The Child's Child (35 page)

Louise came back with me to Dinmont House for an hour or so. We had tea, I saw her into the tube station, and I began the fairly long walk back up the hill. It gets dark so early at this time of the year and the sun having long gone behind the gathering clouds, it was dusk before I came within sight of Dinmont House. Our street, which is rather more like a country lane, is always quiet and apparently deserted. The people who live in its few houses come and go in their cars, which are parked inside garages. If there is on-street parking, no one uses it. So I was surprised to see a man standing by our front gate and, when he saw me, move a little down the road. The street is full of big trees with leopard-skin trunks, planes I suppose, and he stood under one of them, his head turned away, until I had opened our gate and walked halfway up the path towards the front door.

He must have moved fast and silently. I had reached the porch, glazed in and with a kind of glass hood over it, when I turned my head and saw him closing on me. It’s an unpleasant sensation to turn and, expecting to see someone in the distance, find instead within inches of your face another unknown face, especially perhaps one with a scarf tied round it under the hood. I cried out, “What do you want?”—a useless manoeuvre as no one was within two or three hundred yards.

“You know what I want.” He clamped his hand over my mouth. I tried to duck, but the pressure of that hand on my face was too great. “If you do what I tell you, I won’t hurt you.”

I suppose they all say that. At any rate they all say it in films and on TV. I thought of Tess, and as I did, I felt her move gently. I looked at my attacker. He was a big man, not the shaven-headed boy.

“Give me your bag.”

A pregnant woman is the most vulnerable of human beings. Anything I could do—kicking him, kneeing him, stamping on his foot—would ultimately result in injury to me and therefore to her. I gave him my bag, he took the keys out of it, opened the door, and pushed me inside ahead of him.

“Christ. A hundred people could live in here and you’d still have space.”

He couldn’t have got an answer from me and maybe he didn’t expect one. His voice was educated, more or less, rather like that of my students, who had spoken like the blond girl when they were small but whose diction had got some polish in their teenage years. I thought of them and momentarily of Maud, asking myself why I had never wondered what kind of accent she had had.

He took away his hand and pushed me away from him. I had to catch hold of Verity’s sofa to stop myself falling.

“You know what I want to know.”

“Do I?” I said, ashamed of my suddenly squeaky voice

He looked at me from the top of my head down to where my waist had been and a bit lower. “You’d better.” In those two words were somehow the worst kind of threat to Tess. Death to her if not to me.

I made a little sound, a tiny noise of fear and protest.

“Tell me where Andrew Easton lives. That poof, that queen.”

My reaction was strange. My face burned and I felt myself blush as I muttered that I didn’t know.

“Of course you know. He’s your brother.” He was holding my bag. He put the keys back in it, took out my mobile, and pressed the contact icon. I knew he was doing this because he told me so. He began a sort of running commentary on his actions. “I’m looking for your brother’s address.”

“It’s not there.”

Some people add a home address to where there’s space for it, but I never did. Come to that, there was no space there for Andrew, whom I’d always thought of as living here. The man didn’t seem to know James’s name. He told me to sit down and, when I moved to the sofa, shouted at me not to sit there but on the only upright chair in the study. When he felt in the pockets of the padded jacket he wore and brought out a coil of rope, it should have been obvious to me what he wanted it for, but it wasn’t. To torture me, I thought, to whip me. But it was to tie me up. But not in the study.

“Get up, and bring the chair.” I hesitated, flinching a little, but I did get up. “Do it. Do as I say.”

He was carrying the rope, leaving me to carry the chair. He took a cigarette from a packet, and for some reason this frightened me more than anything else that had happened so far. As he raised the scarf to free his mouth, I thought of the cigarettes used to torture people, in the thrillers I’d read on holiday or on flights, stubbed on the palms of hands or worse.

“Sit on the chair,” he said when we’d reached the dining room, the farthest room from the front door, but I didn’t. I stepped backwards, holding it like a shield. The next thing I knew, he had struck me hard across the face. The way Maud had slapped her daughter but as no one had ever slapped me before. I gasped and sat on the chair. It was all I could do not to appeal to him to not hurt me. I could resist struggling, and that was easy, my eyes on that glowing cigarette tip.

