The safe house

I stopped and looked anxiously over at Finn, who was stretched out on the sofa. Even the word seemed insensitive. How had she taken it? Finn wasn’t looking at me. She was looking across at Elsie. She rolled off on to the ground and scrambled over to where Elsie was seated by her box of toys.

‘But he didn’t kill everybody,’ Finn said. ‘There was a man called Noah and there was Mrs Noah and their children, and God loved them. So God told Noah to build a huge boat and to put all the animals on the boat, so that they could be saved. So he built the boat and put every animal he could find inside. Like dogs and cats.’

‘And lions,’ said Elsie. ‘And pandas. And sharks.’

‘Not sharks,’ said Finn. ‘The sharks were all right. They could look after themselves in the water. But the others, the family and the animals, they all stayed in the ark. And it rained and rained and the whole world was covered with water and they stayed safe and dry.’

‘Did it have a top?’

‘It had a roof. It was like a house on a boat. And at the end, when the water had gone away, God promised that he would never do it again, and do you know what he did to show his promise?’

‘No,’ said Elsie, her mouth gaping open.

‘Look, I’ll show you. Where are your felt-tips?’ Finn reached into Elsie’s playbox and took out some pens and a pad of paper. ‘See if you can guess what I’m drawing.’ She drew a crimson curve. Then she drew a yellow line along its top edge. Then blue.

‘I know,’ said Elsie. ‘It’s a rainbow.’

‘That’s right. That’s what God put in the sky as a promise that it would never happen again.’

‘Can we see a rainbow? Now?’

‘Maybe later. If the sun comes out.’

Which it didn’t. We had a good old-fashioned rural ploughman’s lunch as invented by some flash git who lived in a city. Good fresh bread, bought half-baked from the supermarket. I unpeeled the polythene from a wedge of cheese. Some tomatoes from a packet. A jar of relish. Sunflower spread. Finn and I shared a large bottle of Belgian beer. Elsie chattered, but Finn and I didn’t say much. Beer and cheese and the rain on the roof. It felt enough for me.

I got some logs from the shelter at the side of the house and made a fire in the grate in the living room. When the flames were shimmering, I got the chessboard and pieces and set them out on the rug. As I played through an old Karpov-Kasparov world-championship game, Finn and Elsie were on the other side of the chimney-breast. Elsie was drawing with fierce concentration while Finn told what sounded like a story in a conspiratorial, low voice. Sometimes Elsie whispered something back.

I looked down at the board and lost myself in Karpov’s strategic spiders’ webs, turning the tiniest of advantages into an irresistible attack, and Kasparov’s heady plunges into awesome complication, confident that he would be able to emerge ahead. I was playing around with variations, so the games took a very long time to get through. After some time, I don’t know how long, I heard a clink of china and a warm familiar smell beside me. Finn was kneeling beside me with a tray. She had made tea and toast and a couple of hot-cross buns for Elsie.

‘How will I ever manage to go back to an office?’ I said.

‘I don’t know how you can lose yourself like that in a game,’ Finn said. ‘Are you just playing through something that someone else has already played?’

‘That’s right. It’s like watching thought in action.’

Finn crinkled her nose.

‘Doesn’t sound like much fun to me.’

‘I’m not sure that fun is exactly the right word. Who said that life should be fun? Do you know the moves?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That a bishop moves diagonally, that a king moves one square and all that.’

‘Yes, I know that much.’

‘Then look at this.’

I quickly returned the pieces to their starting positions and began to play through a game I knew by heart.

‘Who wins?’ Finn asked.

‘Black. He was thirteen years old.’

‘Friend of yours?’

I laughed.

‘No. It was Bobby Fischer.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘He became world champion. Anyway, his opponent was overconfident and neglected his development.’

I played White’s seventeenth move.

‘Look at the board,’ I said. ‘What can you see?’

Finn pondered the position for more than a minute with that grave concentration of hers that so impressed me.

‘It looks as if White is in a better position.’

‘Very good. Why?’

‘Both Black’s queen and his horse…’

‘His knight.’

‘His knight… are being attacked. He can’t save them both. So how did Black win?’

I reached forward and moved the bishop across the board. I looked with amusement at Finn’s puzzled expression.

‘That doesn’t do anything, does it?’

‘Yes, it does. I love this position.’

‘Why?’

‘White can do lots of different things. He can take the queen or the knight. He can swap off the bishop. He can do nothing and try to batten down the hatches. Whichever he chooses, he loses in a completely different way. Go on, try something.’

Finn looked for a moment and then took Black’s bishop. In just four moves there was a beautiful smothered mate by the knight.

‘That’s wonderful’, said Finn. ‘How could he work out all that in his head?’

‘I don’t know. It hurts me just to think about it.’

‘It’s not my sort of game, though,’ Finn said. ‘The pieces are all out in the open. Poker is my game. All that bluff and deception.’

‘Don’t let Danny hear that or he’ll keep you up all night at it. Anyway, that’s the whole beauty of the game. Chess, I mean. Two people sit across the board from each other. All the pieces are in full view and they manipulate each other, bluff, lure, fool each other. There’s no hiding-place. Hang on a second.’ I reached for a book that was beside the board and nicked to the epigraph. ‘Listen to this: “On the chessboard lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in a checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite.”’

Finn gave an almost flirtatious little moue.

‘Sounds a bit scary to me. I don’t want to be laid bare.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘We need our little self-deceptions and strategies. In real life, I mean, whatever real life is. Chess is a different world, where all that gets stripped away. In the match I just showed you, a little boy lured a grown-up master chess player into destroying himself in the open.’ I saw that I was losing her attention. ‘We must have a game some time. But not today.’

‘Definitely not,’ said Finn firmly. ‘I don’t want to be at your mercy. At least not any more than I am already. More tea?’

‘I want to play chest.’

It was Elsie, her drawing finished or abandoned.

‘Chess,’ I said. ‘All right. What is this piece called?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘How can you remember all those moves?’ Finn asked.

‘Because I’m interested in them.’

‘My memory is totally useless.’

‘I doubt that. Let me show you something. Choose seven or eight objects from the room and tell us what they are.’

After Finn had done that, we sent her out of the room for a couple of minutes, then called her back. She squatted back down on the floor with Elsie and me.

‘All right, Elsie, what were they?’

Elsie closed her eyes and wrinkled her forehead and her little round nose.

‘It was a chess piece… and a cup… and a lamp… and a picture of a sheep and a pink felt-tip and a yellow felt-tip… and Fing’s shoes and Mummy’s watch.’

‘Brilliant,’ I said.

‘That’s pretty good for a five-year-old, isn’t it?’ Finn said. ‘How did she do that?’

‘She practises,’ I said. ‘Centuries ago, remembering things was an art that people used to learn. The way you do it is to have a building in your mind, and you put things in different places in the building, and when you want to remember them, you go into the building – in your mind’s eye – and retrieve the objects.’

‘What do you have, Elsie?’ Finn asked.

‘I’ve got my special house,’ Elsie said.

‘So where was the chess piece?’

‘On the front door.’

‘And where was the cup?’

‘On the doormat.’

‘How did anybody ever think of doing that?’ Finn asked.

‘There’s an old story about that,’ I said. ‘A sort of myth. In Ancient Greece a poet was reciting at a banquet. Before the end of the feast, the poet was called away, and a few minutes later the banqueting hall collapsed and everybody was killed. The corpses were so badly damaged that the next of kin couldn’t recognize them and claim them for burial. But the poet was able to remember where everybody had been silting, and because of that he could identify all the bodies. The poet remembered all the guests because he had seen them in a particular location, and he realized that this could be a means of remembering anything.’

Finn’s face was pensive now.

‘Memory and death,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t dare to wander in the house of my own mind. I’d be frightened of what I might find there.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ Elsie said proudly. ‘My house is safe.’

I stayed up till late. No Danny.

Sixteen

The next evening I went to what Michael Daley had called a social occasion when he invited me to accompany him. ‘You wanted me to launch you into local society,’ he said, so I had to be a sport and say yes.

I pulled garments from their hangers and tossed them on to the bed. There was a long maroon woollen dress with a high waist that I liked, but it seemed too sombre. I rejected a couple of black miniskirts, the delicate blue dress with the soft neckline and three-quarter-length sleeves that I never threw away and never wore, the loose silk black trousers that had started to resemble pyjamas, and finally put on a black voile top and calf-length satin skirt. I pulled out my favourite black shoes with no heel (I tower over most men anyway) and a clunky silver buckle, and hung ear-rings on my lobes in a jangle of hot colour. Then I examined myself in the mirror; I didn’t look very respectable. I put on no make-up, except for a slash of red on my lips to match my hair. I pulled Finn’s trilby from the top of the wardrobe and jammed it on my head. I wished it was Danny taking me to this party; without him, I was dressed up and stepping on to the set of the wrong play. Where was Danny now? I had swallowed my pride and tried to telephone him, but there had been no reply, not even his voice on the answering machine telling me he wasn’t there but would ring me back as soon as he could.

Elsie was already asleep in a nest of duvet. I knelt beside her and breathed in her clean fragrance: her breath smelled of hay and her hair of clover. My hat touched her on the shoulder and she grimaced in her sleep and curled up on her side, muttering something which I couldn’t catch. Her paintings were stuck all around her room, more every day. Rainbows; and people with arms and legs coming out of their bulbous heads, eyes askew; animals with five legs; daubs of violent colour. Finn had labelled each picture neatly with Elsie’s name and the date she had drawn it. Sometimes there was a title: one, a scribble of purple with eyes and hands adrift in the chaos of colour, was called ‘Mummy at work’. It occurred to me that if I died now Elsie would have no real memory of me. She’d miss Finn when the time came for her to go, but she’d get over it quickly.

Linda and Finn turned from the sofa as I came into the living room. They were eating microwaved popcorn and drinking Coke in front of the TV. Finn had resolutely opposed all my suggestions that she contact her old friends, but an unlikely friendship had grown up between these two, comradely and consoling.

‘I’m off. What are you watching?’

‘Linda brought round a video of Dances With Wolves. You look nice.’ Finn smiled sweetly and poured a handful of popcorn into her mouth. She seemed completely comfortable; she’d kicked off her shoes and her legs were tucked up under her, a floppy cardigan was wrapped around her; she’d plaited her hair and looked pre-pubescent. I tried to imagine her as fat and found that I couldn’t.

Kevin Costner was dancing around naked, his white buttocks shining cutely.

‘Such an irritating actor,’ I said waspishly. Linda turned to me, shocked.

‘He’s gorgeous.’

Outside, a car horn sounded. I picked up my coat.

‘That’ll be Michael. I won’t be gone long, Linda. Help yourself to anything you want. Finn, see you in the morning.’

And I was gone, into the cold night air, into the warm interior of Michael’s car, meeting his appreciative gaze, sinking into my coat, leaning back in the seat. I love being driven, probably because I almost never am. Michael drove with deliberation, and his big car slipped smoothly along narrow lanes. He was wearing a navy-blue coat over a dark suit and looked rather expensive and less louche than usual. Sensing my eyes upon him he turned, met my gaze, smiled.

‘What are you thinking, Sam?’

I spoke before my brain intercepted me.

‘I was wondering why you’ve never married, had children.’

He frowned.

‘You sound like my mother. My life is the way I want it to be. Here we are’ – we were in Castletown with its stone lions on gate pillars and lawns – ‘we’ll be there in a couple of minutes.’

I sat up a bit straighter in the seat, pushed back a wisp of hair that had escaped the hat.

‘How many people are going to be there?’

‘About thirty. It’ll be a buffet supper. Laura’s one of the more bearable consultants at your hospital. Her husband Gordon works in London, in the City. They’re very rich. There’ll be a couple of other doctors.’ Michael smiled with a touch of mockery. ‘A cross-section of provincial society.’

He turned off the road and pulled to a halt at the beginning of the drive. The house ahead was dismayingly large. Was I dressed right?

‘It’s the sort of house I imagine Finn’s parents living in,’ I said.

‘It’s just a couple of streets away,’ Michael said and looked serious for a moment. He got out of the car and came round to my door, which he held open for me. Not something Danny would do. ‘Laura and Gordon were close friends of Leo and Liz. There’ll be other friends there as well, I suppose.’

‘Remember I don’t know her though, Michael.’

‘You don’t know Finn,’ said Michael with a conspiratorial smile. ‘I’ll try to remember that.’

He took me by my elbow and steered me up a driveway lined with rhododendrons. A Mercedes was parked outside the Georgian house, whose porch was lit by a lamp. Behind the thin curtains I could see the shapes of groups of guests, hear the chink of glasses, the hum of voices and the laughter of people at ease with each other. I should have worn the delicate blue dress, after all, and lined my lips with pink. Michael ostentatiously sniffed the air.

‘Can’t you smell it?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘Money. It’s in the air. Everywhere. And all we can do is smell it.’ For a moment he sounded bitter. ‘Do you ever have the feeling that people like Laura and Gordon are on the inside and we’re outside with our noses pressed against the glass?’

‘If you ring the bell perhaps they’ll let us inside as well.’

‘You’ve spoiled my image,’ he said.

He thumped the heavy brass knocker and almost immediately a handsome woman with iron-grey curls and a taffeta skirt down to the ground opened the door; the hallway behind her was wide and its walls were lined with paintings.

‘Michael!’ She kissed his cheek three times, French fashion. ‘And you must be Dr Laschen. I’m Laura.’

‘Samantha,’ I said. Her handshake was firm. ‘Thank you so much for inviting me.’

‘We’re so looking forward to having you at the hospital. Not long now, is it?’

But she didn’t wait for a reply. I probably wasn’t supposed to talk shop. And I couldn’t mention Finn. That didn’t leave much I was interested in. The room was full of people standing in exclusive knots, in their hands glasses full of amber-coloured wine. The men were all in dark suits; men only take risks with their ties. Most of the women wore long dresses, and dainty jewellery flashed from their ears and fingers. Michael seemed surprisingly at home here. He broke through a closed circle of four people and said affably:

‘Hello, Bill’ – a large man in, God, one of those things wrapped round the waist, shook him by the hand heartily – ‘Karen, Penny, Judith, isn’t it? May I introduce a new neighbour of ours? This is Samantha Laschen – Samantha’s a doctor. She’s setting up a new centre of her own at Stamford General.’

There was a murmur of subdued interest. ‘Something to do with trauma. People getting upset after accidents, that sort of thing, isn’t it?’

I grunted something meaningless. Running down the trauma industry was my job. I wasn’t so keen on it being done by an oafish amateur. There was a polite chorus of greeting, then a little pause. But these people were social pros. Within half an hour I’d talked about gardening to Bill, country versus town to a rotund man with a gravelly voice and permanently raised eyebrows whose name I never discovered. A high-bunned woman called Bridget told me about the latest activities of the animal rights terrorists. Dogs seized from a research facility, sabotage at the university, vandalism of farm vehicles.

‘I don’t eat veal myself,’ she confessed. ‘I read an article once about how the calves are so weak that they can’t even stand up, poor things. I always found the meat rather tasteless anyway. But these other things are something different. The point is that these are city people who don’t understand rural traditions.’

‘You mean like forcing beagles to smoke cigarettes?’

I looked round at the speaker to my right. A saturnine young man with close-cropped hair and extraordinarily pale eyes nodded at me and drifted away towards a tray of drinks.

‘Don’t mind him,’ said Bridget. ‘He just does it to annoy.’

I was passed expertly from group to group, while women in black skirts and white shirts poured wine into my glass, or handed me tiny canapés with a firm curled shrimp or a shred of dill-topped smoked salmon in the middle, until I found myself once more standing next to Laura.

‘Samantha, this is my husband Gordon. Gordon. Samantha Laschen. You remember, Michael’s friend. And this is Cleo.’ Cleo was taller than me, and broad. She was dressed in pillar-box red, and her hair, which once must have been blonde but had now turned a rusty grey, hung loosely about the pouches of her ageing, intelligent face.

‘We were just talking about Leo and Liz.’

I composed my face into an expression of blank interest and wondered if there was any mayonnaise on my chin. I stroked it as if I were thinking. Nothing. Or perhaps I’d only smeared it.

‘You must remember. Leo and Liz Mackenzie, who were murdered in their own house last month.’

‘I read about it,’ I said.

‘And their daughter, of course, Fiona, lovely girl. She survived, of course, she was in Stamford General for a while. She was terribly wounded and distressed, I heard. Terrible thing.’

‘Awful,’ I said.

‘They were friends of ours, neighbours almost. We used to play bridge with them every first Thursday of the month. Leo had the best memory for cards I ever saw.’

‘Such a waste,’ said Gordon, nodding vigorously and pulling his features into the settled grimace of sorrow. They had evidently performed this double act of shocked remembrance before.

‘What happened to Fiona?’ This was from Cleo, who had managed to get hold of a plate and now scooped up a handful of asparagus wrapped in bacon from a tray as the waitress passed.

‘Nobody knows where she is at the moment. She’s disappeared.’

‘Michael would know, of course.’ Gordon turned to me. ‘He’s her GP. But he’s the soul of discretion.’

‘What was Fiona like?’ I blessed Cleo for asking the questions that I felt unable to, at the same time noting how they talked about the girl as if she had died.

‘Lovely. She had her weight problems, of course, poor thing. Donald,’ Laura caught the arm of a cadaverous man passing and pulled him into our circle. ‘Cleo was just asking what Fiona was like. She used to spend time with your daughter, didn’t she?’

‘Fiona?’ He frowned. A piece of asparagus slid from its bracelet of bacon as I lifted it to my mouth and landed between my feet.

‘You know, Fiona Mackenzie, whose parents both…’

‘Oh, Finn.’ He reflected for a moment. ‘Rather a nice girl, not loud like some of them are, or forward. Sophie hasn’t seen her since she went away, of course, though I think she sent a letter to the police station to forward.’

I tried to prod something specific out of him.

‘Difficult age, though, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Boyfriends. Parties, all that.’ I lobbed the remark into the conversation, then shut my mouth firmly, as if it hadn’t come from me.

