The Listeners

by Anthony J. Quinn

  ‘I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable.’

  ‘No, you haven’t made me uncomfortable.’ She could feel Alice gripping her wrist, digging her nails into her skin. ‘If I’m uncomfortable, it’s not your fault.’

  He tried to change the subject. ‘I’ve often wondered what makes me keep listening to people, trying to analyse them. Do you ever think about detective work in that way?’

  ‘I’m too busy to think like that,’ she said. However, the truth was she thought about it often, not every day, but frequently enough to question the motivation that had led her straight to the police training college six months after the birth of her first child.

  ‘I suspect you have some trauma, a memory that keeps haunting you.’ He probed with a natural lightness that must have been perfected during countless hours with his patients. She heard his breathing change. She was being read, again, systematically through his senses. His nose twitched as he took in her scent, waiting for her silent messages to reach him. She felt a crawling sensation around her neck. The fingers of her right hand stretched out and gripped her daughter’s hand. Her back shifted against the wall, but there was no place of retreat in the crowded corridor.

  ‘You don’t need to say anything more,’ he said with a little smile as though they were sharing an intimate joke. He turned his attention to Alice, saying, ‘What a lovely little girl.’

  She stood back, allowing a couple of harassed mothers to pass through the corridor, and then her phone rang. Seeing that it was her chief inspector, Simon Bates, she excused herself from Cavanagh’s company.

  ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you, Carla?’ said Bates.

  ‘No, not at all.’

  The sound of his voice made the air in the corridor seem suffocatingly domestic. She hesitated, adjusting her voice to the correct professional tone, feeling the gears of her life shift painfully. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Something has just come up and I thought of you.’ He began describing the case, an apparent confession to murder made by a patient at a local psychiatric hospital. Carla passed the phone to her other ear, and led Alice into the main room.

  ‘You still haven’t given the present to Vicki,’ she whispered, giving her a little nudge. She sidestepped a helpless mother who was hovering over a boy throwing a tantrum on the floor, his limbs flailing and kicking against her.

  ‘So you’re putting me in charge of the investigation?’ Carla asked. Alice followed her with her gaze, pleading mutely that she stay with her, but Carla made a discreet exit and slipped out the front door.

  ‘I wouldn’t call it an investigation at this stage,’ said the DCI. ‘Patients at that particular hospital are always claiming to have committed crimes. Most of them are living in complete fantasy land. However, the hospital authorities have a duty to bring the claims to our attention.’

  ‘What should I do then?’

  ‘Keep an open mind. Go over the details of the patient’s story from the beginning to the end and make sure you don’t miss anything. Then write the report and have it on my desk by Thursday morning. I’ll evaluate what action to take from there.’

  The DCI said he was also assigning Harry Morton to the case, to help oversee her interview with the patient. The psychiatrist at the hospital who reported the confession was a Dr Robert Llewyn. Bates had worked with him in the past, and trusted his judgement. He went over the information that had been passed to the police, and then ended the call. She put away her phone and went in search of Vicki’s mother, Deborah.

  Mercifully, there was no sign of Cavanagh, and the corridor had emptied of people. Through the half-opened door of the kitchen, she glimpsed a group of children’s faces, and then the door slammed shut as if a sudden gust of wind had caught it. She stood in the corridor, without anyone, child or adult, paying her the slightest bit of attention. To occupy herself she located Alice’s coat from the hangers and waded deeper into the house. She murmured hello to a group of women but none of them replied. She began to see the party from Alice’s point of view, dragged to a strange house and trapped in a series of rooms with barely known schoolmates. More than unsettling, it felt oppressive.

  Framed by the door into the garden, she saw Deborah with Vicki and Alice, their backs to her. As she drew closer, they turned back into the house. Vicki was frowning as usual. However, it was not Alice holding Deborah’s other hand; it was a different child altogether with freckles and a sulky face. Carla looked at Deborah as though she were a thief who had substituted her child for another.

