The safe house

‘I’ll put them on in a minute.’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘We’re ready.’

With an arm gently on my back, he escorted me down to the boat and we climbed on board. He looked at me, and with the wind blowing in our faces I couldn’t make out his expression.

‘Now, let’s have a bit of fun.’

I’d been here before, the wet rope callusing my palm as I pulled it taut, the boat rising steeply in the wind, sails cracking in the gusts, iron-grey water slopping over the sides, the weird cries of seabirds as we scudded our lonely way out to open sea, the curt commands of ‘lee-oh’ as I cast myself desperately from side to side, the silent minutes of leaning back against the boat’s violent heeling. Danny had been in the boat-house. I tried to think of an innocent explanation. Could Danny have gone there on a walk with Michael? The door hadn’t been opened since last spring. Michael had said so. The little paper creature was still clasped in my frozen fist.

We tacked swiftly away from the shore and the spray stung my face so that if I was crying he wouldn’t know. And I didn’t know. Images passed through my mind: Finn when she arrived at my house, so white and mute; Danny staring at her across the table – and the expression that I could vividly recall wasn’t one of desire, then, but of discontent; Danny with Elsie, lifting her on to his lap, leaning down to her so that his black hair tangled with her blonde wisps. I tried to cling to wisps of thought. Danny had been there. Danny hadn’t run away with Finn. Danny hadn’t committed suicide.

‘You’re silent, Sam. Are you getting the hang of it?’

‘Maybe.’

At that moment a gust caught us, and the boat lifted up so it was almost vertical. I leaned my whole weight out.

‘There we are, we’re almost round the point.’ Michael sounded completely calm. ‘Then we needn’t go so close to the wind. Ready about…’

And we swung, with a neat whip of the boom and a smack of the sails, into open sea, with the wind steady from the side. I looked back, and I couldn’t see the shore we’d started from. It was lost in mist and grey glare.

‘That was pretty good.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Are you beginning to feel better, Sam?’

I attempted a shrug and a neutral mumble.

‘What was that?’

‘I don’t feel sick,’ I said. He looked at me closely. He turned away. He was holding the tiller and mainsheet with one hand now and fiddling with something in his other. I looked around. Then he was close beside.

‘What did you find, Sam?’

There was a metallic cold sensation in the pit of my stomach.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

Very quickly, before I could move, he seized my right wrist and opened the fingers. He was strong. He took the small paper animal from me.

‘I suppose,’ he said. ‘It might have stuck to your clothes.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Or it might have got stuck on my clothes.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

He gave a spooky little giggle and shook his head.

‘Sadly not,’ he said. ‘Pull your jib in tighter, Sam, we’re going to beat a bit.’

The wind was getting stronger again; it bit into my left cheek. Michael pulled on the tiller so that the boat swung away from the wind and let the mainsail billow. We had safely rounded the point and were now heading back to the coastline, towards the sharp needles of rocks that he’d pointed out last time. I turned and looked at him from close up. His strange face looked its best in the wind and the spray. The fog in my mind was slowly dispersing. Finn had been murdered. Danny had been murdered, and I was going to be murdered. I had to speak.

‘You killed Finn.’

Michael looked at me with a half-smile playing across his features but said nothing. His pupils were dilated: there was excitement coursing under that composed surface. What had he once told me about liking a challenge?

‘A spot of running now, let your jib out, Sam.’

I obediently spooled the rope out and the small sail filled with wind. The boat sat back, lifted its bows; water surged beneath us.

‘And did Danny stumble on it? Is that it? So you killed Danny, staged the suicide? And that note, that awful note.’

Michael gave a modest shrug.

‘Unfortunately a degree of coercion was required to produce that. But you’re failing to appreciate the whole picture, Sam.’

‘And then…’ I didn’t care about anything, I didn’t care about my own life, I just had to know. ‘You and Finn killed her parents together, I suppose.’ The Belladonna was taking us towards the treacherous cross-currents: I saw the way he was measuring distance with his calculating sailor’s gaze. I looked down towards the water. Death by drowning.

‘Something like that,’ he replied casually, and smiled again as if a joke had occurred to him. His teeth and his grey eyes shone, his hair whipped back in the wind and spray: he looked eager, rather beautiful, appalling.

And then I thought of Elsie. I remembered how her body felt against mine; I could almost feel her strong little arms around my neck. I remembered how she’d looked that morning when I’d dropped her off at school, in her purple tights and her spotty dress and her solid legs and her freckles. The shine on her hair. Her concentration, pink tip of tongue sticking out when she painted. I wasn’t going to die out here and leave my daughter an orphan. I idled with the rope between my fingers.

‘Why kill Finn then?’

He laughed then; really threw back his head and guffawed as if I’d made a brilliant joke.

‘For the money, of course. But you’re still not seeing the whole, beautiful picture.’

Then the boat tilted violently, as if the wind had suddenly changed direction. The sails flapped and the boom lurched. Without Michael saying anything, I tightened the jib as he pulled in his mainsail, and the boat raced towards the violent eddy. I could see it now: the shiny patch of sucked-in water. The outcrop of rocks was getting closer, their crags and splinters coming into focus. The wind was suddenly up and I could only shout.

‘Needle Point?’ I asked.

He nodded.

‘You’re going to kill me.’

But I spoke too quietly for him to have heard and he was immersed in the business of sailing. I looked at the bottom of the boat. A bailer. A long metal pole. A spare sail stowed at the bows. A coil of rope. A pair of oars. The boat was like a bucking horse now, thwacking its nose over and over into the trough of the sea. Suddenly it stopped, halted in its tracks, and I could feel no wind at all, although all around me I could see the wild sea. The sails wilted. We were in the eye of the storm. I looked across at Michael, who was looking at me. He shook his head, as if in disappointment.

‘It’s so irritating and unnecessary,’ he said. ‘Like the bloody cleaner.’

‘Like Mrs Ferrer? You…?’

Michael turned away. He was looking from side to side, trying to assess where the wind would come from. He said nothing, and we sat side by side – me and the man who was going to kill me – in the becalmed moment. For an instant Michael seemed almost embarrassed by the awkward hiatus. Then it hit us full from behind and the boat jolted. Its sails smacked loudly, like a gun going off, and it lifted its bow so high out of the water that I was flung to its bottom. For one moment I thought it would do a backward somersault on to us. I looked up, my legs thrashing, and saw Michael’s face looking down at me. It loomed out of the weather, handsome and polite.

‘Sorry, Sam,’ he said, leaning towards me as if he were bowing. He had the pole in his hand.

