The Night Ferry

by Michael Robotham

  Farther down the street is a triangular garden with benches and a playground surrounded by a semicircle of plane trees and a copper beech. Something catches my eye beneath the lower branches.

  When soldiers are trained to hide in the jungle, they are told four main things that will give them away: movement, shape, shine and silhouette. Movement is the most important. That’s what I notice. A figure stands from a bench and begins walking away. I recognize his gait.

  It is strange how I react. For years, whenever I have conjured up Donavon’s face, panic has swelled in the space between my heart and lungs. I’m not frightened of him now. I want answers. Why is he so interested in Cate Beaumont?

  He knows I’ve clocked him. His hands are out of his pockets, swinging freely as he runs. If I let him reach the far side of the park I’ll lose him in the side streets.

  Rounding the corner, I accelerate along the path which is flanked by a railing fence and tall shrubs. An old Royal Mail sorting office is on the opposite corner, with tall windows edged in painted stone. Turning left, I follow the perimeter fence. The exit is ahead. Nobody emerges. He should be here by now.

  I pause at the gate, listening for hard heels on the pavement. Nothing. A motorcycle rumbles to life on the far side of the park. He doubled back. Clever.

  Run, rabbit, run. I know where you live.

  My hallway smells of bleach and the stale backdraft of a vacuum cleaner. My mother has been cleaning. That’s one of the signs that my life isn’t all that it should be. No matter how many times I complain that I don’t need a cleaner, she insists on catching a bus from the Isle of Dogs just to “straighten a few things up.”

  “I am defrosting the freezer,” she announces from the kitchen.

  “It doesn’t need defrosting. It’s automatic.”

  She makes a pfffhh sound. Her blue-and-green sari is tucked up into her support stockings, making her backside appear enormous. It is an optical illusion just like her eyes behind her glasses, which are as wet and brown as fresh cow dung.

  She is waiting for a kiss on the cheek. I have to bend. She is scarcely five feet tall and shaped like a pear, with sticky-out ears that help her hear like a bat and X-ray vision that only mothers possess. She also has an oddly selective sense of smell, which can pick up the scent of perfume from fifty feet, yet allows her to sniff the crotches of my four brothers’ underpants to establish if they need washing. I feel like retching at the thought of it.

  “Why is there a padlock on my Hari’s door?”

  “Privacy, perhaps.”

  “I found it open.”

  That’s strange. Hari is always very careful about locking the door.

  Mama holds my face in her hands. “Have you eaten today?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re lying. I can tell. I have brought some dahl and rice.”

  She uses perfect schoolbook English, the kind they used to teach in the dark ages when she went to school.

  I notice a suitcase in the corner. For a moment I fear she might be planning to stay but one suitcase would never be enough.

  “Your father was cleaning out the attic,” she explains.

  “Why?”

  “Because he has nothing else to do.” She sounds exasperated.

  My father has retired after thirty-five years driving mainline trains and is still making the adjustment. Last week he went through my pantry checking use-by dates and putting them in order.

  Mama opens the suitcase. Lying neatly across the top is my old Oaklands school uniform. I feel a stab of recognition and remember Cate. I should phone the hospital for an update on her condition.

  “I didn’t want to throw things away without asking you,” she explains. There are scarves, scrapbooks, photo albums, diaries and running trophies. “I had no idea you had a crush on Mr. Elliot.”

  “You read my diary!”

  “It fell open.”

  Matricide is a possibility.

  She changes the subject. “Now you’re coming early on Sunday to help us cook. Make sure Hari wears something nice. His ivory shirt.”

  My father is having his sixty-fifth birthday and the party has been planned for months. It will include at least, one eligible Sikh bachelor, no doubt. My parents want me to marry a good Sikh boy, bearded of course; not one of those clean-shaven Indians who thinks he’s a Bollywood film star. This ignores the fact that all my brothers cut their hair, apart from Prabakar, the eldest, who is the family’s moral guardian.

