Until You're Mine Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  About the Book

  You have something that someone else wants.

  At any cost...

  Claudia seems to have the perfect life.

  She’s heavily pregnant with a much wanted baby, she has a loving husband, and a beautiful home.

  And then Zoe steps into her life. Zoe has come to help Claudia when her baby arrives.

  But there’s something about Zoe that Claudia doesn’t like. Or trust.

  And when she finds Zoe in her room going through her most personal possesions, Claudia’s anxiety turns to real fear...

  About the Author

  Samantha Hayes grew up in the West Midlands, left school at sixteen, avoided university and took jobs ranging from being a private detective to barmaid to fruit picker and factory worker. She lived on a kibbutz, and spent time in Australia and the USA, before finally becoming a crime-writer.

  Her writing career began when she won a short story competition in 2003. Her novels are family-based psychological thrillers, with the emphasis being on ‘real life fiction’. She focuses on current issues, and when she writes, she sets out to maker her reader ask, ‘What if this happened to me or my family?’ With three children of her own, Samantha is well-versed to talk about how the aftershocks of crime impact upon families and communities.

  To find out more, visit her website www.samhayes.co.uk

  Until You’re Mine

  Samantha Hayes

  For Lucy, my shining light.

  With all my love.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The author is only the start of a book. So many other people are involved once the story has left my head. I’d like to thank, sincerely, Oli Munson, my agent extraordinaire, my brilliant and insightful and lovely editors Selina Walker and Georgina Hawtrey-Woore for believing and making things even better, Dan Balado for seeing things I couldn’t, Richard Ogle for a beautiful cover, and the entire team at Century and Arrow from publicity to marketing to sales and beyond – I am so very grateful for all your hard work. Big thanks also to my publishers around the world for spreading the words.

  Finally, my love to Terry, Ben, Polly and Lucy. Thanks for being a part of it. Couldn’t do it without you!

  PROLOGUE

  I’VE ALWAYS WANTED a baby, even when I was little and didn’t know where they came from. It’s been an ache deep in my soul for as long as I can remember – a sickness, a malignant desire creeping through my body, winding its way around my veins, twisting along the billions of nerve pathways, wrapping up my brain in a hormone-fogged desire. All I wanted was to be a mother.

  A little baby girl. Is that too much to ask?

  It’s funny and makes me embarrassed to remember now. As a kid, I used to wish and wish with screwed-up eyes, summoning all the magic I could through clenched teeth and tight fists, concocting an imaginary magic powder from my mother’s pink-smelling talc and a tube of silver glitter. I sprinkled it over Tiny Tears, holding my breath for the moment she would come to life – my pain-free, virgin labour lasting all of three minutes.

  Yes, it makes me laugh now. Makes me want to smash things.

  I remember the dusty halo of sparkly powder falling to the carpet in a disappointing drift when I gently poked the inanimate plastic doll. Why wasn’t she breathing? Why wasn’t she alive? Why hadn’t the magic powder, or God, or my special powers – anything – made my dolly real? She was still cold plastic and as good as dead. How I sobbed when she just lay there, unmoving and rigid in my arms, swaddled in a knitted blanket. What about all the love I had given her over the years – the longest gestation on record? Didn’t that count for anything? I wanted to snatch her from toy-box-land into real life so I could be her mummy. Didn’t she want to be mine? Didn’t she want to be loved and fed and rocked and played with and gazed at and cherished above anything else? Didn’t she love me back?

  I must have tried the magic powder a hundred times. Each time was a failure, like some kind of useless, waste-of-money IVF – not that I knew what that was back then. By the time I was twelve years old, I’d pulled Tiny Tears’s head off and pushed it into the glowing coals of the living-room fire when no one was looking. She drizzled into the ash pan. Her eyes melted last, each one staring up at me in a different dizzy-blue direction.

  Stupid molten baby.

  ‘If anyone’s going to give me grandchildren, it’ll be you,’ Mum always used to say as her right cheek twitched a feverish dance. I prayed I wouldn’t let her down. Mum wasn’t the kind of person who took kindly to disappointment. She’d had too much of it in her life to be lenient with it any more.

  ‘Sissy’ was what my older sister called me. The name had stuck when she couldn’t pronounce my real one. There are only eighteen months between us in age, and being the only live babies our mother had, we were driven closer still by her smothering. Apart from us, there were eight miscarriages, three stillbirths and a little brother who died from meningitis aged two. I was the youngest – lucky last.

  ‘We nearly lost you, too,’ she reminded me regularly, as if losing children was what everyone did. She was sitting on the old bench, caught up in the dangling red creeper, crunching her tablets and chain smoking. She looked on fire.

  Telling me how I survived against the odds should have made me feel special, as though I was her clever near-miss who had somehow broken the spell, like I shouldn’t really be there at all but by good luck; by huge sprinklings of magic powder, here I was. Breathing and alive.

