The Cradle in the Grave by Sophie Hannah Page B

babysitting jobs as a teenager? Did I love Morgan? Did I love Rowan? Did I welcome both pregnancies? I wanted to scream at them, ‘Of course I bloody well did, and if you can’t see that with your own eyes and ears then you don’t deserve the title of detective!’
    I always had the impression that Giles Proust alone among the police didn’t merely believe that I was innocent of the murder of my babies, but knew it, in the way that I knew it and Paul knew it. He could see I was no baby-killer, and understood how much I’d loved my two precious boys. Now here he was at my door again, with a woman I didn’t recognise, and I could see at once from his facial expression that this was going to be very bad. ‘Just tell me,’ I said, wanting to get it over with.
    â€˜This is DC Ursula Shearer from Child Protection,’ said DS Proust. ‘I’m sorry, Helen. I’m here to arrest you for the murders of Morgan and Rowan Yardley. I don’t have any choice. I’m so sorry.’
    His regret was absolutely genuine. I could see from his face that it was breaking him up to have to do this to me. At that moment, I think I hated his superior officers more for his sake than for my own. Hadn’t they listened to him, all those times he must have told them they were hounding a grief-stricken mother who’d done nothing wrong? I was as much a victim of my boys’ deaths as they were.
    However terrible the moment of my arrest was for me, I can never think of it without also thinking of Giles Proust and how terrible it must have been for him. He must have felt as helpless as I did, powerless to make the people in charge see and hear the truth. Paul had urged me many times not to assume anybody official was on my side. He was scared I might be naïvely deluding myself, storing up more pain for the future. ‘However decent Proust seems, he’s a policeman, don’t forget,’ he would tell me. ‘The sympathy could be a tactic. We’ve got to assume they’re all against us.’
    Although I didn’t agree with Paul, I could understand his attitude. For him it was a way of staying strong. At first he didn’t even trust our close families, our parents, brothers and sisters, to be fully on our side. ‘They say they’re sure you didn’t do it,’ he would say, ‘but how do we know they’re not just saying that because it’s what’s expected of them? What if some of them have doubts?’ To this day I am convinced that none of my relatives or Paul’s ever thought I could be guilty. They had all seen me with Morgan and Rowan and seen my passionate love for them.
    Paul would face no criminal charges, we were told, but he was allowed to come with me in the police car, which was a great comfort to me. He sat on one side of me, DS Proust sat on the other, and DC Shearer drove us to Spilling police station. I sobbed as I was forcibly taken away from my beloved house where I’d been so happy – first with Paul, then with Paul and Morgan, then again when Rowan came along. So many beautiful memories! How could they do this to me after what I’d suffered already? For a moment, I was consumed with hatred for everything and everyone. I had no use for a world that could inflict such terrible suffering. Then I felt an arm round my shoulder and DS Proust said, ‘Helen, listen to me. I know you didn’t kill Morgan or Rowan. Things are looking bleak for you now, but the truth will come out. If I can see the truth, others will too. Any fool can see you were a good, loving mother.’
    DC Shearer muttered something sarcastic under her breath, from which I gathered that she disapproved of what DS Proust had said. Maybe she thought I was guilty, or that DS Proust had breached some sort of protocol by saying what he said to me, but I didn’t care. Paul was smiling. He finally recognised Giles Proust for the ally that he