  I know that all parents are considered eccentric by their children, but mine are particularly embarrassing. My father, for example, is a stickler for conserving energy. He studies the electricity bill every quarter and compares it to previous quarters and previous years.

  Mama crosses entire weeks off the calendar in advance so that she “doesn’t forget.”

  “But how will you know what day it is?” I once asked her.

  “Everyone knows what day it is,” she replied.

  You cannot argue with logic like that.

  “By the way, your phone is fixed,” she announces. “A nice man came this afternoon.”

  “I didn’t report a problem.”

  “Well, he came to fix it.”

  A chill travels across my skin as if someone has left a door open. I fire off questions: What did he look like? What was he wearing? Did he have identification? Mama looks concerned and then frightened.

  “He had a clipboard and a box of tools.”

  “But no ID.”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “He should have shown it to you. Did you leave him alone?”

  “I was cleaning.”

  My eyes dart from one object to the next, taking an inventory. Moving upstairs, I search my wardrobes and drawers. None of my jewelry is missing. My bank statements, passport and spare set of keys are still in the drawer. Carefully, I count the pages of my checkbook.

  “Perhaps Hari reported the fault,” she says.

  I call him on his mobile. The pub is so noisy he can barely hear me.

  “Did you report a problem with the phone?”

  “What?”

  “Did you call British Telecom?”

  “No. Was I supposed to?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  My mother rocks her head from side to side and makes concerned noises. “Should we call the police?”

  The question had already occurred to me. What would I report? There was no break-in. Nothing has been taken as far as I can tell. It is either the perfect crime or no crime at all.

  “Don’t worry about it, Mama.”

  “But the man—”

  “He was just fixing the telephone.”

  I don’t want her worrying. She spends enough time here already.

  Mama looks at her watch. If she doesn’t leave now she won’t be home for dinner. I offer to drive her and she smiles. It is the widest, most radiant smile ever created. No wonder people do as she says—they want to see her smile.

  On the bedside table is a book that I started reading last night. The bookmark is in the wrong place—twenty pages forward. Perhaps I moved it inadvertently. Paranoia is not reality on a finer scale; it is a foolish reaction to unanswered questions.

  7

  On her very last day of being sixteen Cate found her mother lying unconscious in the kitchen. She had suffered something called a hemorrhagic stroke, which Cate explained as being like a “brain explosion.”

  Ruth Elliot had two subsequent strokes in hospital, which paralyzed her down her right side. Cate blamed herself. She should have been at home. Instead we’d sneaked out to watch the Beastie Boys at the Brixton Academy. Cate let a guy kiss her that night. He must have been at least twenty-five. Ancient.

  “Maybe I’m being punished for lying,” she said.

  “But your mum is the one really being punished,” I pointed out.

  Cate started going to church after that—for a while at least. I went with her one Sunday, kneeling down and closing my
eyes.

  “What are you doing?” she whispered.

  “Praying for your mum.”

  “But you’re not an Anglican. Won’t your god think you’re changing teams?”

  “I don’t think it matters which god fixes her up.”

  Mrs. Elliot came home in a wheelchair, unable to talk properly. In the beginning she could only say one word: “When,” uttered more as a statement than a question.

  No matter what you said to her, she answered the same way.

  “How are you today, Mrs. Elliot?”

  “When, when, when.”

  “Have you had your tea?”

  “When, when, when.”

  “I’m just going to study with Cate.”

  “When, when.”

  I know it sounds horrible but we used to play tricks on her.

  “We have a biology test, Mrs. E.”

  “When, when.”

  “On Friday.”

  “When, when, when.”

  “In the morning.”

  “When, when.”

  “About half past nine.”

  “When, when.”

  “Nine thirty-four to be precise. Greenwich mean time.”

  They had a nurse to look after her. A big Jamaican called Yvonne, with pillow breasts and fleshy arms and mottled pink hands. She used to wear electric colors and men’s shoes and she blamed her bad complexion on the English weather. Yvonne was strong enough to scoop Mrs. Elliot up in her arms and lift her into the shower and back into her wheelchair. And she talked to her all the time, having long conversations that sounded completely plausible unless you listened closely.