  ‘Where’s Alice?’ she asked, realising that ten minutes must have passed since she’d last seen her.

  ‘Oh, I think she went into the garden with Derek to look at the bees.’

  Cavanagh kept bees as a hobby and had promised the children a tour of the hives. She walked down through the garden and, before she knew it, was amid the buzzing flashes of the bees. From inside the white hives there rose a hectic roaring sound, drowning out the laughter and shouts from the party. She hunted through the clumps of wild flowers, brambles and nettles, her efforts sending bees into the air and whirring down the hedge, but there was no sign of Alice or Derek. The moments ticked by.

  She went back into the house. Amid the pink balloons, the festoons of birthday bunting and the mingling mothers and fathers, she thought she glimpsed a child’s soft hand gripped by a hand that looked more like a wrinkled claw. She heard a cry like Alice’s and pushed through the crowd. She turned her head, searching the sea of faces, hunting for another sign. She saw a flickering movement, what appeared to be a child’s bare legs running for dear life down the garden, but the image remained indistinct and she was not sure if it was her daughter or not. More sounds trickled through the murmuring conversation. A girl shouting and crying. Was Alice trapped somewhere? She listened carefully, but the plaintive sounds grew faint. Then a rush of children’s voices engulfed her as the birthday cake appeared and everyone began singing ‘Happy Birthday’. Still there was no sign of her daughter.

  She looked in all the rooms of the ground floor and then checked the bedrooms upstairs, the bathrooms, the wardrobes, the closets, and all the drawers of the cupboards, even the ones that were too small for Alice to crawl into, as though her daughter might have been pulled through the thinnest of apertures, and every chink of darkness had to be exposed and investigated.

  She returned to the party and asked Deborah for help. The conversations between the parents seemed to fade. Following behind her, Deborah’s face grew uneasy, frowning with the effort of her reassuring words, which were beginning to sound false to Carla’s ears.

  She stood still, trying to collect her thoughts. She should have kept her daughter at her side. She was the only adult Alice knew at the party. She had forgotten her role as a mother, trusting that her child would stay close by and not move from the one spot. The faces of the other parents began to blur into bright points, their glasses and the bald heads of some of the fathers, and the queasy realisation came to her that the men were all strangers to her. She thought of ringing her police colleagues and organising a search party. However, the relaxed behaviour and advice of the other mothers counselled her to delay raising the alarm. They all seemed to have coped with disappearing children before. Everyone was looking for Alice now, and Deborah kept reassuring her that she could not have gone very far. They searched through the house again. In her distraction, she even glanced into the mirrors in the bathrooms and bedrooms, searching for a trace of her daughter, seeing only her own face, blazing now with maternal fear.

  She made her way to the bottom of the garden and looked back at the house. From here, she could see the building in its entirety. She checked all the windows on each of the floors, scanning the glass panes. Her eyes fixed upon a dormer window in the roof, its drab curtains making it seem cold and remote from the rest of the house. Somehow, she had not been able to access it from the inside. All her attention grew focused on that blind-looking attic window, the frames of the glass panes l
ike the bars of a tiny cage, the roof closing in from above, with just enough space for a little prisoner in red shoes to be hidden away from the rest of the birthday party. She felt the house’s weight tilt above her, bees whizzing past her face, and then she was running back up the garden and through the kitchen doors. She hauled herself up the stairs. At the top of them, she found a small door, hidden behind a plant stand, which led to a narrow flight of steps. As she climbed them, Deborah grabbed her by the arm.

  ‘Wait. That leads to Derek’s old counselling room. He always keeps it locked. No one’s been up there for years.’

  ‘I need to check inside,’ she said. She pulled free and wrenched at the handle, but the door did not budge. She rattled it harder. This was a secret room, hidden away at the top of the house. No other way to describe it.

  ‘All right,’ said Deborah. ‘I’ll get the key.’

