The Safe House (18 page)

‘Good-night, Michael,’ I said and closed the door.

Twenty-Three

I don’t get dumped. I dump. I don’t get humiliated. That’s for other people. When I was growing up it was always me who sat down with the boy and looked him in the eye – or when I couldn’t be bothered, rang him up – and told him that it was time we stopped seeing each other and all that. It was for my boyfriends, my ex-boyfriends, to go red and feel hurt and rejected. And I’ve never had insomnia. Even in the worst times, or at least until I moved to the country, I slept undisturbed. But in the middle of the night after it, after Danny and Finn had gone, I found myself awake, my skin prickling, my mind humming, like an electric motor that had been left on and was running uselessly, burning itself out. I felt a familiar pressure against my right arm. Not Danny. Elsie, heaving gently, fast asleep. She must have climbed up into the bed without waking me. I kissed her hair and her nose. With a loose flap of duvet I wiped her forehead where a hot tear had fallen. I looked around at the window. The curtains were dark. I couldn’t see my watch. I couldn’t see the dial of the clock-radio and if I moved I would wake Elsie and she wouldn’t go back to sleep.

I would like to have taken a scalpel and made a thousand incisions into Danny’s body, slowly, one by one. I couldn’t believe he had done this to me. I wanted to track him down wherever he was and just ask him did he realize what he had done to Elsie, who depended on him so much? Did he realize what he had done to me? I wanted him back, I desperately wanted him back. I wanted to find him to explain that if he returned we could make things all right. We would work things out. I could move back to London, we could get married, anything, just so that we could go back to the way things had been.

And Finn. I would like to take her pretty little face and punch it over and over again. No. Stamp on it. Mash it. I had let her into my house, into the most intimate recesses of my life, revealed secrets I had never let anyone else see, trusted her with Elsie. I had been closer to her than I had been to my own sister, and she had huffed and puffed and blown my house down. Then I remembered the details of Dr Kale’s autopsy on her parents and the bandage across Finn’s neck when I had first seen her, fearful and silent on my sofa. She had been porcelain that I thought might topple and shatter. I had watched her turn soft and human again, and this was what she had done. Or was this just another symptom? Was this a cry for help from a sad, lonely girl? And wasn’t Danny absconding nothing more than the characteristic behaviour of a weak man? Isn’t it just what men do when flattered by the attention of a beautiful young girl? Tears were running down the sides of my face. Even my ears were wet.

After an hour of heaving sobs I descended into cool stillness. I could look at my responses with objectivity, or so I thought. I felt the pain in layers. The core of it was the betrayal of trust by Finn, the abandonment of me and Elsie by Danny. I felt scalded by this, as if nothing else could ever matter, but the sensation grew numb and I thought of other things. There was the sense of professional failure. I had said over and over again that Finn was not my patient, I had resisted the whole stupid arrangement. But even with all that taken into account, it was a total disaster. A traumatized victim of a murderous assault had been in my care and the episode had ended not in cure but in horrible farce. She had run off with my lover. I prided myself as a person who hunted alone and didn’t care what other people thought of me, but I couldn’t help caring now. The faces of professional rivals and foes came into my mind. I thought of Chris Madison up at Newcastle and Paul Mastronarde at the London, finding it funny and telling people that of course it was awful but to be honest it served me right, always so arrogant. I thought of Thelma, whose idea this had been. I thought of Baird, who had seemed dubious enough about me from the first and all the rugby-club gang at the police station. They must all be having a good laugh.

Then – oh, God – I thought of my parents and of Bobbie. I don’t know which seemed worse: the mingled shock, shame and disapproval which would be the first response of the family or the sympathy that would follow in its wake, the outstretched arms offered to Samantha, the prodigal daughter. There was just the hint of a moment where I felt that I would rather go back to sleep and never wake up again than face the ghastliness of what the daylight held for me. It was going to be so horrible and so boring and I didn’t have the strength.

Low blood sugar, of course. The subdued metabolic function characteristic of the early morning, dispersed by activity and nourishment. The curtains were grey now and Elsie was stirring on my arm. Her eyes opened and she sat up as if she were on a spring. My arm had gone to sleep. I rubbed it fiercely and life trickled back into it. Fuck the world. I would survive this and I wouldn’t bother what anybody thought. Nobody was going to catch me showing weakness. I took Elsie under her armpits, threw her upwards and released her. She fell on the blanket with a shrick of terrified pleasure.

