Not that she had any. Not on her husband’s wages. She was probably driving him nuts with the ‘I want my baby’ routine. Y’know what women are like. He was probably wishing they were like tape recorders and came with a pause button.
She wasn’t a bad-looking woman though: late twenties, popcorn hairstyle. Brave pair of tits on her too – I’ve seen smaller arses. Not that I fancied her. In women, I wear a size ten; she had to be a fourteen at least. My only interest in her was that her husband had got in Charlie Swags’s way, and I needed him to get in somebody else’s.
So at two that afternoon I was in the attic office of a hotel, binoculars in hand, looking down at Mary Winters as she went into the phone box in the village of Kilreed to take my call. She was looking very red around the eyes – probably something to do with the wallpaper paste Swags’s men had squirted into them when she’d stepped out of the lift of an underground car park and had junior snatched out of its carrycot. They’d mixed citric acid with the paste, by the way. They tell me Optrex is good for getting rid of it, but you need gallons of the stuff. A hospital’s better.
‘Turn left at the corner,’ I told her, ‘then left again at a sign that says “Whites”. Follow the lane till you come to a farmhouse.’
I watched her arrive. Whites’ farmhouse was less than half a mile from where I was. She’d be bugged of course, and the law wouldn’t be far away, waiting to pounce when I handed over the baby. That’s how they’d be seeing it. They have training for this sort of carry-on, so they can get their man.
She got out of her car, y’know, looking around the farmyard to see what the story was – no doubt expecting me to pop out from behind the barn or whatever – and heard what I wanted her to hear – the sound of her baby roaring and crying in the farmhouse, then the phone ringing just inside the open front door. I was giving her another little call to see how she was getting on.
‘Put down the attaché case and go up and get your child,’ I told her.
After that I couldn’t tell you what happened exactly. I couldn’t see inside. But I’d say she went on in through the hall and looked up and saw an infant in a body harness dangling from the hatch into the attic, where I’d left it.
She was very controlled, to be fair to her. No ‘Oh my God’s, or ‘Look at my poor baby’ crap. All I heard coming down the phone was a distracted wail of relief, then the sound of the case hitting the ground and her running up the stairs, the stepladder creaking as she climbed up to save her baby, only to find a doll dressed in the clothes it was last seen wearing, and her going into hysterics – which was nothing to the screams that came out of her when she climbed up into the attic and saw a recorder playing the tape I’d made of her baby crying and realised that she was going home alone – aaagghh! – and wailing, ‘Where’s my baby? Where’s my baby? Where’s my bay … be …’ and breaking down in tears.
Whether or not the case contained the cash, I couldn’t say. The law had no doubt come up with it for the occasion. They have contingency funds, y’know, for unforeseen eventualities.
Anyway, I heard the clatter of her flying back downstairs to the phone, then coming at me again with her ‘Where’s my baby, where’s my baby? Please tell me where my baby is’ routine.
‘You were told not to involve the cops.’
‘But my husband’s a Guard. How could I not tell him?’
He was a detective sergeant. Chilly Winters. One of the Garda Síochána’s finest. Trained to notice if his kid’d been kidnapped. He could notice whatever he liked as long as it wasn’t me.
‘I can’t show my face with him in on it.’
‘What was I supposed to do? She’s his daughter. What was I supposed to do-oo?’
‘Find some way to keep him out of it.’
‘How could I? Tell me. Plea-ease. I’ll do anything you say.’
‘I’ll have a think and get back to you. I can’t say fairer than that. Bye now.’
‘No, wait. Tell me where my baby is. Please tell me where my baby is. Please. Please …’
A monk’s fancy woman could have been breastfeeding it for all I knew.
Oh, I meant to say, as far as their investigation was concerned, the Gardai would carry out their inquiries, you know the way they do – locate my vantage point as the only place the farmhouse could be seen from across the village rooftops by tracing the phone I was using, which had only one set of prints on it, belonging to a man called Ken Varden, who was connected to the hotel. That way they’d go after him instead of me. He had a beef against Chilly Winters and vice versa. Winters had reason to suspect him for this. Everything would fall into place. Except Ken Varden. He’d already fallen into another place.
And Mary Winters is still waiting for me to get back to her.
So forget kidnapping. There’s plenty of other ways to make money. If you’re prepared to do what I do: make your experiences work for you.
As far as Mary Winters’ daughter was concerned, well, no point in wasting a perfectly good baby.
And I had a personal use for it. One that had nothing to do with Charlie Swags or anybody else. The real reason I had taken it.
Yeah, well, that’s the way it goes.
I
