Second Chances (28 page)

I parked a little distance from the school gates and stroked her head. She sat, winding her hands around one another.

‘Orchestra tonight?’ I asked.

‘Yes. I’ll get the later bus. Mum . . .’

I was watching her hands. There was something disturbing about the way she was wringing them. It was as though she was compulsively washing, trying to erase some dirty spot, like Lady Macbeth. ‘I’m all ears,’ I said. The hand rubbing grew more frenzied. ‘Sacha? Are you in some kind of trouble?’

‘No.’ She reached down for her bag. ‘Just leave it. See you.’

Once she’d disappeared through the gates, I checked my work diary. I had a hectic schedule that day, starting with a staff meeting. Soon my car was headed towards Capeview, but my mind wasn’t.

Just before the meeting began, Sacha sent a text. She must have been hiding her phone under her desk, because lessons started at eight thirty.

Soz mum luv you sooooo much xxx grumpy teen
The sun burst through the clouds.

No probs doll love you too XXXXX

Keith plumped himself down beside me as I was pressing
send
. ‘Soppy text to Sacha,’ I explained sheepishly. ‘Actually, I’m in a state of panic.’ I described the morning’s events.

He looked sympathetic. ‘That all sounds familiar. Parenthood’s terrifying, isn’t it?’

‘You don’t think she could be bulimic? Or . . .’

He waited, eyebrows raised. ‘Or?’

‘Or, well, bipolar or something?’

‘Sacha?’ Keith looked amused at the suggestion. ‘I had a long chat with her at your party—a confident young woman, having a ball. She’s doing nothing mine didn’t do. What makes you think yours should be perfect? Many teenage girls—and boys too—have irrational tantrums. You know that! It’s what they do, even if they haven’t just emigrated. I suspect you’re letting Sacha’s mood swings rule your life.’

‘Of course I am. My happiness is dependent upon hers. She’s been my constant companion since I was twenty-one. In a way, we’ve grown up together.’

He patted the back of my hand. ‘
He that hath a wife and children hath
given hostages to fortune.
Francis Bacon, I think. Makes you wonder why so many of us do it, really.’

As I turned up our drive that evening, I had a kaleidoscope of half-formed thoughts in my head. I considered spraying the smoko hut for fleas, and decided to Google
bedbugs
when I had a moment. I worried about a client I’d just left, a teenage boy with spinal injuries. Finally I imagined Kit at McDonald’s with thirty screaming five-year-olds. The image had me chuckling as I crunched into first gear for the steepest part of our hill.

I was still smiling crookedly as I parked under the walnut. It was fruiting now, and I gathered a couple of nuts from the ground. Muffin was lying in a patch of sunlight, but she came plodding over to greet me, crooning a hello. When I squatted down to give her a pat, her coat felt dusty and warm. The kitchen door wasn’t shut; Kit must have left it open for the dog. I hoped the chickens hadn’t got in and made a mess.

They hadn’t. The room seemed just as I’d left it. Muffin turned round and round in her basket while I dropped my jacket over a chair. I’d picked up the post from our letterbox at the road gate. Junk mail, two bills and a postcard from Dad, who was on a walking holiday in the Lakes. I was engrossed in his handwriting as I reached for the kettle.

Windermere in winter is wondrously winsome, wantonly windy and wistfully
wet.

My searching fingers didn’t touch anything. Reluctantly, I lifted my gaze from the postcard and looked to see where the kettle had got to. It wasn’t in its usual place by the bread bin. With my mind still on Dad’s holiday, I searched the other surfaces.

I saw Mrs Tiggywinkle today. Jeremy Fisher, too. He was out fishing in the
rain again. You’d think he would learn.

I wondered vaguely why Kit had moved the kettle. Perhaps he’d had a last-minute tidy-up before he left. Come to think of it, the room might be slightly neater than usual. I stopped reading and looked around.

No, not neater. Emptier. Finally, I focused.

No radio.

No microwave.

No bottles in the wine rack, and the tin where we kept spare cash was upside down on the floor.

With a feeling of sick certainty I ran across the hall and into the sitting room. Television and DVD player, both gone. They’d left the dinosaur desktop, though—presumably there was no market for them. It was an efficient violation, and chillingly tidy. These intruders hadn’t pulled out drawers or smashed windows. They’d taken their time, as though they knew they had all day.