‘Do it again, Mummy. Do it again.’

The following day I made an adventure of our girls’ breakfast. Bacon and eggs and toast and jam and a grapefruit, and Elsie ate her half and deliriously purloined segments of mine. I had coffee. At half-past eight I drove Elsie to school.

‘What’s that tree like?’

‘A man with green hair and a green beard. What’s
that
tree like?’

‘I said tree already.’

‘No,
I
said,
I
said.’

‘All right, Elsie. It looks… In this wind it looks like a green cloud.’

‘No, it doesn’t.’

‘Does.’

‘Doesn’t.’

‘Does.’

‘Doesn’t.’

The game finished in a crescendo of laughing contradiction.

On the drive back, the clouds had come into focus, the buildings were standing out more clearly against the sky. I had a sense of resolve. I would look after Elsie and I would work. All the rest was waste. I made myself more coffee and went into my study. On the computer I disposed of everything I had written so far. It was dross, the useless product of half-hearted activity. I looked through a file to remind myself of some figures and then I closed it and began to write. It was all in my head anyway. I could check the references later. I wrote for almost two hours without looking away from the screen. The sentences ran off my fingers, and I knew they were good. Like God creating the world. Just before eleven I heard the front door open. Sally. Time to refill my coffee mug anyway. As the kettle boiled, I gave her a brief, sanitized account of what had happened. My voice was level, my hands didn’t tremble, I didn’t blush. She didn’t care much and I didn’t care what she thought about it. Sam Laschen was in control once more. Sally began to clean and I returned to my study. At lunch-time I had a five-minute break. There was half a carton of pre-cooked lasagne in the fridge. I ate it cold. The era of proper food was past. After another hour I had finished a chapter. I clicked a couple of times with the mouse. Four and a half thousand words. At this rate the book would be finished in a couple of weeks. I reached into my filing cabinet and pulled out two folders of processed data. I worked my way through them very quickly, again to remind myself. It took only a few minutes before they were back in the cabinet. I opened a new file: Chapter Two. Definitions of Recovery.

A movement caught my eye. It was outside. A car. Baird and Angeloglou got out. For a moment a part of me assumed that this must be a sort of memory or a hallucination. This had happened yesterday. Was I replaying a horrible dream I had in my mind? It couldn’t be happening again. There was a knock at the door. It was just some routine matter, a form that needed signing or something.

When I opened the door, they were looking at each other shiftily.

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘We thought you might have heard something,’ said Baird.

‘Danny hasn’t rung, and if he bloody does…’

The two officers looked at each other again. What was up?

‘That’s not what we meant. Inside?’ said Baird in a dismal attempt at a casual tone. There were none of the usual smiles and winks. Baird looked like a man imitating professional police behaviour. Beads of sweat shone on his brow although it was cold and damp.

‘What’s this about?’

‘Please, Sam.’

I led them through and they sat side by side on my sofa like Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Baird was stroking the hairy back of his left hand with the fingers of his right. A man about to make a speech. Angeloglou was still, not catching my eye. His cheek-bones were accentuated by the tightness with which he held his face, his jaw.

‘Please sit down, Sam,’ Baird said. ‘I’ve got some bad news for you.’ He was still fingering his hand. The hairs were a startling red even more so than those on his head. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. ‘Yesterday evening we were called to a burnt-out car just outside Bayle Street, twenty miles or so along the coast. We quickly established that it was the Renault van registered to Daniel Rees.’

‘Christ,’ I said, ‘Did he crash…?’

‘There were two badly burned human bodies in the car. Dead bodies. The effects of the fire were extremely severe and there are some identification tests still to be carried out. But I should prepare yourself for the near-certainty that these are the bodies of Mr Rees and Miss Mackenzie.’

I tried to hold on to the moment, grasp the shock and confusion as if it were a precious state of mind. It could never get worse than this.

‘Did you hear what I said, Dr Laschen?’

Baird spoke softly, as if to a small child seated on his lap. I nodded. Not too hard. Nothing hysterical or over-eager.

‘Did you hear what I said, Dr Laschen?’

‘Yes, of course. Well, thank you, Mr Baird, for coming to tell me. I won’t take up any more of your time.’

Chris Angeloglou leaned forward.