‘Boyfriends? Oh, I don’t think she had anything like that. No, as I say she was very pleasant and polite; a bit under the thumb of Leo, I always used to think. Nice girl, as I said.’

That was that. We began to eat supper at half-past nine. Game pie and rocket salad, little crescents of choux pastry filled with fish, chicken satay on skewers, lots of different cheeses, looking grand on a large wooden platter, tangerines heaped in a bowl. I sipped and ate and nodded and smiled, and all the time I kept thinking that Finn must have been in this house – and how could she have come from this kind of high-ceilinged world and yet have fitted so easily into mine? I sat on a yellow-covered chair, my plate propped on my knees, and for a moment was overcome with the familiar agony of not belonging, not here, not to the semi I grew up wanting to escape from, and now (I felt a wave of panic run through me) not to my own house, where a young girl with soft hair was looking over my daughter, singing lullabies that only mothers should sing to their children. If I had been alone I might even have wrapped my arms around myself and rocked, in the age-old gesture of distress which my patients often use. I wanted Elsie, and I wanted Danny, and they were all that I wanted. ‘Fuck you, Danny, I’m not going to sit around moping,’ I muttered under my breath.

‘Clockwork Orange?’

‘What?’ I frowned and looked round, startled out of my reverie. It was the man with the close-cropped head.

‘Your outfit. You’ve come as a character from Clockwork Orange.’

‘Never seen it.’

‘It was a compliment. You look like one of the characters who break into the houses of blindly respectable people and shake them up a bit.’

I surveyed the room.

‘You think this lot need shaking up?’

He laughed.

‘Call me a wet liberal, but after an evening like this, I start to think that the Khmer Rouge had the right idea. Raze all the cities. Kill everybody wearing spectacles. Drive the rest out into the fields and turn them into manual labourers.’

‘You wear spectacles yourself.’

‘Not all the time.’

I looked at the man and he looked at me. After thirty seconds’ acquaintance I would say that he was the most attractive man I had met since I had left London. He raised his glass in an ironic toast, displaying a wedding ring. Oh, well.

‘You’re a friend of Dr Michael Daley.’

‘We’re not exactly friends.’

‘The hunting doctor.’

‘What?’

‘You’ve heard of the flying doctor. And the radio doctor. And the singing nun. Michael Daley is the hunting doctor.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What I say. He rides horses which ride after wild animals and sometimes catch them, and tears them apart. And the triumphant hunters then daub entrails on to each others’ faces. Another of those country traditions you were being lectured about.’

‘I didn’t know Michael did that. I can’t imagine him hunting somehow.’

‘I’m Frank, by the way.’

‘I’m…’

‘I know who you are. You’re Dr Samantha Laschen. I’ve read some of your very interesting articles about the construction of illness. And I know that you’re setting up the new trauma unit at Stamford General. The Stamford Trust’s potential new cash cow.’

‘That isn’t precisely its point,’ I said with as much asperity as I could express with a straight face. Frank’s ambiguously probing and humorous manner both attracted and unsettled me.

‘Well now, Sam, we must meet for a drink some time in a real place, and we can discuss subjects such as how the function and purpose of something like your trauma unit can be different from what it first appears.’

‘Sounds a bit abstract to me.’

‘How is the unit going?’

‘I’m starting in the summer.’

‘So what are you doing now?’

‘A book and things.’

‘Things?’

Frank took not a glass but an entire bottle of white wine from a passing tray and filled our two glasses. I looked ruminatively at his wedding ring once more, a feeling of recklessness that was just another way of being unhappy rising in me. He looked at me with narrowed, thoughtful eyes.

‘You’re a paradox, you know. You’re here at the house of Laura and Gordon Sims, but you’re not, thank goodness, a member of their circle of bridge players and tuft-hunters. You arrive at the party with Michael Daley but you claim not to be a friend. It’s all quite mysterious. Why would an expert in traumatic stress…?’

‘Hello, professor.’

Frank turned.

‘Why, it’s the hunting doctor. I’ve been telling Dr Laschen about your hobbies.’

‘Have you told her about your own hobbies?’

‘I have no hobbies.’

I turned to Michael and was surprised to see his jaw set in anger. He looked at me.

‘I should explain to you, Sam, that Frank Laroue is one of the theorists behind all the barn-burning and veal-protesting and laboratory break-ins.’

Frank gave an ironic bow of the head.

‘You natter me, doctor, but I don’t think that activists need instruction from a humble academic like me. You are far more effective on the other side.’

‘What do you mean?’

Frank winked at me.

‘You shouldn’t be so modest about your recreational activities, Dr Daley. Let me blow his trumpet for him. He is the adviser to an informal secret committee composed of academics and policemen and other stalwart citizens, which monitors the actions and publications of people like me, who are concerned with ecological issues, ensuring that we can be harassed occasionally, pour décourager les autres. Is that about right?’

Michael didn’t reply. ‘I’m afraid we have to go now, Sam.’

Michael had taken my arm, which in itself tempted me to resist and stay, but I yielded to the pressure.

‘See you,’ said Frank in a low voice as I passed him.

‘Was that true, what Frank said about you?’ I asked when we were back in the car. Michael started the car and we drove away.

‘Yes, I ride to hounds. Yes, I advise a committee which monitors the activities of these terrorists.’ There was a long silence as we left Stamford. ‘Is this a problem?’ he said, finally.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Something about it leaves a bad taste. You should have told me.’

‘I know I should,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s all so childish,’ I said. ‘People spying on each other.’

Michael veered sharply, braked and came to a halt. He turned the key and the car shivered and fell silent. I could hear the sea, softly, down below. He turned to me. I could only see his silhouette, not his expression.

‘It isn’t childish,’ he said. ‘Do you remember Chris Woodeson, the behavioural science researcher?’

‘Yes, I know about that.’

‘We all know that behavioural scientists put rats in mazes, don’t we? So somebody sent him a parcel bomb which blew his face off, blinded him. He has three children, you know.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Frank Laroue can be charming sometimes, the ladies love him, but he plays with ideas and sometimes other people put them into practice and he doesn’t take responsibility.’

‘Yes, but…’

‘I’m sorry, I should have told you this earlier. Baird told me not to tell you, but I’m going to tell you anyway. There’s a magazine published by animal activists, it’s illegal and underground and all that, and it prints the addresses of people who are claimed to be torturers of animals, as an obvious invitation to people to take action against them. In December, an edition of the magazine appeared with the home address of Leo Mackenzie, pharmaceutical millionaire.’

‘For God’s sake, Michael, why wasn’t I told about that? Baird just mentioned animal activists vaguely, as a possibility; he never told me about a direct connection.’

‘It wasn’t my decision.’

I couldn’t see his expression. Was he remorseful? Defiant?

‘Knowing this, and the police knowing this, I can’t believe you thought it was a good idea to stick Finn in the middle of nowhere with me and Elsie.’

‘We wouldn’t have considered it if we didn’t think it was safe.’

‘That’s easy for you to say, Michael.’

‘Perhaps I should say that I was first told about this edition of the magazine by Philip Carrier, one of the detectives running the animal rights investigation. It wasn’t the publication of Leo’s address that he rang me about.’

‘No? What was it then? My address, presumably. That’s all I need.’

‘No, they printed my name and address.’

‘Yours?’ I felt a flush of embarrassment. ‘God, I’m so sorry.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘What are you doing about it?’

Michael started the car and we moved off once more.

‘I double-lock the door at night, that’s about all. Don’t worry, I’m strong.’

‘All that riding to hounds.’

‘I do other things as well. I must show you my boat. We should go out on it for a day. Get away from all of this.’

I mumbled something.

‘What are you doing on Saturday?’

I mumbled something else.

‘I’ll pick you up after breakfast.’

That night I couldn’t sleep. I put on my dressing gown – Danny’s, full of his smell in its towelly folds – and sat by my window and listened to the sea. I think that I cried. If Danny had come into the room then I would have laid him on the bed without a word. And I would have undressed him slowly and kissed him tenderly and covered his nakedness with my body, pulling apart my gown and sinking on to him, drawing him into me, watching his face all the while. I would have asked him to take us away, live with us, to marry me, to give me a child.

At dawn I fell asleep.

Seventeen

‘A cash cow?’

Geoff Marsh looked amused, almost nattered by the suggestion.

‘That’s what the man said to me.’

‘You shouldn’t believe everything that strange men say to you at parties. Who was it?’

‘A man called Frank Laroue, an academic.’ Geoff Marsh’s face broke into a knowing smile. ‘A friend of yours?’

‘I know Laroue. He probably believes that the whole of western medicine is a capitalist plot to keep the workers unhealthy, but in this case he has a point. Post-traumatic stress is a growth area, no doubt about it.’

It was the Monday after the party, and Geoff and I were in the middle of a working breakfast of coffee and croissants. I had mischievously quoted Laroue at Geoff and was surprised to find it taken seriously.

‘There can’t be much money in trauma,’ I said.

Marsh shook his head vigorously and swallowed a mouthful of pastry.

‘You’d be surprised. You saw the judgment last week in favour of the trauma suffered by the Northwick firemen. What were the damages and the costs? Five million and change?’

‘Good for the firemen.’

‘Good for us. I suspect we will now be finding insurance companies insisting on a pre-emptive policy of stress counselling to safeguard them against future litigation. And we are in a position to be ahead of the market in supplying that counselling.’

‘I thought the purpose of this unit was to fill a therapeutic need, not to protect the investment of insurance companies.’

‘The two go together, Sam. You should be proud of this potential. After all, the unit is your baby.’

‘I sometimes feel that my baby isn’t turning out the way I had planned.’

Geoff drained his coffee-cup and his face assumed a sententious expression.

‘Well, you know, you have to allow your children to go their own way.’

‘Thank you, Dr Spock,’ I said sourly. ‘The baby hasn’t even been born yet.’

Geoff got up and wiped his lips with a napkin.

‘Sam, I want to show you something. Come over here.’

He led me to one window of his large, high, corner office. He pointed down to a corner of the hospital grounds where a few men in orange helmets were standing disconsolately outside a Portakabin.

‘We’re expanding,’ he said. ‘Stamford is expanding. We’re in the right place. Close to London, close to Europe, green-field sites. I have a dream, Sam. Imagine this hospital trust realizing its full potential and being floated on the Stock Exchange. We could be the Microsoft of primary healthcare.’

I followed his gaze, aghast.

‘I suppose now you’re going to ask me to turn the stones into bread. Unfortunately I can’t stay the full forty days here in the wilderness because I’ve got to get back to making so-called progress on my book.’

Geoff looked confused.

‘What are you talking about, Sam?’

‘Nothing much, Geoff. I’ll see you next week, back in the real world.’

‘This is the real world, Sam.’

As I drove on the now-familiar route out of Stamford I reflected gloomily that he was probably right, and then I considered the rest of my world – Elsie, Danny, Finn, my book – and felt even worse. Elsie was at school, Danny was God knows where, and when I arrived home Finn was sitting on a sofa holding a magazine but not reading it. I looked with a pang towards my office, then took a deep breath and walked over to her.

‘Walk?’ I suggested.

We set off in silence, turning left and walking parallel with the sea for a mile or so and then turning off sharply to the left again. We were walking along the edge of a ploughed field by a ditch so wide as to be almost a canal. All we could see ahead of us were flimsy lines of trees ranged as straight as the posts of a fence – defences against the wind, I supposed.

I was thinking hard. It was the nineteenth of February. Finn had been with us for four weeks. There were two, maybe three, weeks to go before I called a halt. But for Elsie, a temporary expediency had become her life. She loved coming downstairs each morning to find us both (Finn in my old dressing gown, me in clothes that were not office ones) sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee, chatting. She loved me to drive her to school each morning and stand at the classroom door with the other parents and kiss her quickly on her cold cheek when the bell rang and say, ‘I’ll collect you this afternoon.’ And each day, when the bell sounded again at three-forty, she would run out with her coat and her pack folder and usually a piece of stiff paper with colourful daubs on it, and I could see that she was very happy to be like the other children. I was even careful to wear my least exotic clothes when I collected her. I tried to chat to the other mothers about head-lice lotion and the next school jumble sale. For a bit I, too, wanted us to blend in with the scenery. At teatime Finn would make Elsie toast and honey; it became a kind of ritual. At bedtime she’d pad silently into Elsie’s room to say good-night while I read her books. I realized one day that she had made us feel like a real family, rather than a mother and daughter, in a way that Danny had never done. And I knew, too, that that was because I’d never allowed Danny to.

But for Finn as well as for me it was a false, fairy-tale existence. Soon she would have to return to a world of friends and solicitors, A levels, obligations and parties and competition, sex, university, chance, pain.

We arrived at a small, austere church, little more than a box, with a single window in its grey walls and a notice outside announcing that it dated from the eighth century. It had been used as a barn, a cowshed and, according to local tradition, a storehouse for smuggled casks of wine. And please do not throw litter. I asked Finn directly if she had thought about what she was going to do. She shrugged, kicked a stone out of her path, dug her hands further into her pockets.

‘You can’t stay here, you know that. My job starts in a couple of months. And anyway, your life isn’t here.’

She muttered something.

‘What?’ I looked across at her, her face was set against the wind, sullen.

‘I said,’ she responded angrily, ‘that my life isn’t anywhere.’

‘Look, Finn…’

‘I don’t want to talk about it, OK? You’re not my mother.’

‘Talking of which,’ I said as matter-of-factly as possible, jarred by the tone of her voice, ‘my mother is arriving tomorrow for lunch.’

Finn looked up. Her face lost its mutiny.

‘What’s she like? Is she anything like you?’

‘I don’t think so.’ I stopped myself and smiled. ‘Maybe more than I like to believe. She’s more like Bobbie, perhaps. Very respectable. She hates me not being married. I think she’s embarrassed in front of her friends.’

‘Does she want you to marry Danny?’

‘God, no.’

‘Is Danny coming again soon?’

I shrugged, and we set off again, continuing the huge, slow circle that would take us home.

‘Sam? Who was Elsie’s father?’

‘A nice man,’ I replied curtly. Then I relented and shocked myself by saying something to Finn which I had said to almost nobody else. ‘He died a few months before Elsie was born. He killed himself.’

Finn said nothing. That was the only right response. I saw an opportunity.

‘You never talk about your past, Finn. I understand that. But tell me something. Tell me about something that was important to you, a person, an experience, anything.’

Finn tramped on and gave no sign that she had heard me. I worried that I might have repelled her. After a hundred yards she spoke, still walking, still looking straight ahead.

‘Did you hear how I spent last year?’

‘Someone told me you were going round South America.’

‘Yes. It all seems vague and far away now, so much so that I can hardly tell one country from another. It was a strange time for me, a kind of convalescence and a rebirth. But I do remember one time. I was in Peru and went to the Machu Picchu site which used to be something important in the Inca empire. If you’re there at the time of the full moon, you can pay seven dollars for what’s called a boleto nocturno, and you can visit the site at night. I went and looked at the Intihuatana – that’s the only stone calendar that wasn’t destroyed by the Spaniards – and I stood there in the moonlight, and I thought about light and about the way empires decay and die like people. The Inca empire is gone. The Spanish empire is gone. And as I stood there I thought about how all that survived were those ruins, the bits and pieces, and that beautiful light.’

I had never heard Finn talk like this before and I was deeply affected.

‘Finn, that’s beautiful,’ I said. ‘What made you want to tell me that now?’

‘You asked me,’ she said, and I felt the smallest chill of dismissal, unless it was just the chill of the wind blowing in off the North Sea.

As we came in sight of the house again, Finn said, ‘What are you going to cook for her?’

‘Them. Dad’s coming too. Oh, I don’t know, I’ll go to the supermarket and buy something ready-made.’

‘Can I do the lunch for you?’

‘Cook it?’

‘Yes. I’d like to. And could we invite Dr Daley as well?’

I was surprised to realize that there was a small bit of me that resented Finn’s continuing attachment to Michael Daley. It was understandable. He was a contact with normality, he was good-looking, he was the family doctor. Yet, perversely, my vanity wanted her to depend on me, even as I was hardening my resolve that she should leave within a couple of weeks.

‘I’ll ring him.’

‘And Danny?’

‘Maybe not Danny this time.’

For a brief moment, I saw Danny’s night-face, tender and stubbly and quite without his habitual daytime irony – the face I hoped that he turned only towards me – and felt a panicky lurch of desire. I didn’t even know where he was. I didn’t know if he was in London or away. What on earth was I doing in this muddy wasteland anyway, helping a fucked-up girl and losing my lover?

My uneasy feeling hung over me all day like bad weather and wouldn’t disperse even when I drove to fetch Elsie from school. She was sullen also and I tried to cheer her up by telling her how Finn and I had visited a church that in the olden days was a secret pirate store where they used to keep the treasure they had smuggled ashore from their pirate ships.

‘What treasure?’ she asked.

‘Gold crowns and pearl necklaces and silver ear-rings,’ I said. ‘And they buried them and drew a map and then the pirates signed it using their own blood.’

We returned home, Elsie determined to draw her own treasure map. Finn and I sat with mugs of coffee in the kitchen while Elsie crouched over the table, her forehead wrinkled, a little tip of tongue projecting from a corner of her mouth, using almost every colour from her box of Magic Markers. The phone rang and Linda answered it.

‘It’s for you,’ she shouted from upstairs.

‘Who is it?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

I huffed and picked up the phone in the living room.

‘Is that Dr Laschen?’

‘Yes, who is this?’

‘Frank Laroue. I enjoyed meeting you on Saturday and I hoped we could meet again.’

‘That would be nice,’ I said calmly, while my mind flapped in panic. ‘What would you like to do?’

‘Would you like to invite me round for tea at your new house? I always like seeing people’s houses.’

‘And your wife?’

‘My wife’s away.’

‘I’m afraid my house isn’t really in a fit state for anybody to visit at the moment. What about a drink in town?’

