Where We Belong

by Anstey Harris

  I sit on the bed with my head in my hands. I remember despair, my companion for so long. Despair wraps its arms around me, cradles me and welcomes me back. It whispers to me, ‘How did you get here? How did this happen? You know nothing about him at all.’ And it’s true, I don’t know where he comes from, where he grew up. I haven’t any idea who his family might be, where they are. And because of that, I don’t know where he might have gone.

  I text him, four, five, six times in a row. I tell him that he needn’t be scared of Mike Green, that Mike has gone and we can call the police. Despair asks me who I think Mike Green might be and I have to answer that I’ve no clues, nothing to go on at all.

  There is a light knock on my door. I spring up but lose the moment of hope as Malcolm’s voice says, ‘Cate? Are you in there?’

  I clear my throat, shake life into my legs and arms. ‘Sorry, Malcolm, yes. Do you need to go?’

  ‘Someone needs to lock up.’

  I open the door and step out into the hall. Malcolm has the big set of museum keys in his hand. ‘I’ve got my own keys but I didn’t want to leave these downstairs. I can’t find Araminta or Leo to give them to. Or Patch,’ he says and looks puzzled.

  ‘It’s fine, Malcolm. I’ll sort it and put the alarm on.’ I smile at him and hope he believes the fake confidence. ‘Leo’s at the pub with Curtis and some mates.’

  ‘I might well see him in there.’ Malcolm hands me the keys and walks off down the corridor.

  And then it’s only me. I’m alone in the museum. In all these weeks, this is the first time I’ve been absolutely by myself here.

  The curtain on the landing window ripples slightly, though the window is closed. I look at the paintings against the deep green walls of the landing: each person watching me with Richard’s eyes, Leo’s mouth. I am not alone here, even if I might feel it at the moment. I nod my thanks to them and walk down the stairs.

  This has to be the day that the alarm plays up. I do have Araminta’s mobile number but I need to know what I’m going to say to her before I make that call. It would make things worse to ring her just to say that I can’t set the alarm on my own and could she pop back and do that from wherever she has decided to take herself off to: no, I need to give her a bit of space. Maybe she’ll regret her decision all on her own and come back without me having to say anything at all. The only way I can do this is to walk round the museum and see which doors are open. Something must be unlocked and stopping the circuit from being completed. It gives me a little shiver when I think about the day I met Patch, the day someone opened the door marked ‘private’.

  But there is no one here to look but me. I whisper to Ghost Richard to come with me.

  *

  The museum seems bigger than ever now that it’s completely empty. The animals stare at me as I pass by: each beady black eye following my every step. I know that if I glance back, they will be looking right at me, so I concentrate on walking calmly ahead and trusting them to stay still and silent.

  The last room to check – everywhere else is exactly as it should be and, thank God, no scary open doors leading into big dark storerooms – is the Japanese gallery. I pause in the doorway to try Patch’s phone again. This is the room where I met him, where I started to wonder for the first time if I could love anyone after Richard.

  There isn’t the same panic in the silent gallery, the same burning terror, now that Patch’s phone rings out, as the day I rang Richard’s and – with each ring that went unanswered – knew with more and more certainty that he was dead.

  Nothing will ever be as bad as that.

  *

  I check everything: the red cordon rope around the dogs of Fo with their carved jade snarls, the maroon lacquered chairs that seated emperors long before they ended up here. I rattle the doors to the glass case that contains a glazed brick from the Great Wall of China and an explanation card that says how Colonel Hugo put it in his bag while the guide was looking the other way. Even now, under these circumstances, that makes me smile.

  Everything is fine, tucked up and locked up, exactly as it should be. There is one place left to check, the alcove where I first met Patch: where he stood doing the intricate sketches of the netsuke. I remember his artist’s heart: his kindness and – in spite of all his talent – his ordinariness: he will be back.

  The tiny brass key that shuts the netsuke case is in the lock. The door has swung open and hangs – motionless – like an accusation.