I rose, bailer in my hand, and hurled myself at the boom. It swung towards Michael but he ducked. I threw the bailer at his head and kicked wildly at him. He grunted and let go of the tiller and mainsheet and pole. Water was pouring in now and the boom was crashing from side to side. Michael dived at my waist and brought me down to the bottom of the boat once again. His face was a few inches from mine; a trickle of blood oozed down his forehead. There was a trace of stubble beneath the sweat and spray. I brought my knee up under the cage of his straining body and kneed him sharply in the groin, then, as he spasmodically jerked, I bit at the nearest lump of flesh. His nose. He shouted and punched at my jaw, my neck, into my breasts, into the bouncy rubber of my stomach. One finger pierced my eye so that for a moment the world was a red ball of pain. I could feel his breath and I could feel the blows rain down on my body, my jaw, my ribs.

Michael heaved himself into position, knees on my outstretched arms, and put his hands around my neck. I spat at him, my blood on his bloody, grimacing face. This was it. I was to be throttled and tossed overboard like a bit of live bait. He started to squeeze, slowly and with concentration. Behind his head I saw the giant shape of Needle Point bearing down on us, blotting out the sky. I bucked under Michael’s body. I needed to live. I needed to live so badly. I thought that if I could say Elsie’s name out loud I would live. I opened my mouth and felt my tongue slide forward, my eyes roll back. If I could say Elsie’s name I would still live, though my world had gone black.

There was a jolt from beneath the hull, a screeching sound of wood on rock. Michael was thrown off me. Black waves; black rocks all around. I knelt up, grasped the pole, and as Michael stood on the breaking boat I thrust it into his body with all the force I could manage and saw him tip. It wasn’t enough. I looked around, desperately, hungrily. The tiller. I pulled it sharply towards me. The wild boom jibed and viciously struck him; his body crashed into the sea.

‘Elsie,’ I said. ‘Elsie, I’m coming home.’ Then the boat broke against the rocks and the water closed around me.

Twenty-Nine

First I was dimly aware of movement. I knew I’d been gone, lost somewhere timeless, dark. My eyelids fluttered. I saw a face. I yielded with relief to the blackness once more. On later attempts – I didn’t know how much later – the light became easier to take and the shapes that sometimes moved around my bed became clearer, but I still couldn’t make sense of them. I started to put imaginary faces on the shapes. Danny, Finn, my father, Michael. It was all too much effort.

One day, the light seemed greyer and more bearable. I heard a footstep and felt a nudge against the bed. I opened my eyes and everything was clear. I was back and Geoff Marsh was standing over me with a quizzical gaze.

‘Fuck,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said, looking uneasily at the door. ‘Your mother went down to the cafeteria. I said I’d stay for a few minutes. I just walked down from the office for a moment. Maybe I should get a doctor. How are you, Sam?’

I murmured something.

‘Eh?’

‘All right.’

Geoff pulled a chair over and sat beside me. He smiled suddenly. Almost laughed. I wrinkled my face in puzzlement. Even that small movement made me flinch in pain.

‘I was thinking of our last meeting,’ he said. ‘Do you remember it?’

I gave a slow, painful shrug.

‘You agreed that you were going to keep a low profile. Avoid publicity.’

It seemed too much of an effort to speak.

‘At least the media aren’t interested in post-traumatic stress any more,’ Geoff continued jovially. ‘Boating accidents, miraculous escapes. I think the unit is safely out of the spotlight.’

I gathered all my resources and grabbed Geoff’s sleeve.

‘Michael.’

‘What?’

‘Daley. Where?’ I forced myself. ‘Where is Michael Daley?’

Suddenly Geoff looked scared and shifty. I tightened my grip on his sleeve.

‘Is he here? Must tell me.’

‘They haven’t told you? You haven’t been conscious really.’

‘What?’

‘I think you should talk to a doctor.’

‘What?’

I was shouting now.

‘All right, Sam,’ Geoff hissed. ‘For God’s sake, don’t make a scene. I’ll tell you. Daley is dead. He was drowned. They only found his body yesterday. It was amazing that anybody could survive that. I don’t know how you got to the shore. And then it was hours before you were found. With the shock and the exposure, you’re lucky to be alive.’ He tried to remove his sleeve from my grasp. ‘Could you let me go now?’

‘Baird. Get me Baird.’

‘Who’s Baird?’

‘Detective. Stamford CID.’

‘I think I should get a doctor first. And your mother’s been here for days.’

I was almost at the limit of strength. Trying to shout, I could only manage a croaking whisper.

‘Baird. Now.’

I was woken by a murmured conversation. I opened my eyes. Rupert Baird was talking to a middle-aged man in a pinstriped suit. When he noticed I was awake, the man came and sat on the side of the bed. He gave me an almost mischievous smile.

‘Hello, I’m Frank Greenberg. I’d been looking forward to meeting you on your arrival. I didn’t quite expect it to happen like this though.’

I almost laughed and as I did so realized I was feeling stronger, more supple.

‘Sorry to be dramatic,’ I said.

‘Is this how you generally arrive at your new posts?’

‘I didn’t know I had arrived.’

‘Oh yes, in fact your PTSD unit will be just along the corridor. We can wheel you along there for a look in a day or two if you keep improving.’

‘I’m feeling better, I think.’

‘Good. You may be surprised to learn that you were in a very serious condition indeed when you were brought in.’

‘What symptoms?’

‘BP crashing. Obvious signs of peripheral vasoconstriction. It was a cocktail of exposure and shock symptoms. You were extremely fortunate. As you can see, you were on the verge of acute circulatory failure.’

‘How was I found?’

‘A man was walking on the shore with his dog and his mobile phone.’

Baird stepped forward.

‘Can I have a word?’ he asked.

Dr Greenberg turned to me.

‘All right?’

‘Yes.’

‘No more than five minutes.’

I nodded. Dr Greenberg held out his hand.

‘Good to meet you, Dr Laschen,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you again tomorrow morning.’

Baird approached and awkwardly looked for a perch. The moulded plastic chair was in the far corner. He considered whether to sit on the bed in the spot that Dr Greenberg had vacated.

‘Take a seat,’ I said and he sat uncomfortably on the very edge. He looked utterly miserable.

‘I’m glad you’re all right, Sam. This is a blighted case, isn’t it?’ He put his right hand on mine, awkwardly. ‘At some point there may be one or two routine questions but there’s no need now…’

‘It was Michael.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I was in the boat-house and on the floor I found one of those little paper animals Danny used to make.’

Baird gave a resigned sigh and tried to look sympathetic.

‘Yes, well, in itself, that doesn’t prove…’

‘Michael told me, Rupert. He tried to kill me on the boat. That’s how we went overboard. He and Finn killed Finn’s parents. And he killed Mrs Ferrer. And then Michael killed Finn. He killed Danny.’