We agreed a date and place, and I rang off before I had a chance to change my mind. I wondered if I should tell Michael Daley but quickly dismissed the idea. I was going to go on his boat. That was enough. I owed myself some fun, and fuck Danny.

‘We’re like three pirates, aren’t we, Elsie?’ said Finn, as I returned to the kitchen. ‘Mummy and me and you.’

‘Yeah,’ said Elsie.

‘Is it finished?’

‘Yeah.’

I laughed.

‘So shall we all sign the treasure map, you and me and Finn?’

Elsie’s eyes lit up.

‘Yea-a-ah,’ she said enthusiastically.

‘So let’s find the red Magic Marker.’

‘No,’ said Elsie. ‘Blood. Sign it in blood.’

‘Elsie!’ I said sharply, glancing fearfully over at Finn. She got up and left the room. ‘Elsie, you mustn’t talk like that.’

Finn came back into the kitchen and sat next to me.

‘Look,’ she said. She was holding a needle between her thumb and first finger. She smiled. ‘It’s all right, Sam. I’m better. Not perfect, but better. Look, Elsie, it’s easy.’ She jabbed the needle into the end of her left thumb, then leaned forward and squeezed a crimson drop on to Elsie’s map. With the eye of the needle she arranged the drop into a fair approximation of an ‘F’. ‘Now for you, Sam.’

‘No, I hate needles.’

‘You’re a doctor.’

‘That’s why I became one, so that I can put needles into other people.’

‘Hand.’ Finn said firmly. ‘It’s all right. I’ve got a new one for you.’ I reluctantly held out my left hand and flinched as she jabbed the needle into the tip of the thumb. She squeezed it on to the paper.

‘I suppose I’ll have to write Samantha,’ I grumbled.

‘“S” will do,’ laughed Finn.

I formed my blood into an ‘S’.

‘Now, what about Elsie,’ said Finn.

‘I’ll use Mummy’s blood,’ she said with finality.

Finn squeezed another drop from my thumb and Elsie smeared it into something that looked like a raspberry that had been trodden on. I contemplated my thumb.

‘It hurts,’ I said.

‘Let me see,’ said Finn. She took my hand and looked at the thumb. There was a dot of red, and she leaned forward and dabbed it off with her tongue, looking up at me with her big dark eyes.

‘There,’ she said. ‘We’re blood sisters.’

Eighteen

‘Sam, Sam, wake up.’

A whisper close to my ear pulled me up through a tumble of dreams to focus on a white face, a whimper of terror. I sat up and looked at the pale-green numbers of my clock-radio.

‘Finn, it’s three in the morning.’

‘I heard something outside. There’s someone outside.’

I frowned in disbelief, but then I heard it too. Something creaked. I was up now, wide awake in the pitch-black chill. I took Finn by the hand and raced down the corridor into Elsie’s room. I picked her up, duvet, teddy and all, and carried her back into my bedroom with her thumb still in her mouth and one arm still out-flung. I laid her on my bed where she muttered, rolled more securely into a ball of duvet and bear and slept on. I picked up the phone. Nine nine nine.

‘Hello, what service?’

I couldn’t remember the number Baird had given me. I almost howled in frustration.

‘I’m at Elm House near Lymne. There’s an intruder. We need the police. Please tell Detective Inspector Baird at Stamford CID. My name is Samantha Laschen.’ Oh God, she wanted it spelled out. Why couldn’t I be called Smith or Brown? She was finally finished, and I replaced the receiver. I thought of the autopsy reports on the Mackenzies and suddenly I felt as if there were insects crawling over my flesh. Finn was holding me tight. What was the best thing to do? My mind teemed with possibilities. Barricade the door to the bedroom? Go downstairs on my own and perhaps delay any intruder long enough for the police to arrive? Suddenly it was only Elsie that I cared about. She hadn’t asked for this, none of this was her responsibility. Would she be safer if I could somehow separate her from Finn?

‘Finn, come with me,’ I hissed.

I had a vague plan of getting a weapon from somewhere but then – too soon, surely, to have responded to my call – there was the sound of car engines, scraping gravel, and flashing lights. I looked out of the window. There were police cars, dark shapes moving around. I saw a dog. I went to Finn and held her close, murmuring into her hair.

‘It’s OK now, Finn. You’re safe. The police are here. You did well, honey, you did very well. You can relax now.’

There were knocks at the door. I looked out of the window. There was a group of uniformed officers on the path and a second group further away. Another car was pulling up. I ran down the stairs, pulling a robe around me, and opened the door.

‘Is everybody all right?’ the officer in front asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Where is Fiona Mackenzie.’

‘Upstairs, with my daughter.’

‘May we come in?’

‘Sure.’

The man turned around.

‘Secure the first floor,’ he said.

Two officers, one of them female, brushed past me and ran upstairs, their feet clattering on the wood.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Bear with us a moment,’ the first officer said. Another policeman ran up and whispered in his ear. ‘We’ve apprehended a man. He says he knows you. Can you come and make an identification?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you want to get dressed?’

‘That’s all right.’

‘Come this way, then. He’s sitting in the car over there.’

My heart beat almost painfully as I approached the silhouetted figures in the car and then I just had to laugh. It was a dishevelled Danny, firmly pinioned between two officers.

‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘He’s a friend. A close friend.’

The officers let him go with some reluctance. I saw that one of them was holding a handkerchief against his nose.

‘Very well, sir,’ said the other. ‘I should avoid lurking in gardens in the middle of the night, in future.’

Danny didn’t answer. He glowered at them and at me and walked towards the house. I caught up with him at the front door.

‘What were you up to?’

‘My fucking van broke down in the village, so I walked. Somebody grabbed me so I hit back.’

‘I’m glad you came, oh, my God, I’m glad,’ I said and slid my arms around his waist. ‘And I’m sorry.’ A giggle rose in my chest like a sob.

There was another scrape of gravel in the drive behind me. I turned and saw an unmarked car scraping to a halt. The door opened and a burly figure emerged. Baird. He stumbled forward towards us. He stopped and scrutinized Danny blearily.

‘What a bloody shower,’ he said and walked past into the hall. ‘I need some bloody coffee.’

‘Your men were on the scene with improbable speed,’ I said.

Baird was sitting at the table with his head in his hands. Danny was standing in the far corner with a glass of whisky, occasionally topped up from the bottle which he was holding in his other hand.

‘They were in the vicinity,’ Baird said.

‘Why?’

‘I understand that you’ve encountered Frank Laroue.’

‘Did Daley tell you?’

‘We believe him to be a dangerous man, Sam. And now he has contacted you.’

I was confused for a moment.

‘What did…? Are you tapping my phone?’

‘It was an obvious precaution,’ Baird said.

‘Fuck,’ said Danny, and walked out.

‘How much does he know?’ Baird asked.

‘How much do I know? Why wasn’t I told any of this? Is Laroue a suspect?’

Baird frowned and looked at his watch.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘I think it is likely that the Mackenzie murders are linked to the wave of terrorism in the region of Essex around Stamford. We thought it possible that there might be a move against Fiona Mackenzie here. Please offer your friend my apologies.’ He got up to go. ‘For your information, tomorrow…’ He paused and smiled wanly. ‘Today, there will be an operation led by a colleague of mine named Carrier, involving arrests across the county. Among them will be Frank Laroue, who will be charged with various offences of conspiracy and incitement to violence.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘So I suppose the drink I was going to have with him will have to be postponed.’

‘That was not especially prudent,’ Baird said. ‘Anyway, I’m convinced that you are now perfectly safe.’

‘What if it wasn’t the animal terrorists who killed the Mackenzies?’

‘In that case the murderers were probably burglars.’

‘What did they steal?’

‘It went wrong, they were disturbed. Whatever the case, you’re safe now.’

‘No, I’m not. I’ve got my parents coming for dinner later today.’

At ten later that morning there was a timid knock on the door. A thin young man, boy, really, whose hair was scraped back into a pony-tail, was standing there with a bag and a nervously adoring smile. It faded when he saw me.

‘Miss Fiona wanted some vegetables,’ he said and pushed the bag into my hands.

‘Real farm produce, whatever next?’ asked Danny. ‘Real home-cooking, perhaps?’

Finn and Elsie came out of the kitchen. They both had their sleeves rolled up, and Elsie had wrapped a dish towel around her waist like an apron.

‘Why don’t you two go out for a walk before your mother arrives?’ asked Finn.

Was this the girl who only a few weeks ago had been unable to piece two words together? She was wearing her new, dark-blue jeans and a white cotton shirt; her dark hair was brushed back into a pony-tail and tied with a velvet bow. Her face was tanned from our windswept walks and flushed from the heat of the stove. She looked clean and young and soft, with her supple limbs and her strong slim shoulders; I knew if I stood closer to her I would be able to smell soap and talcum power on her. She made me feel old and weathered. Coming forward, she took the bag from me, peering into its interior.

‘Potatoes,’ she said. ‘And spinach. Just what we wanted, eh, Elsie?’

‘Who was that boy?’ I asked.

‘Oh, that was Roy, Judith’s son,’ she replied airily. She knew far more local people than I did. She giggled. ‘I think he fancies me,’ and then she flushed from the roots of her hair down to her throat, on which the scar was already fading.

Danny looked after her as she went.

‘She’s looking well.’

‘You and that boy with the pony-tail,’ I said.

Danny didn’t laugh.

Outside the sky was a bright pale-blue, and although it had snowed a few days ago – spitty, mean little flakes that scattered along the ridges of the red-soiled fields – the air was gentle. I had turned all the heating off and opened the windows. In the garden, among the weeds and undergrowth, daffodils glowed and tulips stood in a row of tightly unopened buds.

‘Shall we have a walk then?’ asked Danny. ‘When are your parents descending?’

‘We’ve a good couple of hours. Let’s go through Stone-on-Sea’ – though the sea had long since been pushed back by the sea walls, leaving the village surrounded by desolate marshland and strange, land-locked jetties – ‘and to the coast that way.’

It was so mild we didn’t even need jackets. Through the kitchen window I could see Finn bending over something, a furrow of concentration on her brows. Elsie was out of sight. Danny pulled me closer to him, and for a long time we walked in silence, strides matched. Then he spoke.

‘Sam, there’s something I need to talk to you about.’

‘What’s that?’ His tone was unusually serious, and an unaccountable fear invaded me.

‘It’s to do with Finn, of course, and you, and Elsie too. Oh hell, I don’t know, come here.’

And he stopped and pulled me against him and buried his face in my neck.

‘What is it, Danny? Talk to me, we should have talked a long time ago, please tell me.’

‘No, wait,’ he murmured. ‘Bodies talk better.’

I pushed my hands under his sweater and shirt and felt his warm, strong back naked under my fingers. With his face still nuzzling me, stubble grazing my cheek, he undid the belt on my jeans like a blind man and slid one hand inside my trousers, cupping my buttocks. My breath came in shallow gasps.

‘Not here, Danny.’

‘Why? There’s no one to see.’

Around us the marshes spread out in every direction, punctuated by stunted trees and rusting boats stranded when the sea was tamed by the walls. Danny undid my bra with one expert hand. I pulled back his head by his long, not-quite-clean hair and saw his face was screwed up in a kind of concentrated disquiet.

‘Don’t be anxious, my love,’ I said, and undid his trousers and let him tug down mine, and he pushed into me despairingly while my jeans and knickers puddled round my pinioned ankles. So we stood tangled together in a great empty space under a tepid sun, and I thought how undignified I must look and hoped no farmer would decide to walk this way and wondered what my mother would say.

‘This,’ Danny was speaking with his mouth full and I could see my mother looking across the table at him with a pucker-mouthed distaste, ‘is great, Finn.’

Finn had served us roast leg of lamb spiked with garlic and rosemary, jacket potatoes with sour cream as well as butter, coarsely chopped spinach, and she’d even remembered to buy mint sauce from the supermarket yesterday. My father – dressed in his version of casual, which meant a tweed jacket, trousers of an indeterminate greyish colour, the first button undone on his well-ironed shirt and a parting like a new pink road running though his thinning grey hair – had produced two bottles of wine. My mother ate her food neatly, dabbing her lips after each mouthful, taking cautious sips of wine every so often. Finn ate almost nothing, but she sat at the table with bright eyes and a nervous smile hovering on her lips. On one side of her sat Danny, who was on his best behaviour but rather subdued, I thought. On the other sat Michael Daley, determinedly animated, diligently charming to everyone. He had arrived in a flurry of yellow roses (for me), anemones (for Finn, who’d clutched them to her like a shy bride), wine, firm handshakes. He listened to my mother attentively when she spoke about the terrible morning they’d had, asked my father respectfully about the route they’d taken to come here, lifted Elsie, wriggling, on to his shoulders, bent consolingly towards Finn every time he spoke to her, his dark-blond hair flopping over his eyes as he did so. He wasn’t suave; he just seemed attractively eager to please. He turned on his chair like a weather-vane, swinging at every remark. He handed out vegetables, jumped up to help Finn in the kitchen. He was full of a strange nervous energy. Suddenly I wondered, appalled, if he was falling in love with Finn, and then I wondered if he was falling in love with me. And if he was, what did I feel about that?

I looked at the two men on either side of the girl: one so dark, surly and gorgeous; the other fairer, more enigmatic. And I could see which of them my mother liked with every grim mouthful that she diligently chewed. There was a strange tension between the men; they were in competition, but I couldn’t work out over what, exactly. Danny incessantly made paper shapes, twisting scraps of his paper napkin into flowers and boats.

Over baked apples (stuffed, by Elsie, with raisins and honey, though Elsie by now had retired to her bedroom, saying she was going to make a picture) my mother said, in her ever-so-interested voice, ‘And how’s work, Samantha?’

I mumbled something about being at a waiting stage, and the conversation would have petered away (indeed, I saw Michael sitting up a bit straighter, waiting to leap gallantly into the silence he knew was coming), when my dad coughed formally and laid down his napkin. We all turned to him.

‘When I was a prisoner in Japan,’ he began, and my heart sank. I’d had this conversation before. ‘I saw lots of men die. They died like flies.’ He paused; we waited with the automatic respect of people who must bow their heads before a tragedy. ‘I saw more than any of you will ever see and more I’m sure than any of your precious patients see.’

I looked at Finn, but her head was bent and she was chasing a raisin around her plate with a fork.

‘I came back home and I just got on with things. I remember everything.’ He laid his hand over the tweed at his breast. ‘But I put it to one side. All this talking about trauma and stress and victims, it does no good, you know, it’s just opening up old wounds. Best to let things lie. I don’t doubt your motives, Samantha. But you young people think that you have a right to happiness. You have to endure. Trauma!’ He guffawed. ‘That’s just modern rubbish.’ He picked up his wine glass and took a mouthful of its contents, his eyes glaring over the rim. My mother looked anxious.

‘Well…’ began Michael in an understanding tone.

‘Dad…’ I started in a wail that I recognized belonged to my childhood.

But Finn’s voice cut through, soft and clear.

‘As far as I understand it, Mr Laschen, trauma is an over-used word. People use it when they often just mean grief or shock or bereavement. Real trauma is something different. People don’t just get over it. They need help.’ Her eyes flicked to mine for a moment, and I gave her a little smile. The room felt oddly quiet. ‘Some people who are traumatized find life is literally unbearable. They’re not weak cowards or fools; they’ve been injured and they need to be healed. Doctors heal the body’s wounds, but sometimes you can’t see the wounds. They are there, though. Just because you suffered and didn’t complain, do you think other people should suffer as well?’ No one spoke. ‘I think Sam helps people a lot. She saves people. It’s not about happiness, you see, it’s about being able to live.’

Michael leaned across and took the fork, which she was still pushing around her plate. He put his arm around her, and she leaned into him gratefully.

‘Finn and I are going to make everybody coffee,’ he said, and led her from the room.

My mother noisily clattered our pudding plates together.

‘Teenage girls are always very intense,’ she said understandingly.

I looked over at my father.

‘You know what the problem is?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Your door’s sticking. I’ll bet it’s the hinges. I’ll look it over later. Have you got any carbon paper?’

‘Carbon paper? Why would I have that?’

‘For spreading down the lintel, find where it’s rubbing. There’s nothing like carbon paper for that.’

Nineteen

Once, when I was about ten, we went on our summer holiday to Filey Bay up on the east coast. I’ve never been back, and all I remember about the place is sand-dunes and a fierce and dirty wind – how it swept along the sea front in the evenings, rattling the cans that had been left lying on the pavements, sending crisp packets into the air like small tatty kites. And I remember, as well, that my father took me out in a pedal-boat. My legs would hardly reach the pedals, and I had to sit forward on the seat while he sat back, his legs – skinny and shiny white in his unaccustomed shorts – skittered away. I looked down into the water and suddenly could no longer see the bottom, just a depthless grey-brown. As if it happened yesterday, I can feel the panic that flooded through me, leaking into all the compartments of my mind. I screamed and I screamed, clutching my bewildered father’s arm, so that my mother, waiting on the shore, thought something terrible had happened, though our little red boat still bobbed safely a few yards out. I don’t feel safe with water, and although I know how to swim I try to avoid doing so. When I take Elsie to the swimming pool I tend to stand knee-deep and watch her splash about. The sea, for me, is not a place to have fun; it’s not a giant leisure centre but a terrifying expanse that sucks up boats and bodies and radioactive waste and shit. Sometimes, especially in the evening when the layered grey of the sea blurs with the darkening grey of the sky, I stand and look out at the shining water and imagine the other, underwater world that lies hidden beneath it and it makes me feel dizzy.

So what did I think I was doing going sailing with Michael Daley? When he’d phoned me up to arrange it I’d replied, in my enthusiastic voice, that I would love to go out in his boat. I like people to think that I’m brave, dauntless. I haven’t screamed with fear since I was a little girl.

‘What shall I bring?’ I asked.

‘Nothing. I’ve got a wet suit that should fit you and a life-jacket, of course. Remember to wear gloves.’

‘Wet suit?’

