see his face before.”
“And can you recall seeing a tag on him at that point?”
“I think so,” I said cautiously. “I mean, I couldn’t absolutely swear to it, but when I try to picture it, it seems to me he had the security tag on his right ankle.” I nodded slowly. “In fact, I’m sure that’s right—that Theo had a tag on when I saw him in the larger incubator.”
A frown touched Grace Matthews’s face. “But you didn’t actually see the nurse put it on?”
“No. But…” I stopped. “This is hard for me to admit. But the moment I found myself in a quiet corner and it felt like the immediate emergency was over, I broke down. I was crying for several minutes. She must have done it then, as soon as she took over. But I literally couldn’t see in front of my own nose.”
“Of course,” Grace Matthews said. “I do understand, Mr. Riley. Seeing your child—or rather, the child you think is yours—being admitted to intensive care is obviously very stressful.” She pushed the cap onto her fountain pen and placed it on her yellow pad. “Thank you for speaking to us today.”
58
MADDIE
I KEEP QUIET DURING Pete’s interview with Grace Matthews. It’s him they want to talk to, after all, the person at the scene, and I didn’t even get to the NICU until long after the mix-up had happened.
Afterward, we get an Uber home, too exhausted to face the Tube. As we crawl through the traffic, I look across at him. “I didn’t realize you saw the tag on Theo’s leg so soon.”
He goes on looking out the window. “Well, I said I couldn’t swear to it.”
“Yes. But after that, you said you were certain. You told her you could picture it.”
He doesn’t reply at first, and for a moment I think he’s going to say something else. But all he says is, “Pretty certain, yes.”
“So the mix-up must have happened before that, in those first few minutes.”
“When the original tags were loose. That’s right.”
I frown. “Were the tags loose? You didn’t mention that.”
“They would have come into the NICU separately, when the babies were zipped into the skin-wrap bags,” he explains. “Grace Matthews would have known that. Although I didn’t actually see them.”
Then how do you know…I almost say, but he forestalls me. “This is so exhausting, isn’t it? All these different legal actions.”
“Perhaps that’s what Miles is counting on. Perhaps he was always planning it this way, to ramp up the pressure.”
Pete only shakes his head. But it’s a gesture of despair, not disagreement.
* * *
—
WHEN WE GET HOME, he gets straight in the car to go and pick up Theo. I open my laptop to check my emails—I’ve told the office I’ll work from home for the rest of the day—but something makes me go into my photo stream instead.
I haven’t looked at the very first picture of my baby—the picture Pete texted while I was still in the recovery room at the private hospital—since the day it was taken. It’s too raw, the memory of my revulsion at it too stark. But it automatically got saved to my iCloud along with all my other pictures, and now here it is. Grainy, a little blurred, taken over the shoulder of a doctor or nurse. No, definitely a nurse: I’d had no way of knowing it at the time, but that’s Bronagh’s slim back and jet-black hair. And the image might be blurry, but Pete always had the latest gadgets and the camera was a powerful one: As well as the stick-thin limbs and nose prongs that even now make me feel nauseous, you can see the tubes coming out of the cooling suit, the brake-light-red glow around the baby’s left ankle from the oxygen sensor.
And no tag. There’s no security tag on the other leg. Of that I’m sure.
Or am I? I peer at the photo again. To use Pete’s phrase, I couldn’t absolutely swear to it. I can’t even say if the wizened little creature in the cooling suit is Theo or David.
And Pete has said what he’s said now. There’d be no point whatsoever in sending this picture to Grace Matthews and saying, sorry, he might have been mistaken. We’d effectively be announcing that he’s an unreliable witness, someone whose entire testimony might be flawed. And that, in turn, might have repercussions for the payout.
No: Better to leave things as they are. As our lawyer said, finding out how