  Yvonne’s greatest gift, however, was to fill the house with laughter and songs, lifting the gloom. She had children of her own—Caspar and Bethany—who had steel-wool hair and neon smiles. I don’t know about her husband—he was never mentioned—but I know Yvonne went to church every Sunday and had Tuesdays off and baked the best lime cheesecake in creation.

  On weekends I sometimes slept over at Cate’s place. We rented a video and stayed up late. Her dad didn’t come home until after nine. Tanned and tireless, he had a deep voice and an endless supply of corny jokes. I thought him unbelievably handsome.

  The tragedy of his wife’s condition gained a lot of sympathy for Barnaby. Women, in particular, seemed to admire his devotion to his crippled wife and how he went out of his way to make her feel special.

  Ruth Elliot, however, didn’t seem to share this admiration. She recovered her speech after months of therapy and attacked Barnaby at every opportunity, belittling him in front of Yvonne and his children and his children’s friends.

  “Did you hear that?” she’d say as the front door opened. “He’s home. He always comes home. Who does he smell like tonight?”

  “Now, now, Ruth, please,” Barnaby would say, but she wouldn’t stop.

  “He smells of soap and shampoo. He always smells of soap and shampoo. Why does a man shower before he comes home?”

  “You know the reason. I’ve been playing tennis at the club.”

  “He washes before he comes home. Washes the smell away.”

  “Ruth, darling,” Barnaby tried to say. “Let’s talk about this upstairs.”

  She would fight at his hands and then surrender as he lifted her easily from her chair and carried her up the sixteen stairs. We would hear her screaming and finally crying. He would put her to bed, settle her like a child, and then rejoin us in the kitchen for hot chocolate.

  When I first met Cate, Barnaby was already forty, but looked good for his age. And he could get away with things because he was so supremely confident. I saw him do it countless times at restaurants, on school open days and in the middle of the street. He could say the most outrageous things, using double entendres and playful squeezes and women would simply giggle and go weak at the knees.

  He called me his “Indian princess” and his “Bollywood beauty” and, one time, when he took us horse riding, I actually felt dizzy when he put his hands around my waist and lifted me down from the saddle.

  I would never have confessed it to anyone, but Cate guessed the truth. It wasn’t hard. I was always inviting myself back to her place and making excuses to talk to her father. She didn’t even know about the times I rode my bicycle past his office, hoping he might see me and wave. Twice I ran into open car doors.

  Cate, of course, found my infatuation hilarious beyond measure, thus ensuring I have never admitted to loving any man.

  See the sort of stuff I remember! It’s all coming back, the good, the bad and the ugly. My mind aches.

  I’ve been dreading this moment—seeing Barnaby again. Ever since the accident he has slept at Cate’s house, according to Jarrod. He hasn’t been to work or answered calls.

  The front door has stained-glass panels and a tarnished knocker in the shape of a naked torso. I grab her hips. Nobody answers. I try again.

  A lock turns. The door opens a crack. Unshaven and unwashed, Barnaby doesn’t want to see me. Self-pity needs his full attention.

  “Please, let me in.”

  He hesitates but the door opens. I move inside, stepping around him as though he’s surrounded by a force field. The place is musty and closed up. Windows need opening. Plants need watering.

  I follow him to the kitchen and dining area, open plan, looking out into the garden. Cate’s touches are everywhere from the French provincial dining table to the art deco posters on the walls. There are photographs on the mantel. One of them, a wedding picture, shows Cate in a twenties flapper dress trimmed with mother-of-pearl.

  Folding himself onto a sofa, Barnaby crosses his legs. A trouser cuff slides up to reveal a bald shin. People used to say he was ageless and joke about him having a portrait in his attic. It’s not true. His features are too feminine to age well. Instead of growing character lines he has wrinkled and one day, ten years from now, he’ll wake up an old man.

