“I didn’t tell Luca, obviously,” said Gloria. “I knew that if I was going to—to do anything—I had to do it quickly, before he noticed my body change, but most of all, before the baby could feel it or…”
Gloria suddenly bowed her head, and covered her face with her hands.
“I’m so sorry,” said Robin. “It must have been awful for you…”
“No—well—” said Gloria, straightening up and again pushing back her white hair, her eyes wet. “Never mind that. I’m only telling you, so you understand…
“Margot made the appointment for me. She gave the clinic her name and contact details and she bought us both wigs, because if she was recognized, someone might recognize me by association. And she came with me—it was a Saturday—to this place in Bride Street. I’ve never forgotten the name of the street, because a bride is exactly what I didn’t want to be, and that’s why I was there.
“The clinic had been using Margot’s name as the referring doctor, and I think somewhere there were crossed wires, because they thought ‘Margot Bamborough’ was the one having the procedure. Margot said, ‘It doesn’t matter, nobody’ll ever know, all these records are confidential.’ And she said, in a way it was convenient, if there was any follow-up needed, they could contact her and arrange it.
“She held my hand on the way in, and she was there when I woke up,” said Gloria, and now tears leaked from her dark eyes, and she brushed them quickly away. “When I was ready to go home, she took me to the end of my grandparents” street in a taxi. She told me what to do afterward, how to take care of myself…
“I wasn’t like Margot,” said Gloria, her voice breaking. “I didn’t believe it was right, what I did. September the fourteenth: I don’t think that date’s come by once, since, that I haven’t remembered, and thought about that baby.
“When I went back to work after a couple of days off, she took me into her office and asked me how I was feeling, and then she said, ‘Now, Gloria, you’ve got to be brave. If you stay with Luca, this will happen again.’ She said, ‘We need to find you a job away from London, and make sure he doesn’t know where you’ve gone.’ And she said something that’s stayed with me always, ‘We aren’t our mistakes. It’s what we do about the mistake that shows who we are.’
“But I wasn’t like Margot,” said Gloria again. “I wasn’t brave, I couldn’t imagine leaving my grandparents. I pretended to agree, but ten days after the abortion I was sleeping with Luca again, not because I wanted to, but because there didn’t seem any other choice.
“And then,” said Gloria, “about a month after we’d been to the clinic, it happened. Margot disappeared.”
A muffled male voice was now heard at Gloria’s end of the call. She turned toward the door behind her and said,
“Non, c’est toujours en cours!”
Turning back to her computer she said,
“Pardon. I mean, sorry.”
“Mrs. Jaubert—Gloria,” said Strike, “could we please take you back through the day Margot disappeared?”
“The whole day?”
Strike nodded. Gloria took a slow inward breath, like somebody about to dive into deep water, then said,
“Well, the morning was all normal. Everyone was there except Wilma the cleaner. She didn’t come in on Fridays.
“I remember two things about the morning: meeting Janice by the kettle at the back, and her going on about the sequel to The Godfather coming out soon, and me pretending to be excited about it, and actually feeling as though I’d run a mile rather than go and see it… and Irene being quite smug and pleased because Janice had just been on a date with some man she’d been trying to set Janice up with for ages.
“Irene was funny about Janice,” said Gloria. “They were supposed to be such great friends, but she was always going on about Janice being a bit of a man-eater, which was funny if you’d known Irene. She used to say that Janice needed to learn to cut her cloth, that she was deluded, waiting for someone like James Caan to show up and sweep her off her feet, because she was a single mother and not that great a catch. Irene thought the best she could hope for was this man from Eddie’s work, who sounded a bit simple. Irene was always laughing about him getting things wrong…
“We were quite busy, as I remember it, all three doctors coming in and out of the waiting room to call for their patients. I can’t remember anything unusual about the afternoon except that Irene left early. She claimed she had toothache, but I thought it was a fib at the time. She hadn’t seemed in pain to me, when she was going on about Janice’s love life.
“I knew Margot was meeting her friend later in the pub. She told me, because she had a doughnut in cling film in the fridge, and she asked me to bring it through to her, right before she saw her last patient, to keep her going. She loved sugar. She was always in the biscuit tin at five o’clock. She had one of those metabolisms, never put on weight, full of nervous energy.
“I remember the doughnut, because when I took it in to her, I said, ‘Why didn’t you just eat those chocolates?’ She had a box she’d taken out of the bin, I think it was the day before. I mean, they were still in their cellophane when she took