Someone says of Maud in
The Child’s Child
that she had led a sheltered life. But haven’t most of us done that in the Western world? More now than in Maud’s day? I had never been hit nor had I ever had any physical violence done to me. To withstand it, you need practice, you need to have got to some extent accustomed to it. I tried hard to stay rigid and not to tremble, but I
failed. My whole body was shaking as he tied my legs to the chair legs and my hands behind me to the chair back. My dome of a stomach was raised up now and vulnerable, but in a way the discomfort helped with the fear.

He lit another cigarette. I could hear my mobile ringing, but of course neither he nor I thought of answering it. I noticed he was wearing heavy boots, not trainers, and holding the cigarette a few inches from my chin, he raised one leg and placed his foot on a stool. Perhaps it wasn’t a threat, but it seemed like one.

“Where does he live?”

I was in such fear that, insane as it sounds, I had forgotten James’s address. I knew it perfectly well, though I had never been there. Something saved me then. I looked up and at shelves full of Verity’s books, the books that were everywhere, even in this room, and my eye caught the novels of Paul Scott. That was when I blessed Verity all over again for having so much reading matter.

“Paul. Paultons Square.” The number came to me without difficulty.

I was so enormously relieved at remembering, at the foot’s being withdrawn and the cigarette stubbed out (albeit on the arm of a chair), that I forgot for a moment what I had done. The enormity of what I had done.

“If you’ve told me a lie . . .”

“I haven’t, I haven’t.”

“I’m not taking any chances.”

Louise had left her scarf behind, draped over the back of a dining chair. He picked it off and gagged me with it. I knew how it was done. I’d seen it on TV. You have to bite the scarf so that it’s half in your mouth before it’s tightly tied. I submitted, I had no choice. The choice had been made before I said Paultons Square.

“If he doesn’t live there, I shall come back.”

T
HE GAG
didn’t hurt and I could breathe all right, but I was uncomfortable. Tess was moving vigorously, as she always did at this time of the evening. If I was deprived of air, would she be? He was an expert tier-upper, I knew that each time I shifted and wriggled, but instead of loosening on my hands, the rope seemed to grow tighter. The phone rang again. How long before it rang again or how many times would it have to ring before someone got frightened for me and came over?

Some places I’d lived in I would only have had to get myself onto the floor, though still attached to the chair, and, pushing myself along up to the dividing wall between this flat and the next, drum as hard as I could with my feet, the chair as a means of making the noise greater, before someone would have heard and been aware something was wrong. But this house was large and isolated. Many yards separated it from its nearest neighbour. Besides, getting myself onto the floor would mean throwing myself and my baby onto a hard surface. Would that matter? Would it perhaps provoke labour, even though my due date was three months off?

I didn’t even know where the phone was, where he had left it. Not that it would have helped me if I had. The clock on the dining-room mantlepiece had said ten past six when I had first come in. It now said eight forty-five. When you’ve been gagged, one of the orifices through which you inhale air has been blocked. My mouth was useless for breathing, but my nostrils were still usable. But once I’d thought of that, I began to worry that something might block my nose. A sneeze could do that if I wasn’t able to blow my nose afterwards, and once I’d thought of it, I seemed to feel a tickle behind the septum and then a kind of stuffiness I was sure hadn’t been there before.

I am making myself sound a terrible solipsist for I had scarcely given a thought to Andrew’s fate, but I did then. His address had been needed so that they could kill him, I had no doubt of that.
The clock told me it was nine fifteen. However the man had travelled to Paultons Square, he had had ample time to get there by now, to collect others or one other and go to find Andrew. I prayed that he and James might be out, but if they were, they must still come home sometime. The phone rang again at ten to ten. This time it must be James, calling to tell me they had found Andrew. My nose hadn’t blocked. My mouth ached and throbbed and the gag was wet with saliva, but all I could think of was that I had betrayed my brother for the second time.