  Each walnut shelf has a line of faint marks on it: the dust ghosts of the netsuke.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I have to choose what to believe. I can call Andrew, the policeman who was so kind after the fire – his number is still in my phone, my phone is in my pocket.

  The second I call Andrew this is a crime: I have to believe it is a crime. Perhaps, if it stays inside these four walls – rests here with the other secrets of Hatters – it needn’t be that dramatic. Perhaps Patch’s visitor – Mike Green or whatever his real name was – took these. Perhaps that’s why he was here. In the back of my mind, an insistent tiny voice, an echo I can’t turn off, whispers that it might not be Patch’s friend who did it. That Patch is not here.

  ‘Add it up,’ whispers the voice and I ‘Shhh’ it loudly in the silent room.

  Perhaps Araminta intends to pay for her new life with the sale of these miniature sculptures, sell off the rat and the drowning sailors and the Lilliputian chickens in their ivory cages.

  The voice scoffs inside my head and I throw my hands over my eyes, hiding from the truth of this.

  I check my watch. It is only 7 p.m.; Leo is likely to be in the pub for another hour or two. I conjure up the image of him and Curtis, Sophie and Martin, playing pool as doubles, pound coins stacked on the edge of the table to claim the right to be the next players. They will be laughing, eating crisps and tying the bags into tiny perfect knots. They are innocent and unaware. I wish I was there with them.

  *

  Of course, I make the call to Andrew, I have no choice. I know, because Araminta explained after the fire, that the netsuke are not insured against theft. I know, because I have run tours around this building, googled, and read up on the subject, that they are highly collectable all over the world and worth well in excess of a million pounds. They are not the kind of item that people will necessarily demand provenance for, not the serious collectors in Japan, America, China. From the basic research I’ve done, I know that these are incredible examples of the art: I remember the microscopic fine lines of Patch’s beautiful sketches.

  Andrew arrives ten minutes after I’ve made the call. I was cagey about what had happened, fudged round his question about whether I’d be better calling 999 than a CID sergeant who happens to live in the town.

  ‘This is a serious crime,’ Andrew says. ‘I will have to ring it in. Now, not tomorrow.’

  I nod my head.

  ‘Do you want to call Leo, get him home before it all kicks off ?’

  As he says it, my phone pings a text. Please let it be Patch’s innocence, a message that describes the terrible mix-up, explains where he’s gone. It’s Leo. He’s upstairs in our corridor, and is wondering where I am. I call him.

  ‘I’m in the oriental gallery. The policeman, Andrew, is here too. Do you want to come down?’

  I can hear the tiredness in his voice when he speaks, the kind of tiredness two pints and lots of laughing brings on. ‘I’m going to have an early night. We had chips out so I’m not hungry.’ The simplicity of his world.

  It’s easier for me, less painful, to have this straight in my head before I try to explain it to Leo. ‘I’ll do my best not to wake you when I come up.’ He loved Patch too.

  ‘And Araminta?’ Andrew asks. ‘She might want to know before the police start crawling all over the museum.’

  ‘She’s not here. And I don’t know where she is.’

  Andrew smiles slightly. ‘Oh, I do,’ he says. ‘I saw her this morning coming out of the
B&B on the seafront. I did wonder.’

  ‘I need to talk to her, Andrew, before this gets any bigger.’

  He nods, gestures towards the empty case, the clear glass that I’m sure will show no fingerprints at all. ‘I’ll ring it in. Get things started. We’ll need to speak to all of you tomorrow. Do you have any way of locking this gallery off so it doesn’t accidentally get touched?’

  I nod that I can, wondering how best to do it. There are lots of things I’m going to have to work out how to do – things I had never expected.

  ‘The first twenty-four hours are the most important in finding out what’s happened – and where we go from here. Our computers are probably the best way forward during the night. Samson’s fingerprints will be everywhere around here and, I’d bet my career, that we don’t find anything on the cabinet from our mysterious Mike Green.

  ‘I’ll get a team here as soon as possible, Cate. Can you leave your phone on overnight – they may arrive in the small hours?’

  I don’t know how on earth he thought I was going to turn it off.