‘Is there anything you would like to ask us? Anything you want to say?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, looking at my watch. ‘The problem is that it’s almost time for me to go and get… er… my child.’

‘Can’t Linda do that?’

‘Can she? I can’t…’

As Baird spoke I had been entirely clear about what was happening. While listening to the information I had also been observing with a professional interest the manner in which he conveyed painful news. And I had considered my own response with total clarity. I felt tears running down my face and realized I was crying with sobs that shook my whole body. I cried and cried until I felt myself almost gagging with all the grief and pain. I felt a hand on my shoulder and then a mug of tea was pressed against my lips and I felt surprised because not enough time seemed to have passed for tea to be made and brewed and poured out. I gulped and sipped some tea and burned my mouth. I tried to speak and couldn’t. I took some deep breaths and tried again.

‘Crashed?’ I asked.

Baird shook his head.

‘What?’ It was hardly more than a croak.

‘A note was found by the car.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It was addressed to you.’

‘To me?’ I said inertly.

‘The note is written by Miss Mackenzie. She writes that after the realization of what they have done, done to you, above all, they feel there is nothing to live for and they have elected to die together.’

‘They committed suicide?’ I asked stupidly.

‘That is our working assumption.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’ The two were silent. ‘Don’t you hear what I’m saying? It’s ridiculous and impossible. Danny would never, never, have killed himself. Under any circumstances. He… How did they?’

I looked at Baird. He had been clutching a pair of gloves in one hand and now he was twisting them, hard, as if he were trying to wring water out of them.

‘Is this something you need…?’

‘Yes.’

‘The car was set alight using a rag inserted into the petrol tank. It appears that they then shot themselves, each with a single shot to the head. A handgun was retrieved at the scene.’

‘A gun?’ I said. ‘Where did they get a gun from?’

Rupert swallowed painfully and shifted his position.

‘The gun was registered to Leopold Mackenzie,’ he murmured in a low voice.

It took me a moment to realize what I was hearing, and when I did realize I felt dizzy with rage.

‘Are you suggesting that Finn had gained possession of her father’s gun?’ Baird shrugged shamefacedly. ‘And that she had it in this house? Didn’t you know that Mackenzie had a gun and that it was missing?’

‘No,’ said Baird. ‘This is difficult for us and I know it must be difficult for you.’

‘Don’t patronize me, Rupert, with all your prepared psychological jargon.’

‘I didn’t mean that, Sam,’ Baird said softly. ‘I meant that it must be difficult for
you.
’

I started.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean this happening again, for a second time.’

I sank back in my chair, miserable and defeated.

‘You bastards. You have done your research, haven’t you?’

Twenty-Four

‘I can count to a hundred.’

‘No! Go on then.’

‘One, two, skip a few, ninety-nine, a hundred.’

I chuckled appreciatively, hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, dark glasses covering my bloodshot gaze.

‘And listen. Knock knock.’

‘Who’s there?’

‘Isobel.’

‘Isobel who?’

‘Isobel necessary on a bicycle? And listen, listen. How does Batman’s mummy call him in for supper?’

‘I don’t know. How does Batman’s mummy call him in for supper?’

‘Dinner-dinner-dinner-dinner, dinner-dinner-dinner-dinner. Batman!’

‘Who told you that one?’

‘Joshua who loves me and kisses me on the slide when Miss isn’t looking and we’re going to get married when we’re growed. And how many ears does Davy Crockett have?’

‘I don’t know, how many ears does Davy Crockett have?’

‘Three. A left ear, a right ear and a wild ear. I don’t understand that joke.’

‘Well, it’s a wild
front
ear. Who told it to you?’

‘Danny. Danny sang it one day, and then he laughed a lot.’

‘Look,’ I said brightly. ‘Here’s Kirsty’s house.’

Kirsty came to the door, white socks pulled firmly up to her plump knees, smocked blue dress with a crisp white collar, red coat trailing behind, shiny hair-slide in her shiny brown hair.

‘Isn’t Fing coming with us?’ she asked when she saw me and Elsie. Behind her, Mrs Langley was mouthing widely: ‘I-haven’t-told-her-yet.’

‘Fing’s…’ began Elsie importantly.

