Baby on Loan
‘Oh, puh-lease! He’s old enough to be your father.’
‘Only just.’ She sighed. ‘I remember him coming to speech day, years ago… He looked so lost. So…solitary. I fantasised for weeks about him. Comforting him, bringing him back to life…’ She pulled a face. ‘Well, you know…’
Carenza rolled her eyes heavenward. ‘I know. You and half the women in London according to my mother, silly cows. He’d lost the love of his life and his baby daughter. Getting over that kind of thing…well, I don’t suppose you ever do. It’s only work that keeps him going. Mum says if he doesn’t ease off he’ll probably end up Lord Chief Justice.’
‘What a waste.’ Then Sarah read, “‘Defendant Changes Plea’’? What does that mean?’
Carenza frowned, retrieved the paper from her friend so that she could see for herself, then groaned. ‘What it means, Sarah, is that I’m in big trouble. I’ve let his house to a woman with a howling infant…’ They exchanged a horrified glance. ‘And he’s probably on his way home right now. How on earth could I have been so stupid?’
‘You’ve had a lot of practice?’ her friend offered, helpfully.
There were plenty of pictures. A Dutch still-life over the mantle in the semi-basement dining room next to the kitchen. A series of cartoons of barristers in wig and gown on the stairs, and a Stubbs upstairs in the drawing room. ‘Look at the lovely horse, Bertie,’ she prompted. Bertie was not impressed.
There were prints of famous nineteenth-century cricketers lining the main staircase and landing; she assumed they were famous, or no one would have bothered to frame them.
No cats.
The large bedroom was richly decorated in a warm red, furnished in antique walnut. It didn’t quite go with Carrie’s image; the cargo pants, the stud in her nose and the radical hairdo.
The second bedroom was furnished as a study, with floor-to-ceiling shelves containing law books. She remembered the cartoons and wondered if it was a family thing. Maybe her new landlady had inherited the house and the books. It would explain a lot.
There was a wonderfully large desk with room for her scanner as well as the computer. She hadn’t had time to connect them, yet. Once Bertie was in bed, she promised herself, she’d make a start, try to catch up.
She hadn’t been in the third room. Carrie had whizzed past, muttering something about it being a store room, not used in years. The door was stiff, as if it hadn’t been opened in a while, but beneath the dust the room was painted in cheerful yellow and white so that it would look sunny on even the greyest of days. There were no pictures, though, just some boxes that looked as if they hadn’t been disturbed for years.
She returned to the kitchen in the hope that Mao might have come back. He hadn’t, but Bertie, overcome with exhaustion, finally dozed off in the crook of her arm.
Hungry, but anxious not to disturb the sleeping baby, she found half a packet of chocolate biscuits left by Carenza, settled carefully into a large and very comfortable armchair and tucked in to them.
She must have fallen asleep mid-bite because when Mao, miaowing and clattering his claws against the window, woke her, there were crumbs adhering to the chocolate liberally smeared down the front of her shirt; the remains of the biscuit had succumbed to gravity and were lying, chocolate-side-down on the carpet.
She let in the cat, bathed and fed Bertie and finally put him into his cot. Then she flung her crumby, chocolate-stained shirt into the laundry basket along with everything else she was wearing, pulled on a T-shirt because it was the first thing that came to hand, brushed her teeth and fell into bed.
In that brief moment before sleep claimed her, she had a momentary vision of the chocolate biscuit lying on the Persian rug in the drawing room and knew she should get up and do something about it.
And turn on the burglar alarm.
Then nothing.
Patrick dropped his bag in the hall and crossed to the alarm to punch in the code number. It wasn’t switched on. Carenza had obviously forgotten to set it. He really should have known better than to give in to his sister’s pleading and let her stay here.
Tomorrow he’d write her a cheque, she’d disappear like snow in August and everything would be back to normal.
Well, very nearly normal. It might be the middle of the night in London, but he’d slept on the plane and it would probably take days for his body clock to readjust. Right now, he was wide awake and hungry.
He just hoped there was something edible in the fridge. He snapped on the kitchen light, swallowed hard and determinedly ignored the sinkful of un-washed dishes.
It was harder to ignore a faint, disturbingly familiar scent that he couldn’t quite place. Probably because it was overlain with the smell of steamed fish.