‘You know, the kind of rubber suit divers wear – you’ll look good in one. If we capsized you’d freeze without it at this time of year.’

‘Capsize?’

‘Has this phone got an echo or is it just you?’

‘I can’t possibly fit into this.’

I was looking at something that resembled a series of black and lime-green inner tubes.

‘You have to take your clothes off first.’ We were in my living room. Danny had gone to Stamford to buy some paint, Finn had gone to the corner shop for milk and bread and Elsie was at school. Michael was already wearing his wet suit, under a yellow waterproof. He looked slim and long, but faintly absurd, like an astronaut without his spaceship, like a fish out of water.

‘Oh.’

‘Put a swimsuit on underneath.’

‘Right. I think that I’ll do this in my bedrom. Help yourself to coffee.’

Upstairs I stripped down, put on my swimming costume and started to push my legs into the thick black rubber. God, it was tight. It closed elastically around my thighs and I tugged it up over my hips. My skin felt as if it were suffocating. The worst bit was getting my arms into the sleeves; I felt as if my body was going to buckle under the pull of the rubber. The zip did up behind but I couldn’t reach it – indeed, I could hardly lift my arms higher than horizontal.

‘Are you all right?’ called Michael.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you want any help?’

‘Yes.’

He came into the room and I saw us both in the mirror, long-legged moon-walkers.

‘I was right, it does suit you,’ he said and I pulled my stomach in self-consciously as he did up the zip, its cold metal and his warm fingers running up my knobbled spine. His breath blew against my hair.

‘Put your boots on’ – he handed me a pair of neat rubber shoes – ‘and then we can go.’

The wind blew in icy gusts up the pebbly beach, where Michael’s boat was pulled up in a line with other dinghies. His boat-house was apparently where he kept his windsurfers and spare tack; his dinghy lived outside in all weathers. A strange humming sound, a bit like forests on a fierce winter night, came from the denuded boats: all those cord-things (‘Shrouds,’ said Michael) which held the masts up were rattling. The small waves were whitetipped. I could see squalls rippling across the slatey water. Michael tipped his head back.

‘Mmm. Good sailing weather.’

I didn’t like the sound of that. Out in the estuary I could see the single small shape of a white-sailed dinghy, tipping alarmingly so that it seemed to stand up out of the water. There was no one else around at all. The horizon disappeared into a misty greyness. It was the kind of day when it never became completely light; a dank gauze lay across the water.

Michael pulled the thick green tarpaulin off his boat (a Wayfarer called Belladonna, he told me, because of her black spinnaker; I didn’t ask what a spinnaker was). He leaned into the bottom of the boat and pulled out a life-jacket.

‘Put this on. I’ll just get her rigged.’

He shook a large rust-coloured sail out of a nylon bag and started to push long flat sticks into pockets in its fabric.

‘Battens,’ he explained. ‘The sails would flap all over the place without them.’

Then he unhooked a wire from the base of the mast and cleated it into the top of the sail; the bottom be threaded through the boom – I knew the name for that – and fastened firmly.

‘That’s the mainsail,’ he said. ‘We won’t actually haul it up until we push her into the water.’

The next sail he buckled to another wire which he unclipped from the mast. He attached its outer edge to the forestay with lots of small hooks and left the sail puddled on the deck. Then he pulled a long rope through a hole at the base of its triangle and trained the ends along either side of the boat, pushing each through the handles, and tying a knot shaped like a figure of eight to stop it escaping. Finally, he produced a small black flag, tied it to a string secured to the mast and pulled it up until it wavered and then jerked into place on the mast’s tip.

‘Right, let’s pull her into the water.’

I was struck by his air of authority. His hands were strong and meticulous, his concentration was all on the job. It struck me that he must be a good doctor, and I wondered how many of his patients fell in love with him. Together we pulled the Belladonna, still on the trailer, down to the water’s edge, where Michael pushed her into the choppy waves while I held the rope.

‘Don’t worry about getting wet,’ he called as he clambered into the boat and started putting the rudder in and hauling up the slapping expanses of sail. ‘You’ll actually feel warmer once there’s a bit of water between your suit and your skin.’

‘Right,’ I said in a quavering voice and waded into the sea, painter in my blue hands, which stung where they hadn’t turned numb, for I’d forgotten my gloves. ‘When?’ I yelled.

‘What?’

‘When will I feel warmer? Ice is coursing around my body, Dr Daley.’

He laughed, his even white teeth gleaming, the sails rolling wildly around him. Suddenly, as first the front sail and then the back one were pulled up the mast, the boat stopped jerking around and strained purposefully; it was no longer like holding a twitching kite; more like holding a dog who is eager to be off.

‘Push her nose out a bit,’ Michael called. ‘That’s the way, and then jump in. Jump, I said, not fall.’

I landed in the bottom of the boat, flapping like a fish, and hit my knee. The boat keeled immediately and water slopped over the side. My face was about six inches above sea-level.

‘Come over to my side,’ instructed Michael, who did not seem unduly alarmed. ‘Now, sit on the side here, beside me, and put your toes under that strap there, it’s called the toe strap. That way if you lean out you won’t fall in.’

He was holding the tiller in one hand, and with the other he leaned forward to push down the centreboard and gathered in the rope attached to the small sail and pulled it taut. The sails stiffened and I could feel the boat lose its sluggish sideways drift and pick up speed. Indeed, it picked up far too much speed for my liking.

‘Right, Sam, while we’re on this tack and the wind’s quite gentle…’

‘Gentle!’ I squawked.

‘It won’t really pick up until we’re around the point and out into more open waters.’

‘Oh.’

‘All you’ve got to remember is that we are using the wind to take us where we want to go. Sometimes it will be coming from the side, and that’s called reaching; sometimes it will be right behind us, that’s called running. And sometimes we will be almost going into it…’

‘And that’s called falling over, I suppose,’ I croaked.

He grinned at me.

‘Your only job is to hold this jibsheet’ – he tossed the rope attached to the small sail into my lap – ‘and control it. The more we go into the wind, the tighter you pull the sail in. When we are running, you let that sail right out. When I shout “Go about”, all you have to do is let out the sail, and then pull it in on the other side. I’ll look after everything else. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘There are some spare gloves in the bow.’

I edged forward to get them, but the boat suddenly keeled further over.

‘Lean back; no, Sam, lean back so we keep the boat upright. Sam, back.’

I leaned and I felt as if I were suspended over the water, held only by brittle toes. My hands crabbed in the cold, my curved back ached, my neck lolled so that if I rolled my eyes I could see the water underneath me, alarmingly far down. The centreboard was lifting out of the water; if I looked forward, I could see water on the other side slopping into the boat. I shut my eyes.

‘We’re going about, Sam. When I say “Lee-oh”, you pull your rope free and let it flap. Then you move swiftly across to the other side as she swings around. Got it?’

‘No. If I move, the boat’s going to fall over.’

‘Capsize.’

‘You fucking call it capsize; I call it fall over.’

‘Don’t worry, Sam, we’re not going to capsize; it’s not so windy.’ I didn’t like the patronizing patience in his voice.

‘OK, let’s go!’ I shouted and tugged the rope out of its cleat. The sail flapped wildly, the boat bucked, the noise was deafening. I lunged into the middle of the boat and tripped over the centreboard. Michael pushed the tiller across and calmly stepped over to the other side, pushing my head down as he did so. The boom whipped past just above me; Michael pulled in his sheet, then mine. The noise subsided, the flapping ceased, the boat lay flat and trim on the grey water. I moved over to join him. If my hands hadn’t been stiff with cold they would have been shaking.

‘Next time, why don’t you wait until I say Lee-oh?’ he said mildly.

‘Sorry.’

‘You’ll soon get the hang of it. This is all right, isn’t it?’ The boat was quite level now and scudding along with its sails bellied and taut. ‘Just sit back and enjoy it. Look, there’s a heron. I often see it when I’m sailing. Over there’ – he pointed to a distant outcrop of rocks in the dark water – ‘is Needle Point. That’s where two currents meet. Very tricky area; especially at spring tide.’

‘We’re not going there now, are we?’ I asked nervously.

‘I think,’ he replied gravely, trimming his sail, ‘that we’ll save that for another day.’

For a few minutes, as long as the Belladonna kept on that course and all I had to do was sit still and watch the water coursing by and Michael’s steady profile, fair hair slicked away from his high, calm forehead, I did almost enjoy myself. The waves slapped underneath us in a steady rhythm, a finger of sun pointed through the leaden sky. Another dinghy passed behind us and the two sailors raised their gloved hands in a comradely fashion, and I managed to wave back, a cheery smile fixed to my face. Once we even had something approaching a conversation.

‘You hate to be in someone else’s hands, don’t you?’

‘I don’t actually trust that many people’s hands,’ I replied.

‘I hope you trust mine.’

Was he flirting? Because this wasn’t very good timing.

‘I’m trying to.’

‘You must be a difficult woman to live with, Dr Laschen. Does Danny find you difficult?’

I didn’t reply; a damp wind stung my cheeks and the grey sea galloped past.

‘Though he seems quite able to look after himself, protect himself. A worldly kind of chap, I should imagine.’

If my mind hadn’t been so fixed upon the far-off shoreline and the dip and thrust of the boat, the word ‘chap’ would have struck a false note. As it was, I just nodded and fiddled with the soggy knot on my rope which lay idly in my lap.

But then Michael pulled the tiller towards him until the wind was right behind us, pulled up the centreboard with one smooth movement, let out his sail until it opened like a luscious, over-blooming flower and told me to pull my sail across so that it filled with wind on the other side.

‘A spot of running now, I think,’ he said. ‘Move across; our weight should be evenly distributed.’

The bow of the dinghy lifted, and we creamed through the waves.

‘Be alert, Sam. If the wind shifts we’ll have to jibe.’

‘Jibe? No, don’t explain. Just tell me how to stop it happening.’

Michael was concentrating, now glancing up at the flag to check the direction of the wind, now adjusting his sails ever so slightly. The boat queasily rolled; we lifted and fell with a yawing motion that did strange things to my innards. My tongue was starting to feel gravelly and too large for my mouth.

‘Um, Michael.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Can you stop this boat moving around for a bit? I feel a bit…’

‘The wind’s shifting, we’re going to jibe. Let your sails flap.’

It could only have taken a second. For a brief moment we seemed to stop dead in the water while the sails hung limp. Then I watched in horror as the boom swung from its outstretched position and flung with a great sideways swipe towards us. The boat heeled over sharply. My stomach lurched and I stood up, thinking only that I had to get to the edge of the boat before I threw up.

‘Duck, Sam,’ said Michael.

The boom cracked me just above the ear with such ringing force that for a moment the world went black. I careered across the boat, tipping it wildly, and the boom swung back again. This time it missed me (I was already down and almost out) but smacked into Michael’s head as he rose to rescue me. We ended up sitting in the dinghy’s watery bottom like two large black beetles, the boom banging above us, both sails loose and wild. It felt much safer when I couldn’t see what was happening.

‘Sit still,’ he commanded.

‘But…’

He put up one hand and very gently, very carefully, hooked a dislodged ear-ring safely back into my ear lobe.

‘Who else would wear such absurd dangly ear-rings out sailing? Are you all right?’

Actually, I was all of a sudden and quite without reason feeling perfectly calm. The queasiness in my stomach was subsiding; the bang of my frightened heart was diminishing; only the side of my head felt swollen and sore. The boat still bucked in the gusts, but with the sails adrift the wind could get no purchase. Michael was such a solid presence near me, so sure of himself. I could see the faint graze of his stubble, the emphatic bow in his upper lip, his large pupils in his grey eyes.

‘I wouldn’t put you in danger, Sam,’ he said softly, staring at me.

I managed a grin.

‘On our next date, Michael, perhaps I could take you to see a film.’

Twenty

Michael and I were silent in the car on the way back to the house. I felt I’d disappointed him, and I hate so much to disappoint anybody that it makes me bad-tempered, and I was afraid I would snap at him and I didn’t want to say anything I would regret, so it was better to say nothing at all. He put on a tape of some classical-sounding music and I pretended to be absorbed in it. Dusk was turning into night and as we wound through the lanes that followed the line of the coast I caught tantalizing glimpses of glowing interiors of the houses we passed. The darkness concealed the oddness of the landscape and made it seem almost reassuring, the way countryside is meant to be. By the time we arrived, I felt that the volcano in my chest had become dormant once more. I took a deep breath.

‘I don’t think I’m a natural sailor.’

‘You did very well.’

‘Yeah, I know. And Nelson was sick every time he went to sea. But it was really nice of you to take me out.’ Michael stayed silent with a half-smile on his face, and I babbled to fill the gap. ‘Let’s try it again some time. I’m sure I’ll be better.’

Bloody hell. What had I committed myself to? But Michael seemed satisfied enough.

‘I’d like that very much,’ he said.

‘You’ll soon have me tacking and jibing and booming like nobody’s business.’

He laughed, and we both got out of the car and walked towards the house, Michael holding my arm. It was dark now and through the window I could make out signs of movement inside. I stepped forward and looked. The fire was blazing. Danny was sitting in the armchair to one side. He had his back to me and I could see little more than the back of his head and the bottle of beer that he was balancing on the arm of the chair with his right hand. But I knew what his expression would be. He would be dreamily staring into the fire. Elsie was in her pyjamas, her hair washed and combed flat, her face red and blotchy with excitement and with the reflection of the flames. She was piling up her wooden bricks. I could hear nothing but I could see her lips moving in a constant chatter directed at Finn who was lying beside her, also with her back to me, so I couldn’t see if she was talking back. Probably she was just lying there with her eyes half closed. I suspected that Elsie responded to Finn’s sense of repose as well as her youth. They were two girls together in a sense that I would never be able to be. It was a lovely scene, so much so that I felt an ache of exclusion, or was it guilt at being absent?

I felt a hand on my shoulder. Michael.

‘What a beautiful family group,’ I said, with more than a hint of dryness.

Michael took some time to reply. He just looked, with fascination, at the fireside scene. His jaw clenched with obvious satisfaction.

‘It’s you, you know,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘When I was first talking with the police and we asked around, everybody said how wonderful you were. And you have been. I can’t believe what you’ve done with Finn.’

I gave a frown and pushed Michael back in a half-jocular fashion.

‘I don’t need your flattery, Dr Daley. Besides, I’ve supplied no treatment of any kind. Anything Finn has done, she’s done for herself.’

‘You underestimate yourself.’

‘I’ve never underestimated myself in my life.’

‘You’re wrong, you know. As a GP I often think of what the job was like a hundred years ago when there were no antibiotics, no insulin, just morphine, digitalis, one or two other things. A doctor had almost nothing in his bag that could change the course of an illness. What he was was a healer. He would sit by a patient and by his presence would help him, maybe just holding his hand.’ Michael’s face was just inches away from mine now, he was speaking in barely more than a whisper. ‘You’re a bloody-minded woman. You’re arrogant. You’re accomplished. You can be harsh with the rest of us. But you’ve got it, you know, that healing human quality.’

I didn’t say anything. Michael raised his hand and with just a finger lightly touched my hair. Was he going to kiss me, out here, with Danny just a few feet away? What would I do? In what must have been less than a second I imagined myself having an affair with Michael, us naked together, and then all the conflicts and anguish and betrayals. I took his hand in a friendly, sisterly fashion.

‘Thank you for the compliment, Michael, however misconceived. Come in and have a drink. Grog, or whatever you sailor types like.’

He smiled and shook his head.

‘I must get back, and out of these things. Good night, clever woman.’

I went into the house feeling that glow that you can only experience when you have been flattered grossly. As I pushed the door of the living room open, three heads, three expressions, turned towards me. Danny, with a hint of an ironic smile. Was he rebuking me for something? Elsie’s whole face glimmered as if the fire were inside her. Finn rotated slightly, like a cat that had appropriated my hearthrug and been partially stirred from a long sleep. I felt a quiver of disquiet deep inside me.

‘Look, Mummy, look,’ said Elsie, as if I had been there all the time.

‘It’s incredible. What is it?’

‘A secret. Guess.’

‘A house.’

‘No.’

‘A boat.’

‘No.’

‘A zoo.’

‘It’s not a zoo. It’s a secret.’

‘So how has your day been?’

‘I went out with Dan and Fing.’

I looked expectantly at the grown-ups.

‘We built a sand-castle,’ said Finn. ‘With stones. And tins.’

‘Thanks, Finn,’ I said. And I went and sat on the armchair and kissed Danny on top of his cross head. ‘And thank you.’

‘I’m going into town tomorrow,’ Danny said.

‘Work?’

‘No.’

It was an awkward, unsatisfactory moment, with Finn and Elsie just beside us.

‘Is everything all right?’ I murmured.

‘Why shouldn’t it be?’ Danny replied in that normal tone that I found so difficult to read.

‘No reason,’ I said.

There was a slightly unpleasant silence, during which I saw Finn and Elsie exchanging smiling glances.

‘What’s up?’ I asked.

‘Ask Elsie what’s hanging on the door,’ Finn said.

‘What’s hanging on the door of your safe house, Elsie?’

In her excitement, Elsie looked like a party balloon that had been blown up almost too far and if it were released would shoot around the room out of control.

‘There’s a spade hanging on the door,’ she said.

‘And ask Elsie what’s on the doormat.’

‘What’s on the doormat, Elsie?’

‘A sand-castle,’ Elsie said with a shriek.

‘A sand-castle on the doormat? That’s a funny thing.’

‘And ask Elsie what’s in Mummy’s bed.’

‘What’s in Mummy’s bed?’

‘A big hug.’ And Elsie ran forward and threw her arms around me. The feeble pressure on my shoulders almost made me cry. I mouthed a thank-you to Finn over Elsie’s shoulder.

Elsie wanted Finn to put her to bed but I wasn’t going to be cheated out of that and I insisted and then she insisted and I carried Elsie’s wriggling body up the stairs, promising that Finn would come and kiss her good-night and tell her a story. After I’d peeled off the wet suit and pulled on some jeans and a T-shirt, I brushed her teeth and then rather grumpily read her a book of tongue-twisters.