A nasty thought struck me: perhaps I had disturbed them. Perhaps they were still here. I stepped out through the kitchen door and into the low autumn sunlight, looking around. There was no sign of a vehicle, but my skin was crawling as I shaded my eyes and peered into the gloom of the bush.

A small violence in the branches of the walnut made me jump half out of my skin, but it was only a tui launching itself with a whirr of wings. I considered driving off somewhere, maybe to ask for help from Tama, but I wanted to be here when the rest of the family came home. Anyway, I could no more leave my house alone and undefended than I could have abandoned one of my children.

In the end I used my mobile to call the Napier police station. The woman on duty took my details and said they’d see who was in my area. I had the impression they might make it by Christmas if they really hurried, and made a mental note to call a twenty-four-hour plumber if there was ever a real emergency—a crazed axe murderer, for example. The nice man in his van would probably be the first to arrive by several hours.

I tried Kit’s phone, which went straight to his messages. He’d have turned it off in the theatre. I sent him a text. Then I forced myself to walk back inside and creep up the stairs. I felt sure someone—or something— was inches behind, leering at the back of my head. Once I felt a touch on the shoulder and swung around in abject terror, eyes popping, heart going like the clapper of a church bell. But it was only my hair.

Something was moving on the landing. I froze, then realised it was a curtain, flapping lazily in the breeze.

In our bedroom the drawers had been left open. I had a pervading image of dirty, thieving hands digging through our clothes, and sure enough the snazzy little video camera was gone from my socks drawer. My jewellery box had moved slightly, though its lid was closed. There wasn’t much of great financial value in it: a string of pearls Dad bought for my eighteenth, a brooch that had been Mum’s, and the sapphire pendant Kit gave me when the twins were born. I reached out with shaking hands—I could actually see the tremor—and lifted the lid.

Empty. I sat on the bed with it in my hands, feeling sick. Then, struck by a new thought, I hurried down the landing to the boys’ bedroom. A shaft of afternoon sunlight spilled an oval pool onto their worn carpet. The cupboard doors were wide open: lake-coloured doors, with Sacha’s careful flamingos spread across them. The shelves were bare, the boys’ clothes and books strewn across the floor. In a daze I began to pick everything up, wanting to have it all tidy and normal before the twins came home. They were too young to be confronted by such callousness.

It wasn’t until I had everything back in place that I realised what was missing. It was painfully obvious, because there was a blank space on the shelf: the blue piggybanks with their Christmas money. I searched the room, frothing with rage, but there was no sign of the two tipsy pigs. By the time I closed the cupboard doors I was ready to kill. Jewellery, DVD players—bad enough. But what kind of a perverted monster steals a child’s piggybank?

I began to roam through the house, teeth gritted, looking for clues. I wasn’t afraid any more. If I had found a man lurking in the pantry with a stripy jersey, a mask and a bag marked
swag
, I swear I would have kneed him where it hurt.
String ’em up
, I muttered to myself,
every last one of
’em.
That was pretty hypocritical, as I have been a member of Amnesty International all my adult life and abhor the death penalty. But dammit,
piggybanks!

A racing engine. Some vehicle was heading up the drive, and fast. My bravado faltered. I caught myself squinting out from behind a curtain while calculating how long the bathroom door would hold if I locked myself in there. The car swirled into the yard and Kit leaped out, hair standing straight up.

‘How bad?’ he yelled, as Finn and Charlie spilled out of their doors in a thrilled little flood.

‘Did we really have a buggerer?’ asked Charlie.

‘Burgerer,’ corrected Finn. ‘We’ve been burgered.’

‘Did they take Blue Blanket?’

‘No, no!’ I hoped I sounded cheerful. ‘Blanket and Buccaneer Bob are still here. Nice, tidy little buggerers.’

Then I broke the news about their piggybanks.

‘Gone?’ repeated Charlie pathetically, his eyes pooling as he looked up at me.

‘My money!’ Finn’s fists became balls.

Kit and I began a systematic search of the house, trying to work out exactly what had gone.

‘Oh no. Bastards have taken my laptop,’ he moaned when we got to the sitting room. ‘That’s going to be a real pain.’

Charlie had crouched down on all fours and was staring into the denuded DVD cupboard. ‘Did they really need
Mary Poppins
?’

When Sacha arrived home from orchestra, the twins rushed to tell her the news.

‘A feef came to the house and took our things,’ screeched Charlie.

Sacha’s hand flew to her mouth. She turned slightly green, as though she was about to be sick.

