The safe house

by Nicci French

  ‘She’s not here at the moment.’ No, that wasn’t it. ‘Finn’s gone away, my darling. She was only ever going to stay here for a bit. She has her own life to lead.’

  ‘But she didn’t say goodbye.’

  ‘She told me to say goodbye for her,’ I lied. ‘She sent a kiss.’ I kissed Elsie’s baffled brow and the shiny softness of her hair. ‘And a hug.’ I hugged Elsie, feeling her stubborn shoulders beneath my nervous hands.

  ‘But where’s she gone?’

  ‘Well, actually’ – a terrible brightness in my voice – ‘she’s gone to stay with Danny for a bit. So that’s nice, isn’t it?’

  ‘But Danny’s ours.’

  ‘Ah, my love, we’re each other’s anyway.’

  ‘Mummy, that’s too tight.’

  After Elsie had gone to sleep, I had a long bath. As I lay in the hot water I thought of Danny and Finn. I imagined them. Her smooth young body engulfed by his strong one; the arrow of dark hair on his chest; her tender breasts. I imagined their legs, hers so pale and his so hairy and muscled, tangled on my bed; Danny’s emphatic feet, the second toe much longer than the big one, hooked under her acquiescent calf. Had he looked at her with the same gravity with which he used to look at me? Of course he had. They loved each other, didn’t they, that’s what Finn had said? They must have said it to each other too. How could I have not seen? Even now I didn’t see it properly: when I looked back over the weeks it was as if a darkness had suddenly dropped over the string of days. Had they fucked in this house, muffling their sighs? They must have, in this house, in the place I had made for them by my trust. By my blindness. We must have sat together all three, and all the time I thought I was the centre and all the time I was on the outside, while they looked at each other, sent electric pulses rippling across the spaces between them, touched feet under the table, sent messages between the lines. Had he groaned when he came into her, that tearing sound of grief? In my mind I saw them, him rearing up above her, sweat on his straining back, her smiling into his frowning, effortful face. I washed vigorously, massaged shampoo into my scalp and, although I felt tired, I felt terribly awake. When I looked in the mirror afterwards, my ghastly red hair plastered down on my scalp, I fingered the slight bags under my eyes, ran a hand down the dry skin of my face. I looked like an ageing crow.

  Then I dressed in an old track suit and made a fire, rolling newspapers into tight balls, chucking empty envelopes and loo rolls and cereal packets among the logs until it was blazing with a quick heat that would soon die away. There was a knock at the door.

  ‘Sam.’

  Michael Daley stood on the doorstep with his arms held open: theatrical, tragic, ridiculous. What did he expect me to do? Walk into them? He looked the way I felt. Pale and shocked.

  ‘Well, Michael, what a surprise. I wonder what brings you here?’ I said sardonically.

  ‘Sam, don’t go cold on me. I’ve just spent an hour with that policeman, Baird. I’m so sorry, I can’t believe it, but I’m so sorry. And I feel responsible. I want to know if there’s anything, anything at all, that I can do. I’m on my way to London, but I had to stop in and see you.’

  To my horror, I felt tears stinging my eyes. If I started crying I’d not stop. Oh God, I didn’t want Michael Daley to see me crying. I had to concentrate.

  ‘What’s in London?’

  ‘Nothing important. I’m flying to Belfast for a conference. Fund-holding. A nightmare. I’m sorry…’ His voice died away. I half-turned towards the house and then felt his hands on my shoulders, holding me steady. He smelled of cigarettes and wine. His pupils were dilated.

  ‘You don’t need to be brave with me, Sam,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes I do,’ I snapped, shaking him off.

  But he cupped my chin in one hand and traced a tear with the other. We stared at each other for a long moment. What did he want from me?

  ‘Good-night, Michael,’ I said and closed the door.

