A Game for All the Family

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘Maybe if I didn’t tell you …’ Ellen says tentatively.

  ‘Yes,’ I say eagerly. ‘You could just let me read the story.’

  ‘No. I can’t.’

  Damn. ‘Why not, El?’

  ‘For the same reason you’re so gagging to read it,’ she says tearfully. ‘If you use stuff in it …’

  Use stuff in it to do what? This is what I’ve been after, isn’t it? Proof? If it’s not a true story, how would I be able to use it in a way that would harm anyone?

  ‘Ask me a question I can answer without answering,’ Ellen mumbles, as if saying it inaudibly is the same as not having said it at all.

  ‘All right. Unless you here and now tell me I’m wrong, I’m going to assume the story you’re writing about the Ingreys is about Anne Donbavand. Perrine is her little sister. Anne is Lisette Ingrey. George told you about her childhood. If you don’t contradict me, I’m going to take that as confirmation that I’m right.’

  ‘Hello?’ Alex calls up the stairs. ‘Justine, is Figgy up there?’

  ‘Yes, Dad, and he’s off the lead,’ Ellen yells back.

  ‘Fuck. Oops, I mean, Damn! Fiver in the swear box. No, make that fifty quid, since I keep reoffending. His lead’s still attached to his harness – he must have wriggled out of the damn thing. It’s too big for him. We need a smaller size.’

  ‘I said that. You bought one for a medium dog.’

  ‘It was the only one Pet Guff had.’ That’s what Alex thinks the pet accessories superstore ought to be called. He’s leading by example.

  He appears in the bedroom. ‘Hello, Figgs, you old Houdini, you. Where’s El?’

  I didn’t notice that she’d left the room. ‘She was here a minute ago,’ I say.

  ‘Bedroom!’ she calls out, before slamming her door shut.

  ‘Yes!’ I say.

  ‘Yes what?’ asks Alex.

  ‘I was right. Anne Donbavand is Lisette Ingrey.’

  I must hang on to this certainty. Mustn’t let doubt creep in. What’s just happened – Ellen leaving the room without a word – that’s conclusive.

  So why couldn’t Ops find any hint of a murdered sister? Did he make a mistake? Is it not true that Anne grew up in an ordinary home, with her parents and one younger sister?

  The Offords. And Sarah Parsons.

  They’re who I need to talk to next. If I want to be really sure.

  Chapter 11

  An Unlocked-House Mystery

  All the people gathered in Speedwell House’s drawing room listened and hardly dared to breathe as the policeman who had gone upstairs with Bascom and Sorrel told what had happened from his point of view. He had led the way upstairs, with Bascom and Sorrel following behind him. When they had reached Perrine’s bedroom door, the policeman had held out his hand for the key, and Sorrel had passed it to him. ‘Be careful,’ she warned. ‘Perrine might go for you.’

  ‘Oh, I think I can fend off a teenage girl,’ said the policeman.

  He unlocked the door and walked into the room. ‘Where is she?’ he asked. ‘This had better not be some sort of prank.’

  On hearing this, Bascom and Sorrel rushed into their youngest daughter’s bedroom. Perrine was not there. Even more peculiarly, her bed was not there either.

  ‘She must be hiding,’ said Bascom.

  ‘Where?’ said Sorrel. ‘There’s no wardrobe in here, only a chest of small drawers – all too small for her to fit in.’

  Bascom, Sorrel and the policeman searched the room. Perrine was nowhere to be found. Her bed was nowhere to be found.

  ‘What about that little green door in the wall?’ said the policeman. ‘Might she have …?’

  ‘No,’ said Sorrel. ‘Absolutely not. You open it and see if you can get out. You can’t. We pushed a very heavy mahogany wardrobe up against the wall on the landing on the other side.

  ‘But … she must have escaped that way,’ said Bascom, his voice brimming with bewilderment. ‘The only other way out of the room is by the main door, which, as you saw, was locked.’

  ‘The window was locked too,’ said Sorrel, who kept turning round suddenly, as if she expected someone dangerous to sneak up on her. ‘She must still be in this room, but where? She can’t be hiding under the bed because there is no bed!’

  ‘Let’s not get carried away until we’ve checked all available avenues,’ said the policeman. ‘I think your husband must be right, Mrs Ingrey. The little green door seems to be the only possibility. I’ll wager that if I were to open it now, I’d see the back of the wardrobe you mentioned, with a large hole cut in it – a hole big enough to allow Perrine to escape.’