The gritty crunch of biscuit crumbs beneath his feet distracted him, doing nothing to improve his temper. Forget a cheque. Carenza would be grateful to escape when he’d finished with her. House-sitting indeed. She couldn’t be relied upon to sit in a cardboard box.
Jessie’s first thought, as she woke up with a guilty start, was panic. It was too quiet. She leapt out of bed, peered anxiously into the cot, then groped for her spectacles and put them on for a closer look. Just to be on the safe side. A week of this and she’d be a nervous wreck.
But there was nothing the matter with Bertie. In the faint spillage of light from the landing, she could see that he was fast asleep. She touched his cheek; it was warm, but not too warm. He was just fine. Gorgeous in fact, with a peachy bloom to his cheek and his dark hair curling softly around his ears.
The cat was fine, too.
She froze, horror struck. Faye would have a hissy fit if she could see her precious infant sharing his sleeping quarters with Mao, who had curled up and made himself thoroughly at home at the bottom of the cot.
She picked him up. He protested. Bertie stirred. She forced herself to cuddle the cat, murmur sweet nothings as she stroked him, even as her skin goosed at the touch of his fur.
Mao looked at her through suspicious, narrowed eyes as if he knew exactly what she was thinking as she tiptoed towards the door.
She had just made it to the landing when she realised what had woken her. There was someone in the kitchen.
CHAPTER TWO
JESSIE had any number of choices. Call the police. Scream. Barricade herself in with Bertie and Mao and wait until the burglar had helped himself to whatever he fancied and went away. Scream. Confront the villain. Scream…
Oh, stop it! she told her wittering brain. The police. She had a mobile; she’d call the police. She pushed her spectacles down her nose and looked around. Where was it? When had she last used it? Oh, hell, it was in her handbag and that was downstairs. With the burglar. Which dealt with option number one.
And she’d thought her life couldn’t get any worse.
Screaming, seriously screaming, and giving vent to all the anguish of the last two days had its attractions.
But screaming would wake Bertie and frighten Mao and maybe the burglar wouldn’t run away. Maybe he’d come looking for her in order to shut her up. Which thought was sufficient to put a hold on screaming. For the moment.
It would have to be option number three, then. The barricade.
She put the cat down and looked around. Memory and the light spilling in from the landing suggested that the furniture was of the kind that required a minimum of three heavily muscled men to shift. With a fourth directing operations. Except for Bertie’s lightweight travelling cot, of course. Apart from the fact that it wouldn’t stop a determined flea, Bertie was in it. Asleep. And no one was going to wake up Bertie if she could help it.
But any burglar worth his salt would certainly come upstairs looking for jewellery and money.
It was time for option four. No! Not screaming! And maybe not confronting the villain; she preferred to remain defensive if at all possible. What she needed, then, was something with which to defend herself. And Bertie. And, since he was her responsibility too, Mao.
She swallowed. And if there was more than one of them?
Refusing to think about it, she opened the wardrobe door and peered into the dark interior, desperate for inspiration. She’d been too busy to unpack and now she discovered it was full of dark, heavy clothes. Really, Carrie might have emptied the wardrobe of her gothic junk before she let the place…
She didn’t have time to worry about it. What she needed right now was a sharply pointed umbrella, or… Something hard and heavy fell out and landed painfully on her toes. She bit back a yell of pain and bent to pick up the object.
It was a cricket bat. Brilliant. Odd—she didn’t quite see Carenza leading out the England ladies’ cricket team—but brilliant. She seized it and immediately felt more in control. Hefting it defensively in her hand, she crossed to the door, opened it a little wider in order to listen.
Before she could stop him, Mao shot through the gap.
Patrick opened the fridge. On the shelf inside the door, there was an open carton of milk; he sniffed it cautiously. It was fresh. He replaced it and explored further.
He took out a dish, uncovered it. It appeared to be mashed up fish. Unimpressed by Carenza’s culinary skills, he rejected it, but as he opened a box of eggs something soft and warm brushed against his ankles.
Unnerved, he stepped back. The creature let out a banshee wail as he stepped on its tail, before tangling itself between his legs as it tried to escape.
Off balance and uncertain where he could safely put his feet, Patrick made a grab for the first thing that came to hand.