Baird responded with a mock double take and his eyes wrinkled into a smile.

‘You don’t believe me.’

‘Of course I believe you, Sam. Now, a cynical copper might say that you have been through a terrible experience, you suffered from concussion and shock and you… er…’

‘Might have imagined it all?’

‘I’m an overly cautious man, Sam. I have to imagine what certain sticklers for evidence might say to me as they demoted me to walking the beat again. If you have anything concrete to offer us, Sam, we will be most interested in investigating it.’

I’d been sitting up, but now I sank back exhausted on to my pillow.

‘I don’t care what you do, Rupert. I know, and that’s enough for me. Why don’t you have a look at Michael’s boat-house? I think that’s where he kept Danny’s body. Where he made him write that suicide note. Shot him.’

Baird was silent for a long time. I couldn’t see his face.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll have a look. I think my five minutes must be up and there is one more senior figure who requires to see you straight away.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, if it’s Geoff Marsh or some other bloody manager, tell them to fuck off.’

Baird smiled.

‘I’m sorry, Sam. I’m afraid this is somebody who is too senior for me to give orders to.’

‘What is it? A royal visit or something?’

‘Close.’ Baird walked to the door and spoke to someone outside who I couldn’t see. ‘She can come in now.’

I looked, expectantly, and a familiar freckled face appeared about a yard below where I was expecting one.

Shoes clicked across the floor and Elsie jumped on to the bed and on top of me. I hugged her so close and tight that I could count the vertebrae in her spine. I was afraid of hurting her with the urgency of my grasp.

‘Oh, Elsie,’ I said. ‘You can be my nurse now.’

She wriggled free of me.

‘I am not your nurse,’ she replied firmly.

‘My doctor, then.’

‘I am not your doctor. Can we go out and play?’

‘Not just yet, my love.’

She looked at me with narrowed, suspicious eyes.

‘You’re not ill,’ she announced, almost in challenge.

‘No, I’m not. I’m a bit tired, but in a couple of days we can run around and play.’

‘I saw a camel.’

‘Where?’

‘And a big camel.’

In the doorway I saw my mother hovering with ostentatious discretion. I waved her over and we hugged like we hadn’t hugged for years, and then she started whispering about Elsie with such a show of secrecy that Elsie immediately began asking about it. I started to cry and couldn’t conceal it and my mother led Elsie out of the room and I was alone again. I’d suddenly thought of Danny. Not the Danny from the past but the Danny I would never know anything about. I pictured him being held at gunpoint and made to write his note to me and I made myself imagine what he must have felt. He must have died thinking he had betrayed me and that I would never know. Ever since I was a teenager, I have been able to make myself giddy with the thought of my death, the disappearance into oblivion. The idea of Danny’s death was more terrible and I felt it not just in my mind but on my skin and and at the back of my eyes and humming in my ears, and it made me cold and implacable.

My mother had moved into the house to look after Elsie. Her sympathy was operatic.

‘I suppose the house will hold unhappy memories for you,’ she said. ‘Can you bear to go back to it?’

I didn’t want to be told what to feel.

‘The house has Elsie. It has no bad memories for me.’

Within a couple of days I felt strong enough to leave hospital and two days after that I was able to ease my mother on to a train at Stamford and myself out of her debt. Everything was all right, except that I heard nothing from Baird and I knew that there was something I wasn’t dwelling on because if I did, I didn’t know where it could stop. A full week after I had spoken to Baird, Chris Angeloglou rang and asked me if I could come in to the station. I asked what for and he said they wanted a statement but also that I might learn something to my advantage. Could I come that afternoon?

I was led into an interview room with Chris and Rupert. They were being very nice to me and smiling. They sat me down, brought me tea and biscuits, switched on their double tape recorder and asked me about the events of the day of Michael’s death. With all their questions and my replies, additions and insertions, it took me almost an hour and a half, but by the end they seemed well satisfied.

‘Excellent,’ said Rupert, as he finally switched off the machine.

‘So you believe me?’

‘Of course we do. Hang on a moment. Phil Kale was supposed to be here at three-thirty. I’ll go and see if he’s around.’

Rupert got up and left the room. Chris yawned and rubbed his eyes.

‘You look the way I’m supposed to look,’ I said.

‘It’s all your fault,’ said Chris with a grin. ‘We’ve been hard at it since your tip-off. You’re going to enjoy this.’

‘Good. I need some enjoyment.’

Baird came back in leading the distracted, dishevelled man I remembered from the day we found Mrs Ferrer dead. Now his wire-framed spectacles had a sticking-plaster on one of the hinges and he wore a corduroy jacket of the sort that I had last seen on several of my teachers in the late seventies. Under his arm was a thick stack of files. Chris pulled a chair over and the man sat down.

‘This is Dr Philip Kale, Home Office pathologist. Phil, this is our heroine, Dr Sam Laschen.’

We shook hands, which resulted in many files being scattered on the floor.

‘DI Baird tells me you’ve just made a statement about Dr Daley’s admission.’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. I can only stay a minute. They’ve just pulled a lollipop lady out of the canal. I can just tell you that what you told the police seems to be confirmed by the full range of forensic evidence. God, where should I start?’

‘Did you check Michael’s boat-house?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ Kale said. ‘There were copious traces of blood in the boat-house. We’ve done a series of serological tests. We also found fibres and hairs and did a Neutron Activation Analysis on the hair samples. We’ve cross-referenced them with hair samples from Mr Rees and some found at the Mackenzie house. We’re still waiting for some results of DNA tests but I know what they’re going to tell us. For undetermined periods and at undetermined times, the bodies of Daniel Rees and Fiona Mackenzie were kept in Michael Daley’s boat-house. This is confirmed by my post-mortem findings on the burnt bodies. There was an absence of hyperaemia, no positive protein reaction, and a host of other signs showing that they were dead when the car was set on fire.’

‘So Finn’s, I mean Fiona’s, dead body was in the boat-house as well?’

‘Traces of hair and fibre associated with Fiona Mackenzie were found attached to a canvas sheet in a rear corner of the boat-house. The assumption, the near certainty, is that it was used for wrapping her body. And now I must go to the canal.’

‘What about Mrs Ferrer?’

Kale shook his head.

‘I think you must have misunderstood. I’ve been over my report. There’s nothing I could find.’

‘Why would he have done it?’ Baird asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said numbly.

Kale held out his hand.

‘Well done, Dr Laschen.’

‘Well done?’

‘This is your triumph.’

‘It’s not my triumph.’

We shook hands and Kale left the room. Angeloglou and Baird were grinning like schoolboys with a dirty secret.

‘What have you got to look so happy about?’ I asked.

