudging admiration all evident. ‘You can’t help worrying about the baby, can you?’ she said, in a more mellow tone.

‘She’s a nice little thing,’ Drew said, a trifle wistfully.

‘Oh, you!’ Karen burst out. ‘You’re too good to be true, aren’t you? Birth, death, it all comes so easily to you. All in a day’s work. It’s sickening sometimes.’

‘But—’ he began, with no idea at all how to react to her sudden attack ‘I don’t—’

A noise outside interrupted him. An outburst of high-pitched screeching that set his nerves on edge seemed to be coming from the field at the back of the house. ‘Good God! What’s that?’ he said.

‘Sounded like animals,’ she said, clutching the duvet to her chest. ‘You’d better go and see.’ The noise came again, as harsh and jangling as before.

‘Are they fighting or what? I’ve never heard anything like it.’

‘We haven’t lived through a mating season in the country before,’ she said, more calmly. ‘That’s probably all it is. Just so long as the foxes aren’t digging up your bodies. That
would
be embarrassing.’

‘I’ll have a look,’ he said, fishing for his shoes. ‘Maybe I can see something from the spare room.’

It was a moonlit night, and dark shapes were visible in the field. The scattering of trees threw shadows across the grass, and the new fence around the pets’ cemetery made a neat pattern of light and shade. Movement caught his eye as he tried to find the source of the noise. He was right – it
was
animals. Slowly he made sense of the scene. A rounded creature, silvery in the moonlight was engaged in a tug of war with something slighter and more agile. They
were at the place where he had flung down the grim crucifix that he and Maggs had found the previous morning.
Fighting over the body of the hare
he realised. Again the shrill screech emerged from one of the combatants. As they shifted and struggled, he could see they were a badger and a fox, each determined to seize the carcase. If he hadn’t known otherwise, he might have thought it was the hapless subject of the battle that was screaming.

Before he could decide what to do, the badger suddenly broke loose, the prey in its mouth, and began scuttling towards the railway line at the top of the field. The fox pursued, in aggressive bounds, but it was clearly defeated. No further sounds emerged, and Drew tiptoed back to bed.

‘Nothing to worry about,’ he whispered. ‘Just nature, red in tooth and claw.’

Karen had snuggled down under the duvet, with her back to Drew’s side of the bed. She was no longer interested. ‘Should be just up your street, then,’ she muttered, without turning over.