It was the shelf inside the fridge door.
It took his weight for a tantalising millisecond during which he thought he’d got away with it. Then, as shelf and door parted company, milk and moulded plastic succumbed to gravity and hit the floor. Patrick and the eggs were delayed slightly, while his head bounced off the edge of the work surface.
Jessie, dithering behind the bedroom door and wondering whether in fact the bat was such a good idea after all—she might just be handing the burglar a weapon—heard Mao’s howl of outrage, swiftly followed by a horrendous crash.
Had the burglar killed the cat? Had the cat killed the burglar? Whatever was going on, it was clear that she could no longer hide upstairs. With the cricket bat raised shakily before her, she advanced slowly down the stairs and approached the kitchen with caution.
She’d been too tired to bother with clearing up before she’d fallen into bed, but, even so, the scene that met her gaze was a shock. Smashed eggs, milk spreading to form a small lake, a lake at which a perfectly content Mao was busy lapping, and in the middle of it all, flat on his back, blood oozing from a wound on his forehead, lay a man who seemed to fill all the available space. A man dressed from head to toe in burglar-black. Black chinos, a black shirt, sleeves rolled back to reveal thickly muscled forearms.
He was tall and strong and he would have disarmed her without raising a sweat.
Fortunately, he was unconscious.
Or maybe not. Even as she stood there, congratulating herself on the fact, he groaned and opened his eyes. Jessie grasped the bat tightly, swallowed nervously and croaked, ‘Don’t move!’
Patrick stared up at the ceiling. The kitchen ceiling. He was lying on the kitchen floor, in a very cold puddle, and his head felt as if it was about to fall off. And there was a wild-haired, semi-naked woman wearing spectacles two sizes too big for her, threatening him with his own cricket bat. Had she hit him with it? He began to raise his hand to his head in order to assess the damage.
‘Don’t move!’ she repeated.
The words, undoubtedly meant to be threatening—although the effect was considerably diminished by the nervous wobble in her voice—were unnecessary. He had no desire to move. He just wanted to close his eyes and hope that when he opened them again all this would have gone away.
He tried it.
His eyes closed again. Jessie ventured a step nearer. He looked horribly pale and the gash on his forehead looked nasty. Oh, good grief, he was going to die. He was going to die and she’d get the blame and go to jail. That was the way it was. You read about it in the papers all the time. Burglar breaks in, burglar dies, innocent householder goes to jail.
Kevin and Faye would be sorry then…
She gasped. What on earth was she thinking of? He might have broken in, but the man clearly needed her help. She dropped the bat and paddled barefoot through the lake of cold milk to his side.
Stretched out on the kitchen floor he seemed very large, very threatening. Even unconscious he looked very dangerous. But she couldn’t just leave him there. Grabbing a clean bib from the work surface, she knelt beside him and dabbed, tentatively, at the blood oozing from the wound on his forehead, forgetting her fear in her concern.
His eyes opened with an immediacy that suggested he hadn’t been as far out of it as she’d thought, and he grabbed at her wrist. ‘Who the devil are you?’ he demanded.
‘Jessie,’ she replied instantly, not wanting to irritate him in any way. ‘My name’s Jessie. How do you feel?’ She put real warmth into her voice. She really wanted him to know that she wasn’t going to do anything bad…
‘How do I look?’ he countered.
He certainly didn’t look good. Apart from the pallor, made worse by the dark shadow of a day-old beard, there was the blood which still hadn’t stopped oozing. She put her fingers against his throat to check his pulse. It seemed the right thing to do, although she wasn’t sure why because she could see for herself that he wasn’t dead.
His skin was warm and smooth beneath her fingers, his pulse reassuringly strong. ‘Well?’ he asked after a moment. ‘Will I live?’
‘I th-th-think so.’
‘I’d be happier if you could sound a little more convincing.’
He didn’t sound like a burglar. But then, what did she know? ‘Well…’ she began. Then something about the sardonic twist of his mouth alerted her to the fact that he wasn’t being entirely serious.
‘I won’t struggle if you think I need the kiss of life,’ he said, confirming her worst suspicions.
