Episode 20 - Sybil

Since the Singleton case involved murder, Gary was in charge as head of Homicide. He was anxious to start looking for Sybil Garnet that day, not least so that he could be reunited with her little daughter. After a deep internet search, Nigel had retrieved a list of addresses for Barnet and none for Garnet, which confirmed Berta’s theory that Sybil had changed her name to avoid her family finding her.

“She probably did not want her family to know what profession she was it,” Nigel said. “They all have fancy names. Hers is almost harmless.”

“Do you want to go on the live search, Nigel,” Gary invited.

“No thanks,” said Nigel. “Cleo’s a much better partner and anyway, I’ve promised to do some figure-skating for Henry.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“That’s what Henry calls it.”

“He is starting to become a liability,” said Gary.

“He holds the purse strings and he’s big buddies with Cobblethwaite. Need I say more?” said Nigel.

“That mayor should go as well,” said Gary.

“As natural wastage?” said Nigel. “As long as people vote for him, he’ll keep the job.”

“All he has going for him is entertainment value and an enormous capacity for imbibing under-the-table liquor, not to forget and his spending of tax-payers’ money on himself.”

“What time are you meeting Cleo, Gary?”

“Now. I’d better get moving.”

***

The plan was for Cleo and Gary to call on all the Barnets on Nigel’s fairly local list until they struck lucky or got to the end of that list. Dorothy’s phone call to Berta Wojciechowski, ostensibly to keep in contact, had confirmed that Sybil’s parents lived on a smallholding somewhere not far away. Berta remembered that Sybil had hoped to take Anna with her to see them and patch up the estrangement. Would Dorothy let her know if and when they found Sybil?

With a delay of only fifteen minutes, since Nigel phoned Cleo to say Gary was on his way and Gary switched on his Martin’s horn to get a clear passage through the busy streets, Gary arrived at the cottage to collect Cleo.

Robert was not there of course, because he was at his shop, but Gary was cautious. He wanted to avoid gossip, so the contact was strictly professional until they drove away from the cottage to find the first address, which proved to be a negative attempt to find Sybil.

“Thanks for saving me the trouble of explaining to local gossips that you are not my lover-boy, Gary.”

“Aren’t I?”

“Not in so many words.”

***

Much to their surprise, since Gary and Cleo had reckoned with the abject failure of such a haphazard attempt to find Sybil, their second stop at a small farm proved to be the right one. From the farm gate they could see a young woman dressed in jeans, a loose sweater and gumboots raking at the vegetable garden in front of the stone farmhouse. Chickens and ducks wandered about scratching in the ground or just picking up the seeds that had been strewn for them to find. The scenario was idyllic.

Cleo opened the gate for Gary to drive up to the house, and Cleo walked the short distance. On instinct, she called out “Sybil” and was gratified when the woman stopped her raking and looked at her.

“Have you come from the Red Cross?” she shouted back.

“No. We’ve come about Anna.”

Sybil dropped the rake and ran towards Cleo.

“What did you say? My daughter?”

Gary got out of the car and joined the two women.

“Yes. We’ve found her, or to be more precise, she found us,” he said.

“Who are you? I’ve been at the mercy of jokers for long enough. It isn’t funny.”

“I’m Cleo Hartley and I run a detective agency, and this is Chief Detective Inspector Gary Hurley of Middlethumpton police.”

“You’d better come in the house and tell me all about it. I can’t believe this is happening.”

“Your old friend Berta told us you’d gone home to your parents on a small farm. It’s sheer luck that we found you so quickly,” said Gary.

Cleo and Gary answered Sybil’s questions as fully as they could. The joy on Sybil’s face was something they were unlikely to forget.

“When can I see her?”

“Now, on a photo.”

Cleo showed her a photo taken at the vicarage.

Sybil could not hold her tears back.

“She’s such a big girl now,” she said.

“What are you doing later today, Miss Garnet?” said Gary.

“Barnet, please. I’ve left Beethoven Road a long way behind me.”

“We could take you back with us now, but we’ll have to go through all the routine legal stuff before Anna can come to you.”

Sybil hesitated.

“How do I know you aren’t playing a joke on me?” she said.

“Look at the photo again. This is what she looks like now, Miss Barnet,” said Cleo.

To verify his status, Gary produced his ID badge. Sybil Barnet smiled at him. Cleo heard alarm bells ringing in her head.

“How can I thank you?” Sybil said. Her smile was infectious.

Gary was in his element. He found Sybil fascinating in comparison with all the females he had had dealings with in the past. Even Cleo’s imposing stature and outgoing personality paled a little confronted with Sybil’s fair beauty and undisguised joy.