‘Not-today-Kirsty-but-we’re-going-to-have-a-lovely-time-and-where-are-your-swimming-things-and-jump-in-the-car-and-don’t-you-look-smart-and-up-you-go,’ I rattled out, as if I could push the question away if I spoke fast enough and long enough, replace it by thoughts of chloriney water and crisps afterwards, and an afternoon spent in the hot dark of the old cinema, where balding velvety seats flipped back and popcorn rolled along the floor, where cartoon characters could be bashed and squashed and dropped in boiling oil and still come back to life.

Mrs Langley leaned in through my window, looking avidly sympathetic, and placed a smooth hand over my callused one, which was clenching the steering-wheel. She files her nails, I thought.

‘If there’s anything I…’

‘Thank you. I’ll bring Kirsty back this afternoon.’ I grabbed away my hand and turned the key in the ignition. ‘Are you both belted in, girls?’

‘Yes,’ they chorused, sitting neatly side by side, two pairs of feet dangling in their patent-leather shoes, two eager faces.

‘OK, let’s go.’

Kirsty and Elsie floated decorously in their rubber rings and armbands, so buoyed up their torsos hardly got wet. Their white legs scampered in the water, their faces were pink with the sense of their own courage.

‘Look at me,’ said Kirsty. She slapped her nose and chin into the water for a nanosecond and came up triumphant with one lock of hair dripping. ‘I can go underwater. I bet you can’t do that.’

Elsie looked at me for a moment, my anxious little landlubber. I thought she would cry. Then she ducked her head down into the pool, struggling clumsily amid her bright orange floats.

‘I did it,’ she said. ‘I did it, Mummy, did you see?’

I wanted to pick her up and hold her.

‘My two little fish, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘Shall I be a shark?’

Under the water, I was weightless and half blind; my eyes squinted through the thick green water and the luminous legs swirled like seaweed; my hands held out for flickering ankles. The tiles were reassuringly only a few inches away from my submerged body. I heard the girls squeal and giggle as I floundered beneath them. I’m not a fish, not me. I only like solid ground.

In the changing room a teenage girl nudged her friend as I tugged vests over wet heads, forced stubborn feet into recalcitrant shoes and buckled stiff straps. She pointed at me with her eyes.

Chicken nuggets and chips and bright pink ice-lollies for lunch. Popcorn, savoury and sweet mixed, and fizzy orange in a huge cardboard cup with two stripy straws poking from the top. The girls watched a cartoon and I let the screen slip into a blur as I looked beyond it and they both held my hands, one sitting on either side of me. Their fingers were sticky, their heads were tilted towards my shoulders. The air all around us felt second-hand, overused. I tried to match my breath to theirs, but couldn’t. It came in ragged unsymmetrical tearings out of lungs that hurt. I put my dark glasses on as soon as we came out into the foyer.

‘Mummy.’

‘Yes, my love.’ Kirsty was safely returned to her mother and we were driving through a milky mist towards home.

‘You know in the video,’ except Elsie pronounced it ‘vidjo’, a surviving trace of baby-talk, the last frail brown leaf left hanging on the tree, ‘of
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?
’

‘Yes.’

‘When he’s killed by the wicked witch and he lies with the mouses?’

‘Yes.’

‘And then he comes back to life, he
does.
Well…’

‘No. Danny and Finn won’t come back like that. We’ll miss them and we’ll remember them, and we’ll talk about them to each other, you must talk to me whenever you want to, and they won’t be dead here.’ I put one hand against my thundering heart. ‘But we won’t see them again.’

‘But where are they? Are they in heaven now?’

Charred lumps of flesh, hilariously grinning skulls with burnt-out eyes, features pouring in a ghastly river down their ruined faces, melted limbs, on a metal tray in a fridge a few miles from where we were driving.

‘I don’t know, my sweetheart. But they are peaceful now.’

‘Mummy?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was I brave to put my head in the water?’

‘You were
very
brave; I was proud.’

‘Brave as a lion?’

‘Braver.’

As we drove towards the house, it looked as if a party was going on, looming out of the fog. A flock of white lights; a herd of cars. We pulled to a halt and I softly touched the tip of Elsie’s nose with my forefinger.

‘Beep,’ I said. ‘We’re going to run through these rude men with their cameras and their tape recorders. Put your head on my shoulder and let’s see if I can get to the door before you count to a hundred.’

‘One, two, skip a few…’

‘Your father and I think you ought to come and stay with us for a few days. Until all the fuss has died down.’