‘Can I see Fing now?’

‘Kiss me good-night first.’

With a sigh she pushed her lips forward and then I was dispatched downstairs to fetch Finn. She slipped past me to keep her appointment with my delinquent daughter. Danny was still sitting in the chair, but I saw he had a fresh bottle of beer. I noticed three empty bottles next to the foot of the chair.

‘Let me have a sip,’ I said, and he handed me the bottle. ‘What’s up?’

‘It’s time I was in London again, that’s all.’

‘All right.’

There was another silence and, again, it wasn’t a comfortable one. I sat on the floor at his feet and leaned back against him, feeling his knees against my shoulder-blades. I sipped at the bottle and then passed it back to him.

‘What do you think of Finn?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘How does she seem to you?’

‘I’m not a doctor, doctor.’

‘You’re a human being.’

‘Thanks, Sam.’

‘You spent the day with her, Danny. Tell me what you think?’

‘Interesting girl.’

‘Interesting damaged girl,’ I said.

‘You’re the doctor.’

‘Do you find her attractive?’

Danny frowned.

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

‘When Michael dropped me off, we looked in at the house. I saw Finn stretched out on the floor in front of the fire. I thought that, if I were a man, I might find her very attractive. A lovely seductive creature.’

‘Well, you’re not a man.’

There was a silence. I listened for Finn’s tread on the stairs. Then I heard a distant giggle from Elsie. Finn would be a few minutes yet.

‘Danny, have you got a problem with this?’

‘With what?’

‘With Finn, this set-up, you know.’

I felt Danny’s hand on my hair. Suddenly he grasped it and pulled my head back. I felt his lips against mine, I tasted his tongue. His left hand ran up my stomach. I felt an ache for him. He stopped and sat back. He gave a sardonic smile.

‘You know I’d never tell you how to run your life, Sam. But…’

‘Shhh,’ I said.

There were steps outside and Finn drifted in and sat near us on the mat in front of the fire.

‘Elsie’s almost asleep. I’ve made a couple of salads,’ she said. ‘Some garlic bread. I didn’t think you’d want much. I hope that’s all right.’

‘You didn’t have any other culinary plans, did you, Sam?’ Danny asked sarcastically.

Finn giggled.

‘Sounds good to me,’ I said.

Danny drank a couple more bottles of beer. I drank wine. Finn drank water. The salads were crispy and colourful. You could almost mistake them for the ones you get in plastic beakers at M&S. I talked a bit about the day’s sailing. Finn asked a couple of questions. Danny said almost nothing at all. Afterwards, we took mugs of coffee back to the living room where the fire had burned down to its embers. Danny had yet another bottle of beer. I put some small pieces of firewood on the embers and blew and blew until there were flames once more. The wind was rattling the window frames and blowing drops of rain against the glass.

‘It’s the sort of night when it feels wonderful to be in front of a fire,’ I said.

‘Stop that crap, Sam,’ said Danny.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re talking like a fucking advertisement for something.’

He walked over to the window.

‘This isn’t you, Sam. What are you doing here? There’s just trees out there and mud and marsh and rain and then the sea. Real people can’t live here, only dressed-up oafs who go hunting.’

‘Stop it, Danny,’ I said, with a glance across at a shocked Finn.

‘Why? What do you think about it, Finn? Do you like living out here.’

Finn looked panic-stricken.

‘I don’t know,’ she mumbled. ‘I’ve just got some clearing up to do. In the kitchen.’

She hurried from the room and I turned to Danny in a rage.

‘You fucking buffoon,’ I hissed. ‘What are you playing at?’

He shrugged.

‘The countryside pisses me off. This whole thing pisses me off.’

‘How could you talk like that in front of Finn? How could you? What’s going on? Do you resent Finn, or Michael? Are you jealous?’

Danny raised the bottle and drained it.

‘I’m off to bed,’ he said and left the room.

I leafed through a magazine for a few minutes until Finn joined me.

‘I apologize,’ I said. ‘Danny can be strange.’

‘That’s all right,’ Finn said. ‘I like Danny. I like the way he can just say anything. I like his difficulty. I’ve always gone for that sort of grim man.’

‘I haven’t.’

Finn smiled and sat next to me on the rug in front of the fire. She pressed close. I could smell her soft, warm skin.

‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ I asked.

‘Do you know what I hate about all of this, what’s happened to me?’

‘What?’

‘There’s an idea that suffering has made me this delicate, saintly creature and everybody gets worried if they say the wrong thing when I’m in earshot. No, I didn’t “have a boyfriend”. When I was fat no one was interested in me, of course, and I guess I wasn’t interested either. Or I was terrified. Maybe that’s what being fat was partly about for me. After I lost all that weight but wasn’t like a bicycle frame either, I felt completely different, and then I had sex with boys sometimes. Especially in South America; it was part of the adventure. Well –’ she gave a harsh, unlikely chuckle – ‘Mummy always said I was too young to get tied down. Does it shock you?’

Well, yes.

‘No, of course not. I’m afraid that I, and all of this,’ I gestured at our surroundings, ‘must seem a bit staid to you.’

‘Oh, no, Sam.’ Finn turned to face me. She stroked my cheek and kissed it, very softly. I wanted to draw back, but forced myself not to. ‘I don’t think you’re staid.’ She sat back. ‘I used to be – for God’s sake, I am – someone who acts on impulse. When Danny was talking about the countryside I sort of agreed with him. But at the same time, for me it’s not boring. I have this idea in my head that won’t go away. There are people out there in the dark who put tape round my face and cut my throat and they would do it again if they had the chance.’

‘Don’t, Finn.’

‘But it’s more than that, Sam. I have this image playing over and over in my head. I don’t know whether it’s a dream. I imagine this house in the middle of the night. Torchlight outside, a window sliding up. A creaking on the stairs. I wake up with masking tape over my mouth, a blade at my throat. Then they move to your room. Then to Elsie’s…’

‘Finn, stop that,’ I was almost shouting. ‘You mustn’t say that. You have no right to say that.’

I felt a sour taste in the back of my throat. I wanted to be sick.

‘Whose feelings are you protecting?’ Finn asked. ‘Mine or yours?’

‘Mine, for once.’

‘So you know how it feels.’

I felt cross.

‘I knew how it felt already, Finn. I knew. It was wrong of you to say that about Elsie. Don’t bring my daughter into this.’

‘I’m desperate for them to be caught, Sam.’

There was something eerily theatrical about all of this.

‘We all want that.’

‘I want to help. I’ve been thinking and thinking, trying to remember something, anything that could help the police. A smell maybe, a voice. I don’t know.’

My mind was clouded by it all, by the wine, the warmth of the fire, the lateness of the hour. I tried to make myself think clearly. Was she trying to tell me something?

‘Finn, is there something you’re holding back, something you haven’t told the police?’

‘I don’t think so. At least…’

‘Was there anything else that happened to you during the assault? Have you told the police everything?’

‘Why should there be anything? I wish there was. Maybe there’s something I’m not facing up to. Perhaps I’m being cowardly. Sam, I want to help. Can you do anything for me?’

She put her arms around me and held me, so close that I could feel her heart beating. She was hugging me desperately. This was creepy, all wrong, as if I were being seduced by somebody who knew I couldn’t reject them. I put my arms around her like a mother comforting a child, but at the same time I was watching myself putting my arms around her, wondering what I was doing. I was dubious about my role as Finn’s doctor, dubious about my role as Finn’s friend, and now she was expecting me to become some sort of psychological detective, some sort of soul mate.

‘Sam, Sam,’ she moaned. ‘I feel so lonely and helpless.’ If this was a crisis, I wished I felt a bit more in control of it, less manipulated.

‘Stop this and calm down. Stop!’ I pushed her away. Her eyes were puffy and wet, she was panting. ‘Listen to me. We’re here to support you. You are protected. No harm will come to you. All right? Secondly, it is entirely possible that there could be a degree of memory loss associated with emotional and physical trauma and it is remediable. But now, late at night, when we’re tired and overwrought, is not the time to talk about it. Things can be done, but I doubt whether I would be the right person to do them. For a variety of reasons. Above all, there are kinds of therapeutic help that you can’t get from me and you can’t get in this environment. We have to think about that. I regard you… That’s too clinical. You are a dear friend. But we have to think about things. But not now. Not even tomorrow. Now go to bed.’

‘Yes, Sam,’ she said in a frail, chastened voice.

‘Now,’ I said.

She nodded and took a final sip of her coffee and left the room without a further word being exchanged. When she was gone I gave a great sigh. What had I brought into my house? And now Elsie adored Finn more than anybody else in the world. What was I doing to everybody?

I went upstairs. I let my clothes fall and got between the sheets in my dark bedroom and felt the warmth of Danny’s body. I ran my hands over him, under, over, between. I needed him badly. He turned and clutched me fiercely. He kissed me hard, his teeth nipping at my lips. I felt his hands rough on my body. I bit into his shoulder to stop myself from screaming with a pleasure that was almost fear. He pinned my arms above my head with one large hand and felt me with the other, felt me as if he were learning me all over again. ‘Don’t move,’ he said as I wriggled in his grasp. ‘Lie quite still now.’ And as he thrust into me I felt he was fucking me with all the suppressed passion, anger even, of the evening. He didn’t speak my name, but he looked at me steadily and I shut my eyes to escape from his. Afterwards I felt battered, wounded. Danny’s breathing became slow and regular and I thought he was asleep. When he spoke it was in the drowsy, slurred tone of a man half asleep, who can scarcely order his thoughts.

‘Have you been looking at Finn?’ he murmured. ‘Really looking at her. Like the great doctor you are.’ I began to answer but he continued speaking as if I wasn’t there and he was just thinking aloud. ‘Or is it all Sam and Elsie and the house and the countryside and a new best friend?’ The bed creaked as he turned, and I felt his breath on my cheek. ‘Have you looked at her, Sam? What’s your sort of word? Objectively. Scientifically.’

‘Are you obsessed with her, Danny?’ A horrible thought came into my mind. ‘Is that it? Were you fantasizing about Finn?’

I was breathless, my heart racing, I could feel its beat in my ears.

‘You just don’t get it, do you?’

I felt him turn away from me.

‘Night, Danny.’

‘Night, Sam.’

When I woke the next morning, Danny had gone.

Twenty-One

‘Am I allowed in here?’

‘So long as you don’t try to do anything,’ Finn replied.

‘Don’t worry.’

My kitchen was like a mad scientist’s laboratory, steam and heat and mysterious clatters and hums. Everything was being used. On the hob a pan sizzled and the lid of a saucepan was shivering as vapour puffed over the rim. A bowl of water contained what looked like soggy leaves. The chicken breasts were in the oven. Finn was chopping something very quickly on a board, rat-a-tat-tat, like a snare-drum roll.

‘What I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘is the way you’re doing all the different bits at the same time. When I try to cook, I have to do one thing after another and even then I get it wrong.’

A couple of old friends were coming round for supper. Normally I would have got a take-away in or popped various pre-cooked dishes into the microwave, but Finn said to leave it all to her, that she would do something simple. After dropping Elsie at school, we had driven twenty miles through villages, past antique emporia and the paddocks of riding schools, along the coast to a supermarket which was comfortingly identical to the one I used to go to on the way home from work when I lived in London. I bought some frozen stuff and bin-bags and washing-up liquid and Finn headed for the real food: chicken breasts not wrapped in Cellophane, mushrooms and rice in expensive small boxes, rosemary, garlic, olive oil, vegetables, red and white wine. As the trolley filled, I tried to talk her out of it.

‘Sarah and Clyde are just like me. They’ve lived on takeaway vindaloos all their professional lives. Their tastebuds have been burned away. They won’t know the difference.’

‘Enjoy yourself while you’re alive,’ Finn replied. ‘Because you’re a long time dead.’ It was with difficulty that I did not gasp.

‘That’s why I’ve never bothered about what food I eat.’

‘Shame on you, Sam. You’re a doctor.’

Finn was becoming alarmingly imperious and I was becoming strangely passive, like a guest in my own house. It occurred to me, before I hastily pushed the thought away, that in the last few weeks, as she had recovered and bloomed again, so my grip on my own life had weakened. Elsie seemed half in love with Finn, Danny was gone again, my trauma unit had become someone else’s capitalist dream, my book stayed unwritten.

During the early evening my kitchen looked like a casualty department. I did some work and played a bit with Elsie and put her to bed, and when I came back a couple of hours later, without much appearing to have been done it had subsided into something tidier: an intensive-care unit, maybe. There was beeping and bubbling, but only the occasional moment of activity, a stir here and a sniff there.

Sarah and Clyde arrived, just after seven, panting and virtuous in their fluorescent cycling gear. They had taken the train to Stamford and biked out. They headed up for a bath and came back down in jeans, loose shirts. This was the authentically miraculous bit. Even if supper had consisted of nothing more than pizza in cardboard boxes brought to the house by motorbike and six-packs of beer, I still would have been rushing round in a panic. But this evening there was an air of serenity. A couple of bottles of wine stood open on the table next to the olives and some little things of salami and cheese that Finn had put together, and the table was laid and there was a general smell of nice food hanging around the place, but without any sense that anybody was actually doing anything. Finn wasn’t red-faced and dashing off to the kitchen every two seconds to deal with some crisis. She was there, pouring out wine, and not being ostentatious. She had put on a pair of pale slacks and a smockish black top and tied her hair back. Fuck, I was impressed with her.

Maybe I’d become friendly with Sarah and Clyde not just because we’d trained together but because they were tall and rangy like me. Sarah’s flowing hair was grey now and she had wrinkles round her eyes. Clyde still had the chiselled, long-boned Clark Kent looks of the rower he had been at university, but he’d got thinner, so his prominent Adam’s apple seemed even larger. We were all big and looked at each other from the same level. Clyde and Sarah were GPs together at a practice in Tower Hamlets. When they had a free weekend, they would put their bikes on to a train, head out from London and cover a couple of hundred miles by Sunday evening, hopping between the houses of friends. I was the first pit-stop on this weekend’s route.

‘And tomorrow we’re staying with Helen – you know, Farlowe.’

‘Where does she live?’

‘Blakeney. North Norfolk.’

‘Jesus, you’ll have earned your dinner tomorrow night.’

‘That’s the whole point.’

We took our drinks outside and wandered in the grounds, as I sarcastically called the neglected garden. Sarah identified birds by their songs and Clyde told me the names of the plants in the garden, some of the nicest examples of which, it emerged, I had weeded in a fit of enthusiasm and tossed on to my compost heap. Finn called us in and we had little bowls of succulent rice with reconstituted mushrooms, followed by chicken cooked in olive oil and garlic and rosemary, with new potatoes and spring greens.

‘Unlike me,’ I explained to Finn across the table, ‘Sarah and Clyde have stayed in London and are doing a real job.’

‘You shouldn’t do yourself down, Sam,’ she said, with feeling.

Sarah laughed.

‘Don’t worry, Fiona,’ she said. ‘Sam is not generally famous for her English modesty and reserve.’

‘Anyway, it’s not modesty,’ I said. ‘The point is to be self-deprecating so that other people then step in and say how wonderful you are. It’s a way of inviting praise.’

Finn shook her head with a wistful smile.

‘I don’t believe that,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe that most people are independent enough to look at what someone does and make up their mind about it for themselves. It’s too much trouble. People take you at your own valuation. If you say you’re good, most people will believe you. If you’re modest, they’ll agree with you.’

Finn’s fervent statement was followed by a cavernous silence which was broken by Clyde.

‘And what do you do? And we don’t expect you to be modest about it.’

‘I’m writing a thesis,’ Finn said.

‘What about?’

‘It’s to do with the history of science.’

‘In what way?’

‘You don’t want to hear all about my work.’

‘Yes, we do.’ Sarah insisted warmly. ‘Remember, we’re all licensed to boast about ourselves now.’

Finn glanced across the table at me. I tried to think of some way to stop this disaster but everything that came into my mind seemed as if it would make matters worse. There was a long pause as Finn leaned over for the wine, filled her glass and then took a sip.

‘You really want to hear about this?’ she asked.

‘We’re on the edge of our seats,’ said Clyde.

‘Well, you asked for it. I’m writing a thesis on the taxonomy of mental disorders, using post-traumatic stress disorder as the principal subject.’

‘What does that mean when it’s at home?’

Finn gave me the most imperceptible of winks across the table before she replied.

‘Basically, the question that fascinated me is the extent to which a particular pathology exists before it has been named. Has it been discovered, identified or invented? There have always been broken legs and tumours. But did Neanderthals suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder after they had been in battle with their flint knives and axes?’

‘There was shell-shock after the First World War, wasn’t there?’ Clyde said.

‘Yes, but do you know where the term came from?’

‘No.’

‘They thought the explosions of the shells were causing physical damage to the nerves around the spine. The reason for this is that the condition was first given medical status after survivors of a Victorian rail crash presented symptoms of shock but no physical injuries. They assumed it was caused by the physical impact and called it “railway spine”. When similar symptoms were observed in the trenches, they assumed it was caused by Shockwaves from the shells. They needed to believe it was a version of the sort of thing they called injury. Maybe the soldiers were just displaying a natural response to the madness of fighting in the trenches. But then people with the power to do so call some of these forms of behaviour symptoms and call them a disorder and treat it in a medical environment.’

‘Do you think it’s an invention?’

‘That’s what Sam is investigating.’

‘How did you two get together?’

‘Someone in my department knew about Sam’s research. I’ve got a background in statistics and Sam had a spare room and it seemed a good idea for me to stay here for a while. I’m very lucky. I suspect that Sam’s work is going to redefine the subject and put it on a proper systematic basis for the first time. I’m just lucky to be tagging along with her for a bit.’

Sarah looked across at me.

‘Fiona makes it sound fascinating. How’s the research going?’ There was a silence. ‘Sam?’

‘What?’

‘How’s the research going?’

‘Sorry, I was miles away. Fine, it’s going fine.’