  She returned with an ancient-looking key. She carefully inserted it into the lock. As soon as the handle gave, Carla pushed forward and the door flew open. She stumbled into a small dark room dominated by two large leather chairs set at an angle to each other and covered in dust, but no sign of Alice. She went over to the window and pulled back the shabby curtains. The grey light diluted the shadows. The room was like a museum to an abandoned career with Cavanagh’s achievements as a therapist proudly on display, certificates framed and hung on the walls in positions of prominence. A younger Cavanagh stared out from photographs with other serious-faced people. Shelves of dusty journals lined one of the walls.

  ‘Satisfied?’ asked Deborah, standing at the door.

  From below, the front door slammed shut and a voice shouted up, ‘I’ve found her. I’ve found her. She was hiding between the cars on the street.’

  Carla rushed down the stairs and into the hall, where she met the relaxed, dark eyes of Derek. He was holding Alice in his arms. Her daughter looked just as she had done when Carla had last seen her. There were no marks on her skin or signs of disarray in her clothing that might have suggested an abduction. Her expression was wide-eyed but composed, no message in her features to suggest an ordeal or that anything untoward had happened to her.

  Alice said nothing as Carla lifted her from Derek’s arms and held her tight. The blankness of her response did not completely dissolve the dread in Carla’s stomach. She thanked Derek and Deborah, and the other parents. Everyone smiled at her and Alice, even the children. Slowly the party mood returned and the children went back to laughing and shouting, glad the celebrations were not yet over.

  However, Carla was in no mood to stay. She said her goodbyes and carried Alice into the street. It was a bright afternoon in the town of Peebles, and the pedestrians she met were happy and smiling. Having Alice in her arms should have been a cause for happiness, and she ought to have returned their smiles, but she felt frightened and also strangely elated. A pressure built up behind her breastbone, intensifying into a form of euphoria. Some deep instinct had been stirred up in her soul, and she gathered Alice tighter to her chest, running the rest of the way home.

  *

  She met her husband in the hallway and decided not to mention what had happened. He was rocking their six-month-old son, Ben, in his pram, and the house had not been tidied from breakfast time. David’s face was rigid with frustration as he tried to settle the baby to sleep. However, as soon as he saw Alice, he bent down to her with a look of concern and asked, ‘What happened to your other princess shoe, pet?’

  To her surprise, Carla saw that one of Alice’s feet was bare.

  ‘The man took it,’ said Alice.

  ‘What man?’

  ‘The man with the beard. He said it was dirty.’

  ‘Then we’ll have to go back and get it.’

  He stared at Carla. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, tight-throated, even though she felt as though she was going to start shaking again. She told him what had happened at the party, how Alice had been missing for about twenty minutes. As she spoke, she felt the pressure return under her breastbone.

  When she had finished, David knelt down beside Alice. ‘What happened at the party?’ he asked.

  ‘I was hiding in the street, and then the man found me.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘I had cake with chocolate sauce. Vicki says her mummy cooked it for her. She said home-made cakes are the best.’

  David half-patted, half-caressed her head. ‘I think Vicki is right. Home-made is always the best.’

  Later, over a coffee, David told her to relax, reminding her that nothing bad could have happened to Alice. He watched her with a look of concern.

  ‘I didn’t look after her,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I let her out of my sight for too long. I was negligent in front of all those other parents. There was a moment when I felt so out of control and dangerous I could have torn the house down.’

  David gave her his full attention over his coffee. It had been a while since she’d felt the force of his cool blue eyes.

  ‘I’ve never seen this side of you before,’ he said.

  ‘What side of me?’

  ‘Your crazy maternal side. You’ve come back from a three-year-old’s birthday party like a wounded animal.’

  ‘Our daughter was missing. I thought someone had taken her. And it was my fault. I left her alone in a house full of strangers.’

  ‘I don’t know how child kidnappers operate, but I’d have thought it unlikely that a stray one was invited to a children’s party.’