“I can even live with waiting for her, now I know she’s alive and well,” said Sybil. ”You can’t imagine the torture I’ve been through since she was snatched.”

“I think I can,” said Cleo.

“I don’t wish that on anyone,” said Sybil.

“I’ll explain on the drive back,” said Cleo. “Anna is staying at the vicarage in Upper Grumpsfield. She is happy there and she’s being well looked after by Edith, the vicar’s wife, and her five boys.”

“Does that mean you want me to leave her there indefinitely?”

“Of course not, but we’ll have to take it slowly, Sybil,” said Cleo. “She was told that you are dead and called someone else ‘mummy’.”

“And I know who. That bitch of a woman, Banu Akbari.”

“Akbari is her father, is he not, Sybil?” said Cleo.

There was a long silence before Sybil said “How do you know that, Miss Hartley?”

“I put two and two together, Sybil. And do call me Cleo.”

“He wanted Anna from the start. For his bitch of a wife. She couldn’t have children, so she took mi little one instead.”

“I thought Banu was a prostitute,” said Gary.

“Prostitutes also have private lives, Mr Hurley.”

“Call me Gary if we are going to see more of one another.”

Cleo was now quite shocked. She was jealous. Gary was almost inviting Sybil out for a date.

Gary was not aware that he had upset Cleo.

“One problem will be that Mr Akbari has a legal right to her,” said Gary.

“He isn’t on her birth certificate,” said Sybil.

“Always supposing we find him, Sybil, and he has a clean slate,” said Cleo. “His DNA will prove he’s her father.”

“No need to worry about a clean slate, Cleo. That bastard has a criminal record as long as your arm -he came to Britain for avoid arrest on the continent – and I fell for his tricks.”

“Was he more than just a client, Sybil?”

“I was a call-girl, Cleo, not a prostitute. That’s what fascinated Akbari – that and my blond hair.”

“You can count yourself lucky that you survived,” said Gary. “Others have not been as fortunate.”

“Why would he want to kill me?” said Sybil, and leo wondered if the woman really was that naïve.

“He’s killing everyone who might know something about what he has been up to,” said Gary.

Cleo was thoughtful. Sybil must know more than she was letting on. Was she afraid of what could still happen to her or Anna?  

“I expect you were in hiding here, weren’t you Sybil,” Gary said.

“I suppose I was. The police did not make much of an effort to find Anna. I kept phoning and asking, but it was futile and in the end I gave up.”

“That’s unfortunately but typical of police procedure. The main problem is under-staffing. They will have moved on and filed the case as unsolved. We have an archive full of such files.”

“I have another question, Sybil” said Cleo. “Was Ruby Singleton your midwife?”

“Yes, but ho w do you know that? She was a weird sort of woman. Concerned for my welfare, she said. I thought that was what she was there for.”

“I don’t suppose you were expecting twins, by any chance, were you?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“What a funny question.”

“But a relevant one, Sybil.”

“How?”

“To cut a long story short, we are investigating a case of infant trading,” said Cleo.

There was a long pause, at the end of which Sybil asked that if she had had twins, would one have simply disappeared.

“That’s how it works,” said Gary.

Sybil was clearly horrified at the idea of losing a child to this monstrosity of a midwife and her scheming.

 “I think you were lucky that Akbari did not have the child abducted at birth,” said Cleo. “We are sure that Mrs Singleton worked for him, but we assume that he wanted to wait until Anna was older before she was abducted. I expect Banu Akbari became impatient and decided to take the abduction into her own hands.”

“If I had had twins, I’d have kept one and ‘lost’ one,” aid Sybil.

“That’s how the system worked for Mrs Singleton,” said Cleo.

“It’s like out of a horror film,” said Sybil.

“It gets worse,” said Gary.

“How can it get any worse?”

“Mrs Singleton feigned the death of infants and the distraught parents were left grieving.”

“Did mothers get to keep one baby, if Mrs Singleton could fake deaths?” Sybil asked.

“It’s probable. For instance, some women did not really want a child and may even have received payment for relinquishing them,” said Cleo.

“Mrs Singleton did not steal all the babies,” Cleo added. “She had a good reputation that she kept afloat by delivering healthy babies to delighted parents.”

“Then once in a while a baby would disappear. Either one of twins without the mother knowing she had been expecting two babies, or because Singleton fabricated a still birth,” Gary explained, and Cleo realized that she had at last convinced him that this was not an idle theory.

“Do you think it’s possible that Banu wanted a child so that she could stay legally in the UK, Sybil?” Cleo asked.