  *

  I set my alarm for 6 a.m., but I needn’t have – I don’t sleep a wink. I text Patch over and over. The texts start sad and, by the time the dawn light starts to creep across the moist cobwebs of the garden, they are fully angry.

  I know Araminta well enough to predict that she will have gone to bed early last evening and got up with the day, even in her B&B.

  *

  The town is still sleeping. A seagull pecks aggressively at the opening of a litter bin, bobbing and diving for yesterday’s fish and chips. In the distance, ships silhouette against a perfect sky. Until yesterday I would have looked at them with envy, wondering where their journey began, where it will end: now I wonder who is on the boat, and what they are running from.

  The newsagent’s shop is the only sign of human life. A woman comes out to put up the sign with today’s headline on, written in large upper case letters with a thick black pen. Tomorrow’s headline will be us, we will be the news: today’s mundane problems will seem infinitesimal.

  I pass a tiny pub, its window almost as wide as the building, and a greengrocer’s yet to put out this morning’s coloured displays of the late strawberries, fat raspberries.

  I text Araminta’s phone. ‘I’m outside the B&B. Please come down. We need to talk.’ I add a kiss, then take it off, then add it again. I press send.

  The front of the little boarding house is the best of local architecture: round black flints stud the cottage walls and a twining rose climbs and clambers in and out of the porch over the front door and up into the eaves. A sparrow hops across a hydrangea bush in the tiny front garden, skipping from blousy flower to fat green leaf. There are worse places to wait.

  On the other side of the road, the sea laps quietly at the shore. Pebbles drag into the shallows with a shoosh: it is calm and slow and I try to match my breathing to it.

  ‘Cate?’ Araminta is behind me, she must have come out of the side door.

  I turn round to face her. She is pale, tired. It can’t have been easy for her sleeping in a strange bed: the B&B must have felt so restrictive compared to the long wide corridors of Hatters.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say without introduction. ‘I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry you’re here, I’m sorry we’re not better friends.’ I take a step towards her. ‘I’m sorry I killed your fox.’ It’s the first time I’ve said it.

  ‘That was an accident. It couldn’t be helped.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have lied about it.’

  She thinks for a moment before she speaks. ‘We have a tradition – at Hatters – of not telling the truth, not whole truths. A long tradition of secrets.’

  We have turned to face the last tufts of sunrise in the east, and fallen into gentle step next to each other. We walk slowly along the front.

  ‘I have more to tell you, I’m afraid.’

  She thinks in silence for a moment and the only noise is the screeching of the wheeling gulls, momentarily drowning the rhythm of the sea. ‘Maybe I should be telling you things.’ Another pause. A seagull shouts through it. ‘I lent Patch the money to get out of his contract at Pear Tree Cottage,’ Araminta says. ‘I should have told you that.’

  My stomach clenches. I feel sick. ‘I did too.’

  She nods, almost as though she expected me to say that.

  ‘I came to tell you something else. Something worse, I’m afraid.’ Our elbows are almost touching as we walk along, I consider looping my arm through hers in support but we are not that intimate.

  ‘The netsuke are gone.’ I think of the beautiful sketches, the horror on the faces of the sailors drowning in their junk, the tiny toggles holding their hats under their chins in the invisible wind.

  Araminta is impassive, unreadable.

  ‘Shall we sit, Cate?’ she says, and her voice sounds so much older than it did a couple of days ago, so much more exhausted.

  There is a bench facing the sea, mahogany with a small brass plaque screwed to the back of it. ‘For Ken and Jess, who loved this place,’ I read as we sit down. I wonder if Ken and Jess got to grow old together, sit on this bench or one like it and talk about the minutiae of their day. It’s not Patch I picture when I think about it, it’s Richard.

  ‘Was it Patch?’ she asks and catches me by surprise.

  I nod. My mouth is open but I cannot bring myself to say yes, cannot let my mouth say what my brain won’t process.

  She closes her eyes slightly against the sunlight, looks out to sea. ‘I had my suspicions. There are a couple of other things missing. Small things but . . .’ She shrugs her shoulders slightly and her voice trails away.

