In a way, Harper felt fraudulent in feeling that her baby was lost: she knew exactly where Ruby was. She spoke to her at least twice a month. The story of Harper’s lost baby was one of transformation, just like Lauren’s. Lauren Tranter had looked at her babies and seen something no one else could. No matter how hard she tried to trick herself not to, every time Harper looked at the person the world insisted was her sister, she saw only her own child.

The divers were about to come in when one of them signalled that he had found something else, buried in the clay. He waded towards the shore, cradling two small bundles in his arms. The bundles were grey with river mud and wrapped in dark rags. Rags, she thought, exactly like those she had found at the riverside when the twins were taken. Exactly like the scraps in the bushes outside Lauren’s window.

On the grid Harper had created, showing the exact location of each bone, the diver with the bundles indicated that he had found them in the same square where they had found the mystery woman’s pelvis and the lower half of her spine. Harper watched as the pathologist carefully picked up the two small bodies so lovingly wrapped and buried, mummified in the silt, each no bigger than her two cupped hands. She placed them in the box and closed the lid.

Chapter 43

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

A woman, as she heard tell, had a child changed, and one, a poor thing, left in his place, but she was very kind to it, and every morning on getting up she found a small piece of money in her pocket. My informant firmly believes in their existence, and wonders how it is that of late years no such things have been seen.

Hollingworth

OCTOBER 10TH
TWELVE WEEKS AND FIVE DAYS OLD
3:30 P.M.

The Selver General psychiatric ward was a modern addition, an annexe to a much larger hospital within the city. Ten patients were housed in rooms built on one side of a wide corridor. Opposite the rooms were observation points, desks behind which members of staff could watch several patients at one time. Lauren’s room, like the other nine, had a large window taking up the entire top half of the front wall. This window was made of toughened safety glass, and she knew this for certain because, very early in her incarceration, she had pounded on it with her fists repeatedly as hard as she could, and it hadn’t even vibrated.