  Twenty-Three

  I don’t get dumped. I dump. I don’t get humiliated. That’s for other people. When I was growing up it was always me who sat down with the boy and looked him in the eye – or when I couldn’t be bothered, rang him up – and told him that it was time we stopped seeing each other and all that. It was for my boyfriends, my ex-boyfriends, to go red and feel hurt and rejected. And I’ve never had insomnia. Even in the worst times, or at least until I moved to the country, I slept undisturbed. But in the middle of the night after it, after Danny and Finn had gone, I found myself awake, my skin prickling, my mind humming, like an electric motor that had been left on and was running uselessly, burning itself out. I felt a familiar pressure against my right arm. Not Danny. Elsie, heaving gently, fast asleep. She must have climbed up into the bed without waking me. I kissed her hair and her nose. With a loose flap of duvet I wiped her forehead where a hot tear had fallen. I looked around at the window. The curtains were dark. I couldn’t see my watch. I couldn’t see the dial of the clock-radio and if I moved I would wake Elsie and she wouldn’t go back to sleep.

  I would like to have taken a scalpel and made a thousand incisions into Danny’s body, slowly, one by one. I couldn’t believe he had done this to me. I wanted to track him down wherever he was and just ask him did he realize what he had done to Elsie, who depended on him so much? Did he realize what he had done to me? I wanted him back, I desperately wanted him back. I wanted to find him to explain that if he returned we could make things all right. We would work things out. I could move back to London, we could get married, anything, just so that we could go back to the way things had been.

  And Finn. I would like to take her pretty little face and punch it over and over again. No. Stamp on it. Mash it. I had let her into my house, into the most intimate recesses of my life, revealed secrets I had never let anyone else see, trusted her with Elsie. I had been closer to her than I had been to my own sister, and she had huffed and puffed and blown my house down. Then I remembered the details of Dr Kale’s autopsy on her parents and the bandage across Finn’s neck when I had first seen her, fearful and silent on my sofa. She had been porcelain that I thought might topple and shatter. I had watched her turn soft and human again, and this was what she had done. Or was this just another symptom? Was this a cry for help from a sad, lonely girl? And wasn’t Danny absconding nothing more than the characteristic behaviour of a weak man? Isn’t it just what men do when flattered by the attention of a beautiful young girl? Tears were running down the sides of my face. Even my ears were wet.

  After an hour of heaving sobs I descended into cool stillness. I could look at my responses with objectivity, or so I thought. I felt the pain in layers. The core of it was the betrayal of trust by Finn, the abandonment of me and Elsie by Danny. I felt scalded by this, as if nothing else could ever matter, but the sensation grew numb and I thought of other things. There was the sense of professional failure. I had said over and over again that Finn was not my patient, I had resisted the whole stupid arrangement. But even with all that taken into account, it was a total disaster. A traumatized victim of a murderous assault had been in my care and the episode had ended not in cure but in horrible farce. She had run off with my lover. I prided myself as a person who hunted alone and didn’t care what other people thought of me, but I couldn’t help caring now. The faces of professional rivals and foes came into my mind. I thought of Chris Madison up at Newcastle and Paul Mastronarde at the London, finding it funny and telling people that of course it was awful but to be honest it served me right, always so arrogant. I thought of Thelma, whose idea this had been. I thought of Baird, who had seemed dubious enough about me from the first and all the rugby-club gang at the police station. They must all be having a good laugh.

  Then – oh, God – I thought of my parents and of Bobbie. I don’t know which seemed worse: the mingled shock, shame and disapproval which would be the first response of the family or the sympathy that would follow in its wake, the outstretched arms offered to Samantha, the prodigal daug
hter. There was just the hint of a moment where I felt that I would rather go back to sleep and never wake up again than face the ghastliness of what the daylight held for me. It was going to be so horrible and so boring and I didn’t have the strength.

  Low blood sugar, of course. The subdued metabolic function characteristic of the early morning, dispersed by activity and nourishment. The curtains were grey now and Elsie was stirring on my arm. Her eyes opened and she sat up as if she were on a spring. My arm had gone to sleep. I rubbed it fiercely and life trickled back into it. Fuck the world. I would survive this and I wouldn’t bother what anybody thought. Nobody was going to catch me showing weakness. I took Elsie under her armpits, threw her upwards and released her. She fell on the blanket with a shrick of terrified pleasure.