‘We’re holding a press conference tomorrow morning,’ said Baird. ‘We shall be revealing our findings and announcing that the cases involving the murders of Leopold and Elizabeth Mackenzie, Fiona Mackenzie and Daniel Rees are now closed. There are no further inquiries pending. We shall also give you full credit for your own contribution and your heroic actions vis-á-vis Michael Daley. You may even be recommended for some form of civilian award. That should square you with the hospital. Everybody will be happy.’

‘Let’s not overstate it.’

‘I don’t want to be insensitive to what you’ve been through,’ said Rupert. ‘But in the circumstances this must be the best possible conclusion.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I need to think all this through. Do you know how the murders of the parents were committed?’

‘You really need to talk to Kale about that. It looks as if Daley and the girl tied up and killed the parents in the middle of the night. Fiona allowed herself to be tied up by Daley. When the cleaner arrived, Daley used a scalpel and made what was basically a shallow incision in her neck and then escaped down the back stairs that lead into the garden. We’d always thought that there was relatively little blood because she had gone into shock with a massive drop in blood pressure. In fact, it was because the wound had been inflicted only a few minutes before. Is everything all right? You don’t look happy.’

‘I keep going over it in my head, trying to disentangle it.’ I said. ‘It was all a fake. Finn helped to cut the throats of her own parents and then allowed her own throat to be cut. Is there anything in her past that was consistent with that?’

Chris looked puzzled.

‘You mean, had she killed anyone before?’

‘No, I don’t mean that. Was there evidence of serious conflict with her parents? Or medical instability?’

‘There was £18,000,000. I’m afraid there are a lot of people out there who would cut their parents’ throats for a lot less than that. And we’ve ascertained from his bank that Dr Daley was living well beyond his means. He was seriously in debt.’

‘What about the stuff on the wall? The animal rights connection?’

‘Daley knew about that because he was involved with monitoring animal rights terrorists. It gave him the perfect opportunity to shift suspicion. It’s all perfectly simple.’

I forced myself to think, the way I used to do mental arithmetic at school, when I would wrinkle my nose and my forehead and think so hard that it hurt.

‘No, it isn’t,’ I said. ‘It may be true but it’s not perfectly simple. Why did Finn make a will in favour of Michael Daley? That was convenient for him, wasn’t it?’

‘Maybe they were going to get married.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Rupert. And there’s one other thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You may remember that I raised the suspicion about Michael Daley before and you demonstrated to me that he couldn’t have any connection with the burning of the car. As far as I understand it, you have no evidence putting him at the murder scene of the Mackenzies and you told me that he was in Belfast when the car was burned.’

The two men looked at each other sheepishly. Or were they winking at each other? Rupert opened his hands in an appeasing gesture.

‘Sam, Sam, you were right, we were wrong. What do you want us to do, get down on our knees? I admit, there are one or two loose ends, and we are going to do our best to tie them up, but in real life things are hardly ever neat. We know what was done and we know who did it. We probably will never know exactly how.’

‘Would you get a conviction if Michael Daley had got to the shore?’

Baird held up a finger in sanctimonious admonishment.

‘Enough, Sam. This is going to be good for all of us. We’ve got a result. You’re going to be a famous heroine like Boudicca and… er… like…’ He looked helplessly at Angeloglou.

‘Edith Cavell,’ volunteered Angeloglou brightly.

‘She was executed.’

‘Florence Nightingale, then. What’s important is that this is over and that we can all get back to our lives. In a few months we’ll meet for a drink and laugh about all of this.’

‘The George Cross,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘I’ve always rather fancied the George Cross as a medal.’

‘You weren’t that brave. If you had drowned, you could have got the George Cross.’

I got up to leave.

‘If I’d drowned, you wouldn’t have known what a wonderful heroine I was. See you on TV, Rupert.’

Thirty

I was doing lots of things at the same time. I was feeling lots of things at the same time. For once in my life, it felt good to be absorbed in all that boring stuff that is only noticed when it isn’t being done – keeping the house organized, getting things washed, paying some attention to what Elsie was wearing, standing over Sally to make sure she did something more than just wash the kitchen floor and straighten the piles of paper on the kitchen table and take out the rubbish. Once a week Elsie went out and was bullied by Kirsty and once a week Kirsty came to us and was bullied by Elsie. I found a second friend for her, Susie, a thin, anaemic-looking child with ribbons in her blonde hair and a scream like a road drill. For the afternoons when Elsie was alone I bought a big colourful book, and each late afternoon we sat and counted the bananas in each bunch and grouped animals according to legs and wings, or size, or whether they lived in water or on land. Despite all the biology, it was meant to teach her maths.

I got through chapter after chapter of my book, like a burrowing mole. My routine barely altered. Take Elsie to school. Write. Eat sandwich made with what was to hand and didn’t have anything growing on it that wasn’t easily removable. Go for brisk walk down to the sea to catch the tide at its highest. Look at it and think complicated things. Go back home. Write.

Thoughts rotated in my mind as I went over and over them, constructing more or less plausible structures out of the flotsam and jetsam that I could gather. There were simple bits and complicated bits. The motive for the murders was Finn’s inheritance of a great deal of money and perhaps also some sense of grievance. The crime was conceived and committed by Michael Daley with a child who had always been pampered and had, so far as reports showed, never shown any signs of the smallest adolescent rebellion. But of course we psychologists always have a simple response to that. Evidence of rebellion? QED. No evidence at all of rebellion? Worse still, it must have been bottled up, unexpressed, until it all came out at once. QED likewise.

The act itself was simple enough. The murder was presumably being planned anyway when Michael, through his work on the committee monitoring animal terrorism, learned of the threat against Leo Mackenzie. It would be an obvious opportunity. The only requirement was to commit the murders in such a way that it might seem like the work of particularly crazed animal rights activists, hence the trussing up and throat-cutting and wall-daubing. I felt that I had known Leo and Liz Mackenzie only through a couple of blurred photographs in the newspapers and – I felt with a heave in my chest – from a few bland things Finn had said about them. But they didn’t seem real to me. What did seem real, a huge stain in the lattices of my logical thought, was the image of Danny with a gun barrel against his temple. Did he cry and plead, or was he brave and silent? What had I been doing at the moment when he knew there was no hope, that he wouldn’t be able to bargain himself out of being killed? Feeling angry or sorry for myself, probably.