“It wouldn’t surprise me. He sold her to all sorts of nabobs. She looked exotic and presumably had a repertoire of novel sex techniques,” said Sybil, and Gary wondered how much rivalry there was between those night butterflies. “What did she do with Anna?”.

“We don’t know for sure, Sybil,” said Gary. “She took Anna to Scotland, where other Indian women had settled. She probably told them it was her child with a blond father. I think she was hiding from Akbari by then.”

“I broke off with Akbari and the trade before Anna was born,” said Sybil. ”He thought it was a whim, and since I was breast-feeding, he left me alone. But it seems I was lucky with Anna, not because of him but presumably because Mrs Singleton had no customer handy.”

“And because he was Anna’s father,” said Cleo.

“I never let him think that,” said Sybil.

“But presumably he did,” said Gary.  “Was your private affair with him over before he met Banu, Sybil?” Gary asked.

“I’m not sure. I know that he paid off her pimp and set her up. Then she was noticed by the immigration authorities so he married her. After Anna’s birth, I faked health problems. Akbari told me he’d get me back one day and I lived in fear of my life until Banu introduced him to one or two other good earners acquired from among her school friends in India and subsequently brought into the country by Akbari.”

“It’s a really nasty story.”

“And one that ended in my losing Anna and having no proof that he and his horrible wife took her.”

“Did he help you financially after you stopped working for him, Sybil?” Gary wanted to know.

“More than one of my clients was more than anxious to support me in return for keeping their child a secret,” said Sybil.

“So you resorted to blackmail, telling several clients that the child was theirs?” said Gary.

“What would you have done?”

“I’ll have to follow that up, Miss Barnet, at least theoretically,” said Gary. “You pretended the child had various fathers in order to make money.”

Cleo was appalled, not at Sybil, but at Gary deciding he had a case on a plate.

“The hell you will follow anything up,” said Cleo to Gary. “That was charity, not blackmail. If you take any measures, it’s the end of us,” she added.

Gary said nothing more. Cleo thought he would forget Sybil’s confession. Sybil was sure that the cop was more than half in love with Cleo and would do what she said. Gary shocked himself by deciding that Cleo could be replaced if the worse came to the worst. Sybil would be a candidate. That was the nearest he had ever come to being critical of their affair and even slightly open for something else.

“Is Akbari British?” Cleo asked mainly to change the subject. She had not failed to notice a change in Gary’s attitude to her. Their intimate relationship was under threat. Alarm bells now sounded in both their heads. The baby under her ribs need not be his, after all, she concluded. It had a legal father, and that was just as well.

“Akbari has a French passport. But once she was married, Banu was protected from the extradition authorities.”

“Well, you won’t have any more trouble with Banu Akbari,” said Gary with more than a hint of satisfaction. “The late Mrs Akbari’s as dead as a doornail.”

“Murdered?”

“What makes you think that, Sybil?”

“I’m not sure I should say any more, Mr Hurley.”

“I’m still Gary, Sybil. You’d be a crown witness and I have forgotten about your charity drive with the multiple fathers.”

“OK.”

Gary told Sybil briefly how the child got to Upper Grumpsfield vicarage. Cleo confirmed what he said. Gary was taking all the credit.  He was obviously attracted to Sybil and anxious to impress her. Cleo remembered that she used to think Gary was oversexed. If he took up with Sybil, she would end their affair, however painful she found that. Meanwhile she would make herself scarce. Would he even notice, given his attraction for this ex call-gill?

Sybil was stunned by what she heard. Cleo phoned Edith on her mobile to tell her that they would be arriving soon and bring Anna’s birth mother with them. Edith said the juniors would be home from school round three thirty. It was not long before Gary was driving up the gravel path that led to the vicarage front door.

***

“How can I ever thank you?” said Sybil.

“Don’t even try,” said Cleo.

“All in a day’s work,” said Gary, who was sure Cleo would deny hearing anything of what Sybil had said about blackmail if it came to the crunch. He thought she would have noticed his physical attraction to Sybil.

***

Reunions are always special. The reunion between a mother who thought her child was gone forever and a child who only really knew her mother as a woman on a photograph she had hidden in her teddy-bear could have been shambolic, but it wasn’t.

Edith could not have had time to prepare the child for what was in store for her, and Sybil was still in a very emotional state, but Anna immediately recognized Sybil as the woman on the photo she had treasured. Mother and daughter got on like a house on fire. When you saw them together, you could see the family resemblance. It was as if they had never been apart.

