Silent Children (11 page)

Ian didn't mind, or only to the extent of walking ahead, which struck her as having more to do with encouragement than embarrassment, not that she intended anything other than a leisurely stroll. The quiet suburban houses glowed from within, the street-lamps seemed to be lighting the way to the future. She squeezed Jack's arm and relinquished it as they came to their gate.

She saw Ian unlock the front door and step into the house. A moment later the hall fitted a carpet of light to the path. Ian had halted at the foot of the stairs and was gazing toward the kitchen—into the kitchen. She'd closed all the doors before leaving the house, yet the kitchen door was wide open.

A shiver chased away her mellowness as she ventured into the house. A chill had come down the hall to meet her, and something else was wrong with the kitchen. The view beyond the back door was too clear—she was no longer seeing it through glass. A glistening of crimson drew her attention upward. With a cry of dismay and rage that left her throat raw, she sprinted up the stairs to read the words that were dripping from the door of her room and Ian's and Jack's.

It was only a bit of paint sprayed on the doors and spattering the carpet in front of them, Leslie kept telling herself. Whatever people said, being broken into couldn't be as bad as being raped, though the sense of being invaded had lodged deep in her body, the sense that someone had delighted in the mess they'd left. Jack brought her a coffee Ian had made, a bubble that looked full of brown earth bursting on its surface, and then he loitered by the stairs, visibly wishing he could do more to help. The coffee only lent the dullness that was her delayed shock a harsh edge. "At least you can't say your first night wasn't memorable," she said.

His lips twitched as if he didn't feel entitled to smile. "It already was."

"For us too. Thanks again."

"Gee, I wish you wouldn't say that."

"Why ever not?"

"Because if I hadn't insisted on buying you guys dinner your house would be fine now."

"It's still going to be. We'll make sure it is, won't we?" Ian had emerged from the kitchen, allowing her to turn to him and let Jack choose whether he wanted to be included in her pronouncement. She sensed he was about to respond when they heard a car door slam, echoed instantly by its twin.

She pulled the front door open just not soon enough to head off the doorbell. The unnecessary trill sounded more piercing than usual, and she hoped the pair of policemen didn't assume she'd stiffened at the sight of them, their thin faces younger than hers and looking as though they had recently been scrubbed by their mothers, their chins blue as litmus from the hours they must already have worked. "Mrs. Ames?" the foremost, whose sharp quick eyes were almost exactly the colour of his chin, said.

"Come in."

He gazed at her as if he was waiting for his question to be answered, then he planted one foot in the hall. "Did we ask you not to touch anything?"

"No, but we haven't."

"That'll do," he said, both feet in the hall now, and emitted a sniff that she thought was referring to the vandalism until he added "You'll have had a drink to help you cope, will you?"

"Just some wine with dinner. We were dining out when whoever broke in broke in."

"Somewhere local, was it?"

"Close enough that we all walked to it, if that's what you're getting at."

"I was trying to establish how long you were out of the house."

"Three hours at least," she told him and his brown-eyed colleague, whose face immediately toned down the little expression it had. "We were back by half past ten and I rang you it couldn't have been more than five minutes later."

"It's been a full night," the policeman with the chin-blue eyes said, presumably explaining the hour's delay. "So where's the damage?"

"They broke in at the back, and what they did is upstairs."

"Are you saying they because you think you can identify the perpetrators?"

"No, I'm saying it because I don't."

His gaze flickered at that, then raised itself above her. "I'll deal with upstairs."

He was speaking mostly to his colleague, who headed for the kitchen. "Good excuse for staying up late, is it, son?" Leslie heard him say, and Ian barely answer, while blue-eyes halted on the stairs. "This is about your house," he said.

Leslie saw the graffiti swell up like red weals on the wood. KILLER LOVER, they said on her door, and KILLERS FRIEND on Ian's. The wielder of the aerosol must have run out of ideas or paint or time in front of Jack's door, on which there was either too much of a word—KILLE—or not enough. A sudden prickling of her eyes made her blurt "Why, do you think it should be?"

"It's not my job to have opinions like that, Mrs. Ames."