‘Your room looks okay,’ I said quickly. ‘Helluva mess, but I don’t think that’s the burglar’s fault.’

She swung around the kitchen, staring at the blank spaces. Then she spun on her heels, crashed through the door and pelted towards the smoko hut. There was a short silence before an anguished yell tore the air. Kit and I met at the kitchen door, both running, and sprinted down the track. The boys trotted after us.

Sacha was kneeling on the floor of her hut, smashing her fist against the wooden wall. ‘The bastards!’ she screamed. ‘The fucking idiots!’

‘Hey, calm down,’ I said, taking hold of her shoulder. ‘You’re scaring the little ones.’

‘Those sodding bastards, I’ll kill them! They took my stuff.’

We looked at her, baffled. She wasn’t Sacha at all. This was a different being altogether: a furious, maddened creature.

‘What stuff?’ I asked.

‘My stuff! My new iPod. My speakers. My money. Even my little telly.’ She drove her fist right through a rotten piece of wall. ‘This is bullshit!’

‘Mine too,’ said Finn. ‘I told you. They took our piggybanks. Our
special
piggybanks, that Grandpa gave us.’

‘All gone,’ added Charlie sadly.

For some reason, those words seemed to pop Sacha’s rage like a pin in a balloon. ‘This is awful,’ she whispered. ‘This is hell. I want to go home.’

‘It’s only a burglary,’ I said firmly. ‘It’s not a disaster. In England I know people who’ve been burgled lots of times—the Caldwell family, remember? Three times in three years. We’ve got good insurance. At least you’ve still got your laptop—you took that to school today, didn’t you? And look, there’s your old iPod in your pocket.’

‘We’re all fine, that’s the important thing,’ said Kit, pulling a boy onto each knee. ‘Nobody’s hurt.’

‘Hurt?’ wailed Sacha. ‘We are! Of
course
we are. We’re all hurt.’

A police car pulled up an hour later, and the local bobby heaved himself out. I recognised him as one of the school parents: Robert Andrews. He had two rugby-playing children, a boy and a girl. I’d seen them on the field, menacingly shoving their mouthguards in and out of their mouths like hunting chimpanzees then passing and tackling with a deadly blend of skill and psychopathy. Robert was one of those slow-moving middle-aged men who have developed a permanent shelf sticking out in front, upon which to rest their beer bottles. He made me feel positively lithe and fit. There was something reassuring about his sheer solidity; he was like one of those toys that wobble but don’t fall down.

He gave me a laconic nod. It’s a special Kiwi rural male nod. It means ‘hello,’ and ‘please don’t display any emotion,’ and sometimes, ‘I can’t remember your name.’

‘Hello,’ I said, advancing on him. ‘Martha McNamara.’

He shook my hand with his hairy paw, glancing over my shoulder with a twitch of the facial muscles that I thought was probably his version of a smile. ‘G’day, mate,’ he said. ‘Been having a bit of drama, I hear.’

Kit had stepped out of the kitchen doorway. ‘Thanks for dropping by, Robbie.’

I was surprised by all this first-name matiness. Then I remembered that Kit did school trips and sausage sizzles and umpired cricket matches. He did McDonald’s. He was one of the in crowd, down at Torutaniwha Primary School.

‘You’ve been unlucky,’ said Robbie the bobby. ‘We don’t have many house burglaries around here. Once in a blue moon.’

He and Kit strolled off for a session of knowledgeable squinting at windows and checking of flowerbeds for footprints. Eventually they arrived in the kitchen. Robert was gloomily certain of the method. ‘Tidy job. In through the
unlocked
kitchen door, clean the place out, off in a vehicle.’ I had the impression his crime report would read pretty much like that. Economical.

‘More than one?’ I asked.

‘Hard to tell.’

‘They can get away by continuing along the track,’ said Kit. ‘It runs on through the bush, meets up with a forestry road and comes out three miles north of here.’

The policeman nodded. ‘I know that,’ he said. ‘And so do all the other locals.’

‘How come?’ I asked.

‘The trail ride comes through this bit of land most years.’

‘Trail ride?’ I pictured romantic horsemen, men of Rohan, re-enacting some venture of yesteryear—perhaps with teams of packhorses and wagons, sleeping under the stars, eating around campfires and communing with the spirits of the land.

Robert stirred half a pound of sugar into his coffee. ‘The school holds a ninety-kilometre trail ride as a fundraiser.’