  I never imagined speaking to him again. It doesn’t seem so hard, although grief makes everything more intimate.

  “They always say that a father is the last person to know anything,” he says. “Cate used to laugh at me. ‘Dear old Dad,’ she said. ‘Always in the dark.’”

  Confusion clouds his eyes. Doubt.

  “Did Felix know?”

  “They weren’t sleeping together.”

  “He told you that.”

  “Cate wouldn’t let him touch her. She said it might harm the baby. They slept in different beds—in different rooms.”

  “Surely a husband would—”

  “Marriage and sex aren’t mutually inclusive,” he says, perhaps too knowingly. I feel myself growing uncomfortable. “Cate even told Felix he could see a prostitute if he wanted. Said she wouldn’t mind. What sort of wife says that? He should have seen something was wrong.”

  “Why couldn’t she conceive?”

  “Her womb destroyed his sperm. I don’t know the medical name for it. They tried for seven years. IVF, drugs, injections, herbal remedies; they exorcised the house of evil spirits and sprinkled Chinese lemongrass oil on the garden. Cate was a walking bloody textbook on infertility. That’s why it came as such a surprise. Cate was over the moon—I’ve never seen her happier. I remember looking at Felix and he was trying hard to be excited—I guess he was—but it’s like he had a question inside him that wouldn’t go away.”

  “He had doubts?”

  “For years his wife rejects his sperm and then suddenly she’s pregnant? Any man would have doubts.”

  “But if that’s the case—”

  “He wanted to believe, don’t you see? She convinced everyone.”

  Standing, he motions me to follow. His slippers flap gently against his heels as he climbs the stairs. The nursery door is open. The room is freshly painted and papered. The furniture new. A cot, a changing table, a comfortable chair with a Winnie the Pooh pillow.

  Opening a drawer, he takes out a folder. There are receipts for the furniture and instructions for a
ssembling the cot. He up-ends an envelope, shaking it gently. Two sheets of photographs, monochrome images, drop into his hand. Ultrasound pictures.

  Each photograph is only a few inches square. The background is black, the images white. For a moment it’s like looking at one of those Magic Eye pictures where a 3-D image emerges from within. In this case I see tiny arms and legs. A face, eyes, a nose…

  “They were taken at twenty-three weeks.”

  “How?”

  “Felix was supposed to be there but Cate messed up the days. She came home with the photographs.”

  The rest of the file contains testimony of an unborn baby’s existence. There are application forms to the hospital, appointment slips, medical reports, correspondence and receipts for the nursery furniture. An NHS pamphlet gives details of how to register the birth. Another lists the benefits of folic acid in early pregnancy.

  There are other documents in the drawer, including a bundle of private letters tucked in a corner, bank statements, a passport and health insurance certificates. A separate file contains details of Cate’s IVF treatments. There appear to have been five of them. Sohan Banerjee, a fertility specialist in Wimbledon, is mentioned several times.

  “Where was she planning to have the baby?”

  “Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.”

  I look at a brochure for prenatal classes. “What I can’t understand is how it was supposed to end. What was Cate going to do in four weeks?”

  Barnaby shrugs. “She was going to be exposed as a liar.”

  “No, think about it. That prosthetic was almost a work of art. She must have altered it two or three times over the months. She also had to forge medical letters and appointment slips. Where did she get the ultrasound pictures? She went to all that effort. Surely she had a plan.”

  “Like what?”

  “Maybe she organized a surrogacy or a private adoption.”

  “Why keep it a secret?”

  “Perhaps she couldn’t let anyone know. Commercial surrogacy is illegal. Women can’t accept money to have a baby. I know it sounds far-fetched but isn’t it worth considering?”

  He scoffs and smites at the air between us. “So a month from now my daughter was going to nip off somewhere, dump the padding and come back with a baby, custom-made, ready to order from the baby factory. Maybe Ikea does them nowadays.”