For a moment she was tempted. He might have broken in, but if he’d been the man in black leaving a box of chocolates she had the feeling any woman would be left wearing a smile. Maybe she should offer to kiss him better…
No! For heaven’s sake, would she never learn?
And if he was well enough to joke, he was probably capable of getting up and…and maybe it would be better not to think about what he was capable of doing. Actually, she realised, as her brain stopped freewheeling and finally clicked into gear, she should stop wasting time and call the police and an ambulance. Right now.
‘What you need is a trip to the nearest A and E department,’ she said, primly, making a tentative attempt to free herself. He might be in a jokey mood, but she wasn’t prepared to risk annoying him. His fingers remained clamped about her wrist as he tried to sit up. The effort was clearly too much for him and he subsided, with a groan, releasing her as he put his hand to his head.
Her mobile. She needed her mobile. Her bag was on the work surface next to the fridge and she stood up to reach for it. That was when her burglar grabbed her ankle.
And that was when she finally stopped being controlled and sensible and did what she’d been wanting to ever since she’d realised she had an intruder. She opened her mouth and screamed blue murder.
Patrick, who had simply wanted to know what this Jessie woman was doing in his house and where Carenza had disappeared to, decided that, after all, it didn’t matter that much. Stopping her from screaming was far more important, so he tugged on her foot. Hard. The noise stopped abruptly.
Then she fell on top of him.
He muttered one brief word as the breath was knocked from him. One word was all it took to sum up his feelings. Her eyes, inches from his own, widened in shock, but before she could do or say another thing he grabbed her. ‘Don’t. Please don’t say another word. I don’t know who you are, or what you’re doing here, but I give up. You win.’
‘Win? Win?’ Even to her own ears she was beginning to sound hysterical. Well, that was fine. She had every right to be hysterical. She was lying crushed against the chest of a ruthless criminal. A man who’d broken into her home. Who, even with a nasty head wound, was more than capable of taking advantage of the situation. And the situation was that while she was wearing a mercifully long and baggy T-shirt, there was little else to cover her embarrassment. Well, actually nothing else. All he had to do was move his hand a few inches and he’d discover that for himself.
She firmly resisted her brain’s urgent prompting to tug her T-shirt down as far as it would go. That would only draw attention to her plight. Instead she forced herself to look him squarely in the face and tell him to let her go. Right now.
It was an interesting face. The kind of face that, under different circumstances, she’d like to see more of. On the thin side, but with strong bones, a lot of character, and she had the strong impression that pain was not a stranger to him. Yet his mouth promised passion. Oh, good grief. And she’d thought he was rambling!
‘In what way, exactly, do I win?’ she demanded, trying to get a grip of herself, gather her wits.
‘I surrender,’ he said. Surrender? What was he talking about? She stared at him. He had the most extraordinary eyes, she thought. Grey, but with tiny flecks of gold that seemed to be heating them up. Or was that just her imagination? ‘Just don’t scream any more. Please.’
‘Do you mean that?’ she demanded as fiercely as she could, not entirely trusting him. The wobble in her voice wouldn’t scare a mouse.
‘Oh, forget it. Give me a knife and I’ll cut my own throat. It’ll be quicker than the punishment you’re dishing out.’
‘Me!’ she squeaked. ‘I didn’t ask you to break in and fall over.’
‘Fall over?’ he shouted, then winced. ‘Is that going to be your story?’ And he flung the arm that was holding her towards the cricket bat and grasped the handle. ‘Haven’t you forgotten exhibit A?’ he said as he brandished it at her.
She scrambled to her feet and put some distance between them before he decided to beat her senseless with it. ‘Just stay there,’ she said. ‘Don’t you move. I’m going to call an ambulance.’ She backed hurriedly away, ignoring the milk dripping from her T-shirt and running down her legs.
He dropped the bat. ‘You’ll have to drag me out into the street if you want it to run me over,’ he warned her blackly.
Rambling. Definitely rambling. He needed to be in hospital, and quickly, but she moved well out of reach before she extracted her cellphone from her bag, dialled the emergency services and asked for an ambulance. They wanted details. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know who he is. He broke into my house and he’s fallen in the kitchen…’
‘It’s not your house!’ he yelled. ‘It’s mine!’
