Another two bottles were half full before the milk flow slowed to a trickle. Pauline took the bottles of thin white fluid into the bathroom, from where there was the sound of splashing in the sink. The tap was turned on for a second before the nurse came out and started to bag up the machine and its tubing. She looked at Lauren and smiled again in that flat, unsympathetic way.

“The psychiatrist will be along for a chat soon.”

“Everyone thinks I’m nuts, don’t they?”

Pauline sat down next to Lauren on the bed. “Whatever you do, don’t say the word nuts to Doctor Summer. She hates that kind of thing.”

“What do you think I am then? Loopy?”

A laugh escaped from Pauline, but she clapped a hand over it and frowned with forced concern. “You’ve been under pressure, flower. It’s affected you badly, that’s all. We’re going to help you.”

“I need to go home. How long do you think they’ll keep me here?”

“Doctor Summer knows what she’s doing. You’ll feel better after you’ve chatted to her.”

“I feel fine,” said Lauren, thinking that she definitely sounded very reasonable, very sane. So why wasn’t she writing that down?

“Don’t worry, my lovely,” said Pauline. “Let me get you a nice cup of tea. Doctor Summer will probably be ready to see you after that.”

Chapter 22

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

At the Infirmary, the doctor explained what she was going to do before she did it. She would check the boys over, inspect all their “nooks and folds”, then weigh them.

“Nothing invasive. They’ve been through enough today already, from what I hear.”

Patrick didn’t respond to that. He glanced at Harper, who smiled her reassuring smile again. It was a dumb thing for the doctor to say, under the circumstances. Nobody knew what the babies had been through—what the suspect had or hadn’t done to them in that hour in which they were missing. Patrick’s imagination would be coming up with infinite excruciating possibilities, if it was anything like hers. The difference between them, the father and the police officer, was that she didn’t need to imagine the depths that humans could sink to; she knew it first-hand. His fear that something terrible might have happened to his sons was matched and beaten by her certainty that the outcome could easily have been much worse.