DS Joanna Harper stood on the viaduct with the other police officers. On the far bank, across the great expanse of the reservoir, a woman paused at the water’s edge, about to go in, her twin baby boys held tightly in her arms.

Harper turned to the DI. ‘How close are the officers on that side?’

Dense woodland surrounded the scrap of shore where the woman stood. Even at this distance, Harper could see that her legs were scarlet with blood from the thorns.

‘Not close enough,’ said Thrupp. ‘They can’t find a way to get to her.’

In a fury of thudding, the helicopter flew over their heads, disturbing the surface of the reservoir, bellowing its command: Step away from the water. It loomed above the tiny figure of the mother, deafening and relentless, but the officers on board wouldn’t be able to stop her. There was nowhere in the valley where the craft could make a safe landing, or get low enough to drop the winch.

Through the binoculars, Harper saw the woman collapse into a sitting position on the dried-out silt, her face turned to the sky, still clutching the babies. Perhaps she wouldn’t do it, after all.

A memory surfaced then, of what the old lady had said to her:

‘She’ll have to put them in the water, if she wants her own babies back . . . Right under the water. Hold ’em down.’

The woman wasn’t sitting at the water’s edge anymore; she was knee-deep, and wading further in. The DS kicked off her shoes, climbed up on the rail and prepared to dive.

Chapter 1

The child is not mine as the first was,

I cannot sing it to rest,

I cannot lift it up fatherly

And bliss it upon my breast;

Yet it lies in my little one’s cradle

And sits in my little one’s chair,

And the light of the heaven she’s gone to

Transfigures its golden hair.

FROM The Changeling

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

July 13th

8.10 p.m.

All she cared about was that the pain had been taken away. With it, the fear, and the certainty that she would die, all gone in the space of a few miraculous seconds. She wanted to drift off but then Patrick’s worried face appeared, topped by a green hospital cap and she remembered: I’m having my babies. The spinal injection she’d been given didn’t just signal the end of the horrendous contractions, but the beginning of a forceps extraction procedure that could still go wrong. The first baby was stuck in the birth canal. So, instead of allowing herself to sink inside her glorious, warm cocoon of numbness and fall asleep – which she hadn’t done for thirty-six hours – she tried to concentrate on what was happening.

The doctor’s face appeared, near to Lauren’s own, the mask pulled down revealing her mouth and most of her chin. The woman’s lips were moving as if untethered to her words. It was the drugs, and the exhaustion; the world had slowed right down. Lauren frowned. The doctor was looking at her, but she seemed so far away. She’s talking to me, thought Lauren, I should listen.

‘Ok, Mrs Tranter, because of the spinal, СКАЧАТЬ

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