There was little doubt in Leslie's mind that he meant yes. She was struggling not to retort when he said "Were these doors open?"

"No," Leslie admitted, the paint on the carpet having betrayed as much. "We needed to look in the rooms."

"Pity. Knobs are favourite for prints," he said, surveying the chaos in the rooms—not so different from usual in Ian's, but clothes strewn on her floor and Jack's, drawers pulled out, wardrobes gaping, quilts thrown or kicked to the floor. "Have you missed anything?"

"Nothing's been taken that we can see, can't see, if you see what I mean."

"Let's see if there's any joy downstairs."

She trudged after him in time to hear his colleague say "And where are you from, sir?"

"Hollywood," Ian responded with some pride on Jack's behalf.

"Does this look like a professional job to you?" Jack said.

"In what way, sir?"

Jack was indicating the old sink plunger that had apparently been used to hold the pane in the back door steady while the edge of the glass had been carefully smashed. "More likely they got the idea from a film," the policeman said with a brown-eyed glance at him, so blank it was meaningful.

"I'll do the paperwork if you want to take a look around," his colleague said and sat on a kitchen bench.

He asked Leslie questions about herself and Ian followed by questions about Jack while the other policeman prowled the back garden toward the alley gate Leslie'd locked last night, no longer locked. Before the questions ceased she was having to close her eyes, because the floor kept twitching like a sheet about to be thrown off a sleeper. She could have imagined the night was half over when she heard "Was there anything you'd like to add?"

It was a mutter from Ian, not quite a word, that made her open her eyes. "Sorry," she said for more than one reason. "No."

"We'll get out of your way," the other policeman offered, locking the door with her key and lifting the sink plunger in a plastic bag, and then the doorbell contradicted him. "That'll be fingers," he said.

The newcomer was a short man in a grey suit rather too ample for him. His freckled dome was striped with half a dozen lines of faded black hair. His expression as he spread dust on various surfaces suggested that he was unable to shift an unpleasant taste from his mouth. He seemed especially to dislike being watched at work by Ian, though Leslie didn't see why he should object to someone following him around their own house and into their own bedroom. Eventually the fingerprint man tramped downstairs, looking dissatisfied. "Are you through?" Jack said.

The man sucked in his lips as if he'd swallowed some of the dust. "We'll want your prints."

At first Leslie thought only Jack was going to be fingerprinted, presumably for being a foreigner. Once that was finished it was Ian's turn, however, and then hers to be made to feel like a criminal, having ink rolled onto her fingertips before they were pressed one by one against an official sheet of paper. By the time the last of her fingers had been pinched in his finicky grip she felt manhandled and grubby. As she held her blackened hands away from herself Jack said "That's going to help, right? You had to eliminate us."

"I doubt that'll be called for."

"By which you mean ..." Leslie prompted.

He didn't answer until he'd snapped the locks shut on his briefcase. "Anyone who takes that much care breaking in isn't likely to leave prints."

Leslie felt more than ever like a victim, and not just of the break-in. She let Jack and Ian see him out while she used a nailbrush in the bathroom, then hurried downstairs to clear away the broken glass, only to find Jack busy with dustpan and brush, and Ian on his hands and knees in search of stray fragments. "Can you get the window fixed tonight?" Jack said.

"It'll wait until tomorrow so long as nobody can get in."

He helped her upend the table against the door and wedge it with the benches. She switched off the fluorescent tube, though a trace of its glare appeared to linger in the concrete, and led the way upstairs, bracing herself for the sight of the raw words on the doors. "I should try and get some sleep, Ian," she said. "You'll have all tomorrow to tidy your room."

Perhaps that sounded too much like her frequent rebuke. "Won't need it," he muttered.

"Will it bother anybody if I make a start on my room now?" Jack said. "Just thump on the wall if I keep you awake."

Once Leslie had closed her door she had to restrain herself to tidying only the bed. She lay naked beneath the quilt, all her skin tender with her sense of the invasion of the house. Every so often she heard faint sounds through the wall she shared with Jack, the metallic whisper of a coat hanger, the hushed creak of a board. She found herself waiting at the edge of sleep for a cry that would mean he'd discovered his research or however much of his new book he'd written had been tampered with or destroyed. But his room stayed almost as quiet as the suburb, and eventually she deduced that he must have crept into bed.