“What are you going to do next?” Edith asked Sybil after the party had eaten the food Edith had prepared straight from the freezer into the oven and were relaxing over coffee around the kitchen table.

“Anna can stay here as long as she wants to,” proposed Edith, “and you too, Sybil. It’s a pleasure to have a little girl to care for alongside five rowdy boys.”

“I do want to come and live near here,” said Sybil, looking intensely at Gary.

“I don’t live near here,” said Gary, and they all looked at him. Cleo’s heart sank. Gary had hardly taken his eyes off Sybil since he had met her and it looked as if the attraction was mutual.

“But I want to get a proper job, too,” Sybil added. “That former life was over before Anna was born.”

“What was that?” Edith asked.

“I was a call-girl,” said Sybil.

“Oh,” said Edith. How could a call-girl look so respectable?

“You suspected Akbari of taking her, didn’t you?” said Cleo. “Why didn’t you tell the police that, Sybil?”

“Who is Akbari?” Edith asked.

“It’s a long story, Edith. I’ll tell you another time,” said Cleo.

“I’d have had to admit he’s her father, Cleo, and that would have been documented and could have been used against me later.”

“Oh. Now I understand,” said Edith.

“That’s unlikely, Sybil,” said Gary. “I repeat: He may have rights theoretically, but certainly not the right to let his wife abscond with the child. That would be enough to negate any claims he had on Anna.”

“But I didn’t know for sure what had happened. He may not even have known, either, at least for a time. I did not know that Banu had left him. I thought he was punishing me for not getting back into the old routine of earning him a good income.”

Edith held back, astonished at the conversation she was listening to and glad the children had gone outside to play.

“But it was Banu Akbari taking revenge, Sybil,” said Gary. “She and the Akbari character were already estranged because he was having blatant affairs with other women quite apart from living off the proceeds of prostitution and heaven knows what else. We have to assume that Mrs Akbari had quite conventional ideas about marriage.”

“You surprise me,” said Sybil.

“We eventually traced Banu’s contacts to Scotland, mainly because a group of women there all came from the same corner of the world and had all been smuggled in for prostitution. And escaped by marrying men who were probably clients originally. They talked. They were all leading respectable lives.”

“Oh, I see,” said Edith, who was trying to come to terms with the implications of what Gary was explaining.

“So now I have to look for somewhere to live and a job, then I can share my life with Anna again.”

“Please live here for a bit,” Edith invited. “You can sort out your future from here and be near Anna, and she can go to school every day with the boys and join in their games as usual.”

“Won’t that be too much for you?”

“Of course not.”

“But what about your husband?”

“He probably won’t even notice,” said Edith.

***

Sybil stayed at the vicarage after phoning home to explain the situation. Gary dropped Cleo off at her office. That is to say that he parked the car and accepted a quick espresso before going back to HQ.

“I should not have spent half the afternoon socializing,” he said.

“Do you call that socializing, Gary? I thought it looking like big game hunting, or even a mercy mission.”

“Not all of it.”

“I don’t want to misinterpret that, but are you referring to Sybil, Gary?”

“You women are witches!”

“I hate to admit it, but you’d be the best thing that could happen to Sybil.”

“You don’t really mean that, do you, Cleo?”

“I do, Gary. I have no claims on you.”

“Of course you have claims. We sleep together and you are having my baby.”

“Does that stop you looking elsewhere?”

“That’s not fair,” he said. “I pleaded with you not to marry Robert.”

“But I did, and now you’ve seen a woman you find attractive, Gary. I’m not blind.”

“I admit that she’s attractive, but that does not mean I want her more than I need you, Cleo.”

“Time will tell. Let’s change the subject.”

“If we have to.”

“Let’s get back to the case, Gary.”

“OK, but reluctantly. Do you think Akbari will want to kill Sybil?”

Cleo thought Gary might be thinking of his own safety, but she did not say so.

“He’s around somewhere near and we don’t know if he still bears a grudge. He must have given up on Anna after a time, or else he’d have long since dealt with Banu,” she said.

“I’ll have to get security for the vicarage.”

“I think you should,” said Cleo. “And Gary, if you think you could be happy with Sybil, give it a try.”

“I hope you don’t mean that, Cleo.”

“I do.”

“Can we discuss that in the utility room?”

“No, Gary. I think you’ll have to decide first. If you want Sybil and she wants you, go ahead. I’ll survive.”

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing, Cleo. I love you. Don’t you love me?”

“Yes, Gary. That’s why I’m really hurting now.”

Gary embraced Cleo and she did not resist. Then he left the office, got into his car and drove off.