  I close my eyes against the warm day: I want to hide somewhere; crawl into bed and tug the covers over my head; climb down into the abandoned ice house in the dark, holding the spiders and worms responsible for keeping people away. ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

  Her sigh whispers away across the tops of the waves. ‘I couldn’t risk the small steps forward I’d made with you. My relationship with you and Leo is too important. They were small things.’

  ‘Like what?’ My heart is pulsing in my ears. I don’t want to hear this and yet, at the same time, I don’t doubt any of it.

  ‘A little pendant that belonged to Harriet. A Meissen mirror frame that was in the billiard room.’

  ‘Was the pendant in your room?’

  ‘It was in my jewellery box.’

  I look down at my feet. I’m wearing flip-flops, perfect for the beach. To anyone who walks past we must look like carefree holidaymakers – an elderly woman, conservatively dressed in a twinset, and her daughter in a sundress and flip-flops; we are anything but. ‘You should have said.’

  ‘I couldn’t be sure it was him.’

  ‘And I would have stupidly assumed it was Curtis.’ I exhale. ‘And gone off on one.’ I put my head in my hands, my elbows on my knees. I have made a terrible mess of this: just as we were coming out of the woods. I have made stupid, delusional choices. ‘Andrew, the policeman, is coming to the house this morning. That’s why I’ve come so early, to take you back up there with me.’

  She straightens her legs in front of her. Her thin tights have nylon in and it shines an arc of light across her bony shins. Beside her my calves look sturdy, my bare skin tanned from a summer outside the city. Araminta flexes her feet, toes up, toes down. ‘I have other things to tell you before we talk to Andrew,’ she says. ‘Some of which Andrew already knows.’

  A cormorant skims the surface of the sea, stops and bobs – black in the water – in front of us. He dives for a fish and is gone.

  ‘This isn’t the first time things have been stolen from Hatters, or that there’s been a thief behind the scenes,’ Araminta says. ‘Within the family, as it were.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  ‘It’s going to take a lot of telling,’ Araminta says. I can see the reflection of the sea in her ice-blue eyes, the sparkle of the sun
on the horizon. I can’t tell whether the sun has made her eyes water or whether it’s going to make her cry, this story from the past: she is as composed as ever.

  ‘We could get a cup of tea?’ she says. The little tea shack along the beach is starting to put out its chairs and tables, ready to catch the first of the dog walkers. She hesitates slightly as she goes to get up and I offer her my hand. She takes it without comment and gets to her feet.

  The tea hut is right on the prom. A long silver rail separates the wooden tables and chairs from the pebbles. The man inside waves at us to take a seat and points to the sticky menus he has put in little wooden holders in the middle of each table.

  ‘I’d like to sit as far away as possible,’ Araminta says and we choose a table right by the edge, out of view of the village and past the end of the road. The only people going past us will be running or walking their dogs. We will be able to talk here.

  ‘We have about an hour,’ I say to Araminta once we’ve ordered our drinks; a pot of tea for one and a coffee. ‘Then we have to get back for Andrew.’

  ‘It won’t take long,’ she says and stops for a moment as the man puts the tray of drinks down in front of us. ‘Which is ironic, considering the lifetime I’ve held on to it.’ She shoos the man away and pours the first cup from the pot. ‘It happened once before. Patch isn’t the first person to steal from the museum and you’re not the first person to trust someone in error.’ She takes a sip of the hot tea. ‘Love does that. It makes you blind.’

  And then she is silent again, long enough that I think she might be changing her mind, holding on to Hatters’ secrets after all.

  ‘This is wrong, Cate.’ Araminta sounds stronger, more definite. ‘The secrets I am about to tell you belong to the house. I can’t do it here.’

  ‘I completely understand,’ I say and stand up. ‘My car is along by the green. Let’s go home.’ I leave a five-pound note on the table to cover our barely touched drinks and we walk across to the car.

  *

  We are pretty much silent on the drive back. The crunch of the gravel as we pull into the drive is familiar, comforting. You can’t see from the outside that anything is different here.