Split Code by Dorothy Dunnett Read Free Book Online Page B

nearest, so I turned back the fur coverlet, the merino blankets and the Viyella sheet, revealing Sukey Eisenkopp, who had all her fingers stuck through different holes in her fine fancy shawl, and scratch marks all over her face from her fingernails. She also had both the terry and Harrington squares between her bare, mottled limbs, and looked like a two-legged terrapin.
    I said, fixing her, ‘Do the Eisenkopps know they’re going to have a hen-toed daughter and a son with bent teeth from dummy-sucking?’
    Charlotte put down the child whose nose she was wiping and came over to help. ‘I did tell Bunty to alter the nappies,’ she said. ‘The shawl’s a new disaster, and so are the scratches: she’ll have to get gloves. Will you tell her? Or shall I?’
    With good reason, non-Maggie Bee nurses do not appreciate Maggie Bee nurses telling them their business. I was therefore surprised, and Charlotte saw it, and grinned. ‘Bunty doesn’t mind. Bunty’s trouble is that she has three serious boyfriends and can’t make up her mind which one to bypass her pills for, or whether to save it all up for her trips back to England. I tell you, she gets more Friendship Club letters than I do. But she’s all right. She likes kids, when she remembers.’
    There was nothing reassuring about that statement. Charlotte’s address book is maintained with the help of roughly five hundred male correspondents in both hemispheres.
    ‘Even when she remembers,’ I said cautiously, ‘isn’t it rough on the kids?’
    ‘It won’t be, now she’s got you next door,’ said Charlotte with, as it turned out, push-button accuracy.
    Then she said, ‘Joanna?’
    The last time I heard her whisper like that, the incubator lights had cut out in a prem. ward. This time, she was staring at Benedict’s baby carriage.
    It was still there, braked at the end of the wooden bench, shining. But the hood was eased back and the cover half off, instead of mitred and tucked as I’d left it. Nor, like a wren’s egg in its nest, was Ben’s bullet head bedded under it.
    I got to the pram before Charlotte’s next breath and tore up the merinos. The pram was empty but for one knitted bootee. Benedict Booker-Readman had vanished.
    Two of the Mallard children, frightened by the look on Charlotte’s face, started to cry. Charlotte said, ‘I didn’t see anyone.’
    I was looking round. ‘There’s a pram over there. Run. If he’s not in it, try East End Avenue. I’ll go out by the river.’ The Carl Shurz has a very small tots’ lot. Unless he’d been chucked in the loo, or another pram, he was out in the streets in a basket, a bag or a car, in which case the Booker-Readmans had lost him. There was also the network of paths between the rest of the park and East River.
    He wasn’t in the lavatories. I affronted a number of kids of both genders and then hared for the riverside exit, shouting to Bunty, who had stopped there with Grover. She said, her hand over Grover’s mouth, ‘No one came out this way. Wait. Someone did. The attendant.’ She turned suddenly and made a grab at one of the kids staring at us. ‘You had a ride on the oil can. Where did he go? The man with the brushes?’
    Fast questions don’t work with children. The kid’s mouth remained open but silent. Bunty didn’t wait. She was quicker than I was. Abandoning a thunderstruck Grover she took to her heels through the gate and past the play-courts and down the paths where old men in overcoats were sitting playing chess on stone benches.
    The attendant was no more than a flying shadow among the bare trees: he must have seen us coming. But in his wake were two irate cardplayers sounding off in a mess of broken cigars and bent court cards, while beyond, an oil drum lay on its side, screaming hollowly.
    Inside among the cigarette packs and toffee papers and popcorn lay Benedict, still padded like a hand grenade in his matinee jacket, hat, coat and two shawls and tearlessly emoting