by Penny Kline
‘Ian?’ It seemed unfair to wake him, but time was passing and I had to find out about Rod. A world atlas was lying on the rug in front of the fire. I picked it up and turned to Australia, wondering if my brother’s town was large enough to feature on such a small-scale map. New South Wales was only the length of my finger but I found Bega and started working out the distance between Steven’s home and Sydney. One inch to a hundred and ninety seven miles. Bega to Nowra,
Nowra to Wollongong… I couldn’t stop yawning. Glancing at Ian I felt a sudden stab of alarm. Something was wrong. The movements under the duvet were quick and jerky, like a dog having a dream. Dropping the atlas on the rug I bent over the sofa and touched him lightly on the forehead. His breathing was rapid, much too rapid, and his skin had a bluish tinge.
‘Ian? Ian!’ I lifted him by the shoulder and shook him, gently at first, then much more vigorously. There was no response. Kneeling beside him, my head throbbing and the gas fire burning the back of my legs I shouted at him to wake up. ‘Ian, it’s me, Anna. Ian!’
The fire! How could I have been so idiotic? Putting my hands under his shoulders I pulled him on to the floor, then started dragging his senseless body towards the door. One of his legs caught against a chair. I wrenched it free, hoping the pain would make him cry out. He felt nothing. He was a dead weight. All that mattered was to get him out into the fresh air. The symptoms I had noticed had nothing to do with flu. He wasn’t ill. Please let it not be too late. He was suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning.
Just inside the back door I let go for an instant, struggling to turn the key in the lock. He slumped to the ground but I caught hold of his arms and yanked him out into the garden. When I crouched beside him he had stopped breathing.
The first-aid class. The pink dummy with its hard inflatable chest. Tip the head back by grasping and lifting the chin. Pinch the nose with one hand, take a deep breath, seal your mouth around the patient’s mouth and give two long hard breaths. Don’t think, just rely on automatic responses. Twelve breaths per minute. Two long breaths, then pause. Two long breaths and…
Ian’s chest rose and fell. I continued for what seemed an unbearably long time… then fell back on my heels, exhausted. It couldn’t be working. But it was. Two more long breaths, then a pause.
‘Ian? It’s all right. You’re going to be all right.’
Someone was coming through the house. I heard the light quick steps and realized with a great rush of relief it must be Grace.
‘Quick. It’s Ian. Fumes from the fire. He stopped breathing, but I’ve… You take over. I’ll phone for an ambulance.’
The phone was on the wall in the kitchen. I punched 999 and waiting, listening to the ringing with mounting impatience, breathing hard, almost as though I was breathing for Ian. Why didn’t someone answer? It seemed to have been ringing for ages. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a movement in the passage outside.
‘Grace? Is that you? Is Ian all right? Grace?’
I let go of the phone and it swung suspended from the wall. I could hear noises coming from the living room, metal scraping against stone, heavy, laboured breathing. She was kneeling in front of the fire. It had been turned off and in spite of it still being red hot her hand, encased in a thick smouldering oven glove, was reaching beyond the artificial coal, pulling at something — something that was blocking the flue.
‘Grace?’
She spun round and her expression sent a tremor through the whole of my upper body. ‘Get out,’ she yelled. ‘Go away. Everything you’ve done… ’ She was removing blackened rags. Her hand had gone up to her face and left a dark sooty smudge on the side of her nose. ‘Your word,’ she shouted. ‘Your word against mine and everyone knows what you’re like, upsetting people, looking for trouble, stirring up — ’
‘You did it. It was you.’ I heard my own voice as if it was coming from a long way off. ‘He was asleep on the sofa and you deliberately… ’
Then I remembered Ian.
Outside the rain had started again and it was getting dark. Ian lay on his back — he should have been put in the recovery position — but he was breathing. His eyes flicked open for a second, he was deathly pale, but the blueness of his skin had disappeared.
‘It’s all right, it’s all right.’ I kept repeating.
But it wasn’t. Grace stood on the top step. She had a knife in her hand, a small one like the one I used for peeling potatoes, with a short, sharp blade.
‘He told you,’ she said.
‘I don’t understand.’ It was vital to keep her talking, keep her at a distance. ‘Who told me? Told me what?’
She stared at me, jerking her head in Ian’s direction. ‘He knew what Maggie was going to do. She was wicked, she was going to ruin everything, eaten up with ambition. Evil!’
‘What d’you mean? I don’t understand. What was Maggie going to do?’
‘She was coming to see you. She knew what I thought. I’d warned her but she wouldn’t listen. She was asking for it. Ian knows, don’t you, Ian? He was going to tell you, I could see it in his face.’
It was crazy. The whole conversation was insane, Grace was insane, but I had to keep her talking. ‘So you killed her,’ I said, trying to sound as though what Grace had done was entirely reasonable in the circumstances. What was it Martin had said about Maggie’s research? It was going to demonstrate how all previous theories, and that included Terry’s, were incorrect. ‘Yes, I think I can understand.’