‘And she can cook as well.’

‘Yes,’ I said, feebly.

∗

I absolutely wouldn’t let Finn do the washing-up. I sent her through to the living room with Clyde while I washed and Sarah dried.

‘How’s your book going?’

‘Not,’ I replied.

‘Oh dear – well, when you’ve written it, would you like me to have a look?’

‘That’d be great, except you might have to wait a long time.’

‘And how’s Danny?’

‘I don’t know really,’ I said, and to my horror I felt tears prick at my eyelids.

‘Are you two OK?’

I shrugged, not wanting to trust my voice.

Sarah glanced across at me, then meticulously polished off a spoon and put it in the drawer. ‘Fiona’s a real find,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said a bit gloomily.

‘She idolizes you, you know.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so.’

‘Of course she does. I was looking at her during the meal. She looks at you constantly. She was echoing your expressions, your posture. After everything she said, she almost seemed to check with you, just for a fraction of a second, as if she needed to be reassured about your reaction.’

‘That sounds almost creepy.’

‘I didn’t mean it that way.’

‘Anyway, it’s common, isn’t it, with… er, teachers and pupils. It’s like patients becoming attached to their doctors. And it’s only for a short while.’

Sarah raised an eyebrow.

‘Really? I thought she was helping with your project.’

‘She is for the moment, but this isn’t a permanent arrangement.’

‘I’m amazed you can manage without her.’

Sarah and Clyde were leaving almost at first light, so after coffee and some shoptalk, they went up to bed. Finn was lying on the floor with a book.

‘That was extraordinary.’

‘What?’

‘I almost had a heart attack when Clyde starting asking you about your research.’

Finn put down the book and sat up, her knees pulled close to her chest.

‘I felt awful for you,’ she said. ‘I just tried to think of anything I could to be convincing. I hope it was all right.’

‘All right? You made me want to read your thesis. I can’t believe how much you’ve taken in. You’re an amazing girl, Finn. Woman.’

‘It’s not me, it’s you, Sam. I’m just interested in you and your work. When Clyde asked me about what I was doing, I completely panicked for a second. Then, do you know what I did? I imagined myself as you and tried to say what you would say.’

I laughed.

‘I wish I was as good at being me as you are,’ I said.

I turned to go but Finn continued talking.

‘I want all this to go on, you know.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I love it. Don’t smile. I really do. I love you and I love being with Elsie and looking after her. I think Danny’s wonderful. And Michael… he saved my life, really. I’d be nothing without him. I don’t know what I could ever do to pay him back for what he’s done for me.’ She looked up at me, almost pleading. ‘I want it to go on and on.’

It was a moment I had been waiting for and now I was relieved it had come. I knelt beside her.

‘Finn, it can’t. You have a life of your own. You have to go back into it, and soon. Look at yourself, you can do anything. You can do it.’

Finn’s eyes filled with tears.

‘I feel safe here, in this house,’ she said. ‘I’m frightened of outside.’

Twenty-Two

The first time I met Danny was at a party, although as a rule I never meet anyone at a party except for people whom I already know. It was at that mellow, sozzled stage of the evening when most of the guests have gone and the hosts are carrying glasses into the kitchen or emptying overflowing ashtrays, and the remaining guests are entirely comfortable, and the music is sweet and slow. The pressure to perform has dropped away, and you no longer have to be bright or have to smile, and you know the evening is at an end and suddenly you want it to go on a little longer. And Danny crossed the room, his eyes on me. I remember hoping that he wasn’t stupid, as if someone so handsome couldn’t be intelligent too, as if life is divided up fairly like that. Before he addressed a single word to me, I knew we’d have an affair. He told me his name and asked me mine; told me he was an unsuccessful actor and a quite successful carpenter, and I said I was a doctor. Then he said quite simply he’d like to see me again and I replied that I’d like that too. And then when I got back to my flat, and after I’d paid the babysitter and kicked off my shoes and looked in on a sleeping Elsie, I’d listened to the messages on my answering machine, and there was his voice, asking me to dinner the next day. He must have rung me as soon as I’d left the party.

The point is, Danny doesn’t play games. He comes and he goes, and sometimes I don’t hear from him for days or even know where he is. But he’s always been straightforward with me; we quarrel and then we make up, we shout and then we apologize. He’s not devious. He wouldn’t keep away in order to teach me a lesson. He wouldn’t fail to telephone just to keep me waiting for him, just to make me suffer.

For days, I waited for Danny to call me, I checked my machine whenever I came in. I checked that Elsie hadn’t knocked the receiver off its hook. When the telephone rang I’d feel as nervous as a teenager, would wait for its second or third ring before picking it up, but it was never Danny. At night I’d stay up long after Finn went to bed, because I thought he’d walk in through the door, quite casual, as if he’d never been away. I’d wake up in the dark and think he was there, my body alert with hope. I slept like a feather, fluttering into consciousness at any noise – a car on the distant road, wind in the trees, the unnerving hoot of an owl in the dark. There was never any reply when I called his flat, and he never left his own machine on. After nearly a week I called his best friend, Ronan, and asked him as casually as I could if he’d seen Danny recently.

‘Had another row, Sam?’ he’d said, cheerfully. Then, ‘No, I haven’t seen Dan. I thought he was with you.’

I thanked him and was about to put the phone down when Ronan added, ‘While we’re talking about Dan, though, I’ve been worried by him lately. Is he OK?’

‘Why? What do you mean?’

‘It’s just that he’s been a bit, well, gloomy. Brooding. Know what I mean?’

‘Mummy?’

‘Yes, my love.’

‘When’s Danny coming again?’

‘I’m not sure, Elsie. He’s busy. Why, do you miss him?’

‘He promised to take me to a puppet show, and I want to show him how I can do cartwheels now.’

‘When he comes, he’ll be so proud of your cartwheels. Come here and give me a hug, a bear-hug.’

‘Ow, you’re hurting me, Mummy. You shouldn’t hold on so tight. I’m only little.’

‘Sam.’

‘Mmmmm.’

‘Is Danny coming again soon?’

‘I don’t know. For God’s sake, Finn, don’t you go on about Danny as well. He’ll come when he bloody feels like it, I suppose.’

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes, of course. Oh fuck, I’m going for a walk.’

‘Do you want me to…’

‘Alone.’

‘Sam, your father and I wondered if you and Elsie and Danny would like to come over for the day next Sunday. We thought, well, that it was time we made the effort to get to know your young man better.’

‘Mum, we’d love to, that’s really nice of you, I appreciate it – but can I get back to you about it? Now’s not a good time.’

‘Oh’ – a familiar huffy tone of injured pride that gave me an unfamiliar, unwelcome rush of homesickness – ‘all right then, dear.’

Not a good time.

∗

I went around the supermarket like a fury, my head hurting after a long depressing morning spent interviewing secretaries in the hospital. Frozen peas. Bubble bath with a cartoon character I don’t recognize on the bottle. Fish fingers. Pasta in three colours. Tea-bags. Digestive biscuits and jammy dodgers. Fuck Danny, fuck him fuck him fuck him. Garlic bread. Sunflower spread. Sliced brown bread. Peanut butter. I wanted him back, I wanted him, and what should I do oh what should I do? Wings of chicken, oriental-style. Crisp green apples, all the way from the Cape, but that was O K nowadays. Three cartons of soup, lentil and spinach and curried parsnip, suitable for the microwave. Vanilla ice-cream. Pecan pie, heat from frozen. Belgian beer. I should never have moved to the country and I should never have taken in Finn. Cheddar cheese, mozzarella cheese. Cat food in rabbit and chicken and salmon flavours and the fat face of a purring mog on the tin. Crisps. Nuts. Television dinner: serves one.

The door was locked when I arrived home. I let myself in and called upstairs for Finn, but there was nobody there. So I unloaded all the shopping, pushed food into the already crowded freezer, filled up the kettle, turned on the radio, turned it off again. Then I took a deep breath and went in to my study to check the answering machine. Its little green eye wasn’t blinking: no one had rung me at all.

But there was an envelope on my desk and it had my name on it. And – I put my hand on the wood of the desktop for a moment – the handwriting was Danny’s. He’d been here, come in while I was out and left a note so he wouldn’t have to say it to me. I picked up the envelope and turned it over, held it for a moment. There were two sheets of paper. The top one was his. The paper was grubby and smeared. There were few words, obviously written in haste, without care, but they were unmistakably his.Sam

Goodbye. I’m sorry. I

Danny

That was it. His apparent attempt at self-justification had fizzled, and he hadn’t bothered even to complete it. My breath rose and fell in my chest. The desk was grainy under my hand. I put Danny’s letter carefully down. My hands were trembling. Then I looked at the sheet of paper beneath, a forest of blue loops and underlinings.Darling Sam – how very intimate she’d become, all of a sudden. Perhaps she felt almost sisterly towards me now, having run off with my lover – It’s a madness, I know. We couldn’t live without each other. – How touching, I thought, love like the magazines say that it can be; love as a landslide, a destiny, a madness. – I’m sorry to hurt you, so sorry. Love, Finn.

I folded Danny’s pitiful scrawl and Finn’s letter back in the envelope and put it where it had been. Danny and Finn, Danny and Finn. I took the photograph of Danny, back to the camera and head turned towards it, caught unawares, and put it neatly in the drawer of my desk. I ran into Finn’s room. The bed was made, a towel neatly folded on the bed. I clattered down the stairs. One of Finn’s jackets, the navy-blue one, was missing. Was it some crazy joke that I wasn’t getting the point of? No. They had gone. I said it aloud as if it was the only way I could take in what had happened: ‘They’ve run away. Finn.’ I made myself say it. ‘Danny.’ I looked at my watch. In two hours Elsie would be back. The memory of her little body wrapped around Finn’s slim one, of her pale grave face tilted up towards Finn’s smiling one, her cartwheel practised nightly in preparation for Danny’s return, momentarily stopped me dead. Bile rose in my throat. I went to the kitchen sink, splashed cold water over my face and drank two glasses more. Then I returned to my study and picked up the phone and pressed the button three times.

‘Stamford Central 2243.’ There was a pause. ‘Chief Inspector Frank Baird, please. Well, get him then.’

Baird arrived in less than half an hour, Angeloglou with him. They both looked agitated, solemn. They could hardly meet my eye. My fidgety mind suddenly fixed on the contrast between them. Baird large, his suit tight under the arms, red hair across a large head. Angeloglou was neater, his tie pulled all the way up against his collar, a full head of dark curls. How did he brush it? They seemed newly wary of me. I was transformed from a professional person to a jilted woman. And although they didn’t say it, they both clearly thought Danny was little short of criminal, running off with Finn. There wasn’t much I could say to them, the story was simple enough. Any fool could understand it. Angeloglou wrote some things down in a notebook, they read the letters that the two of them had left behind, and together we went to Finn’s bedroom and stared into the wardrobe. One shirt was left hanging among the clatter of empty hangers; no underwear; no shoes; nothing. The room had been left quite tidy, one twist of tissue in the waste-paper basket and the duvet folded back. I was quite tart with Baird. I’m afraid, but I think that he understood. Just before he left he stood in the doorway, twisting the plain wedding ring on his thick finger, flushed with embarrassment.

‘Miss Laschen…’

‘Doctor Laschen.’

‘Doctor Laschen, I’m…’

‘Don’t say anything,’ I said. ‘But thanks, anyway.’

I still had thirty minutes left until Elsie came. I tidied the kitchen, wiped clean the table and opened the window, because outside it had turned into a balmy spring day. I picked four orange tulips from my garden and put them in the living room. I ran into Elsie’s room and made her bed, turned down the sheet on it and put her balding teddy on the pillow. Then I rummaged in the kitchen cupboards for her supper. Sonic the Hedgehog spaghetti shapes; she loved those. And I’d bought that ice-cream at the supermarket. I brushed my teeth in the bathroom and stared at the staring face that looked back at me out of the mirror. I smiled at myself and myself obediently smiled back.

Elsie ate her Sonic shapes, and her ice-cream, and had Pocahontas bubbles in her bath. Then we played a rather forlorn game of charades and I read her three books. Then she said, ‘Where’s Fing?’

What had I agreed with myself to say?

‘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 daughter. 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?’

Rupert 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?’

‘Three. A left ear, a right ear and a wild ear. I don’t understand that joke.’

‘Well, it’s a wild front ear. Who told it to you?’

‘Danny. Danny sang it one day, and then he laughed a lot.’

‘Look,’ I said brightly. ‘Here’s Kirsty’s house.’

Kirsty came to the door, white socks pulled firmly up to her plump knees, smocked blue dress with a crisp white collar, red coat trailing behind, shiny hair-slide in her shiny brown hair.

‘Isn’t Fing coming with us?’ she asked when she saw me and Elsie. Behind her, Mrs Langley was mouthing widely: ‘I-haven’t-told-her-yet.’

‘Fing’s…’ began Elsie importantly.

‘Not-today-Kirsty-but-we’re-going-to-have-a-lovely-time-and-where-are-your-swimming-things-and-jump-in-the-car-and-don’t-you-look-smart-and-up-you-go,’ I rattled out, as if I could push the question away if I spoke fast enough and long enough, replace it by thoughts of chloriney water and crisps afterwards, and an afternoon spent in the hot dark of the old cinema, where balding velvety seats flipped back and popcorn rolled along the floor, where cartoon characters could be bashed and squashed and dropped in boiling oil and still come back to life.

Mrs Langley leaned in through my window, looking avidly sympathetic, and placed a smooth hand over my callused one, which was clenching the steering-wheel. She files her nails, I thought.

‘If there’s anything I…’

‘Thank you. I’ll bring Kirsty back this afternoon.’ I grabbed away my hand and turned the key in the ignition. ‘Are you both belted in, girls?’

‘Yes,’ they chorused, sitting neatly side by side, two pairs of feet dangling in their patent-leather shoes, two eager faces.

‘OK, let’s go.’

Kirsty and Elsie floated decorously in their rubber rings and armbands, so buoyed up their torsos hardly got wet. Their white legs scampered in the water, their faces were pink with the sense of their own courage.

‘Look at me,’ said Kirsty. She slapped her nose and chin into the water for a nanosecond and came up triumphant with one lock of hair dripping. ‘I can go underwater. I bet you can’t do that.’

Elsie looked at me for a moment, my anxious little landlubber. I thought she would cry. Then she ducked her head down into the pool, struggling clumsily amid her bright orange floats.

‘I did it,’ she said. ‘I did it, Mummy, did you see?’

I wanted to pick her up and hold her.

‘My two little fish, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘Shall I be a shark?’

Under the water, I was weightless and half blind; my eyes squinted through the thick green water and the luminous legs swirled like seaweed; my hands held out for flickering ankles. The tiles were reassuringly only a few inches away from my submerged body. I heard the girls squeal and giggle as I floundered beneath them. I’m not a fish, not me. I only like solid ground.

In the changing room a teenage girl nudged her friend as I tugged vests over wet heads, forced stubborn feet into recalcitrant shoes and buckled stiff straps. She pointed at me with her eyes.

Chicken nuggets and chips and bright pink ice-lollies for lunch. Popcorn, savoury and sweet mixed, and fizzy orange in a huge cardboard cup with two stripy straws poking from the top. The girls watched a cartoon and I let the screen slip into a blur as I looked beyond it and they both held my hands, one sitting on either side of me. Their fingers were sticky, their heads were tilted towards my shoulders. The air all around us felt second-hand, overused. I tried to match my breath to theirs, but couldn’t. It came in ragged unsymmetrical tearings out of lungs that hurt. I put my dark glasses on as soon as we came out into the foyer.

‘Mummy.’

‘Yes, my love.’ Kirsty was safely returned to her mother and we were driving through a milky mist towards home.

‘You know in the video,’ except Elsie pronounced it ‘vidjo’, a surviving trace of baby-talk, the last frail brown leaf left hanging on the tree, ‘of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?’

‘Yes.’

‘When he’s killed by the wicked witch and he lies with the mouses?’

‘Yes.’

‘And then he comes back to life, he does. Well…’

‘No. Danny and Finn won’t come back like that. We’ll miss them and we’ll remember them, and we’ll talk about them to each other, you must talk to me whenever you want to, and they won’t be dead here.’ I put one hand against my thundering heart. ‘But we won’t see them again.’

‘But where are they? Are they in heaven now?’

Charred lumps of flesh, hilariously grinning skulls with burnt-out eyes, features pouring in a ghastly river down their ruined faces, melted limbs, on a metal tray in a fridge a few miles from where we were driving.

‘I don’t know, my sweetheart. But they are peaceful now.’

‘Mummy?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was I brave to put my head in the water?’

‘You were very brave; I was proud.’

‘Brave as a lion?’

‘Braver.’

As we drove towards the house, it looked as if a party was going on, looming out of the fog. A flock of white lights; a herd of cars. We pulled to a halt and I softly touched the tip of Elsie’s nose with my forefinger.

‘Beep,’ I said. ‘We’re going to run through these rude men with their cameras and their tape recorders. Put your head on my shoulder and let’s see if I can get to the door before you count to a hundred.’

‘One, two, skip a few…’

‘Your father and I think you ought to come and stay with us for a few days. Until all the fuss has died down.’

‘Mum, that’s…’ I paused, searching for what I ought to say. ‘Kind of you, but I’m all right. We have to stay here.’

My parents had arrived just after us. They marched into the house like two guards, left-right, chins up, eyes ahead. I was grateful for their resilience. I knew how much they must be hating all of this. They brought a fruit cake in a large maroon tin, a bunch of flowers wrapped in Cellophane and some Smarties and a colouring book for Elsie, who hates colouring books but loves Smarties. She took them off to the kitchen to eat meticulously, colour by colour, leaving the orange ones till last. My father made a fire. He stacked twigs in a neat pyre over half a firelighter and then arranged four logs on top. My mother made tea with a bustling air and thumped a hunk of fruit cake in front of me.

‘At least let us stay here then.’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘You can’t do everything by yourself.’