I
T WASN’T
a time for crying. I remembered what Fay had said about our crying from emotion, not because we are unhappy, but still I cried. I think my tears were from fear. He might come back, he had said he would if I had given him the wrong address. I hadn’t, I hadn’t had the courage to do that. Had he taken my keys? I could see my handbag on the table, miles away it seemed, far out of reach even if I had any reach. The keys might still be in it, but even if they were, they would have been of no use to me. It was ten o’clock and the phone was ringing again. It stopped and I was thinking of a Stephen King thriller I had read in which someone was far more horribly tied up than I but managed just the same with incredible ingenuity and over a long time to cut his bonds and free himself. I was thinking about that when suddenly the front doorbell rang.

Frightened as I was, I nevertheless realised it couldn’t be him. He almost certainly had my keys. It must be someone who expected me to answer the door. The bell rang again.

This time I leant over as far as I could and let myself fall onto my right side, shaking with fear for Tess. On the floor, which was uncarpeted, I managed to slide and so propel myself along out into the hall, and once there I made the only vocal sound I could, a kind of wordless, strangled bray through the gag. That front door is solid hardwood, but not apparently oak, which would have resisted more. Malcolm is a big man, and he and Fay had a policeman
with them. I suppose the two men broke it down between them with their feet. The door fell, splintered, but nowhere near where I lay. That’s one of the advantages of a really big house, there’s room for a lot of manoeuvring even if you’re trussed up like a chicken.

When I was free with no harm done—Tess was lurching about like a little boat in a storm—I told them what had happened. The policeman wanted to know if I would be able to identify the man, but I said I didn’t think so and told him about the mask under his hood. “I’d know his voice again,” I said, and then I asked my mother why she and Malcolm had come, what had brought them to Dinmont House at that particular time, far too late for them to be paying a social call.

“I said we’d come. Don’t say you’d forgotten?”

I had but I remembered then.

“If I phoned three times and got no answer, we’d come over.”

“Oh, yes. Yes.”

“You’ll have to come back with me now,” said my mother, “while your front door gets boarded up.”

So I picked up my handbag from the table and saw that I was right and my keys had gone. I went back with Fay while Malcolm and the policeman went off to try to find Andrew. Fay had seen him only the day before, when he had been well and happy but not willing to talk about me, though she had raised the subject. We each drank some whisky, I remembering this was the last thing I should be doing and pouring it away after the first sip. We wouldn’t sleep, we were sure of that, but Fay, who is more of an optimist than I am, kept saying that now the police knew about it, Andrew would be all right.

But he wasn’t. Summers and two other friends of Kevin Drake’s found him, in of all innocuous places, coming out of the Odeon cinema in the Fulham Road. James had been with him but wasn’t with him at that precise moment, having gone back to retrieve his
mobile, which he thought had fallen down the back of the seat he had been sitting in. In the midst of a jostling crowd, hardly noticed, three knives went into Andrew’s chest and back.

M
Y ATTACKER,
who turned out indeed to be Gary Summers, had had several hours’ start on us. It was several days before I knew what had happened. Summers had gone straight to Paultons Square, made his way into the block where James lived, and in the foyer checked the number of the flat from the postboxes. You were supposed to get the porter to call up to the flat for you, but Summers avoided the lift and went up the stairs. Finding no one at home in James’s flat, he turned away to come face-to-face with the girl who lived opposite. Yes, she had seen them go out, she knew them quite well, and James had told her they were going to the cinema. She even volunteered the information, unasked, that they’d be out of there by nine thirty and then they’d go and have a meal. She even told Summers the name of the restaurant they often ate at. As it happened, he wasn’t going to need that information.

It was in the newspapers and on TV, but three days later no arrests had been made. I couldn’t identify Summers, and the men that were with him remained anonymous. But it was, thank God, not murder but attempted murder. Andrew was operated on twice, lay in what hospitals (or maybe only the media) call “critical” condition for three days. Fay was with him most of the time, and I for quite a lot of it, but they wouldn’t allow poor James. What after all was James but a friend?