And he’d killed Finn, his accomplice, too. I thought of the garrulous letter she had written to me, and I just could not understand how she could have produced such a gush of words with a gun to her head. Yet how little I knew her, after all. I kept worrying at all the little memories of Finn in my house, as if I were probing a broken tooth with my tongue. Each touch would provoke waves of pain and nausea, yet I couldn’t resist it. Finn sitting numbly on my sofa. Finn in her room. My own brilliant coaxing of her back into life with the use of my own little daughter. Finn destroying her clothes. Conversations in the garden. Sitting drinking wine and giggling together. Telling Finn about chess. Letting Finn look after me. It was a form of self-torture. Confiding in Michael Daley. Michael Daley complimenting me on how well I had handled Finn. Oh God oh God oh God oh God. I was the gull in an extended confidence trick that had begun in blood in a Stamford suburb, continued as a charade enacted in my house and finished in a fire on a lonely stretch of Essex coastline.

Then there was Mrs Ferrer. What was that about? Had Michael really said that he had killed her, or had I misunderstood at a moment when I feared for my own life? I tried to go over anything that Mrs Ferrer might have found out. Perhaps as a cleaner she had come across a piece of damning evidence in the house and mentioned it to a man she trusted – her doctor. But what could it have been?

Suddenly, on one rainy spring afternoon, as I stood in grey rain watching the sailing boats in sunshine a mile away, in the middle of the estuary, I asked myself the question that I tried to cure my own patients of asking: ‘Why me?’ I thought of how I had become part of the murderous deception, and how effectively I had played that part, me with my unmatched expertise, my acuteness of perception, my skill in diagnosis.

‘But she wasn’t my patient,’ I muttered to myself, as if I would be embarrassed for my whining to be overheard by a gull or by the reeds. How I wished that the plan could have been carried out without me or that somebody else could have been chosen, somebody else’s life ruined, someone else’s lover killed.

‘Why me? Why me?’ And then I found myself cutting the question short. ‘Why? Why?’

I put it to myself as a chess match. If you are a clear bishop ahead, you don’t throw yourself into a speculative sacrifice. You simplify. Michael Daley and Finn Mackenzie’s motive was disgusting but it was simple. So why was their crime so complicated? I went over the event in my head yet again. I couldn’t understand why Finn had to be there for the crime, with all the added risk of Michael Daley being caught. She could have been somewhere else, with a perfect alibi, and there would have been no need for the cutting of her throat and the long, detailed, hazardous charade that ensnared me and Elsie and poor Danny and poor, sad Mrs Ferrer, if indeed she had been ensnared. And then why should Finn change her will so suddenly, leaving everything to the man who would murder her? Did she commit suicide after all? Did Michael kill her because he suddenly decided that half was not enough? Neither version seemed to make sense. I tried to construct a scenario in which Michael killed the parents and forced Finn into complicity by threatening her with murder, but none of it quite worked in my head.

I did no more work that afternoon. I just walked into the wind and rain until I saw by my watch that I had to run to be home to meet Elsie. I was out of breath when I ran along the drive, a sour pain in my chest, and I saw the car was already back. I ran inside and picked up my little bundle and held her close against me, burying my face in her hair. She pushed herself back and reached for some incomprehensible picture she had drawn at school. We got out the paints and covered the kitchen table with newspaper and did more pictures. We did three puzzles. We played charades and hide-and-seek all over the house. Elsie had her bath and we read two whole books. Occasionally I would stop and point to a short word – ‘cow’, ‘ball’, ‘sun’ – and ask Elsie what it was, and she would look at the picture above the text for clues. If it was totally obvious – ‘The cow jumped over the… What comes next, Elsie?’ – she would make an elaborate pretence of spelling out the word – ‘Mer… oo… oo… moon!’ – that in its elaborate mendacity impressed me more than if she had simply been able to read.

After her bath I held her plump, strong, naked body and rubbed my face in her sweet-smelling hair (‘Are you looking for nits?’ she asked) and I suddenly realized two things. I had spent almost three hours without brooding on horror and deceit and humiliation. And Elsie wasn’t asking after Finn or even Danny. In my darker moments I sometimes felt as if there were slime on the walls left by the people who had been inside them, but Elsie had moved on. I held her close and felt that she at least was unpolluted by the evil. I croaked a couple of songs to her and left her.

Though it was barely after eight o’clock, I made myself a mug of some instant coffee or other that was nominally reserved for Linda’s use, topped it up with lots of milk and went up to bed. Elsie had survived this horror the way it seems that children are designed to do and I had a sudden impulse to take her away from all of this, go somewhere safe, away from fear and danger. I had never escaped. As a teenager I had kept my head down and worked and worked. I had worked even harder as a medical student and then harder still once I had qualified. There had never been a light at the end of the tunnel. Just the next examination or prize or scholarship or job that nobody thought I could get. Food and fun and sex and the other things that life is meant to consist of had been something to grab bite-sized pieces of along the way.

A thought occurred to me and I gave a bitter smirk. I’d forgotten. Finn had got away from it all, backpacked her way around South America, or whatever the hell it was she’d done. She’d even polluted the idea of safety and purity. I remembered the one item of Finn’s that I had held back. I sprinted across the chilly room, grabbed the chunky paperback and sprinted back to bed, pulling the covers over me. I looked at the book properly for the first time. Practically Latin America: The Smart Guide. I grunted. The best guides in the world – five million copies sold. I grunted again. Getting away from it all, indeed. Nevertheless I began to have a fantasy of taking a year or two years off and heading around South America, just me and Elsie. There were some practical obstacles: my unit was about to open, I had no money, I couldn’t speak a word of Spanish. But children are good at languages. Elsie would soon pick it up and she could be my interpreter.

Peru, everybody said that was beautiful. I flicked through the book until I came to a paragraph in the Peruvian section headed ‘Problems’:The urban centres of Peru should be treated with caution. Robbery of tourists is endemic – pockets are picked; bags snatched; the razoring of packs or pockets is a local speciality. Confidence tricksters and police corruption are rife.

I grunted once more. Elsie and I could handle that. Where was it that Finn had gone? Mitch something. I looked in the index. Machu Picchu. That was it. I turned to the entry: ‘The most famous and sublime archaeological site in South America.’ I could take a year’s sabbatical and we could travel round and Elsie would have the advantage of being fluent in Spanish. My eye drifted down the page until it was stopped by some familiar words:If you are lucky enough to be in the area for the full moon, visit the Machu Picchu site at night. (US $7 for a boleto nocturne.) Look at the Intihuatana – the only stone calendar that wasn’t destroyed by the Spaniards – and contemplate the effects of light and the fates of empires. The Inca empire is gone. The Spanish empire is gone. All that remains are the ruins, the fragments. And the light.

There it was, Finn’s great transcendent experience, pinched from a crappy little travel guide. I remembered Finn’s shining eyes, the tremble in her voice as she had described it to me. It felt like my final failure. There had been a little vain bit of me still left in a corner of my psyche which hoped that I had got somewhere with Finn. Despite the wickedness and the deception, she had liked me a bit, just as she had won Elsie’s love. Now I knew that even there, where it wouldn’t have mattered, she hadn’t taken the trouble to toss me something real. It was all fake, all of it.