Something in the tone of my mother’s voice made me look at her. Beneath her glasses, her eyes swam; her lips were tautened against emotion. When had I last seen her cry? I leaned forward in my seat and touched her knee, under her thick wool skirt, awkwardly. When had I last touched her, apart from those stiff pecks on the cheek?

‘Let it be, Joan. Can’t you see Samantha’s upset?’

‘No! No, I can’t see she’s upset. That’s my point, Bill. She should be upset; she should be – be – prostrated. Her friend, I always did think she was sly that one and I told you so that day we met her, and her boyfriend run off together and kill themselves in a car and it’s all over the newspapers. And everything.’ She gestured vaguely at the window, at the world beyond. ‘And Samantha sits there as cool as anything, when all I want, all I want, is to help.’ She paused, and perhaps I would have leaned forward and hugged her then, but I saw her give a twitch and she said the final thing, the thing she must have promised herself not to say: ‘It’s not as if it’s the first time this has happened to Samantha.’

‘Joan…’

‘That’s all right, Dad,’ I said and I meant it. The pain of that being said to me by my mother was so intense that it almost became an astringent twisted pleasure.

‘Elsie shouldn’t be here at all,’ my mother said. ‘She should come away with us.’

She half-rose, as if she were going to make off with my daughter at once.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Elsie is with me.’ As if on cue, Elsie appeared in the living room, crunching on her last Smarties. I pulled her on to my lap and put my chin on her head.

There was a knock at the door.

‘Who is it?’ I called.

‘Me. Michael.’

I let him in, closing the door quickly behind him. He took off his coat and I saw he was wearing old jeans and a faded blue cotton shirt, but otherwise he looked relaxed, steady.

‘I’ve brought smoked salmon and brown bread and a bottle of Sancerre, I thought we might… oh, hello, Mrs Laschen, Mr Laschen.’

‘They’re just going, Michael,’ I said.

‘But Samantha, we’ve only just…’

My father nodded insistently at my mother and took her arm. I helped them on with their coats in silence and steered them to the door. My mother looked back at Michael and me. I don’t know which disquieted me more, her puzzlement or her approval.

Elsie was waiting for me in my bed that night. As I slipped under the cover, she shifted, wrapped a tentacle arm around my neck, butted her face into my shoulder, sighed. Then, with the miraculous ease that children have, she closed her eyes again and sank into sleep. I lay awake for a long time. Outside it was moonless and dark. Everyone had gone home; I could hear nothing but the wind in the trees, once or twice the faint shriek of a bird out at sea. If I put my hand to Elsie’s chest I could feel her heartbeat. Her breath blew warmly against my neck. Every so often she would murmur something indistinguishable.

Michael hadn’t stayed long that evening. He had opened the wine and poured me a glass, which I’d knocked back without tasting, as if it were schnapps. He had spread the butter he’d brought with him on to slices of the bread and covered them with smoked salmon, which reminded me horribly of raw human flesh, so I nibbled a bit of the crust and left it at that. We didn’t talk much. He mentioned a couple of details from the Belfast conference he thought might interest me. I said nothing but stared at the dying embers of the fire my father had made. Anatoly wrapped his black length around our legs and purred loudly.

‘It seems unreal, impossible, doesn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’ve known Finn for years,’ he said. ‘Years.’

I said nothing. I felt unable even to nod.

‘Well.’ He stood up and pulled on his coat. ‘I’m going to go, Sam. Will you be able to sleep? I could give you something.’

I waved him away. When he had gone, I went upstairs. I held Elsie against me and stared, wide-eyed, dry-eyed, at the silent dark.

Twenty-Five

‘It’s a bad business, these suicides.’

‘I’m coping.’

‘Bad for us, I mean.’

‘No, I don’t know what you mean.’

Geoff Marsh fingered the knot of his tie as if attempting to establish by touch alone whether it was in the centre of his neck. This meeting had been arranged a fortnight earlier to discuss some possible new sources of funding that had arisen. These we had disposed of over a cup of coffee. I had stood up to go, but he had gestured me back into my chair and started to look worried.

‘This couldn’t have come at a worse time,’ he said.

I bit back a retort and said nothing.

‘You should have told us, Sam.’

‘What should I have told you, Geoff?’

Geoff reached for a pad and looked at some jottings in a display of bureaucratic efficiency.

‘You were technically in our employment, Sam,’ he said after a pause. He gave that shrug of helplessness that I had come to know well. It was an acknowledgement of the implacability of the political and economic climate which cruelly constrained him. He continued, ‘The last thing I want to do is make anything of that, of course, but you should have told us that you were doing sensitive work that would impact on our project.’

I was going to have to work with this man for a long time, so it was difficult for me to think of what I could decently say. I took a deep breath.

‘I thought I was being a good citizen. The police asked me for help. They insisted on secrecy. I didn’t even tell my own family.’

Geoff placed his two hands delicately on the edge of his grossly oversized desk. I felt like a schoolgirl in the headmaster’s office.

‘It’s going to be in the papers,’ he said, with a frown.

‘It’s already in the bloody papers,’ I said. ‘My front lawn is like Greenham Common.’

‘Yes, yes, but so far there has been no mention of, well…’ Geoff gestured around him vaguely. ‘Us, all this, the unit.’

‘Why should they mention that?’

Geoff stood up and walked over to the window and stared out. I tried to think of a way of bringing this tiresome meeting to an end. After a couple of minutes’ silence, I couldn’t bear it any longer.

‘Geoff, if there’s nothing more, I’ve got things to do.’

Geoff turned suddenly as if he had forgotten I was in the room.

‘Sam, do you mind if I am entirely frank?’

‘Go ahead,’ I said drily. ‘Don’t spare my feelings.’

He joined his hands in a pose of statuesque gravity.

‘The whole subject of post-traumatic stress disorder is still controversial. You’ve told me that enough times. We’re creating a new centre for it here and at the same time I don’t want to tell you how many wards I’ve been closing over the past couple of months. And the Linden Report – you know, into that photogenic six-year-old girl who died in Birmingham after we’d turned her away – that’s coming out in a couple of weeks. And I’m just waiting for some bright medical correspondent to put all that together with your thing…’

‘What do you mean, my thing?’

Geoff’s face had become pinker and harder.

‘Since I’m looking into the abyss,’ he said, ‘maybe I’ll tell you. We chose you to superintend the largest project of my reign… my tenure, whatever you like to call it. Sir Reginald Lennox on my committee says that post-traumatic stress disorder is an excuse for weaklings and nancy boys, to use his expression. But we’ve brought in the famous Dr Samantha Laschen to fight our corner. And about a month before taking up her post, she has shown the world what she can do by treating a traumatized woman in her own home. An irresponsible journalist might point out that the result of Dr Laschen’s personal brand of treatment was that the patient fell in love with Dr Laschen’s own boyfriend, they absconded and then both committed suicide.’ Geoff paused. ‘Any such summary would, of course, be most unfair. But if such an argument were to be made, it would in truth be difficult to argue that the treatment of Fiona Mackenzie was one of your great successes.’

‘I wasn’t treating Fiona Mackenzie. She wasn’t my patient. The point was to provide her with a safe and secure – and temporary – refuge. And as a matter of fact I was against the idea myself.’

I was whining and making excuses and I despised myself for it. Geoff looked unimpressed.

‘It’s a subtle distinction,’ he said, dubiously.

‘What is all this, Geoff? If you’ve got anything to say, just say it.’

‘I’m trying to save you, Sam, and save the unit.’

‘Save me? What are you talking about?’

‘Sam, I’m not expressing a personal view, I’m just putting forward a few pertinent facts. If this trust becomes embroiled in a public scandal in the media, things will be awkward for everybody.’

‘I don’t want to be belligerent about this, but are you making some sort of threat? Do you want me to resign?’

‘No, absolutely not, not at present. This is your project, Sam, and you’re going to see it through, supported by us.’

‘And?’

‘Perhaps we should consider a strategy of containment.’

‘Such as?’

‘That was what I had hoped we could discuss, but it occurred to me that one possibility might be a judicious interview with the right journalist, a sort of pre-emptive strike.’

‘No, absolutely not.’

‘Sam, think about it, don’t just say no.’

‘No.’

‘Think about it.’

‘No. And I’ve got to go now, Geoff. I’ve got doctors to talk to. Lest we forget that the point of this project is to provide a medical service.’

Geoff walked with me across his vast office to the door.

‘I envy you, Sam.’

‘That’s hard to believe.’

‘People come to you with their symptoms and you help them and that’s it. I argue with doctors and then I argue with politicians and then I argue with bureaucrats and then I argue with doctors again.’

I turned back to the office and looked at the Mexican tapestry, the sofa, the desk that was about the size of Ayers Rock, the panoramic view across fens and marshes or whatever it was that lay between Stamford and the sea.

‘There are some compensations,’ I said.

We shook hands.

‘I need to be able to look my board in the face without too much embarrassment. Please don’t do anything to embarrass me. And if you do, tell me first.’

When I arrived home, it took me fifteen minutes to play through the messages on my answering machine. I lost count of the different newspapers whose representatives left their numbers and of the different euphemisms they employed, the offers of deals, sympathy, consultation fees. Buried among them were messages from my mother, baffled by the tirade of beeps caused by the preceding messages, and Michael Daley, and Linda, who was going to be late today, and from Rupert Baird, who asked if we could have a word about Finn’s effects.

Her effects. The idea irritated me and then made me feel so sad. What was to be done with her few things? Presumably they now had no significance as part of an investigation. They weren’t evidence of anything except two wasted lives and a landscape of emotional damage. Our possessions were supposed to drift down from one generation to the next, but I couldn’t even think of anyone to give Finn’s pitiful few things to. I wondered what would happen to her untouched inheritance.

Even so, if there was nothing to do, at least I would do it straight away. I took a cardboard box from the kitchen and ran up the stairs to the room from which I had deliberately excluded myself, Finn’s room. Even now there was a feeling of transgression as I pushed the door open and stepped inside. It was pathetically bare, as if it had been unoccupied for months. For the first time I realized that Finn had accumulated none of the burrs and barnacles that stick to most of us as we pass through life. Apart from some paperbacks piled on a shelf, there was not a single personal object in view, not even a pencil. The bed was carefully made, the rug straight, the surfaces were all bare. There was a musty smell and I hastily pushed the window open. There was nothing in the wardrobe but a rattle of metal clothes hangers. I looked at the books: some thrillers, Bleak House, The Woman in White, poetry by Anne Sexton, a battered guide to South America. I took that and tossed it out of the door on to the landing. I felt like escaping to South America. Escaping anywhere. The rest of the books I put in the box, and as I did so a white envelope fell from the pages of one of them on to the floor.

I picked it up and was about to put it in the box too when I saw what was written on it and stopped. In large childish capital letters it said: MY WILL. Finn, so scared, so preoccupied with death, had written a will.

I had a sudden tremulous conviction that she had impulsively left everything to me and that this would be a further public disaster. I slowly turned the envelope over. It wasn’t sealed. The flap had simply been tucked inside without being stuck down, the way one does with greetings cards. I knew that what I was doing was wrong, possibly illegal, but I opened it and unfolded the paper inside. It was a blue form, headed ‘Make Your Own Will’ at the top, and it had been filled out very simply. Under the box marked ‘Will of’ there was written: Fiona Mackenzie, 3 Wilkinson Crescent, Stamford, Essex. In the box marked ‘I appoint as my executor’ there was written: Michael Daley, 14 Alice Road, Cumberton, Essex. In the box marked ‘I leave everything I own to’ there was written: Michael Daley, 14 Alice Road, Cumberton, Essex. It was signed and dated Monday 4 March 1996. She ticked that she wished to be cremated.

At the bottom were two boxes marked ‘Signed by the person making this will in our presence, in whose presence we then signed’. In these, in different hands, were written: Linda Parris, 22 Lam Road, Lymne. Sally Cole, 3b Primrose Villas, Lymne.

Finn had gone completely mad. Finn had gone mad and then my fucking child-minder and my fucking cleaner had joined in a mad conspiracy under my own roof. My head was spinning and I had to sit on the bed for a moment. And what conspiracy, anyway? A conspiracy to leave your wealth in a mad way after your death? Old ladies left millions to their cats; why shouldn’t Finn leave everything to Michael Daley? But as I thought of his ineffectual role in all of this as Finn’s doctor, as Mrs Ferrer’s doctor, I became angry. Who knew about this will? The idea of the wealth of the Mackenzie family being handed over to Michael Daley suddenly seemed unbearable. Why shouldn’t I destroy the will, so that some sort of justice could be done? Anyway, if the person who was the executor also got all the money, it could hardly be legal, so it might as well be destroyed anyway. As I pondered this I saw there was another slip of paper in the envelope. It was hardly larger than a business card. On it was Finn’s unmistakable handwriting: ‘There is another copy of this will in the possession of the executor, Michael Daley. Signed, Fiona Mackenzie.’ I gave a shiver and felt as if Finn had come into the room and caught me rummaging through her things. I blushed until I felt my cheeks sting.

I carefully replaced both pieces of paper in the envelope and placed it into the cardboard box. Then I spoke aloud, even though I was alone.

‘What a bloody mess.’

Twenty-Six

I don’t believe in God, I don’t think that I ever have, although I have a dim and suspiciously hackneyed memory of kneeling by my bed like Christopher Robin and rattling off Our-Father-who-art-in-heaven-hallowed-be-thy-name. And I do recall being terrified when very young of that prayer that goes: ‘If I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take.’ I would lie in my knee-length nightie with the frills round the wrists and the shell-white buttons closed up to the demure neckline, blinking worriedly in the darkness, Bobbie’s breath rising and falling from the bed across the room, and try to keep off the great wall of sleep. And I have always hated the idea of the capricious deity who answers some people’s calls for help and not others’.

But when I woke in the grey light of the March morning, on the narrow hem of a bed almost entirely occupied by an out-flung Elsie, I found myself to my shame muttering, ‘Please God, dear God, let it not be true.’ Morning, though, is harsh. Not as bad as night, of course, when time is like a great river spilling over its banks, losing all onrushing momentum, lying in shallow stagnant pools. My patients often talk to me about night terrors. And they talk too about the terror of waking up from dreams into an undeceived day.

I lay for a few minutes until the first panic had subsided and my breathing grew steady. Elsie shifted abruptly beside me, yanked the duvet cover off me and wrapped herself in it like some hibernating creature. Only the top of her head showed. I stroked it, and it too disappeared. Outside I could hear the sounds of the day: a dog barking, cock crowing, cars changing gear at the sharp corner. The journalists had gone from my door, the newspapers were no longer full of the story, the phone did not ring every few minutes with solicitous or curious inquiry. This was my life.

So I jumped out of bed and, quietly so as not to wake Elsie, got dressed in a short woollen dress, some ribbed tights and a pair of ankle boots, methodically threading the laces into little eyelets and noticing while I did so that my hands were no longer shaking. I looped dangly earrings into my lobes and brushed my hair. I wasn’t going anywhere, but I knew if I shuffled round in leggings that had lost their stretch I’d add to my despondency. Thelma had once said to me that feelings often follow behaviour, rather than the other way round: behave with courage and you give yourself courage; behave with generosity and you start to lose your mean-spirited envy. So now I was going to face the world as if it didn’t make me sick with panic, and maybe my nausea would begin to fade.

I fed Anatoly, drank a scalding cup of coffee and made a shopping list before Elsie woke and staggered into the kitchen. She had a bowl of Honey Nut Loops, which I finished for her, and then a bowl of muesli, picking out the raisins with her spoon and handing the soggy beige remainder to me.

‘I want a stick insect in a jar,’ she said.

‘All right.’ I could cope with cleaning out a stick insect’s home.

She looked at me in surprise. Maybe she’d started too low, a grave negotiating mistake.

‘I want a hamster.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘I want a hamster.’

‘The trouble with pets,’ I said, ‘is that they need cleaning out and feeding, and after the first few days you’ll get bored, and guess who’ll do it. And pets die.’ I regretted the words as soon as I spoke them, but Elsie didn’t blink.

‘I want two hamsters, so if one dies, I’ll still have the other.’

‘Elsie…’

‘Or one dog.’

Letters abruptly slapped through the letter-box and on to the tiled floor.

‘I’ll get them.’

Elsie slid from the table and retrieved a pile of envelopes, more than usual. The brown for bills I put to one side. The slim white ones, with my name formally typed and the stamp franked in the corner, I peered at suspiciously and put to the other side. They were almost certainly from newspapers or TV programmes. The handwritten ones I opened and quickly glanced at: ‘Darling Sam, if there’s anything we can do…’; ‘I was so surprised when I read…’; ‘Dear Sam, I know we’ve lost touch recently, but when I heard about…’

And there was one envelope I didn’t know what to do with. It was addressed to Daniel Rees in neat blue-Biro capitals. I supposed I’d better send it on to his parents. I held up the envelope to the light, stared at it as if it held the key to a mystery. The gummed seal of the envelope was detached in one corner. I slid my finger under the flap and opened it a bit further. Then all the way.Dear Mr Rees,Thank you for your inquiries this morning concerning weekend breaks in Italy. This is to confirm that you have booked two nights, half board, in Rome, for the weekend of May 18/19. We will send you your flight details and tickets shortly. Can you confirm the names of the passengers are Mr D. Rees and Dr S. Laschen?Yours sincerely,Miss Sarah KellyGlobe Travel

I folded the letter up and slid it back into its envelope. Rome with Danny. Hand in hand in T-shirts and in love. Under the starched sheets in a hotel bedroom, with a fan stirring the baked air. Pasta and red wine and huge and antique ruins. Cool churches and fountains. I’d never been to Rome.

‘Who’s the letter from, Mummy?’

‘Oh, nobody.’

Why had he changed his mind so abruptly? What had I done, or not done, that he could forgo Rome with me for death in a burnt-out car with a fucked-up girl? I pulled out the letter again. ‘Thank you for your inquiries this morning…’ It was dated 8 March 1996. That was the day that it happened, the day he went off with Finn. Pain gathered, ready to spring, above my eyes.

