Marielle glares at him, flicking the syringe pointedly.
‘What’s that for? The last injection will be wearing off and she’s not going to be able to answer any questions if she’s drugged up, is she?’
‘It’s a deterrent, Henry. Follow me.’
This is useless, he wants to shout at her. But he follows her obediently up the stairs. He should never have allowed this charade to go on for as long as it has.
Lena won’t give Marielle the answers she so desperately seeks, because the only people who know what he did are Hugh Warrington and Simone Harvey. And they’re both dead.
He made sure of that.
57
LENA
I can hear footsteps on the stairs. I drag myself back across the floor, careful to avoid the protruding nail, and, with great effort, climb onto the bed, exhausted. It’s useless. There’s nowhere to hide and nothing in this room to use as a weapon. I’m totally at their mercy, trapped. I watch, frozen in horror, as I hear the sound of the key in the lock. The door swings open to reveal Marielle. She steps into the room and I can see she’s brandishing a syringe. Henry is following close behind and it occurs to me that I wouldn’t just have to overpower one of them but both. And even when I’ve not been drugged with something, that would be impossible.
‘Why are you doing this?’ I manage to say, annoyed that my voice sounds so weak and pathetic.
Marielle perches on the edge of my bed with the needle in her hand. Her face is devoid of compassion. It sends a sliver of fear through me.
‘Do you really have no idea?’ she asks. ‘You don’t remember what you did?’
I stare at her, confused. ‘No.’
‘I gave birth to a baby boy in your hospital. Hugh Warrington was the doctor who delivered my son. There was a midwife there too. Simone Harvey. Do you remember?’
‘Yes, I remember them both, but I – I was only there for six weeks …’ I try to picture her and Henry coming into the hospital, but I can’t. I can only recall a handful of occasions when I was in the delivery room with Hugh and Simone – Natalie Grant’s birth was the last.
She glances at Henry, who is guarding the door, then back at me.
‘Hugh Warrington said my baby died. And I believed him. I was an older mother, there were a few complications. But a few years ago I read that in 1999 he went to prison for prescription fraud, among other things, and it confirmed what I already knew to be true in here.’ She thumps her chest above her heart. ‘He was a crook. A chancer. I don’t know how he managed it, but he took my baby. He took my baby and sold him and I began collecting every article I could find about him and that horrible, seedy hospital where you worked. So many things came to light after it closed down. So many terrible, terrible things.’
She’s totally delusional. Hugh and Simone might have been involved in many underhand, illegal activities but, as far as I knew, an adoption racket wasn’t one of them. ‘I’m sorry, Marielle, I really am, but I don’t know anything about this.’
Her face contorts with rage. ‘Don’t lie to me. Simone told me that you knew all about what happened to my baby.’
My heart twists as the horror of what she’s saying hits me. ‘That’s not true. Simone lied to you.’
‘She couldn’t help me, but you can. What did they do with my baby?’
Tears of panic and fear roll down my cheeks. She’s obviously killed Simone and now she’s going to kill me too. I have no clue what she’s talking about. ‘I promise you, Marielle, I know nothing about any of this.’
‘Why would Simone tell me you were involved if it wasn’t true?’
‘Because she’s a liar?’ I cry. ‘I don’t know!’
‘He was born on the twenty-first of February 1999,’ she says, as though I haven’t spoken. My heart sinks. That was a few days before I left St Calvert’s and just a week after Natalie Grant died. I’d been so disillusioned by then and had had a blazing row with Simone outside my shared house in Walthamstow when I confronted her. She denied everything and told me that nobody would believe me anyway. The last image I have of her is her stalking off into the winter’s night, in her burgundy fake-fur coat and her Dr Martens and I’d slumped against the wall, shaking from the confrontation. I’d made up my mind there and then to leave my course.
‘That was my last week,’ I say to Marielle. ‘I know I definitely didn’t help with your birth. Do you think you remember me or are you just taking Simone’s word that I was there?’
The confusion in her face tells me everything. Simone made it up. Was throwing my name into the ring her revenge for my having confronted her? For being the first to suspect her? Or just a last-ditch attempt to save her own skin?
She sighs deeply. ‘After I’d realized what sort of man Hugh was, it didn’t take me long to find Simone. Her face is in here.’ She taps the side of her head. ‘I never forget a face. It took me a while to track her down but I found that article in the local paper when we were living in Salisbury last year. What are the chances that I’d end up living in the same place as her? Fate, that’s what. And then, after her, it was easy to find you, thanks to Simone’s information. She knew you’d married an ex-rock star. She must have been keeping tabs on you. Lena isn’t a common name, even if you were no longer Bull but Fletcher. I had to bide my time, of course, work out how to play it. But Fate intervened again when the house next door to yours went up for sale. It was easy to keep an eye on you, being so close. I tried to get you talking, Lena, do you remember? I asked about your dreams, your hopes, but you never admitted to me that you used to be a midwife. Why was that?’ She says all this calmly, which is even more chilling.
‘Because I wasn’t a midwife,’ I mutter. ‘I never completed my course. I left. Because of what Hugh and Simone were doing and the guilt I felt at not reporting it.’
‘Their adoption racket?’