  He pulled the tiny door open, and saw straight away that he was wrong. There was unbroken solid wood pushed right up against the doorway. No hole. ‘Perhaps she pushed the wardrobe out of the way, climbed out, then replaced it.’

  ‘Try it,’ Sorrel suggested.

  The policeman pushed and puffed and panted, but the wardrobe did not budge one millimetre (or one inch, as people used to say in the old days).

  ‘See?’ said Sorrel. ‘You’re a big burly man and you can’t shift it. How could Perrine? She’s a slender teenage girl.’

  ‘So then we searched the bedroom again, every nook and cranny,’ the policeman told everybody in the drawing room. ‘And we found neither Perrine nor her bed.’

  The Dodds and the Butchers looked furious, especially the women. ‘So, what, she’s run off somewhere?’ snapped Mrs Dodd. ‘If you police let her get away with what she’s done, I’ll make your lives a misery, you mark my words!’

  ‘There must be justice!’ declared Mrs Butcher.

  Jack Kirbyshire’s widow burst into tears. ‘I can’t bear the thought of someone else being murdered like my poor Jack,’ she sobbed.

  ‘Never mind your grief and your desire for justice,’ said Sorrel in a commanding tone. ‘Let us first focus on the practical side of things. It is not possible that Perrine escaped from her bedroom. It is utterly impossible, I tell you, unless one of you let her out!’

  ‘One of us?’ said Mr Careless, Mimsie Careless’s father. ‘Oh, I see! You mean me, don’t you? You’re accusing me of letting a murderer loose on the world!’

  ‘No one’s accused you, sir,’ said the policeman. ‘And I have to say that you’re behaving rather suspiciously.’

  ‘No one’s accused me yet,’ said Mr Careless, ‘but they soon will, you’ll see. Do you have any idea what it’s like to go through life with the name Careless? The instant something goes wrong and there’s no one else obviously to blame, even your best friends start to think, “Well, what about that Careless chap? Careless by name, careless by nature, no smoke without fire …”’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Mrs Careless said, blushing. ‘My husband has the most enormous chip on his shoulder about his surname. Whereas I rather like it. My maiden name was a horrendous double-barreller. You’ll never guess, so I’ll tell you: Common-Dowd. Can you imagine?’

  ‘I don’t give two hoots about your stupid husband and his stupid name!’ wailed Sorrel. ‘Where is my Perrine? I can’t bear this! I have to know where she is! I need to know she’s safe! One of you has sneaked her out of this house when I wasn’t looking, and you’re planning to torture and kill her! Oh, why was I foolish enough to let you all in?’

  Bascom patted her and did his best to calm her down. Once her hysterical fit had subsided, the policeman took over the proceedings. ‘Now listen, everyone,’ he said. ‘This is very simple. Well, actually, it is very puzzling, and finding the solution will not be easy at all, but what I mean to say is that the puzzle is simple to explain. What we have here might seem to be a locked-room mystery – how does a child disappear from a room when to do so is impossible in every practical and scientific sense? – but in fact it is not a locked-room mystery!’

  ‘It isn’t?’ said Lisette, who thought that it clearly was.

  ‘No,’ said the policeman. ‘Because that part is simple: someone unlocked
Perrine’s bedroom door and took Perrine and her bed. Having removed them from the room, this person then locked the door again. We know that must have happened, because it’s the only thing that could have happened. Now, let me show you what I found on Perrine’s bedroom floor.’ He rummaged in his pocket and produced something so small that no one could see it. ‘A small metal screw,’ he said. ‘This strongly suggests that whoever removed Perrine’s bed from the room took it apart first. Of course, it is much easier to remove a bed in the form of discrete pieces of wood than as a whole bed, so dismantling the bed would make sense.’

  The policeman went on, ‘I would argue that what we have here is not a locked-room mystery but an unlocked-house mystery. For the first time in months, this morning Bascom and Sorrel Ingrey unlocked their home and filled it with people, including my good self and your good selves. Before we all congregated in this drawing room, we were wandering about singly and in little groups, having a good old nosy and chatting to one another. One of us – not me, I hasten to add, being a policeman and therefore above suspicion – one of us stole the key to Perrine’s bedroom, went upstairs, unlocked her door, dismantled her bed and took it and her out of the house. But why did they take the bed too? That’s a real mystery! And did they take Perrine in order to punish her, or to let her escape justice?’