‘Will we be late for school again, Mummy?’

‘What? No! No of course we won’t be late for school, we’ll be early. Come on.’

‘I just signed where she told me to.’

‘But Sally, how could you not look? It was her will, and she was a distressed young girl.’

‘Sorry.’ Sally went on scrubbing the oven. That was it.

‘I wanted to speak to you about it, Linda, before Elsie comes back.’

‘She said it was nothing.’ Linda’s eyes filled with tears. ‘A formality.’

‘Didn’t you read it?’

She just shrugged and shook her head. Why hadn’t they been nosy like me?

Michael’s house was not large, but it was lovely in a cool and modish kind of way. The downstairs floor was entirely open-plan and the French windows in the uncluttered kitchen opened out on to a paved courtyard in which stood a small conical fountain. I looked around: well-stocked bookshelves, vivid rugs on austere floors, tortured black-and-white drawings writhing on serene white walls, pot plants that looked green and fleshy, full wine racks, photographs of boats and cliffs and not a single person in them. How could a GP afford such style? Well, at least he was living up to the status he would soon acquire. We sat at a long refectory table and drank real coffee out of mugs with delicate handles.

‘You were lucky to catch me. I’m on call,’ he said. Then he reached over and took my hand in both of his. I noticed his nails were long and clean.

‘Are you all right, Sam?’

As if I were a patient. I pulled away.

‘Does that mean you aren’t?’ he asked. ‘Look, this is a horrible business, horrible for you, horrible for me too. We should try and help each other through it.’

‘I’ve read Finn’s will.’

He raised an eyebrow.

‘Did she show it to you?’ I shook my head and he sighed. ‘So is that what this is about?’

‘Michael, do you know what’s in her will? You’ve got a copy.’

He sighed.

‘I know I’m the executor, whatever that means. She asked me.’

‘Do you mean you’ve got no idea?’

He looked at his watch.

‘Has she left everything to you?’ he asked with a smile.

‘No. She’s left everything to you.’

The expression on his face froze. He stood up and walked to the French window with his back to me.

‘Well?’ I demanded.

He looked round.

‘To me?’ He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Why should she do that?’

‘But it’s not on, right?’

Michael’s face took on a quizzical expression.

‘I don’t know what to say. It’s all so…’

‘So unethical,’ I said. ‘Dubious.’

‘What?’ Michael looked up as if he had only just heard. ‘Why would she do that? What was she up to?’

‘Are you going to accept it?’

‘What? It’s all so sudden.’

There was a sudden beeping sound and he put his hand in his jacket pocket.

‘Sorry, I’ve got to rush,’ he said. ‘I’m stunned, Sam.’ Then he smiled. ‘Saturday.’ I looked puzzled. ‘Sailing, remember? Might be good for us. Get things in perspective. And we should have a proper talk.’

I’d forgotten about that arrangement: sailing was all I needed.

‘It’ll do me good,’ I said hollowly.

I held Elsie like a precious jewel; I was scared that I would break her with the might of my love. I felt so strong, so alive, so euphoric with grief and rage. My blood was coursing around my body, my heart was beating loudly; I felt clean and supple and untired.

‘Did Danny,’ I asked carefully, casually, ‘ever say anything to you about Finn?’

She shrugged.

‘What about Finn?’ I stroked Elsie’s silky hair and wondered what secrets were locked inside her neat skull. ‘Did she say anything about Danny?’

‘Nope.’ She shifted in my lap. ‘Danny used to ask me about Finn.’

‘Oh.’

Elsie looked at me with curious wide eyes.

‘And Danny said that you’re the best mummy in the world.’

‘Did he?’

‘Are you?

After Elsie was asleep. I prowled around the house, pulling curtains aside, forcing myself under beds, reaching into corners. At the end of it I had on the kitchen table in front of me a battered menagerie of six tiny paper animals, three little birds, two sort of dogs, something baffling. I looked at them and they looked back at me.

Twenty-Seven

She had his dark eyes and the heavy eyebrows that almost joined in the middle of the forehead. The hair itself was lighter in colour and finer, and her skin was different in texture and heavily freckled already, though it was only just spring. Danny’s skin was pale, but always clear. He always went a lovely smooth caramel-brown. I could remember the smell of it, and the slight dampness, when he had been in the sun.

I had never met any of Danny’s family. He told me they lived in the West Country, his father owned a construction company, he had a brother and a sister, and that was all. I was typing away at the book – it was going really fast now, it would be finished in a matter of weeks – when the phone rang. I left the answering machine to deal with it.

‘Hello, Dr Laschen. This is… um… my name’s Isobel Hyde, we’ve never met, but I’m Danny’s sister and…’

I gave a shiver and felt repulsed. What on earth could she want with me? I picked up the phone.

‘Hello, this is Sam Laschen, I was hiding behind the answering machine.’

There were some awkward halting exchanges as she thought that I thought she just wanted to grab any of Danny’s possessions that had been left with me and I didn’t know what she wanted. I said there was nothing valuable but of course she could have it all and she said that wasn’t what she meant and she was down in London for a few days and wondered if she could pop out in the train to see me. I don’t know why, irrational instinct maybe, but I didn’t want her to come to the house. I had had enough of people seeing where I lived in any case, and I didn’t know what ghoulish motives might impel a woman to see the setting where her dead brother had been with a woman that he abandoned and all that. In fact I didn’t know what the hell was going on, so I said I would meet her off the train at Stamford on the following morning and we could go to a pub.

‘How will we recognize each other?’ she asked.

‘Maybe I’ll recognize you, but I’m tall and I’ve got very short red hair. Nobody who’s actually free to walk the streets looks remotely like me in this entire county.’

I almost cried when she got off the train, and I couldn’t speak. I just shook her hand and led her off to a café opposite the station. We sat and played with our coffeecups.

‘Where are you from?’

‘We’re living in Bristol at the moment.’

‘Which part?’

‘Do you know Bristol?’

‘Not really,’ I confessed.

‘Then there’s not much point in going into detail, is there?’

I could see that Danny’s easygoing charm was a family trait.

‘I didn’t bring any of Danny’s things,’ I said. ‘There were a couple of shirts, some knickers, a toothbrush, a razor, that sort of thing. He never seemed to have much. I could send them if you like.’

‘No.’

There was a silence which I had to break.

‘It’s interesting for me to meet you, Isobel. Eerie, too. You look so like him. But Danny never talked about his family. Maybe he didn’t think that I’m the sort of person you take home to Mum. He left in a horrible way. And I’m not sure what the point of all this is, although of course I am deeply sorry for all of you.’

Once more there was a silence, and I began to feel a little alarmed. What was I going to do with this woman, staring at me with Danny’s gaze?

‘I’m not really sure myself,’ she said finally. ‘It may seem stupid, but I wanted to meet you, to look at you. I’d wanted to for ages and I thought that now we might never meet at all.’

‘That’s understandable, in the circumstances. I mean, that we might never meet.’

‘The family is in a terrible state.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

I hadn’t allowed myself to think about Danny’s parents. Isobel had been looking down into her coffee but now she raised her large heavy-lidded dark eyes and looked at me. I felt a ripple of lust flow through me and I clenched my teeth so that it hurt.

‘Are you coming to the funeral?’

‘No.’

‘We thought not.’

A horrible thought occurred to me.

‘You weren’t, by any chance, coming to ask me not to come?’

‘No, of course not. You mustn’t think that.’

Isobel seemed to be trying to gather courage for some great leap.

‘Isobel,’ I said, ‘is there something you want to tell me, because if not…’

‘Yes, there is,’ she interrupted. ‘I’m not good at putting things but what I wanted to say is that you know that Danny had loads of affairs, loads and loads of women before you.’

‘Well, thank you, Isobel, for coming all the way here by train to tell me that.’

‘I don’t mean that. That’s the way he was, you know that, and women always fell for him. But what I wanted to say is that you were different. You were different for him.’

Suddenly I felt I was in danger of losing emotional control over myself.

‘That’s what I thought, Isobel. But that’s not how it turned out, is it? I ended up like the others, dumped and forgotten about.’

‘Yes, I know about that and I don’t know what to say except that I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t believe it. I don’t believe it.’

I pushed my coffee cup to one side. I wanted to draw the encounter to a close.

‘No, but you see it did happen, whatever your instinct tells you. It was a kind impulse to come and say that to me, and yet it does no good at all. What am I expected to do with what you say? To be honest, I’m just trying to put it all behind me and move on.’

Isobel looked dismayed.

‘Oh, well, I wanted to give you something, but maybe you won’t want it.’

She rummaged in her bag and produced a sheaf of photocopies. I could instantly see the bold handwriting was Danny’s.

‘What’s this?’

‘Danny used to write to me, about two letters a year. This is a copy of the last one he wrote to me. I knew that the break-up must have been terrible for you. And then the deaths. I suppose it must have been a public humiliation as well.’

‘Yes.’

‘I wasn’t being tactless, was I? I just thought this letter might be a sort of comfort.’

I expressed a hollow gratitude but I wasn’t really sure how to respond, although I did take the letter, gingerly, as if it might hurt me. She just got on the train and I gave a small wave at a woman I knew I would never see again. I was half-tempted to throw away the photocopied letter unread.

An hour later I was in the CID section of Stamford Central police station. A WPC brought me tea and sat me at Chris Angeloglou’s desk. I looked at his jacket, draped over the back of his chair, at the photograph of a woman and lumpy child, played with his pens, and then Angeloglou himself appeared. He put his hand on my shoulder in a carefully rehearsed spontaneous gesture of reassurance.

‘Sam, are you all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m afraid Rupert’s busy.’

‘How’s the investigation going?’

‘All right. Last week’s raids went quite well. We’ve got some interesting stuff.’

‘About the murders?’

‘Not exactly.’

I sighed.

‘So charges are not imminent. Look at this letter. It was written by Danny to his sister just a couple of weeks before he died.’

Chris took it and pulled a face.

‘Don’t worry, you only need to read the last couple of pages.’

He leaned on the edge of his desk and scanned them.

‘Well?’ he said, when he was finished.

‘Is that the letter of somebody about to run off with another woman?’

Chris shrugged.

‘You’ve read it,’ I said. ‘Never met anyone like her before, I don’t want anyone else any more, I want to marry her and spend the rest of my life with her, I love her child, my only worry is whether she’ll have me.’

‘Yes,’ said Chris uneasily.

‘And there’s this.’

I handed him the letter of confirmation from the travel company. He scrutinized it with a half-smile.

‘Do you arrange to run away with somebody when you’ve planned something like that?’

Chris smiled, not unkindly.

‘I don’t know. Maybe you do. Was Danny the impulsive type?’

‘Well, sort of…’

‘The kind of man who might just get up and leave…’

‘Yes, but he wouldn’t have done this,’ I said lamely.

‘Is there anything else,’ Angeloglou asked gently.

‘No, except…’ I felt desperate. ‘Except for the whole thing. Have you thought about it?’

‘What?’

‘This young girl writes a will…’

‘How do you know about the will, Sam? All right, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.’

‘She writes a will and the next moment she’s dead. Isn’t that peculiar?’

Angeloglou thought silently for a time.

‘Had Finn ever talked about dying?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Had she ever talked about suicide?’

I paused for a moment and swallowed hard.

‘Yes.’

‘So,’ said Chris. ‘And, anyway, what were you suggesting?’

‘Have you even considered that they could have been murdered?’

‘For God’s sake, Sam, who by?’

‘Who stands to gain a fantastic amount from Finn’s death?’

‘Is this a serious accusation?’

‘It’s a serious nomination.’

Chris laughed.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I give in. Can I keep these pieces of paper?’ I nodded. ‘Out of compassion for everybody, including you, I’m going to make this little inquiry as discreet as possible. But I’ll ring you tomorrow. And now, doctor, go home and take a pill or have a drink or watch TV or all three at once.’

But it wasn’t the following day. At seven o’clock at the end of the same day, Chris Angeloglou rang me.

‘I’ve made some inquiries about your suspect.’

‘Yes?’

‘Let’s get this clear, Sam. The still-burning car was found shortly before six p.m. on the ninth.’

‘Yes.’

‘On the eighth, Dr Michael Daley flew to Belfast to attend a conference for fund-holding general practitioners. He spoke at the conference on the ninth and flew back to London in the late evening. Enough?’

‘Yes. Actually, I knew that. I’m sorry, Chris. Silly me and all that.’

‘That’s completely all right. Sam?’

‘Yes?’

‘We all feel bad that we let you in for this. We’ll do anything we can to help.’

‘Thank you, Chris.’

‘You’re the expert on trauma, Sam, but I think the truth is that we need to improve our investigation and you need to improve your grieving.’

‘Sounds good to me, Chris.’

Twenty-Eight

Six years ago my lover, the father of my unborn child, had killed himself. Of course, everyone had told me I mustn’t, not for one minute, blame myself. I said it to myself, in my doctor’s tone of voice. He was a depressive. He had tried it before. You thought you could save him but we can only save ourselves. And so on.

One week ago my lover – the only other man I’d ever really loved – had killed himself. People’s admonitions that I should not blame myself were beginning to sound a bit frantic. Danny’s funeral was the next day but I was not going to attend. He’d died in another woman’s arms, hadn’t he? He’d run away from me entirely. At the thought of Danny and Finn together, I felt hot, loose; almost excited and almost despairing. For a moment I was quite sick with jealousy and hopeless lust.

‘I’m off out now, Sally,’ I said a few minutes later. ‘I won’t be back before you leave so I’ve left the money on the mantelpiece. Thanks for making everything look so much better.’

‘Not going to work?’ Sally looked at my faded blue jeans, ripped at one knee, my beaten-up leather jacket.

‘I’m going sailing.’

She pulled a face. Of disapproval?

‘Nice,’ she said.

Finn’s two doctors, one her supposed protector, the other the sole beneficiary of her will, didn’t have much to say to each other on the short drive to the sea. Michael seemed preoccupied and I looked out of the window without seeing anything. When the car pulled to a halt he turned to me.

‘You forgot to put your wet suit on,’ he said.

It was in a carrier bag between my feet.

‘You forgot to tell me to put it on.’

We continued in silence. I looked for the sea. The day was too grey. The car turned off on to a narrow road between high hedges. I looked inquiringly.

‘I’ve moved the boat near to the boat-house.’

It felt like driving in a tunnel and it was a relief when we came out into the open. I saw some boats. When the car stopped I heard them rattling in the wind. There were a few wooden shacks, with peeling paint. One of them was abandoned and open to the sky. There was nobody around at all.

‘You can change in the car,’ Michael said briskly.

‘I want a changing room,’ I said in a sulky tone and got out of the car. ‘Which one’s yours?’

‘I don’t really want to go to the trouble of opening it up. The car would be better if it’s all right with you.’

‘It isn’t.’

Michael extracted himself awkwardly from the car. He was already in his rubbers, big and slick and black.

‘All right,’ he said with an ill grace. ‘Over here.’

He led me to a seasoned wooden building with double doors facing the sea and handed me his bunch of keys.

‘The door might be a bit stiff,’ he said. ‘It hasn’t been used since last spring. There’s a life-jacket hanging on a hook.’ He padded off the coarse yellow grass and along the pebbly beach to the boat. ‘Stay near the front or you’ll probably tread on something sharp or pull something down on you.’

I looked along the shoreline. Nobody, and no wonder: the sky was all shades of slate and the water was whipped up by vicious squalls. White spray flew off the waves. I could hardly see the point from where I stood and the wind on my face felt icy. I scraped the key into the lock and with difficulty turned it, pushing one of the doors narrowly open. Inside, there was a jumble of objects: yellow and orange life-jackets hanging from a large hook on the wall to my left, two fishing rods standing propped against the opposite wall, several large nylon bags which, when prodded by my curious foot, turned out to contain sails. At the back of the shed lay a windsurfer. There were buckets, bailers, boxes with nails and hooks and small implements I didn’t recognize, a few empty beer bottles, an old green tarpaulin, some pots of paints, sandpaper, a tool box, a crowbar, a broom. A thick smell of oil, salt, sweetness, rot, decay. There was probably a dead rat in here.

I laid the wet suit on a rough wooden bench and started to pull off my clothes, shivering in the icy, stagnant air. Then I tugged on the unwelcoming rubber. It closed relentlessly around my limbs. God, what was I doing here?

I’d dropped the little rubber shoes on my way to the bench so I gingerly hobbled across the shed to pick them up, trying to avoid stepping on wood chips and grit with my bare feet, and then tottered back. Sitting on the bench once more I rubbed the soles of my feet to remove the debris that had stuck to them. Something – it felt like a straw stalk – had caught between two toes. I prised them apart and removed it. A pink bit of paper twisted into the shape of something with four legs and a sort of head and a funny little tail. I rotated it in my fingers, a little cousin to the six creatures standing on my kitchen table.

Could Michael have brought it along? Could it have stuck to his clothes? ‘It hasn’t been used since last spring.’ Last spring Danny and I had been squabbling in London. Danny had been here. I was in a fever. I knew that I needed to think clearly but the objects in the room were shifting in shape, making me dizzy. My stomach shifted. I felt each hair on my skin prickling against the inside of my outer, rubber, skin. There was a light of clarity on the edge of my mind and I had to calculate my way towards it, but everything I had been sure of was now twisted out of shape. Danny had been here.

‘Remember your life jacket, Sam.’

I turned to the door where Michael was standing, silhouetted against the grey. I closed my fist around the little paper creature. He came towards me.

‘Let me help you with that,’ he said. He pulled the zip up behind me, so hard that it made me gasp. I was aware of his large physical presence. ‘And now the boots.’ He knelt in front of me. I sat down and he took both my feet in turn and gently eased them into the boots. He looked up with a smile. ‘The slipper fits, Cinderella,’ he said. Danny had been here. He took a yellow life-jacket from the hook and slipped it over my shoulders. ‘And, finally, your gloves.’ I looked down at my closed fist. I took the gloves in my left hand.