‘I’m not imagining it,’ she shouted at Wexford. ‘I’m not! D’you think I wouldn’t know my own baby? D’you think I wouldn’t know my Karen from that?’

Polly had folded the towel cornerwise. She moved a little so that Wexford could see the baby’s waving legs and bare crotch. ‘Whoever this baby is, sir, it isn’t Karen. Look for yourself – it’s a boy.’

Trevor Bond was fetched from the Stowerton estate agent’s where he worked. He looked very little older than his wife. Pippa clung to him, crying and inarticulate, and over her bent head he cast despairing eyes at the policemen.

He had arrived in a car driven by a young woman he said was his sister-in-law, Pippa’s sister, who also lived at Greenhill Court with her husband. She sat stiffly at the wheel, giving Pippa no more than a nod and what seemed like a shrug of exasperation when she came out of the police station with Trevor’s arm round her. Susan Rains, her name was, and a quarter of an hour later it was she who was showing Loring and Sergeant Martin just where the pram had stood on the lawn between the block of flats and the main road from Kingsmarkham to Stowerton. While this thin red-haired girl castigated her sister’s negligence and put forward her own theories as to where Karen might be, Dr Moss arrived with sedation for Pippa, though she had become calmer once she understood no one would expect her to have charge of the changeling boy.

His fate was removal to a Kingsmarkham Borough nursery for infants in the care of the local authority.

‘Poor lamb,’ said the children’s officer Wexford spoke to. ‘I expect Kay will be able to take him in Bystall Lane. There’s no one to fetch him, though, they’ve got ten to bath and get to bed down there.’

Young Ginger, Wexford had begun to call him. He was a fine-looking baby with large eyes, strong pudgy features, and hair of a curious pale red, the colour of a new raw carrot. To Wexford’s not inexperienced eye, he looked older than the missing Karen, nearer four months than two. His eyes were able to focus firmly, and now they focused on the chief inspector, a scrutiny which moved the baby to yell miserably. Young Ginger buried his face in Polly’s boyish bosom, crying and searching for sustenance.

‘You don’t know what they’re thinking, do you, sir?’ Polly said. ‘Just because we can’t remember anything about when we were his age we sort of think babies don’t feel much or notice things. But suppose what they feel is so awful they sort of block it off just so as they won’t be able to remember? Suppose it’s dreadful pain being separated from your mother and not being able to say and – Oh, I don’t know, but does anyone think of these things, sir?’

‘Well, psychiatrists do,’ said Wexford, ‘and philosophers, I expect, but not many ordinary people like us. You’ll have to remember it when you have babies of your own. Now take him down to Bystall Lane, will you?’