‘Mum, that’s…’ I paused, searching for what I ought to say. ‘Kind of you, but I’m all right. We have to stay here.’

My parents had arrived just after us. They marched into the house like two guards, left-right, chins up, eyes ahead. I was grateful for their resilience. I knew how much they must be hating all of this. They brought a fruit cake in a large maroon tin, a bunch of flowers wrapped in Cellophane and some Smarties and a colouring book for Elsie, who hates colouring books but loves Smarties. She took them off to the kitchen to eat meticulously, colour by colour, leaving the orange ones till last. My father made a fire. He stacked twigs in a neat pyre over half a firelighter and then arranged four logs on top. My mother made tea with a bustling air and thumped a hunk of fruit cake in front of me.

‘At least let us stay here then.’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘You can’t do everything by yourself.’

Something in the tone of my mother’s voice made me look at her. Beneath her glasses, her eyes swam; her lips were tautened against emotion. When had I last seen her cry? I leaned forward in my seat and touched her knee, under her thick wool skirt, awkwardly. When had I last touched her, apart from those stiff pecks on the cheek?

‘Let it be, Joan. Can’t you see Samantha’s upset?’

‘No! No, I
can’t
see she’s upset. That’s my point, Bill. She should be upset; she should be – be – prostrated. Her friend, I always did think she was sly that one and I told you so that day we met her, and her boyfriend run off together and kill themselves in a car and it’s all over the newspapers. And everything.’ She gestured vaguely at the window, at the world beyond. ‘And Samantha sits there as cool as anything, when all I want, all I want, is to
help.
’ She paused, and perhaps I would have leaned forward and hugged her then, but I saw her give a twitch and she said the final thing, the thing she must have promised herself not to say: ‘It’s not as if it’s the first time this has happened to Samantha.’

‘Joan…’

‘That’s all right, Dad,’ I said and I meant it. The pain of that being said to me by my mother was so intense that it almost became an astringent twisted pleasure.

‘Elsie shouldn’t be here at all,’ my mother said. ‘She should come away with us.’

She half-rose, as if she were going to make off with my daughter at once.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Elsie is with me.’ As if on cue, Elsie appeared in the living room, crunching on her last Smarties. I pulled her on to my lap and put my chin on her head.

There was a knock at the door.

‘Who is it?’ I called.

‘Me. Michael.’

I let him in, closing the door quickly behind him. He took off his coat and I saw he was wearing old jeans and a faded blue cotton shirt, but otherwise he looked relaxed, steady.

‘I’ve brought smoked salmon and brown bread and a bottle of Sancerre, I thought we might… oh, hello, Mrs Laschen, Mr Laschen.’

‘They’re just going, Michael,’ I said.

‘But Samantha, we’ve only just…’

My father nodded insistently at my mother and took her arm. I helped them on with their coats in silence and steered them to the door. My mother looked back at Michael and me. I don’t know which disquieted me more, her puzzlement or her approval.

Elsie was waiting for me in my bed that night. As I slipped under the cover, she shifted, wrapped a tentacle arm around my neck, butted her face into my shoulder, sighed. Then, with the miraculous ease that children have, she closed her eyes again and sank into sleep. I lay awake for a long time. Outside it was moonless and dark. Everyone had gone home; I could hear nothing but the wind in the trees, once or twice the faint shriek of a bird out at sea. If I put my hand to Elsie’s chest I could feel her heartbeat. Her breath blew warmly against my neck. Every so often she would murmur something indistinguishable.

Michael hadn’t stayed long that evening. He had opened the wine and poured me a glass, which I’d knocked back without tasting, as if it were schnapps. He had spread the butter he’d brought with him on to slices of the bread and covered them with smoked salmon, which reminded me horribly of raw human flesh, so I nibbled a bit of the crust and left it at that. We didn’t talk much. He mentioned a couple of details from the Belfast conference he thought might interest me. I said nothing but stared at the dying embers of the fire my father had made. Anatoly wrapped his black length around our legs and purred loudly.

‘It seems unreal, impossible, doesn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’ve known Finn for years,’ he said. ‘Years.’

I said nothing. I felt unable even to nod.

‘Well.’ He stood up and pulled on his coat. ‘I’m going to go, Sam. Will you be able to sleep? I could give you something.’

I waved him away. When he had gone, I went upstairs. I held Elsie against me and stared, wide-eyed, dry-eyed, at the silent dark.