He never forgot her. She stayed lingering in his mind, the little brown eyed baby who'd stared at him in the drab police station. He kept all the clippings of the newspapers which showed the fuzzy picture of her in her little pink hat. It was nicer to think of her as the clean little infant as opposed to the grubby little thing he'd pulled out of the dustbin.

She was sleeping in the photograph, so he couldn't see her eyes. Her eyes were burned into his memory, so awake, so alert, looking at him like he was the only thing in the world.

All the newspapers called her Isabella. That made him happy. Isabella, after the headline dustbin baby. Still, he heard that she was adopted two weeks later by some fine upstanding family.

He didn't hear any more after that.

He often thought about trying to track her down, but it was always a fleeting thought. His name was on all the forms and in the papers as the man who found her, but he understood that this gave him no right to try and find her.

That didn't stop him from absently hoping her name might pop up every time he had to scan through a school register. He often thought about sending her a Christmas card, and on 19th Of March he always thought about what she might be doing.

It wasn't nice, not knowing, but there wasn't anything he could do about it. It wasn't like he was her father, or any type of blood relative. He was just the bloke that found her and held her for a while, before handing her over.

As is police career moved on, he worked with many different people of all ages, several kids and babies, but none of them stuck with him like Isabella had. For a start, he wasn't as involved with any of the other ones, and he always got clarification of how the case ended.

He never heard another word about Isabella.

As he moved on and moved out of London, people forgot that he was the man that found the baby in the dustbin outside the police station.

That being said, several babies turned up in other dustbins, but he didn't find anymore, and he certainly didn't get to name anymore.

It often cheered him up on darker nights, the thought that those two random women had let him name a baby. She probably didn't stay Isabella; if the system didn't change her name, adoptive families would have.

But she'd always be Isabella to him, the tiny baby with brown eyes that he'd cradled and kissed goodbye to.