Chapter 91

MANDY

Mandy stood rigidly at the foot of the drive of the home where she’d lived with Pat for five months.

‘The door’s unlocked, you can go in,’ urged Lorraine, her police liaison officer. ‘Just take your time.’

Mandy hesitated and glanced over her shoulder to check her sister Paula was still in the police car they’d both arrived in. Paula had offered to go inside with her for support, but Mandy was too embarrassed to show her the home of the family she had chosen above her own.

Lorraine went inside first, and Mandy followed apprehensively.

Together they paused in the hallway and Mandy’s eyes shot to the bottom of the staircase where she’d fallen some five weeks earlier.

She looked at the open doors leading to the rooms off the hallway and took a deep breath, covering her stomach with her arms. Where a baby bump had once protruded, there was now just loose skin, and Mandy felt her caesarean stitches tug sharply each time she made a sudden movement. Yet she cherished the horizontal scar above her bikini line – it was the only physical proof she had that she and her baby boy had ever been together. He’d been removed from her unconscious body and then stolen by her twisted in-laws before she’d had the opportunity to even catch sight of him. Every morning after showering, she wiped the steam from the full-length bathroom mirror and traced the red, raised scar tissue with her finger, imagining what her son might look like.

It had been a very difficult few weeks. She regularly pumped her breasts to keep them lactating in preparation for the time she would be reunited with her boy. She cursed the breast pump for not being her child clamping upon her nipple. She hated that they were losing

this precious bonding time, and she prayed that the police would find a lead to his whereabouts.

Pat’s house hadn’t been aired in the best part of a month and it was beginning to smell stale. Mandy gave the lounge, kitchen and dining room a cursory glance before following Lorraine up the staircase. She liked Lorraine; her softly spoken approach was at odds with her masculine appearance, and under different circumstances she’d have tried to match-make her with Kirstin.

Once Mandy had alerted the hospital staff to her missing child, they had contacted the police. A warrant had been issued to search Pat’s home, where they’d found that everything but her clothes and gifts she’d purchased for the baby had been left. Chloe’s house was in a similar state, and their bank accounts had been emptied. Along with the baby, they had vanished into thin air.

Mandy’s worried family insisted she return to stay with them. The tragedy had rebuilt their bridges without need of a word of apology from either side, and they supported her as she anxiously awaited police updates. Together they prayed that Pat or Chloe might develop a conscience and return the baby, but in the month following their disappearance there had been no contact whatsoever. There had been some potential sightings following her appeal in the national newspapers and a televised press conference, but they’d turned out to be false leads.

Mandy had run the full gamut of emotions: from anger towards the hospital for allowing her son to be placed into the hands of those who had no business touching her child, to frustration at the police for failing to develop any fresh leads, to herself for her post-op body not allowing her to become more physically proactive in the search.

Her still-tender wound and limited mobility gave her too much time to dwell on the guilt she felt for failing to do the one thing a parent must do – protect their child. No matter how many times her family, Lorraine or doctors tried to convince her she was blameless, Mandy refused to believe them. It was her fault because she’d tried to chase the impossible – the love of a man who could never love her in return

– and she’d lost her baby because of it.

‘I want to go to back to her house and look around,’ Mandy had informed Lorraine after much internal deliberation. She wasn’t sure

why, but it was something she felt compelled to do. Lorraine wasn’t convinced of the benefits of this to Mandy’s healing, but she had persisted, threatening to go alone if necessary.

Mandy stood in the doorway of Pat’s bedroom. It wasn’t very different to how it’d always been, with the exception of the empty drawers and clothes rails inside her open wardrobe. She made her way into Richard’s room where she’d spent much of her time. Like Pat’s, it had been ransacked by the police who had been hunting for clues. For a moment, it saddened her that her sanctuary had been soiled as part of a criminal investigation.

Stay strong, Mandy told herself, and balled her fists.

Her eyes made their way across the collage of photographs spread across Richard’s wall. Each snapshot of his life had once made her wish they’d found each other earlier. But from what his ex-girlfriend had revealed shortly before Mandy’s accident, Richard wasn’t the man of her dreams. He wasn’t the monogamous type and he had little desire to settle down and have a family of his own. He was a human being, and he was flawed, not a fantasy, and she could see that now.

As her eyes skimmed across the photographs, Mandy went back to one in particular. Richard and Chloe were still children, probably aged around ten, and were on oversized bikes outside a cottage surrounded by rolling green hills and woodland.

Suddenly Mandy felt like someone had woken her with a slap across the face.

‘I know where my baby is!’ she said out loud, and stared Lorraine in the eye. ‘I know where to find him.’