‘Can you?’ She hesitated, but only for a split second, then she moved forward, stumbling down the last two steps and landing a few feet away from me and Ian. Now we were trapped. There was no way I could get to the phone, nothing I could do. But was it just possible Grace had failed to notice the phone had been left off the hook? As long as it stayed that way the police would be able to trace where the call had come from. Someone would come — a police car, an ambulance. Someone would find us — eventually.
‘Ian didn’t tell me anything,’ I said, struggling to keep my voice as steady as possible. ‘Ian didn’t tell me anything.’ ‘Yes, he did. R-O-D spells ROD. The car. Terry’s beautiful car. You wanted me to know, wanted me to think you were closing in.’
I took a step back and at the same moment Grace tightened her grip on the knife. As I lifted my hand to ward it off, she lunged towards me, and I felt its point pierce the palm of my hand, then watched, transfixed, as she started circling me like an animal closing in on its prey. There was no pain. It was a scene in a film. Her eyes were open wide. She glanced at Ian, then back at me. Any minute now and it … I heard the siren first. A moment later the sound penetrated her brain and she looked towards the house. I sprang, catching her by the wrist with both hands, feeling the blood ooze beneath my grasp.
‘No!’ The first deafening shriek coincided with the screech of brakes as a car pulled up in the street. Someone called out, banging on the front door, then smashing something against it, again and again. With a loud crash I heard the door burst open and heavy footsteps in the passage leading out towards the garden. A moment later two uniformed figures were running towards us.
Chapter Nineteen
Ian was in hospital, out of danger, sitting up in bed with music hissing out of his headphones. When he saw me he pulled them off, smoothing down his thick, wiry hair. ‘The nurse said you were coming. I wanted to thank you.’
‘Forget it, Ian. Just be grateful to the guy who taught me a bit of basic first aid. As a matter of fact it was probably the fresh air that revived you.’
He looked up, trying to work out if I was treating him like a little kid, or telling the truth. ‘I thought it was Terry,’ he said. ‘I mean, the person who set fire to the house. I read this letter at Mum’s, she was writing it to a friend she went to college with, all about how Terry’s work was out of date. I don’t usually read other people’s letters. It was just I wanted to know if Mum had a lover.’
‘So you asked me to look for Rod.’
‘But you wanted someone to check him out. You know, one academic’s work never wipes out another’s, Ian, not that easily, not in the social sciences.’
‘That’s not what Grace thought.’ He managed a weak smile. ‘Still, she’s bonkers, isn’t she? I suppose she always was.’
‘Has your dad been to see you?’ I said, not wanting to get into a discussion about what was going to happen to Grace.
He nodded. ‘I should think we’ll both be allowed home tomorrow.’
‘Good. Maybe I’ll drop by in a day or two.’
‘Hope so. You could give us some lessons in how to communicate with each other.’ He broke off, looking mortified. ‘Oh, I didn’t mean… We’ll be really glad to see you. Anyway, I have to do this history assignment on loony bins in the nineteenth century. I was wondering if you might be able to give me a hand.’
The false euphoria wouldn’t last for long. After holding himself in check for so long, while he waited for his mother’s killer to be discovered, now he would have to start coming to terms with the fact that he was never going to see her again. He might need help, but maybe not. Perhaps, in their own quirky way, he and his father really would be able to help each other to get over the loss.
I was on my way to see Howard Fry.
Grace was in a secure unit, while the police awaited reports. Not all acts of extreme violence can be put down to temporary insanity. Maggie Hazeldean’s murder had been carefully planned and there would be another charge: the attempted murder of her son. A psychiatrist, acting for the defence, would try to convince the jury that Grace had been obsessed with Terry’s academic success, that, in her distorted mind, he had to be the Great Man, in order to justify her decision to move in with him and leave her children.
Owen and I planned to go round to Terry’s house that evening, but whether he would want to see us was a different matter. I thought about Jon Turle and wondered if I owed him an apology. But what for? If he had told me everything, in the first place, I could have been far more use to poor Imogen. She had phoned Heather, asking if Rachel could accompany her when she came for her next appointment. The two of them must have had a proper talk and, with any luck, Imogen would be prepared to face up to some of the real issues that had been making her so unhappy, even before she attached herself to Jon.
Leaving the car in a side road I walked back to the police station, still thinking about Grace. Her anxiety about Terry’s career had been so totally, so tragically misguided. By Terry’s own admission, their time together had turned out to be less than idyllic — how could any relationship have lived up to Grace’s expectations — so she had substituted the perfect marriage for playing the role of wife and mother to a great scientific genius. Then along had come Maggie, apparently threatening Terry’s ambitious plan to obtain government money for training parents in how to bring up their children. Grace, the perfect wife. Maggie, the successful mature student, and then the successful career woman. Both had ‘deserted’ their families, but in Grace’s mind Maggie stood for everything she felt she could never achieve. Had she always been unstable or had leaving her children filled her with so much guilt and remorse that it had tipped her over the edge?