Thirty-One

‘Have you thought of seeing someone about what’s happened? I mean, you know…’

Sarah was sitting at my kitchen table, making sandwiches. She’d brought cream cheese, ham, tomatoes, avocados – real food – and was now layering them between thick slices of white bread. She was one of the few people I could stand to have around me. She was straightforward and talked about emotions objectively, as if she were a mathematician puzzling over a problem. Now the sun was streaming in through the windows, and we had the afternoon to ourselves before Elsie came home from school and Sarah returned to London.

‘You mean,’ I took a swig of beer, ‘go and see a trauma counsellor?’

‘I mean,’ Sarah said calmly, ‘that it must be hard to get over what’s happened.’

I stared at the crooked metal eye of the beer can.

‘The trouble is,’ I said at last, ‘there are so many bits to it. Anger. Guilt. Bafflement. Grief.’

‘Mmm, of course. Do you miss him a lot?’

I often dreamed about Danny. Usually, the dreams were happy ones, not of losing him, but of finding him again. In one, I was standing by a bus stop and I saw him walking towards me; he held out his arms and I slid into their empty circle like coming home. It was so physical – his heartbeat against mine, the warm hollow of his neck – that when I woke I turned in the huge bed to hold him. In another I was talking to someone who didn’t know about his death, and crying, and suddenly the stranger’s face became Danny’s and he smiled at me. I woke and tears were streaming down my face.

Every morning, I lost him all over again. My flesh ached for him, not so much with desire as with loneliness. My homesick body recalled him: the way he would cup the back of my head with a hand, the rasp of his roughened fingers on my nipples, his body folded against my folds in bed. Sometimes I would pick Elsie up and hug her until she cried out and struggled to get away. My love for her felt, suddenly, too big and too needy.

Too often I would take out the letter he had written to his sister. I wouldn’t read it but would stare at the bold black script and let phrases come into focus. I only had a few photographs of him; he’d always been the one behind the camera, the way most men are. There was one of both of us in shorts and T-shirts; I was looking at the camera and he was looking at me. I couldn’t remember who’d taken the picture. There was another of him lying on his back and holding Elsie up on his lifted legs. His face was out of focus in the sunlight, a bleached-out blur where his eyes should be, but Elsie’s mouth was agape in panicky delight. Mostly, he was turned away from the camera lens, hidden. I wanted a photo of him that would stare directly at me, like a film star’s glossy publicity, for I was terribly scared of forgetting what he looked like. Only in my dreams did I see his face properly.

‘Yes’, I answered Sarah, picking up a sandwich that disgorged tomato as I lifted it to my mouth, ‘yes, I miss him.’ I chewed a bit, then added, ‘I don’t know how to restore him to his proper size in my memory. If you see what I mean.’

‘What about her?’

‘Finn, you mean? God, that’s complicated. First of all I almost got to love her; she was part of the family, you see. Then, I hated her; I felt almost sick with hatred and humiliation. And then she died and it’s as if that’s stopped all my emotions in their tracks. I don’t know what I feel about her. At sea.’ I shivered at the figure of speech, remembering again the dark waters. I saw Michael Daley standing on the breaking boat and, in slow motion, I saw again the metal pole hitting him, the boom striking him, his long body buckling.

‘The police keep saying how pleased they are that it’s all cleared up, and never mind the loose ends, they can deal with those bit by bit, but I feel bothered. That’s too little a word. I can’t get it right in my head. There are things, I mean, I don’t see how it was possible that…’ I stopped abruptly. ‘Let’s have a game of chess. I haven’t played for ages.’

I put the chess-board on the table and slid open the lid of the dark wooden box, picking out two smooth-headed pawns. I held out my fists and Sarah tapped my left hand.

‘White,’ I said, and we arranged the pieces on their squares. They stood there stalwartly in their ranks, the wood gleaming in the shafts of sunlight; a bird chirped outside, not the lonely cry of a seabird that sent shivers down my spine, but the homely mundane chirrup of an English garden bird sitting in a small tree whose leaves were just about to unfurl.

∗

Later, after Sarah had left for London and I’d collected Elsie and settled her with Linda, I made a trip to the supermarket. I had been only a few days previously and the shelves and fridge at home were groaning with convenience food. But it calmed me to wheel my trolley up and down familiar alleys, picking out the solid comforting objects which were always in their proper place. I liked to compare the prices of reduced-sugar baked beans, washing powder, peanut butter.

I was hovering over a freezer full of puddings – should it be another pecan pie, or a lemon meringue? – when I heard a voice behind me.

‘Sam?’

I took both puddings and turned.

‘Why, hello, er…’ I’d forgotten her name again, just as I had done the last time we’d met. The memory of Finn’s shopping expedition surfaced briefly and painfully. That was the day I’d believed she’d started opening up to me. Now I knew it had been just part of the charade.

‘Lucy,’ she prompted me. ‘Lucy Myers.’

‘Of course. Sorry, I was miles away.’ I balanced the puddings on the overflowing trolley. ‘How are you?’

‘No, how are you? she responded eagerly. ‘You’ve been having such an awful time. I’ve been reading all about it, well, we all have. We admire what you did so much. So brave. It’s all anyone’s talking about at the hospital.’

‘Great,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ She pulled her trolley in from the centre of the aisle, so that it blocked my path. I was trapped beside the freezer by our trolleys’ brimming cages, with Lucy as my beaming keeper. In her trolley I saw dog food, mineral water, leeks, deodorant, kitchen roll and bin-bags. I suddenly felt a bit sick and furtively discarded my lemon meringue pie. ‘I mean, I can’t believe you’re so famous now. People must recognize you on the streets and things.’

‘Sometimes.’ I returned the pecan pie too.

‘You nearly drowned. How awful.’

‘It was,’ I agreed. I must remember cat food for Anatoly.

‘And do you know the really amazing thing?’

‘No.’

She opened up the trolleys and stepped inside, putting her face close to mine. I could see the circles of her contact lenses.

‘I knew her.’

‘Who?’

She nodded emphatically at me, triumphant to have her own special slice of this delicious drama.

‘I knew Fiona Mackenzie. Now isn’t that weird, to know you and to know her too?’

‘But…’

‘It’s true. My mother and her mother were friends. I even babysat for her when she was little.’ Lucy giggled as if it were the most thrilling news in the world, that she had babysat for someone who’d later slaughtered her parents and then been burned up in a car. ‘I hadn’t seen her for a few years, maybe three years. She came to my sister’s wedding with her parents. She…’

‘Hang on, Lucy.’ I spoke slowly as if she didn’t understand English very well. ‘You met her.’

