Mad Cows by Kathy Lette Page A

shop.’
    Maddy gulped for air. Her breasts hardened and milk seeped through her nursing pads. Thoughts of Jack left her euchred, washed up and totally wasted.
    â€˜16a Ludgate Street, Clapham.’
    The look on Edwina Phelps’s face was not unlike the look of a born-again Christian making a convert.
    Maddy concentrated on the expanding slit of light as she climbed the stairs into the well of the court. She was hours, maybe minutes from freedom. She had found the silver lining inside her dark cloud.
    â€˜Bail refused,’ the magistrate intoned, with less deliberation than he’d give to a sandwich order.
    â€˜What’s he saying?’ Anxiety coated Maddy’s tongue. Forgetting her body-language instructions, she gripped the dock’s metal railings, knuckles tight and white, tendons taut.
    Peregrine cleared his throat. ‘There’s a regression, time wise, on your bail application.’
    â€˜A
what
?’ She felt glazed and unfocussed.
    â€˜We’ll have to appeal to the Crown Court . . .’ he whispered. ‘The infanticide thing. They want psychiatric reports . . .’
    Maddy couldn’t breathe. The courtroom billowed, the walls spun, her temples pounded, although the rest of her appeared still to be functioning because her mouth was moving and words were coming out.
    â€˜But I’ve told you about the baby. I told
her
.’ Maddy jabbed desperately in Dwina’s direction. Dwina was handing Slynne a packet of Nicotinell, which he was receiving with a sheepish grin. A ragged flicker of doubt zig-zagged across her brow. ‘Dwina! Tell them.’
    A few people glanced at Dwina who gave a light ‘what can you do?’ laugh at the absurdity of the suggestion – the way Salome would have laughed, post-head. A cold blade of realization knifed into Maddy. Edwina Phelps had been friendly in the way an intestinal parasite is friendly. This woman was a top order predator. Dwina, She-Bitch of the S.S.; the sort who’d like to become the Führer’s play-thing. Edwina Phelps had wanted her to sign Jack over for adoption. Now she wouldn’t even
need
adoption papers, because everyone believed Jack was dead. All Dwina had to do was seize him from Gillian’s flat in Clapham.
    â€˜She just wants to keep me in jail so she can steal my baby!’ Maddy blurted.
    â€˜Not even the O.J. jury would believe
that
,’ quipped Dwina to Slynne.
    â€˜Don’t tell me,’ Detective Sergeant Slynne mocked for Maddy’s benefit. ‘It’s a miscarriage of justice.’
    â€˜Arresting me in the first place was the miscarriage of justice.
This
is the curette!’
    â€˜Silence! Call the next case.’ The usher drowned out her pleas. Only Slynne’s voice was distinctive – ‘If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.’ And then, finally, the stentorian tones of the magistrate – ‘Take the prisoner down.’
    In a state of advanced disbelief, Maddy was bundled into the prison van and seated next to Joyce, a thin, prim woman in a grey cardigan and seed pearls whose husbands made a habit of leaping between her carving knife and her chopping board. (Joyce didn’t call it murder. She preferred to look on it as a Kidney Transplant Scheme.)
    â€˜So,’ Joyce asked, extending a packet of Polo mints, as Maddy clambered past, ‘you didn’t get a result, dear?’ She made it sound like an exam.
    Maddy glimpsed the faces of the other failed applicants, slumped in mute desolation. ‘My baby! She’s trying to get my baby!’
    As Maddy pressed her knees to her chest and rocked back and forth on the seat, Joyce tried to console her by reeling off a list of Edwina Phelps’s crimes against humanity: the young girl in Holloway who’d tried to commit suicide after Dwina had her daughter taken into care; the forced adoptions – ‘Babies just seem to disappear into her