‘Head injury?’ she repeated distractedly as the ambulance dispatcher probed for details. Had he been watching the house? Had he seen Carenza leave and thought it was empty? He was regarding her angrily, but he hadn’t moved an inch. Unconvinced by this evidence of co-operation, she stepped further back into the hall, leaving a milky footprint on the carpet. More mess. More bother. ‘Oh, yes, he gashed his forehead on the corner of the kitchen unit… Yes, he’s conscious, but he seems to be a bit odd…not quite making sense… I thought maybe he was, you know, on something…’ He groaned. She ignored him. ‘Would you? And you’ll inform the police. Thank you so much.’ She hung up and returned to the kitchen, standing in the doorway, unwilling to get any nearer. One close encounter had been quite enough. ‘They’ll be here soon.’
‘Tell me,’ he asked, finally managing to heave himself into a sitting position and propping himself up against a cupboard, ‘are you mad, or is it me?’ He sounded quite serious, as if he really wanted to know.
Unwilling to say anything that might agitate him further, Jessie kept her distance, although her knees were shaking so much that if she didn’t sit down soon, she’d probably collapse in a heap right where she was. ‘Just keep still. I’m sure they’ll be here soon,’ she said, with a lot more calm conviction than she felt.
‘Are you? I hope you’re right. Tell me, where did that cat come from?’
Mao, having enjoyed the free spillage of milk and toyed with the yolk of one of the eggs, was now carefully washing his face. Jessie watched him for a moment. There was something almost hypnotic about the delicate, repetitive movements… ‘I don’t know. He belongs to the owner of the house.’ She turned to him. ‘It’s one of the reasons she was desperate for someone to move in. She needed someone to look after him. It must have been a bit of shock to discover the house wasn’t empty after all.’
‘You could say that. Especially since this is my house.’
He was worse than she thought. Much worse. Jessie glanced at her watch, wondering how long it would take the ambulance to arrive. ‘This is your house, is it?’ she asked in what sounded, even to her own ears, a patronising attempt to humour him.
‘Yes, madam, it is,’ he said, sharply. ‘And you can believe me when I tell you that I hate cats. And so does my dog. So maybe you’d like to explain what you’re doing here?’ Dog? He had a dog? She glanced around nervously. That was all she needed, a burglar who modelled himself on that Dickensian prototype Bill Sykes. But there was no slavering bull-terrier waiting to tear her limb from limb and Jessie, praying fervently for the early arrival of someone to remove this madman from her home, decided that humouring him would be the safest course.
‘I’d love to—’
‘Why don’t you start by telling me—?’
Upstairs, Bertie began to cry. She could have kissed him. Would kiss him. Right now. ‘I’d love to stop and chat but I have to see to the baby.’
‘Baby?’ He looked, she thought, as if he’d been struck a second blow. ‘You’ve got a baby? Here?’
‘He’s teething, poor soul,’ she said, beating a hasty retreat, stumbling over the bag her unwelcome caller had left in the hall. It was black and expensive and clearly very heavy. He’d probably stolen it and stuffed it full of the loot at a house he’d broken into earlier. ‘Just stay put and the ambulancemen will be with you any minute.’ She turned, put the front door on the latch so that whichever of the emergency services got there first could let themselves in, and bolted upstairs.
Bertie was intermittently bawling and stuffing his fist into his mouth. Jessie threw on the first things that came to hand and then she picked him up. He needed changing. The nappies were downstairs. In the kitchen. It figured.
Baby? Patrick grabbed hold of the edge of the sink and hauled himself to his feet, doing his best to ignore the thumping pain in his head, the rush of nausea. That was the smell. Warm milk, baby cream, talc, that stuff Bella had used to sterilise bottles. That was the scent that had eluded him. How could he have forgotten it?
He’d come back after the funeral and it had seemed to fill the house. It had taken him months to get rid of it. He’d got to the point where he’d thought he’d have to move. But in the end he’d realised that the smell existed more in his head than in reality. A faint ghost of his lost family that would forever haunt him. Moving would have been pointless.
Where the hell was Carenza? He clutched onto the sink for a moment while the kitchen spun around him, determined that whatever happened he wouldn’t be sick. When he felt strong enough to risk opening his eyes, he discovered that he was being regarded suspiciously by a uniformed policeman.