‘That’s what I’ve just been saying, Sam.’

‘No, I mean you met her with me. The last time you saw me, in Goldswan Green, I had a young woman with me, remember?’

‘Well, of course.’

‘Finn. Fiona Mackenzie.’

‘That was Fiona? She was so slim, but I heard something about her problem.’

I nodded. ‘Anorexia,’ I said.

She looked at me, her round face creasing, and then a fat man, with his paunch hanging over his belt and sweat spreading under his armpits, heaved his trolley into our parked group.

‘Mind where you’re standing,’ he barked.

‘Mind where you’re walking,’ I snapped back, then looked at Lucy again. I wasn’t about to let this woman get away; here at last was somebody who had actually known Finn Mackenzie. ‘Tell me about her.’

‘Describe her? Oh dear, well, she was,’ she held her hands apart as if she were grasping a beach ball, ‘rather round, you could say, but nice. Yes’ – Lucy looked at me as if she’d given me some kind of key – ‘very nice.’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘Nice?’

‘Yes. Quite quiet, I think, she didn’t push herself forward. Perhaps she was a bit shy.’

‘So she was nice and quiet?’

‘Yes.’ Lucy looked as if she were about to burst into tears. How did this woman ever get through the ward rounds? ‘It’s so long ago.’

‘What did she look like then? How did she dress?’

‘Well, I couldn’t say really. Nothing outrageous, you know. She always looked quite pretty, I think, although she was very plump, of course. She wore her hair long and loose. Look, Sam, it’s been lovely seeing you but…’

‘Sorry, Lucy, your shopping awaits you. See you soon.’

‘That’d be lovely.’ The eager note of friendship came back into her voice now that we were parting. ‘Hey, wait, Sam, what about your trolley?’

‘I changed my mind,’ I called as I strode empty-handed down the aisle towards the exit. ‘I didn’t need anything after all.’

The house was absolutely quiet. Upstairs Elsie lay asleep, clean in her ironed pyjamas. I sat on the sofa, Anatoly on my lap, with only a single lamp to illuminate the room. I remembered one evening here with Danny, a few days after I’d moved and was still surrounded by packing cases and bare boards. He’d rented a video and bought us an Indian take-away which he’d spread out on newspaper in front of us. We sat cross-legged on the floor and watched the film, and I’d laughed so much that I started to weep. Danny had hugged me to him, pushing away the silver-foil containers with their slop of dark-red meats and sinister vegetables, and told me he loved me, and I’d gone on laughing, weeping. And never said it back. Never said I loved him. Not then, not later. So now I sat in his gown, with the cat and the darkness, and I said it to him. Over and over again I said it to him, as though somewhere there in the darkness and quiet he was listening, as though if I said it enough I could bring him back. And then I picked up a cushion and pressed my face into it and cried, heaving my heart out into a plump square of flowered corduroy.

And after that, I thought about Finn. She’d stayed in this house for nearly two months and she had hardly left a trace. She’d burned all her old clothes and taken her few new ones. She’d left no bits and pieces of her life. I looked around the dim room where I sat: its surfaces were cluttered with stuff I’d accumulated even in the last couple of months. The wobbly clay pot Elsie had made for me at school, the papier-maché peach Sarah had presented me with today, a glass bowl I’d picked up in Goldswan Green because I loved its pure cobalt-blue, the ebony cat, yesterday’s list of tasks, a wooden candlestick, a dying bunch of anemones, a box of Lil-lets, a pile of magazines, another pile of books, a pewter mug holding pens. But her room had always looked like a hotel room, and she’d entered it and left it without disturbing its anonymity at all.

What did I know about this girl who’d lived under the same roof as me for two months, shared my meals and charmed my daughter? Not much at all, although I realized as I thought that she had extracted a good deal of information from me. I’d even told her about Elsie’s father. What had Lucy called her? And those schoolfriends of hers that I’d met at her parents’ funeral? ‘Sweet’, was it; ‘sweet’ and ‘nice’. And those family friends – they called her ‘lovely’ in that patronizing way that means ‘no trouble’. She seemed memorable to me, with her youthful, soft-skinned radiance. Death usually fixes people, pinning them on to their finished life. But death seemed to be dissolving Finn, dispersing her like a cloud.

Thirty-Two

The days and the nights started to become normal, lacking in obvious incident so that one slid into the other. It would be an overstatement to describe the result as blissful, but it was just about bearable, and that would do for the moment. Things happened, of course. After a month more of grim concentration, the book was finished. My printer coughed out a satisfyingly large pile of paper, which I sent off to Sarah for a quick read and some encouragement. There were developments with Elsie. I started to suspect that if a word in one of her reading books was very short indeed, like ‘cat’ or ‘son’, then, given time, and when she was in a good mood, she might be able to work it out without the help of the picture above the text. And she made a third friend: Vanda, whose real name was Miranda. I invited her – or rather Elsie invited her and I confirmed the invitation – to stay the night.

And my unit was about to start, it really was. Two doctors and an SHO were appointed and on their way. I spent many hours in offices talking about details of pay and national insurance, I attended meetings about internal market practice at Stamford, and I went with Geoff Marsh on a round trip of insurance companies discussing the protection we offered against liability over rubber chicken and mineral water. Just one week of Dr Laschen’s famous snakebite medicine and you are guaranteed free from all lawsuits. I sounded so marketable, I only wished I could own a piece of myself.

I thought of Danny, but not every bit of the time. He wasn’t in every room of my house any longer. Occasionally I would open a door, a cupboard, and there he would be in some silly detail or object or memory but that was all. Sometimes I would wake in the night and cry, which was fine, but the obsessive, pointless speculating about the rest of our lives together, the bitterness at having him snatched away from me by a wicked lunatic, I didn’t dwell on that so much any more.

The press attention was slackening off. The articles about the fallibility of the trauma industry had metamorphosed into columnists’ analysis of the nature of female courage. My heroism had replaced my failure but I was no more interested in the second than in the first. There were invitations to be photographed in my garden, to discuss my childhood, my influences, to respond to questionnaires, to go on the radio and play my favourite records. I was offered the opportunity of talking to a radio psychiatrist about what it was like to have my lover murdered and then almost to be murdered myself. As, for the time being at least, the most famous expert in Britain on recovery from mental trauma, I decided that such exposure would not be helpful so, to the lightly suppressed exasperation of Geoff Marsh, I turned everything down.

