‘Not if she thought there was a chance the police would find out. She’d have known our house would have been swarming with them. Much safer to approach Bill.’
‘So why didn’t he tell us?’
‘Maybe he didn’t want to get our hopes up.’
‘I’ll phone him.’
‘Put him on speakerphone,’ I instructed.
A muscle in his jaw twitched, but he did as I asked. All at once a ring tone filled the room. Then Bill’s voice. ‘This is Bill Harrison, co-director of FoodWrapped. If you’d like to leave a message, you know what to do.’
‘Bill, it’s Stu. Call me when you pick this up, yeah?’ Stuart ended the call and looked at me. ‘I’ll try Mel.’
He hit her number before I could stop him.
‘Stu?’ Her voice was breathless. I tapped my foot against the floor.
‘Cleo’s here with me,’ he blurted. ‘Is Bill there?’
‘No. Why?’
I shook my head and mouthed, ‘Don’t tell her.’
He nodded. ‘Where is he?’
‘It’s quiz night at the pub. He’ll be there till last orders, either celebrating a win or drowning his sorrows. You know Bill.’
‘I do. No worries. It’s not urgent. I’ll catch up with him tomorrow. Night Mel.’ Stuart ended the call and balanced the phone on his knee. ‘We should phone Sam Bennett.’
I shook my head. ‘Not until we hear from Bill. We can’t do anything that could compromise Immy’s safety. The minute she’s home, yes. But not yet.’
Stuart eyed me as he took a long draught of beer. ‘And what about Niamh? Are you going to tell the police you’ve spoken to her?’
I hesitated. If I’d wanted to turn her in, I’d have phoned them the minute I’d left the warehouse, and I hadn’t. ‘Let’s wait until we’ve spoken to Bill. As long as Immy’s safe, I don’t care what happens to Niamh. She can piss off back to Ireland or rot in hell as far as I’m concerned.’
By tacit agreement, we stayed in the front room and waited for Bill to bring Immy home. Stuart stretched out on the sofa and dozed. Occasionally he would wake with a start, look wildly around the room and then fall asleep again. I wrapped myself in a throw, curled up in the armchair and gazed out of the window until slivers of dawn pierced the night sky.
At six o’clock, Stuart pulled himself to his feet and tramped out of the room, reappearing a few minutes later with two mugs of tea. ‘Where is he, then?’ he asked, handing me a mug.
‘I don’t know.’ My conviction had wavered as the hours ticked by. Maybe I’d misread the situation, jumped to the wrong conclusions. But I couldn’t think of another reason Bill might hand Niamh thousands of pounds in cash outside a deserted warehouse in the middle of the night.
‘Perhaps he kept Immy at theirs last night because he didn’t want to wake us,’ I said with more certainty than I felt.
Stuart snorted. ‘You don’t think Mel might have told us?’
I ran my hands through my hair. ‘I don’t know what to think, all right? I don’t have all the answers.’
‘Makes a fucking change.’ Stuart slammed his mug on the coffee table and strode over to the window. The back of his crumpled T-shirt was stuck to his back and sweat stains darkened his armpits. He peered down the street and stiffened.
‘What is it?’
He swivelled around to face me. ‘The police are here.’
Chapter Thirty-Four
AFTER CORFU
FOUR YEARS EARLIER
A couple of days after I broached the possibility that we adopt Niamh’s baby, Stuart came and found me, a wide smile on his face.
‘I think we should do it,’ he said.
I blinked. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely, one hundred percent. I’ve been feeling there’s something missing for a while, and last night I realised what it is. We never intended Nate to be an only child. Another baby would complete our family.’
‘Shall we tell Niamh?’
‘No time like the present.’
We trooped down to the front room where Niamh was sitting cross-legged on the floor helping Nate lay out his Duplo train set.
‘Niamh?’ I said. ‘Have you got a minute?’
She followed us into the kitchen and as we sat around the table, the air felt heavy with expectation. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I’ve talked to Stuart about your suggestion, and he agrees. We would like to help you out by adopting the baby.’
Niamh closed her eyes and pressed her hands to her concave stomach. ‘Thank God,’ she whispered. Then she looked from me to Stuart and back again. ‘Thank you.’
Stuart reached for my hand and squeezed it. He looked the happiest I’d seen him for a long time, and a tiny part of me wondered why.
If we thought adopting Niamh’s baby would be simple, we were wrong. I knew from internet searches private adoptions were illegal in the UK, and a quick look at the county council’s official adoption website revealed the countless hoops we would have to jump through to formally adopt a child.
‘You have to attend an information event before you fill in the initial inquiry form,’ I told Stuart in bed that night, my MacBook perched on my lap. I scrolled down the website. ‘Then you have a phone call with a member of the adoption team and meet an adoption worker, and that’s before you even get to the first stage!’
‘How long does that take?’
‘The first stage? Um, let’s see. Up to two months. And the second stage takes four months. Then you have to go before an adoption panel and pass that before they match you with a child. The baby will have been born by then!’
‘And I don’t suppose you can dictate which baby you want to adopt,’ Stuart said. ‘You know what bureaucrats are like, they’re so bloody minded they’d probably offer us a spotty thirteen-year-old kid to spite us.’
I grimaced. ‘God forbid. Why do they have to make everything so bloody complicated? It’s simple. Niamh wants us to adopt her baby, we want