  In contrast, Pa was a quiet, unassuming man, who ate his food leaning against the sink, watching the three women in his life, winking at me when the wretched guilty feeling about my existence squeezed tears from my virtually dry eyes. I felt sorry for all my dead brothers and sisters, as if I’d pushed in and taken their places. Pa forked up his mashed potato, a ciggie tucked behind his ear for afters, and always with those lines of coal dust circling his throat. Pa loved me. Pa stroked my hair when Mum wasn’t looking. Pa had been dying for as long as I could remember.

  The dirty circles were still round his neck when I peeked into his coffin as a virtually mute fifteen-year-old. The tattooed necklace from years down the mines (lung cancer and emphysema to boot, my mother proudly told everyone) was the only thing I recognised about him. At the wake, I overheard Mum talking to Aunty Diane about the likelihood of Pa having gone to heaven and becoming a baby again.
Mum was into all that crazy spiritual stuff and went to see a medium before Pa’s body was even cold. Usually Aunty Diane would humour Mum during her ‘less-than-normal times’, as she called them, to make her feel better. But now, I think it was just to make me and my sister feel better, to make us believe that everything was all right when it wasn’t. ‘Your mother’s as loopy as a box of weasels,’ she told us once. After that, I wished Aunty Di was our real mother.

  Later, in the bath, I scattered the remains of my old magic talc mixture all over my tummy, pretending it was my poor Pa’s ashes, praying he would somehow be absorbed into my eggs, my womb, become a baby and not be dead at all. All I’d ever wanted was to take care of something. I figured it was the next best thing to being taken care of. Better than anything, though, I knew it would make Mum happy to have Pa alive again – even if he was born a little girl.

  Having a baby, I decided, would be my life’s mission.

  1

  ‘SOMEONE’S REPLIED TO our advert.’ I peer over my laptop lid, making a semi-pained face. Part of me had been hoping no one would answer, that I could somehow manage alone. The heat of the computer is cooking my legs but I can’t be bothered to move. It’s work and a winter-warmer rolled into one.

  ‘You shouldn’t have that thing so close, you know.’ James taps the screen as he walks past on his way to the cupboard. He pulls out the wok. ‘Radiation and all that.’ I love him for cooking, for caring.

  ‘The scan says she’s got all her arms and legs. Stop worrying.’ I’ve shown him the ultrasound pictures a dozen times. He’s missed all my scans so far. ‘We have a healthy little baby girl on the way.’ I shift uncomfortably and put the computer on the old saggy sofa beside me. ‘Aren’t you interested in who’s replied to the advert?’

  ‘Of course I am. Tell me.’ James splashes oil in the pan. He’s a messy cook. The ring of blue flames leaps into life as he turns the gas burner to high. He bites his lower lip and tosses pieces of chicken into the wok. The smoke gets sucked up into the extractor fan.

  ‘Someone called Zoe Harper,’ I say above the sizzling noise. I read the details in the email again. ‘It says she’s got loads of experience and has all the right qualifications.’ I will phone her later, get a feel for how she sounds. I must show willing even though the thought of a stranger in the house isn’t a particularly pleasant one. I know how worried James is about me coping when he goes away again. He’s right, of course. I am going to need help.

  Our nanny chatter is suddenly interrupted by noise and fuss and screaming coming from the sitting room. I heave myself up from the sofa, legs apart and hands wedged in the small of my back to stop my spine giving way. I raise my hands to halt James’s rescue dash. ‘It’s OK, I’ll go.’ He seems to think I’m incapable of anything since he’s been home. Probably because last time he saw me I didn’t resemble a house.

  ‘Oscar, Noah, what’s going on?’ I stand in the sitting-room doorway. The boys look up at me. Forlorn, they have been sprung in the early stages of war. Oscar has something crusty and yellow stuck in the corner of his mouth. Noah is brandishing his brother’s toy gun.

  I only let them play with toys like that when James is home. He doesn’t see the problem. Other times, they’re locked away in a cupboard. Toy weapons were a hot topic at that dreadful dinner party, a few years ago now, not long after I’d met James. I’d wanted all his friends to like me, to not make comparisons, to trust that I had my own set of maternal instincts when it came to bringing up my newly-inherited sons.

  ‘How do you handle things like that with the twins, Claudia?’ she’d asked me, when I stated I didn’t like to see children playing with swords and guns. God knows, in my job I see enough messed-up kids to know that there are better things they could be doing with their time. ‘Must be hard being a mother . . . but not being one,’ she finished. I could have slapped her.

  ‘Come here, Os,’ I say, and do the unthinkable. I lick a tissue and wipe his mouth. He wriggles away. I eye the gun in Noah’s hand. Taking it away from him would cause a major incident.

  At the dinner party, I’d feebly explained that as step-mother to twin boys who’d lost their birth mum to cancer, I believed it pretty much gave me the right to call myself their mother – but no one really cared or was listening by then. The topic had moved on. ‘James is in the Navy,’ I heard myself saying, ‘so of course they’re fascinated by wars . . . it’s not taboo as such in our house but . . .’ I was burning crimson by that point. I just wanted James to take me home.

  ‘Give the gun back to your brother, Noah. Did you snatch it?’

  Noah doesn’t reply. He holds up the plastic weapon, aims it at my belly and pulls the trigger. There’s a weak crack of plastic as it play-fires. ‘Bang. Baby’s dead,’ he says with a toothy grin.

