Jack was very lucky that Maggie and Penny got on so well, but Penny was also surprisingly astute about their need for privacy. She’d signed up for a couple of evening classes and had even bought herself a little TV for her bedroom, turning the top floor into a proper little granny flat. She was secretive about the evening classes, prompting hours of humorous speculation, Jack eventually deciding that Penny was doing pole dancing and woodwork.
Jack loved returning of an evening to his ever-changing home. This house, or one like it, had been their dream ever since they moved from Totnes. They’d been priced out of the London market for so long, but after Jack’s ‘windfall’, they jumped on this property by quickly offering £15k below the asking price, in cash. Within a week, they were in. The windfall was attributed to an impulsive lottery ticket purchase, which Maggie never questioned. Jack didn’t know whether she thought he was lying, or whether she was just too scared of hearing the truth. All Maggie knew for sure was that her husband was a changed man after the Rose Cottage case. He was found. He now knew where he belonged and that, for any person, was life-changing.
Penny didn’t know that Jack had even looked for his real dad, let alone that he’d found out he was the son of Harry Rawlins, one of London’s biggest gangsters in the 1980s. That was Jack and Maggie’s secret. But the ‘gift’ of £250,000 was Jack’s secret alone. Jack knew it was the proceeds of crimes from back in the ’80s; he knew it was untraceable; he knew the thieves were long gone; he knew the case file was closed. No one knew or would care... and all that made it easy to keep, and easy to spend.
The money had now dwindled, but Penny’s pension and Jack’s sergeant’s wages kept them ticking over. As a new young family, they were firmly on the social ladder — they wouldn’t fall off unless Jack got sacked, but on the other hand they wouldn’t climb unless he got promoted. For the first time in years, it felt as though life was where it should be.
The baby would complete the family, and Jack and Maggie would get married once she’d got her figure back — her words, not his — he was loving her big breasts and ample backside...
But Jack’s dream evening vanished in a split second when he saw the car parked in his space on the street. They had visitors.
Jack recognised the deep, howling laughter as soon as he opened his front door. Regina was a nursing auxiliary in the same hospital as Maggie and they’d bonded over both being pregnant. She was nice enough, but loud. The moment the front door closed, Maggie was out of the kitchen and in Jack’s arms. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry...’ Her words were punctuated with a kiss. ‘She’s had a rough day and I wanted to cheer her up.’ Maggie dragged Jack down, over her heavily pregnant belly and hugged him tightly round his neck. He could have fallen asleep on her shoulder right there, but instead he allowed himself to be led into the kitchen where he would spend the next couple of hours pretending to want Maggie’s friends in his home.
Regina and Mario were both drinking non-alcoholic wine, and there was a buffet-style feast on the table. Jack briefly raised his dark eyebrows; widening his beautiful brown eyes at Maggie with the unspoken message: ‘We’re not a food bank.’ Maggie had previously told Jack that Regina and Mario were struggling financially in the run-up to the birth of their baby, so he knew why Maggie had taken it upon herself to treat them to a feast every now and then. They’d also be forced to take home doggy bags, whether they were embarrassed to or not.
Regina had been to the house numerous times, but tonight was Mario’s first visit. Jack knew it was his job to talk ‘man stuff’ with this stranger and as Jack got himself a beer from the fridge, Mario made a comment about abstaining from alcohol in solidarity with Regina. Jack quickly assumed that his evening would go downhill from there.
In fact, Mario was decent company and, by ten o’clock, he was on the beer too. Mario was a painter and decorator, existing on word-of-mouth recommendations. It was a tough job, with long hours and no security, but he had the sort of friendly demeanour that won people over quickly. Slowly but surely, Jack began to understand why Maggie gave so much to this couple and was happy to get nothing practical in return. They were worth helping.
At 11.15, Regina and Mario said their goodbyes at the front door, and Jack confirmed that he’d be in touch to talk about dates and times for decorating the nursery. The men shook hands, the women hugged, and Jack finally had his wife all to himself.
Maggie brought Jack a whisky and they settled into their newly adopted positions on the sofa. Before Maggie was too pregnant, they’d sit close together, using only one half of the sofa, but these days, they sat at opposite ends so that Maggie could bring her feet up and rest them on Jack’s lap. ‘Was it your idea for Mario to paint the nursery?’ she asked. Jack’s smug little smirk told her that it was. ‘I love you, Jack Warr.’
‘I know.’ From where he sat, he could hardly see her face above her bump. He stroked his hand across her belly. ‘Ah! She’s a footballer!’ Jack closed his eyes and felt his baby slowly turn and stretch and kick. ‘There is only one in there, isn’t there, Mags?’ For a moment, there was genuine worry on Jack’s face. ‘Regina’s much smaller than you and I can definitely feel three legs.’
‘She’s only five months, you idiot; I’m close to my due date. And I imagine that third leg might be an arm.’ By midnight, Maggie was hauling herself up the stairs by the bannister, and Jack was pushing her bum skywards from below. They were both giggling as quietly as possible, so as not to wake Penny. ‘That doesn’t actually help, Jack.’
He knew. She told him every night. But he liked doing it.
At the top of the stairs were three boxes from Amazon. Maggie went into the bathroom, leaving Jack to have a nosy at what she and Penny had been buying. With no distinguishing pictures on the delivery boxes, Jack scrabbled about on his hands and knees trying to decipher the labels. Nursery stuff was about all he could discern.
As he knelt on the third stair down, his elbows on the landing floor; he smiled. Penny and Maggie’s nestbuilding had accelerated over the past few weeks. They’d shown him material swatches, paint charts, online nurseries and asked his opinion, which they didn’t really want or need, and Jack didn’t want to give. Being asked his opinion put Jack in very dangerous territory: if he said it was up to them, he’d be scolded for being uninterested; but if he offered an opinion that differed from theirs, he’d be scolded for not understanding the needs of his unborn child. Jack much preferred the mind games of criminals to the mind games of his wife and mother: they mercilessly ganged up on him all the time. But the masochistic part of him adored being bullied by the women he loved — and it was tragic that Charlie wasn’t here to share the burden. He deserved to be here. He’d worked hard all his life to mould Jack into a man to be proud of and now, when Jack needed his dad to be on his side against ‘the women’, Charlie wasn’t around. The very thought of Charlie brought tears to Jack’s eyes — the pain stage of his grief was merging with the anger stage and resulted in short-lived, intense moments of heightened emotion. Jack deep-breathed through it and the tears subsided.
Then a strange memory popped into Jack’s head and he sat on the stair to relive it.
The sonogram burst into life and showed them an indistinct, grainy picture like something on a water-damaged VHS tape. In this uniquely beautiful moment, Jack’s mind leapt to one of his first cases for the Met, in which he was asked to watch illegally produced porn tapes found in a toilet cistern, to see if any of them starred James Daniels, a well-known, yet highly elusive local pervert. Jack closed his eyes — ‘For fuck’s sake!’ he thought as he desperately tried to get rid of the memory. Maggie squeezed his hand, and he was back in the room.