The police station was reassuringly familiar. A woman, dressed in a motheaten fur coat and a yellow straw hat was asking the desk sergeant if he believed in God. ‘Yes, that’s right. Now off you go, Sadie. Why not have a nice long walk?’ He saw me and pointed down the corridor, indicating that Howard Fry was waiting in his office.
My back was aching badly and I felt a little sick. As I approached the door at the end of the corridor I felt a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the encounter, knowing Howard would insist I described what had happened all over again, even though I had told Inspector Barnes absolutely everything I could remember. But perhaps it would act as a kind of therapeutic debriefing. After all, it was not as if I had withheld information. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that Howard could throw in my face. Up to the moment I had seen Terry’s car registration any doubt I had about the fire being the work of right-wing activists had been based on the flimsiest of evidence. My suspicions, about Trev Baker and the furniture store, about Jon Turle and Imogen, even about a possible connection between Heather’s friend, Kieran, and a group of racists — nothing I knew would have been of the slightest assistance to the CID. Did the third-hand description passed on by Paddy Jinnah, about the figure dressed in a shiny green anorak, count as information withheld? In a determined effort to convince myself Ian had been nowhere near the house at the time of the fire, I had told myself there must be thousands of green anoraks in Bristol, along with hundreds of brown Allegros. Besides, my instinct had told me all along that Ian was innocent. Not that Howard had ever had the slightest interest in my ‘instinct’.
He answered my knock on his door with a brief ‘Come in.’ He was seated at his desk, talking to someone on the phone. Gesturing towards a chair with the fingers of one hand he finished the call, then pointed to my bandaged hand.
‘How are you? They gave you an antitetanus jab?’
‘I had one not long ago.’
‘Good.’ He didn’t ask why. ‘Incidentally, do you happen to know if Grace Curtis was familiar with the house in Bishopston?’ ‘You mean would she have known about the furniture just inside the front door? If not the fire could have been just to frighten Maggie Hazeldean, although it seems pretty irrational. I mean, she wouldn’t even have known who’d done it.’
‘The car that knocked Bill Hazeldean off his cycle,’ he said, aware that we were both thinking the same thing, that the word irrational was something of an understatement when applied to the mind of Grace. ‘Mrs Curtis has a dark blue Astra. Do you suppose she was responsible for the accident to Mr Hazeldean?’
‘You mean she thought it was Ian on the bike? But that was before I mentioned the messages about Rod.’
‘Ah, the messages about Rod.’
‘I never thought they had any connection with the fire.’
He thought about this for a moment. ‘How could you? Obviously if Mr Hazeldean remembers any more details we’ll look into it again.’
‘I doubt if he’ll be too bothered, not after what’s happened since.’ I was thinking about Paddy and Azim, wondering if Howard would understand why she had kept the sexual assault to herself. He would, but he wouldn’t condone it. Justice must be done whatever the consequences to the victim of the crime.
‘One thing,’ said Howard. ‘Why do you think Dr Hazeldean had made an appointment to come and see you?’
‘Who knows? Maybe she was afraid, sensed Grace Curtis saw her as some kind of threat. Maybe it was about something entirely different.’
He straightened the folders on his desk, then sto.od up and walked round to my side of the desk. ‘You look exhausted, Anna, let’s leave all this for another day.’ He put his hand on my shoulder and for a dreadful moment I felt tears pricking the back of my eyes. Of self-pity? Surely not. Of relief, then, relief combined with the disinhibiting effect of going through a traumatic experience and coming out safely the other side.
‘Come back in a day or two,’ he said, making it clear I was to see myself out of the police station. ‘I haven’t forgotten about the interviewing techniques. Oh, and by the way, your advice about the woman who kept saying her property had been vandalized — worked a treat, not a peep out of her for over a week.’
All the lights wee on in the house. Terry saw us through the window and hurried to let us in. He looked terrible, but as soon as I saw him I realized he was already some way towards coming to terms with what had happened. This would be no counselling session. He and Owen would go over the events of the last few weeks, applying their rational brains to a psychological analysis of fear, guilt, anger, and any other of the human emotions or motivations that came to mind. It wasn’t that Terry didn’t care ab
out Grace — God only knew all the complicated feelings he was having to disentangle — but talking it over, man to man, surely that was the most positive attitude to take in the circumstances. But perhaps I was quite wrong. Terry would break down, confessing that he had known for months that Grace was mentally disturbed, that he held himself responsible for Maggie’s death and what had almost happened to Ian.
As we followed him into his spacious study I thought about Janice and Trev sitting on the bare boards in front of their television set, the one item of furniture they seemed to own outright. I wanted to tell Owen and Terry how wrong it was that some academics handed out questionnaires without explaining properly what the research was all about, how the Bakers had believed Maggie’s questionnaire was a way of checking if they were fit to look after their own child. But now wasn’t the time.
‘Right, then,’ said Terry, ‘who’s having what? Gin, vodka, whisky, whatever you fancy.’ He had his back turned but the intonation in his voice was exactly the same as the last time he had asked us the identical question.
Owen looked at me and a flicker of a smile spread across his face. He made an effort to control himself, looking into my eyes, appealing to me to say something to break the tension. I wished we were back home — in bed.
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