  ‘We would have seen!’ said Sorrel. ‘Someone would have seen someone else with Perrine and a load of bed pieces under their arm, moving through the house!’

  ‘No, dear,’ said Bascom. ‘We wouldn’t have seen. You and I were in the kitchen serving breakfast right up until we moved through to this room. From where we were, we couldn’t see the hall or the front door.’

  ‘Was anyone in the hall the whole time?’ the policeman asked the assembled company. ‘Can anyone swear to me on the lives of their nearest and dearest that nobody went upstairs, and that nobody came down shortly or longly afterwards with Perrine and the bits of bed in their grasp?’

  Everyone started to talk at the same time, which made it hard to get the gist of what was being said, but it became clear in due course: nobody had been in the hall, or able to see the hall and stairs, for the whole time.

  ‘Aha!’ said the policeman. ‘Then we have made some progress. We know now that my theory is perfectly possible.’

  ‘How did this person get the key to Perrine’s bedroom?’ asked Sorrel. ‘It was in my cardigan pocket. It was there just now, when I came upstairs with you, when you were going to arrest Perrine.’

  ‘Whoever took it must have replaced it,’ said the policeman. ‘Though I admit it’s a bit odd that you didn’t notice anyone reaching into your pocket, Mrs Ingrey.’

  ‘Mum, you weren’t wearing your cardy when you were sorting out the breakfast,’ said Allisande. ‘I remember, because there was a stain on your shirt, on the right shoulder. I thought to myself, “Mum looks a total scruff, I wish she’d put her cardy back on.”’

  ‘She’s right!’ blurted out Mrs Sennitt-Sasse. ‘It looked like a coffee splash. I saw it too.’

  ‘Yes, I remember now,’ said Sorrel distantly, as if busy trying to coax the whole memory out of a dark and cobwebby corner of her mind. She pulled her cardy down on the right-hand side, and everyone saw the stain that had been described. ‘Yes, I did take my cardy off. I remember now. I hung it on one of the coat hooks in the hall before I started in the kitchen.’

  ‘There you are, then!’ said the policeman. ‘Anyone could have got to it, unseen in the hall.’

  ‘This all seems laughably unlikely.’ Mr Careless proved his point by laughing. ‘No one would be able to do all this unnoticed: sneak upstairs, somehow dispose of a girl, not to mention a bed, which one would first have to dismantle. It’s preposterous! There were people milling about all over the place – someone would have seen something.’

  ‘How would the person have known that the key to Perrine’s room was in your cardigan pocket?’ Bascom asked Sorrel. ‘Only the family knew that.’

  The policeman stared hard at Lisette and Allisande. ‘Girls?’ he said. ‘Does either of you have anything you want to share with us?’

  ‘No,’ said Allisande aggressively. ‘I didn’t do it! I would never bother to dismantle a bed, for any reason whatsoever. It would be a major hassle.’

  ‘She’s telling the truth,’ said Lisette. ‘I could see her the whole time. She didn’t go upstairs and set Perrine free. Or kill Perrine and hide her body in another part of the house.’

  The phone started to ring at that moment. Sorrel gave Bascom a weary look. ‘I’ll get it,’ he said.

  ‘“Set her free, or kill her and hide her body,”’ mused the policeman, repeating Lisette’s words. ‘That’s the real question, isn’t it? Which one was it? If the former, we might never find Perrine. If the latter, we will no doubt find her body either hidden somewhere here, in the grounds of Speedwell House, or locked in the boot of someone’s car.’

  ‘We should check all the car boots quickly!’ said Lisette. ‘What if Perrine’s trapped in one of them still alive? Maybe whoever took her is planning to kill her later because they didn’t have time this morning.’

  Everyone looked at Mrs Dodd, who said, ‘I wish I did have her locked in my car boot so that I could make her suffer later as much as she’s made me suffer … but I’m afraid I don’t. Check if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘On balance, I think I do believe you,’ said the policeman. ‘I have a question for you, miss.’

  Allisande nudged Lisette, who looked up and saw that the policeman was talking to her. ‘Yes?’ she said. She hadn’t noticed because she had an idea in her head that wouldn’t go away.

  ‘You mentioned that you could see your sister Allisande the whole time, so therefore she cannot be the culprit. Correct?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lisette.

