Divers will go down. They’ll go down to the murk, to old prams and supermarket trolleys, wheels of bicycles, parts of cars, the rotting shells of boats. In their ugly wet-suits they’ll search the slime, fish streaking about them, dead flotsam disturbed. They’ll root among the weeds and clumps of rust. They’ll lay out rags of clothing on the riverbank and gaze at them, and nod.
Thaddeus calculates: his child has lived for a hundred and eighty-eight days.
A ladder was placed beneath the nursery window; in a matter of minutes the baby was gone. When he heard, Al Capone offered a reward, knowing how he’d feel himself, he said. Twenty-five thousand dollars Lindbergh earned for flying the Atlantic, common knowledge at the time.
‘I would ask you not to,’ Zenobia requests. ‘It doesn’t help.’
A riposte comes swiftly to her husband’s lips but is not issued. An hour ago, when he walked to the end of the drive, he saw the lights of two police cars parked a few yards away and there was chatter coming from a mobile phone. In the early morning, unless there has been a discovery in the night, the search will begin again with local help. Farm labourers will form a line to beat the undergrowth and walk the woods. They’ll rove the harvest fields.
‘First light,’ Maidment predicts.
Zenobia waits for the water in the electric kettle to boil, emptying away what she has heated the teapot with. She makes the tea, then slices a tomato. She thought of making toast, buttering it and cutting it into fingers, but decided on a sandwich instead. It’s hard to know what to prepare for someone at a quarter to twelve at night, someone who’s sick with worry.
‘She said she wanted nothing,’ Maidment reminds her, ‘and he’s not back yet.’ The Lindbergh ransom sum was twice as much as the twenty-five thousand, but they had it and they paid it, not knowing that their baby had already been murdered. An illiterate German immigrant the abductor was.
‘She can’t want nothing for ever. It could be I should sit with her.’
‘She has the dog, of course.’
An hour ago he heard Mrs. Iveson moving about. She went from the drawing-room to the conservatory and was settling down there with the dog when he went to ask her if she needed anything. He opened a window for her.
‘I’ll take the tray in. Look in yourself, why don’t you, before you go upstairs? If she wants company she’ll say so.’
‘I couldn’t go upstairs tonight.’
Maidment, who intends to retire in the usual way, refrains from arguing that rest offers strength, and takes his jacket from the back of a chair. Rhymer the name of the elderly butler who knew about the Lindberghs was, Rhymer who touched the port and suffered for it. The old man’s knotted features appear in Maidment’s recall, the addled look that had developed in the bloodshot eyes. Gout and worse affected him in his work and they found him early, passed away quietly in a lavatory the night before. The pantryman was next in line for the position.
‘Nothing can be done but wait.’ Picking up the tray, Maidment satisfies himself with the observation. The Lone Eagle they called Lindbergh after his Atlantic flight, Rhymer said. The German was a jobbing carpenter, trusted in people’s houses.
‘I couldn’t,’ Zenobia repeats, filling the kettle again for the kitchen tea. ‘I couldn’t lie there sleepless.’
‘I’ll chance it myself for a while.’ For all they know, it could have been on the News, but sometimes of course the police will keep quiet for reasons of their own. Maidment pauses at the door, about to mention the News, but decides against that also.
‘I brought you something, Mrs. Iveson,’ he says in the conservatory. He hesitates for a moment, since this is going against her wishes, neither tea nor food requested. Disturbed by his entry, the dog stands up and stretches.
‘That’s kind of you, Maidment.’
‘It’s just a little.’
‘Thank you.’
She’s always polite and civil. She’s distant, but that’s her way; getting to know her, you come to understand that. A different manner of shyness in mother and daughter; less than a week ago he remarked on that.
He clears a space for the tray and pulls the wicker table a little closer to her. She has been waiting for the telephone in the hall to ring: you can tell that from how she is.
‘All we can do,’ she says.
The Lindbergh family was never the same again, Rhymer said; you had money, you had trouble; they took it from you, they killed you for it. Servants to money, the well-to-do were: when it came down to it, everyone was a servant, Rhymer maintained, unaware that most of his utterances were taken with a pinch of salt.
‘I can’t believe it was just some woman walking by. Do you think it was, Maidment?’
‘It’s hard to know what to believe, Mrs. Iveson.’ The trouble with a woman who’d take a baby, she could be a mental case. Without a shadow of doubt, the man who climbed up to the Lindberghs’ window was what they’d call a nutter nowadays.
‘You never had children, Maidment?’
She surprises him, asking that, and the question coming so suddenly. There is an intimacy in the query, as if what has happened this afternoon has changed their relationship, as if formality no longer makes sense.
‘No, we never did.’
With encumbrances, they wouldn’t have held a position down. They’d have to have gone for a different kind of house right from the beginning. He explains this, passing the time for her because it’s what she wants. Her voice is empty, but she keeps the conversation going.
‘This was the work you chose? Both of you?’
‘We met through the work. When the times changed we went as a couple because couples were the thing then. Zenobia picked up the kitchen knowledge, although lady’s maid she’d have preferred, upstairs being what she knew. Beggars can’t be choosers.’
‘My daughter thought the world of you both.’
‘She was the soul of kindness, your daughter.’
‘I’ve let her down.’
‘She’d be the last to say that.’
The tray is as he has placed it. She hasn’t poured her tea. She stares at the prickles of a plant he considers unattractive. Ripening fast, the grapes hang all around her. It’s hard to imagine, she says, that anyone wouldn’t stop to think before causing such distress.
Greed takes care of that, Maidment refrains from stating. It was greed that possessed an illiterate foreigner when he hatched his plot, fear that caused him to commit his more terrible crime. When greed and fear get going, who stops to think?
‘I would pay anything,’ she says, and Maidment can think of no suitable rejoinder. He pours her tea for her, handing her cup and saucer. A sudden longing to have a cigarette stirs in him. The dog is restless, he says, and takes her with him to the darkened garden.
‘Still we’ve never been to Scarrow Hill,’ Zenobia hears herself remark, and then they’re there. In the picnic area she spreads out the lunch-time fare, bread and salad, meat-loaf she made herself. Exposed on spongy hillside turf, an outline of grey rock depicts a giant.
She wakes abruptly. Around her on the kitchen table is the brass she has collected from all over the house, and Duraglit and cloths. There’s the silver, too: the ornamental pheasants from the dining-room, sugar-casters, toast racks and cutlery, the silver eggs that came from Poland, the Polish crucifixes. An hour she has spent already with the Duraglit and Goddard’s; before that she rearranged the tins and bottles on the cold-room shelves, and washed the passage and the cold-room floor. It’s five to three now.
She blinks and rubs her eyes, dragging herself back to fuller consciousness. There was a nurse who killed babies. Four babies, maybe more. A woman pretended to be pregnant, preparing her neighbours and her husband for what she intended to do, but when she got the baby she neglected it and it died. Other babies were taken in order to be tortured and afterwards a woman sought forgiveness, pointing out the burial places.