Hope to Die

To be honest, I laughed. I said I didn’t know where he’d got that from but I knew for a fact she’d had at least one previous child. That’s not the sort of thing you can hide from an obstetrician. And it wasn’t only that either – just after the baby was born Miss Rowan told me it had been ‘easy, compared to last time’, and when I asked her about the previous child she said the baby had been adopted. She said that was why she was so convinced it was the right thing to do this time as well.

Cut to: Steve McIlvanney

STEVE McILVANNEY

I was gobsmacked when I heard that – there’s simply no other word for it. She’d explicitly stated on her forms that this was her first child. I started wondering what else she might be lying about, and whether this was the real reason she wasn’t answering her phone. I alerted my manager, and we decided to search UK adoption records for the first child. It took a while because we didn’t even know where to start, but we got there in the end. And there she was: Camilla Kathleen Rowan, listed as the biological mother of a baby born at the West Bromwich Women’s Hospital on November 9th 1996.

So I contacted their Maternity Unit and got put through to a hospital administrator.

Intercut: RECONSTRUCTION: Woman at computer screen in hospital office, talking on phone and gesturing at screen, etc.

I explained to her who I was and that I was looking for information about a Miss Camilla Rowan, who was listed as having given birth in their maternity unit in 1996. So she starts looking back through the Birmingham NHS Trust computer records and suddenly says, ‘1996, don’t you mean 1997?’ So I say no, it was a baby boy born in November 1996. And she says, ‘What I have here is a baby boy born in December 1997. And it wasn’t at West Bromwich, it was at Birmingham and Solihull General.’

Cut back to Steve McIlvanney

STEVE McILVANNEY

So, to cut a long story short, it turns out there were two previous births – the boy born in 1996 at West Bromwich, who had definitely been adopted, and another boy born in 1997 at Birmingham and Solihull who no one seemed to know anything about. There were no adoption records for that child that I could find, and I couldn’t believe Camilla Rowan still had it living with her. She’d mentioned having a dog; she never mentioned having a four-year-old son. So I did some more checks on the General Registrar database of births and couldn’t find any baby registered by Miss Rowan at any time in the six months after that child was born.

That’s when I knew we had a real problem on our hands. And that’s when I called the Child Protection team.

JOHN’S VOICE (off)

And what did they do?

STEVE McILVANNEY

They called the police.

- freeze frame -

* * *

Interview with Keith Phillips, Royal Mail Oxford depot

25 October 2018, 1.35 p.m.

On the call, DCC. Sargent

CS: Hello, Mr Phillips, it’s DC Chloe Sargent, Thames Valley Police. I believe you’re the person who covers the Wytham area, is that right?

KP: Yes, that’s me. The office told me you might call.

CS: Do you know the people at Gantry Manor?

KP: Mr and Mrs Swann – yes, I know them. Very private people. Old-fashioned. They’re always very polite, but they don’t chat. Not like some on my round.

CS: Do they get much post?

KP: Two or three deliveries a week, I’d say. Bills, the council, official stuff mostly. Apart from the junk mail, of course.

CS: So not much of a personal nature then?

KP: No, definitely not. They don’t even go in much for Christmas cards, to be honest.

CS: Do you remember anything that looked personal recently – anything handwritten?

KP: Actually there was something. Must have been four or five weeks ago.

CS: A letter – or a postcard?

KP: A letter. Quite big handwriting. Confident-looking, you know?

CS: Do you by any chance recall if the letter came from abroad – was there an Airmail sticker or anything like that?

KP: Now you mention it, there was. I remember thinking the Swanns had never got foreign post before. Not in my time, anyway.

CS: I don’t suppose you remember where it was from?

KP: Sorry, mate – the envelope was a bit of a mess. The postmark was all smudged.

CS: What about the stamp? Do you remember what that looked like?

KP: Now you’re asking. That was all messed up too, I think. Could have been a face? That probably doesn’t help much, does it. Afraid I only saw it for a minute – Mrs Swann was just coming out of the door with the rubbish so I handed it straight to her.

CS: That’s very interesting. How did she react to it?

KP: She frowned, if I remember rightly.

CS: So she didn’t look happy to receive it?

KP: No, definitely not. In fact, she tore it up and shoved it in the rubbish bag there and then.