  ‘Very good. My question is this: could she see you the whole time?’

  But before Lisette, or indeed Allisande, could answer, Bascom Ingrey came back into the drawing room. In fact, it would be most accurate to say that he staggered in. His face looked like a slab of old grey meat. ‘That was the police station,’ he said. ‘Perrine has been found dead. Murdered!’

  13

  ‘Anne’s more than my sister,’ Sarah Parsons tells me. We’re standing in her gallery, looking at the Anne, Tide Glider painting on the wall. ‘In a way, I’ve always regarded her as my creator. If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t exist.’ She giggles. I was expecting it. Her laughter doesn’t mean she finds something funny, I’ve discovered; it’s a signal that she’s finished speaking. It would be interesting to see if she did it after saying, ‘I’m bankrupt and about to lose my house.’ Maybe she has a different punctuation-behaviour for sad conversations.

  She’s a short, round woman in her mid-thirties, with a mass of brown, curly hair, and – thank God – no reservations about inviting a stranger into her home. I emailed her via her website and said I loved her paintings, and could I come and look at them with a view to buying one? It worked.

  Sarah lives on Fore Street in Totnes in a narrow three-storey building that’s squashed in between a shop that sells crystals and an estate agent. The ground floor is where the paintings are: all hers, no one else’s. Above is her home, spread over the top two floors. We’ve just had tea up there: delicious Earl Grey, complete with shiny silver contraptions to catch the twiggy bits. The teabag tea I have at home doesn’t taste as good, but is less fiddly to make and pour.

  ‘How did Anne create you?’ I ask Sarah. She seems happy to talk about her family, and strikes me as an exuberant innocent. Bare feet, no make-up. On the middle toe of her right foot, she’s wearing a ring with a big red heart on it. As we chat, she swishes the skirt of her long blue silk dress from one side to the other, like Ellen used to when she was three and dressed as a Disney princess.

  ‘My mum turned up at school to collect Anne one day, and another mother congratulated her – told her how fantastic she was looking, how excited she mu
st be, and why was there no sign of a bump yet? Turned out Anne had told the whole school her mum was preggers with twins. Twins! Anne was quite lonely being the only child, and our parents weren’t showing any signs of supplying a sibling, so she invented two of them. When Mum heard about Anne’s lie, she felt guilty for depriving her of what she so obviously wanted, had a word with Dad, and …’ Sarah stretches out her skirt on both sides, like low-down wings, and does a little curtsy. ‘Voilà! Here I am, thanks to my older sister.’

  And there’s the punctuation laugh: my cue to speak. ‘Why Tide Glider?’ I ask, looking at the picture.

  ‘Oh, Anne and her family have a boat with that name, and it seemed appropriate as a name for Anne too. She’s sort of glided away from us. Me, Mum and Dad, I mean. Still … maybe not forever.’ A sad smile instead of a laugh this time.

  So Anne had a sticker made with the name of her own boat on it, and stuck it over my house sign. Why the other houses, though, and the other boats? Why involve them? To create extra confusion? So I wouldn’t be able to convince the police that I and my house, specifically, were the targets?

  ‘It’s a beautiful painting,’ I say. This could be the biggest lie I’ve ever told. Sarah’s a talented artist, but I find the picture of Anne offensive because of its subject. I might buy it and make one or two additions: a red arrow and the words ‘EVIL BITCH’ in red capitals.

  I was hoping to talk to Sarah and Anne’s parents today too – Martin and Denise Offord – as they live nearby, but shortly after I arrived Sarah mentioned that they’re in the Algarve and spend most winters in their villa there.

  I force my eyes to linger on the portrait in front of me. ‘I read something online about this painting, I think.’ I do my best to sound vague. ‘Anne was referred to as your estranged sister.’

  Sarah frowns. ‘Yes, I know exactly the article you’re talking about. I never used the word estranged and was furious when they did. There’s been no row, and we all get on perfectly well. Anne’s busy with her own life and family, but we see her every Christmas and …’ She shrugs. ‘To be fair to her, we’re an in-each-other’s-pockets family. It can be a bit stifling. I can understand why Anne needed to go her own way. I did too. Or I thought I did: fled to Scotland, got married. When we split up, my ex-husband gave my parents as the main reason he couldn’t live with me.’ Big, loud laugh for this.