  ‘Do it again, Mummy. Do it again.’

  The following day I made an adventure of our girls’ breakfast. Bacon and eggs and toast and jam and a grapefruit, and Elsie ate her half and deliriously purloined segments of mine. I had coffee. At half-past eight I drove Elsie to school.

  ‘What’s that tree like?’

  ‘A man with green hair and a green beard. What’s that tree like?’

  ‘I said tree already.’

  ‘No, I said, I said.’

  ‘All right, Elsie. It looks… In this wind it looks like a green cloud.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t.’

  ‘Does.’

  ‘Doesn’t.’

  ‘Does.’

  ‘Doesn’t.’

  The game finished in a crescendo of laughing contradiction.

  On the drive back, the clouds had come into focus, the buildings were standing out more clearly against the sky. I had a sense of resolve. I would look after Elsie and I would work. All the rest was waste. I made myself more coffee and went into my study. On the computer I disposed of everything I had written so far. It was dross, the useless product of half-hearted activity. I looked through a file to remind myself of some figures and then I closed it and began to write. It was all in my head anyway. I could check the references later. I wrote for almost two hours without looking away from the screen. The sentences ran off my fingers, and I knew they were good. Like God creating the world. Just before eleven I heard the front door open. Sally. Time to refill my coffee mug anyway. As the kettle boiled, I gave her a brief, sanitized account of what had happened. My voice was level, my hands didn’t tremble, I didn’t blush. She didn’t care much and I didn’t care what she thought about it. Sam Laschen was in control once more. Sally began to clean and I returned to my study. At lunch-time I had a five-minute break. There was half a carton of pre-cooked lasagne in the fridge. I ate it cold. The era of proper food was past. After another hour I had finished a chapter. I clicked a couple of times with the mouse. Four and a half thousand words. At this rate the book would be finished in a couple of weeks. I reached into my filing cabinet and pulled out two folders of processed data. I worked my way through them very quickly, again to remind myself. It took only a few minutes before they were back in the cabinet. I opened a new file: Chapter Two. Definitions of Recovery.

  A movement caught my eye. It was outside. A car. Baird and Angeloglou got out. For a moment a part of me assumed that this must be a sort of memory or a hallucination. This had happened yesterday. Was I replaying a horrible dream I had in my mind? It couldn’t be happening again. There was a knock at the door. It was just some routine matter, a form that needed signing or something.

  When I opened the door, they were looking at each other shiftily.

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘We thought you might have heard something,’ said Baird.

  ‘Danny hasn’t rung, and if he bloody does…’

  The two officers looked at each other again. What was up?

  ‘That’s not what we meant. Inside?’ said Baird in a dismal attempt at a casual tone. There were none of the usual smiles and winks. Baird looked like a man imitating professional police behaviour. Beads of sweat shone on his brow although it was cold and damp.

  ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘Please, Sam.’

  I led them through and they sat side by side on my sofa like Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Baird was stroking the hairy back of his left hand with the fingers of his right. A man about to make a speech. Angeloglou was still, not catching my eye. His cheek-bones were accentuated by the tightness with which he held his face, his jaw.

  ‘Please sit down, Sam,’ Baird said. ‘I’ve got some bad news for you.’ He was still fingering his hand. The hairs were a startling red even more so than those on his head. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. ‘Yesterday evening we were called to a burnt-out car just outside Bayle Street, twenty miles or so along the coast. We quickly established that it was the Renault van registered to Daniel Rees.’

  ‘Christ,’ I said, ‘Did he crash…?’

  ‘There were two badly burned human bodies in the car. Dead bodies. The effects of the fire were extremely severe and there are some identification tests still to be carried out. But I should prepare yourself for the near-certainty that these are the bodies of Mr Rees and Miss Mackenzie.’

  I tried to hold on to the moment, grasp the shock and confusion as if it were a precious state of mind. It could never get worse than this.