For the first time in months she felt alone in hers. She stretched one arm across the mattress and turned her empty hand palm upward, and squeezed a fistful of the quilt. The thoughts she began to entertain, if a little guiltily, resembled a better dream than she would have expected of herself just now, and in time her awareness of being less alone in the house than yesterday allowed her to sleep.

She was wakened by smells of coffee and bacon and toast, and Jack's and Ian's voices downstairs. All that made the sight of the sunlit mess around the bed more bearable than she would have dared hope, and she was letting herself bask for a few seconds in a sense of unexpected rightness, when it occurred to her that the kitchen staff might be planning to serve her breakfast in bed. She kicked off the quilt and grabbed her bathrobe from the hook on the door, and was tying the cord around herself when the doorbell rang. "I'll get it," Jack said.

She heard his footsteps, which already seemed part of the house, tramp along the hall. She heard the front door open, and Jack's surprised voice, and then Ian's. "Don't let her in," he shouted.

Ian had almost finished cramming socks and shorts into the top drawer when he heard Jack go downstairs. He would have called out to him except for not wanting to wake his mother. She must be the worst upset of anyone about last night, and she was getting old—she'd be forty in just a few years. He leaned his weight on the stuffed drawer to close it, then he went down to find Jack.

He was in the kitchen doorway, gazing into the room. He didn't notice when Ian paced along the hall and stared past him. "What's wrong?" Ian said.

"God
damn."
That was all the surprise Jack betrayed as he turned to grin. "I thought I'd fix breakfast for your mom after her evening was ruined. Just trying to decide what to put together for her."

"Oh, right," Ian said, though it was evident to him that Jack's thoughts had been on more than breakfast—he guessed, with some amusement he managed to keep to himself, that they had been focused on his mother. "Want some help?"

"How are you at scrambling eggs?"

"Don't know."

"Better leave the little guys to me, then, and you can be the toast and bacon chef."

"No problemo," Ian said, which he thought was the kind of thing Americans said or liked to hear.

As he laid rashers of bacon on the grill and tried to judge how crisp they ought to be before they were joined by slices of bread, he felt increasingly American himself, a cook in a diner. He liked having someone new in the house whom he could sense there was plenty to learn about yet, unlike his father, who had become less and less of himself in the months before he and Ian's mother had split up, and whose efforts to regain himself since he'd moved in with Hilene were too obvious and strenuous. Ian no longer resented him so much for having moved out—could even be grateful to him for taking the tension out of the house. If Ian's mother carried on growing happier, that was fine too—would have been if last night hadn't been wrecked. Was he alone in having identified the culprit? Once he'd discharged his duties as short order cook he meant to ask if Jack had solved the case too. But he was standing guard over the last slices of toast when the doorbell rang.

"I'll get it," Jack said, so swiftly that Ian supposed he must be expecting some post—some mail, as he determined to call it from now on. He watched Jack transfer the scrambled eggs in a single uninterrupted movement from the pan to the plate with a spatula and slide the plate into the oven on the way to consigning pan and spatula to the sink as a preamble to striding down the hall to open the front door. "Excuse me," he said, adding with a brightness that seemed meant to apologise for his apology "Hi. Are you looking for Mrs. Ames?"

"Whom else?"

Ian recognised both the voice and the grammar before he saw the reporter from the
Advertiser
sitting in her wheelchair on the path. "Don't let her in," he shouted, imagining how little his mother would want to find her in the house.

The reporter scarcely even blinked at him on the way to raising her appraisal to Jack's face. "And you'll be..."

"Jack Lamb. I'm the lodger. How about you?"

Ian heard his mother's footsteps, anything but gentle, and the thud of her doorknob against the wall. He grabbed a plate and loaded it with the contents of the grill and shut the plate in the oven as his mother marched rapidly downstairs to confront the reporter, who said "I represent the press" and then "I understand you've had some further trouble, Mrs. Ames."