  *

  ‘They’re asleep. Kind of,’ James says. He’s wearing his favourite sweater, the one he doesn’t know I take to bed with me when he’s away. And he’s got a glass of wine. Lucky him on a Friday night. I’ve got peppermint tea and a pain in my lower back. I’m convinced my ankles look swollen today.

  He sits down beside me on the sofa. ‘So, what did she sound like, this Mary Poppins woman?’ An arm goes around my shoulders, fingers twirling the ends of my hair.

  While he was tucking the boys into bed – drunkenly singing Aerosmith’s ‘Janie’s Got a Gun’ but putting the names Oscar and Noah in instead – I’d phoned Zoe Harper, the woman who replied to our advert.

  ‘She sounded . . . fine.’ I say it rather flippantly because I hadn’t expected her to sound fine at all. ‘Lovely, in fact. To be honest, I was hoping she’d sound like a witch and be slurring from booze.’ The thing is, I’ve tried two nannies before and, one way or another, they weren’t exactly what they claimed to be. Besides, the boys didn’t take to having them around at all. So between understanding friends, day-care and, more recently, school breakfast and afternoon clubs, we’ve somehow managed to cope. James thoroughly advocates them being cared for in their own home while I’m at work and, now our own baby’s nearly due, he wants things more settled.

  ‘But she really didn’t,’ I say, watching his expression change to one of hope. ‘Sound like a witch, that is.’ What with James away at sea for weeks or even months at a time and me trying to cram a demanding job into hours that often aren’t regular, I was tearing my hair out with guilt. I wanted to be the best mother I could but not give up my career. That was one thing I’d promised myself when I took on this ready-made family. I love my job, it’s who I am. I guess I wanted it all, and now I’m paying the price.

  ‘Yes, she sounded perfectly normal and down to earth.’

  We sit in silence for a moment, both pondering the reality of what we’ve done – the advertisement took up several nights of deliberation. I don’t think we ever considered the reality of what came after that: actually having someone live with us again.

  ‘Oh God, but what if she’s like the last two? It’s not fair on the boys. Or the baby. Or me.’ I shift my bump so I can curl my legs up on the sofa.

  ‘Nanny-cam?’ James says. He pours another glass of wine.

  ‘Give me a sniff,’ I say, leaning over, desperate for a sip.

  ‘Fumes,’ he says, holding the glass away from me and covering it with his other hand. I slap him on the shoulder and grin. It’s only because he cares.

  ‘But I need fumes. Nanny-cam? You’re not serious, right?’

  ‘Of course I am. Everyone does it.’

  ‘Buggering hell, they do. It’s a violation of . . . of their human nanny rights or something. Besides, what do you want me to do? Sit staring at my computer all day watching the boys play Lego while nanny feeds the baby? Kind of defeats the point of having her, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Give up work, then,’ he says in his faint-but-serious voice.

  ‘Oh, James,’ I say, hardly believing he’s trying that one again. ‘Let’s not go there.’ A hand on his thigh is warning enough as he shrugs and tur
ns the telly up. It’s Children’s Hospital. The last thing I want to watch is sick kids but there’s nothing much else on.

  I consider the nanny-cam idea. I suppose it could work.

  Suddenly Oscar is standing frozen in the doorway for effect (he does it so well) – tiny boy in dramatic period setting with blood pouring from his nose. He doesn’t even attempt to contain the flow. His Ben 10 pyjamas look theatrical.

  ‘Oh, darling Ossy,’ I say. No point me moving. James is up quickly with a handful of tissues plucked from the box on the table as he goes. ‘Not again.’

  James swipes our son up and plants him on the sofa next to me. He goes off to fetch ice, and Oscar leans on me for a cuddle. He rests his head on my bump and blood gets on my old T-shirt.

  ‘Baby says she loves you, Ossy,’ I tell him. He looks up at me with big blue eyes and a murderous bloody nose. James comes back with a pack of frozen peas. ‘Tea towel?’ I say, not wanting to put them on Oscar’s skin directly. James nods and goes off to get one.

  ‘How can she love me? She doesn’t even know me.’ He sounds all bunged up.

  ‘Well . . .’

  James returns again. I wrap the peas in the tea towel and hold it against the bridge of Oscar’s little nose while also pinching it gently. The GP says if it keeps happening it’ll need to be cauterised. ‘She loves you, I guarantee it. It’s instinctive, built-in. Babies come with their own love and she already knows we love her.’

  ‘Noah doesn’t love her,’ Oscar says from beneath the peas. ‘He says he hates her and wants to shoot her off the planet.’

  Even though it’s just Noah, my little son-by-proxy, I flinch inside. ‘He’s perhaps a bit jealous, that’s all. He’ll be fine when she’s born, you see.’ I glance over Oscar’s head and catch James’s eye. We each pull a face, wondering what delights are in store with three under-fives, and then I’m fretting about getting them used to a new nanny again. Perhaps it would be easier if I did give up work.

  ‘Now, let’s see how things are going here.’ I lift the bag of peas and peel away the red sodden tissue. The bleeding seems to have stopped.