  ‘Did you hear what I said, Dr Laschen?’

  Baird spoke softly, as if to a small child seated on his lap. I nodded. Not too hard. Nothing hysterical or over-eager.

  ‘Did you hear what I said, Dr Laschen?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Well, thank you, Mr Baird, for coming to tell me. I won’t take up any more of your time.’

  Chris Angeloglou leaned forward.

  ‘Is there anything you would like to ask us? Anything you want to say?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, looking at my watch. ‘The problem is that it’s almost time for me to go and get… er… my child.’

  ‘Can’t Linda do that?’

  ‘Can she? I can’t…’

  As Baird spoke I had been entirely clear about what was happening. While listening to the information I had also been observing with a professional interest the manner in which he conveyed painful news. And I had considered my own response with total clarity. I felt tears running down my face and realized I was crying with sobs that shook my whole body. I cried and cried until I felt myself almost gagging with all the grief and pain. I felt a hand on my shoulder and then a mug of tea was pressed against my lips and I felt surprised because not enough time seemed to have passed for tea to be made and brewed and poured out. I gulped and sipped some tea and burned my mouth. I tried to speak and couldn’t. I took some deep breaths and tried again.

  ‘Crashed?’ I asked.

  Baird shook his head.

  ‘What?’ It was hardly more than a croak.

  ‘A note was found by the car.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It was addressed to you.’

  ‘To me?’ I said inertly.

  ‘The note is written by Miss Mackenzie. She writes that after the realization of what they have done, done to you, above all, they feel there is nothing to live for and they have elected to die together.’

  ‘They committed suicide?’ I asked stupidly.

  ‘That is our working assumption.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’ The two were silent. ‘Don’t you hear what I’m saying? It’s ridiculous and impossible. Danny would never, never, have killed himself. Under any circumstances. He… How did they?’

  I looked at Baird. He had been clutching a pair of gloves in one hand and now he was twisting them, hard, as if he were trying to wring water out of them.

  ‘Is this something you need…?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The car was set alight using a rag inserted into the petrol tank. It appears that they then shot themselves, each with a single shot to the head. A handgun was retrieved at the scene.’

  ‘A gun?’ I said. ‘Where did they get a gun from?’

  Ru
pert swallowed painfully and shifted his position.

  ‘The gun was registered to Leopold Mackenzie,’ he murmured in a low voice.

  It took me a moment to realize what I was hearing, and when I did realize I felt dizzy with rage.

  ‘Are you suggesting that Finn had gained possession of her father’s gun?’ Baird shrugged shamefacedly. ‘And that she had it in this house? Didn’t you know that Mackenzie had a gun and that it was missing?’

  ‘No,’ said Baird. ‘This is difficult for us and I know it must be difficult for you.’

  ‘Don’t patronize me, Rupert, with all your prepared psychological jargon.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that, Sam,’ Baird said softly. ‘I meant that it must be difficult for you.’

  I started.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean this happening again, for a second time.’

  I sank back in my chair, miserable and defeated.

  ‘You bastards. You have done your research, haven’t you?’

  Twenty-Four

  ‘I can count to a hundred.’

  ‘No! Go on then.’

  ‘One, two, skip a few, ninety-nine, a hundred.’

  I chuckled appreciatively, hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, dark glasses covering my bloodshot gaze.

  ‘And listen. Knock knock.’

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Isobel.’

  ‘Isobel who?’

  ‘Isobel necessary on a bicycle? And listen, listen. How does Batman’s mummy call him in for supper?’

  ‘I don’t know. How does Batman’s mummy call him in for supper?’

  ‘Dinner-dinner-dinner-dinner, dinner-dinner-dinner-dinner. Batman!’

  ‘Who told you that one?’

  ‘Joshua who loves me and kisses me on the slide when Miss isn’t looking and we’re going to get married when we’re growed. And how many ears does Davy Crockett have?’

  ‘I don’t know, how many ears does Davy Crockett have?’