  ‘Children disappear all the time, even in towns like this,’ she said. However, even as she spoke her voice weakened, knowing what she had said wasn’t entirely true.

  David rolled his eyes. It was clear he did not believe predators roamed the streets of snug little Peebles, waiting for the chance to snatch an unsuspecting child. She recalled those terrible moments in the garden and then climbing the stairs to the attic, and tried to analyse her feelings. The intensity triggered inside her had been strong enough to turn her understanding of motherhood on its head, and make everything else seem meaningless. Where before she had lived and moved easily in the world of maternal instincts, now she saw that it was the world of maternal instincts that lived and moved within her with a frightening force. Not knowing the whereabouts of Alice was all that had been necessary for the meaning of her old life to be lost, and everything she had striven for to cease to matter.

  She rose in the middle of the night to check on Alice and Ben. When she returned to bed, David murmured, in between a bout of snoring, ‘Sleep now, go back to sleep, now,’ as though he could sense her inner fears. She snuggled up against him, but all she could see in her mind’s eye was the cold attic window and its shabby curtains, and somewhere hidden within, a tiny red shoe covered in dirt.

  4

  Carla usually found conversation with her colleague Harry Morton tough, and his reticence when they drove on the A72 out of Peebles to Deepwell Hospital diluted any enthusiasm she might have felt at being handed a fresh assignment.

  ‘Ever been to Deepwell before?’ she asked.

  He nodded with his usual aura of weary resignation. His furrowed face leaned towards the windscreen as he changed gears, his long hair falling down his bearded cheeks, as though he were deliberately trying to prevent Herron from reading his expression or glimpsing his eyes.

  ‘What was it like?’

  He paused, thinking, and then he turned to her briefly, his stiff, mask-like expression impossible to read or get close to in any way. She had only exchanged a few words with Morton in the six months she had been working in Peebles and knew practically nothing about him personally. Other officers at the station found him distant and off-hand, even arrogant, but she regarded him with more than a trace of pity. He lacked the swagger of confidence that emboldened the other male officers in the team. Instead, she sensed something miserable and fragile about him as he clung to his aloof manner.

  ‘You’ll see when we get there,’ he said.
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br />   Well, don’t take too bloody long, she thought to herself. Her thoughts changed direction, rehearsing various lines she might say. She remembered a joke by a mentally ill shoplifter she had helped arrest during her first post in Edinburgh. The man had been caught at an off-licence, shortly after absconding from a psychiatric hospital. When Herron had read the charges to him, he had replied, ‘It’s not a frontal lobotomy I need, it’s a bottle in front of me.’ It was a good line, but she couldn’t summon up the nerve to tell it to Morton. She was afraid he would not react at all, and that he would just stare at her with that morose expression of his.

  That doesn’t sound like you talking, her father used to say when she tried to fill the silences between them with a ready-made story. However, the greater the quiet in the car, the more she felt compelled to say something. She even contemplated sticking her tongue out at Morton’s profile to provoke a reaction. She kept wondering what he really thought of her as a detective and colleague. Perhaps he was annoyed at having to partner a newly recruited officer on one of her first assignments.

  The road began to rise and descend through a landscape of hills and sheep farms. After several miles, the only signs of habitation were stone structures of unknown purpose, tumbling cairns, low-slung ruins taken over by sheep, and ancient hill-forts stranded in a sea of heather. At the bottom of a valley, she saw what might have been the remnants of an entire village swallowed up by the poverty of a previous century. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the landscape had grown more forested, and it was raining. The smell of pine trees drifted into the car. They were heading southwards over the hills, but the encroaching forests made the road appear directionless. Morton did not seem to have noticed that she had fallen asleep. She began to suspect that perhaps the older detective had no particular opinion about her capabilities. Perhaps he had passed no judgement upon her as a detective or a human being, and had a complete lack of interest in her feelings. She relaxed at the thought that nothing she could say or do would get a reaction from this world-weary policeman.