There was one day, though, that didn’t merge into all the others. It was the day when Miranda was coming to spend the night with Elsie and I had promised them a midnight feast. Over breakfast, Elsie had ordered biscuits, lollies, miniature salami sausages in silver paper, fromage frais, chocolate fingers, and as I wiped her mouth, brushed her hair and teeth, I calculated how I could go to the supermarket between meetings. We were in a desperate rush out of the door and I noticed it had started to pour with rain in iron-coloured streaks. I threw off my jacket and pulled on a raincoat and put a cap on my head.

‘Put your raincoat on, Elsie,’ I said.

She looked at me and started giggling.

‘I haven’t got time to play,’ I said. ‘Get your coat on.’

‘You look funny, Mummy,’ she said, in between gurgles.

With a sigh of exasperation I turned to the mirror. I started to laugh as well. I couldn’t help it. I did look funny.

‘You’re like Hardy Hardy,’ Elsie said.

She meant Laurel and Hardy. She had remembered a scene in one of her videos where they had got their hats mixed up. The cap was too small for me and perched precariously on the top of my head. What the bloody hell was it? I pulled the thing off my head and examined it. It was one of Finn’s. I tossed it aside and grabbed my old trilby and we ran for the car.

‘That was a funny hat, Mummy.’

‘Yes, it was… er…’ Well, why not? ‘It was Finn’s.’

‘That was Fing’s too,’ she said, pointing at the trilby which nestled neatly on my head.

I stopped short and looked at it.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s right. It was. It…’

‘Mumme-e-e-e. It’s wet.’

‘Sorry.’

I ran around the car and let her into the passenger seat and fastened her in, then ran back to the other side and sat beside her. I was very wet.

‘You smell like a dog, Mummy.’

We had played musical statues, musical bumps and a complicated game whose rules I never quite understood but which made Elsie and Miranda echo with laughter. They had their secret midnight feast at a quarter past eight and then I came in in the form of a ghost with a toothbrush to tell them a story. I looked for a book but Elsie said, ‘No, out of your head, Mummy,’ knowing that I only knew one story, so they sat back while I tried to remember the principal events of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. Did the grandmother die? Well, she wouldn’t in my version. I tiptoed through all the details until I reached the climax.

‘Come in, Little Red Riding Hood,’ I said in a croaky voice.

‘Hello, Granny,’ I said in a little-girl voice. ‘But what big ears you’ve got, Granny.’

‘All the better to hear you with, my dear,’ I said in my croaky voice. There were giggles from the bed.

‘And what big eyes you’ve got, Granny,’ I said in my little-girl voice.

‘All the better to see you with,’ I said in a croak that made me cough. More giggles.

‘And what a big mouth you’ve got, Granny,’ I piped. I left a long pause this time and looked at their expectant wide eyes.

‘All the better to-o-o-o eat you up.’ And I leaped on to the bed and enfolded the little girls in my arms and snapped at them with my lips. They shrieked and laughed and wriggled under me. After we composed ourselves, I spoke again in what was left of my normal voice.

‘So who was it in the bed, Miranda?’

‘Granny,’ said Miranda, laughing.

‘No, Miranda, it wasn’t Granny. Who was in the bed. Elsie?’

‘Granny,’ said Elsie and they both howled with laughter, rolling and jumping on the bed.

‘If something has eyes like a wolf, and it has ears like a wolf, and it has a mouth like a wolf, then what is it?’

‘A gra-a-anny,’ shouted Elsie and they both howled once more.

‘You two are like naughty little wolf-cubs,’ I said, ‘and it’s time you were asleep.’ I hugged and kissed them and went downstairs where the lamp was swinging on its flex from their continued bouncing on Elsie’s bed. There was a bottle of some old white wine in the fridge and I poured myself half a glass. I needed to think for a moment. There was something buzzing around in the recesses of my skull and I wanted to grab it. If it knew I was chasing it, it would escape. I would have to sneak up on it. I began muttering to myself.

‘If something has eyes like a wolf, and it has ears like a wolf, and it has a mouth like a wolf, then it’s a wolf.’ I sipped at my wine. ‘But if it doesn’t have eyes like a wolf, and it doesn’t have ears like a wolf, and it doesn’t have a mouth like a wolf, and it doesn’t howl at the moon, then what?’

I found a piece of paper and a pen and began to write things down. I compiled a list and then began to underscore and circle and join things with lines. I let the pen fall. I thought of Geoff Marsh and his medium-term strategy, I thought of Elsie and my new peaceful life, I thought of the absence of press attention and finally and inevitably I thought of Danny.

In a pocket of my purse with some ticket stubs and credit-card slips and my identity card for the hospital and bits of fluff and stupid things I should have thrown away was a slip of paper with Chris Angeloglou’s home number on it. The last time we had met he had given it to me, saying if at any time I wanted to talk about things, I should feel free to give him a call. I suspect the plan was for him to apply his own brand of intrusive remedial therapy and I had responded with the driest of smiles. Oh God. The police were totally sick of me. Everybody – the family, the hospital, everybody – just wanted these terrible events to go away. If I let it go, there would be no problem. It would interfere with my work, unbalance me emotionally and stir up old memories for Elsie which could only harm her. And if I actually phoned Chris Angeloglou now, on top of everything else, he would probably imagine that I was asking him out on a date. But when I was sixteen I had sworn a very stupid oath to myself. At the end of your life, it is the things you didn’t do, not the things you did do, that you regret. So, faced with a choice of action or inaction, I promised myself that I would always act. The results had been frequently disastrous and I didn’t feel optimistic. I picked up the phone and dialled.

‘Hello, is Chris Angeloglou there? Oh, Chris, hi. I was ringing… I wondered if we could meet for a drink. There’s something I wanted to talk to you about… No, I can’t do the evening. What about lunch-time? Fine… Is that the one in the square?… Fine, see you there.’

I replaced the receiver.

‘Stupid, stupid, stupid,’ I said to myself, consolingly.

Thirty-Three

A resource manager in a suit with strange lapels was trying to explain to me the philosophical difference between hospital beds as an accounting concept and hospital beds as physical objects that people can lie in, and by the time I half-understood it I realized I was running late. I tried to ring Chris Angeloglou but he was out. I conducted another meeting on the phone and another while walking along a hospital corridor. I cut even that short and ran to my car. I stopped to pick up a prescription for Elsie (as if there were any medicine which could cure lack of sleep in association with chronic naughtiness) and drove around the central Stamford car park, getting stuck for long periods behind people manoeuvring into tiny spaces when there were huge sections visibly free ahead.

By the time I puffed into the Queen Anne I was almost half an hour late. I immediately saw Chris seated in the far corner. As I drew closer, I saw he had made a complicated construction out of matches. I sat down heavily with a cascade of apologies and, naturally, it fell over. I insisted on getting drinks, and without waiting for any instructions I went to the bar and hysterically ordered two large gin and tonics, every flavour of crisps they had and a packet of pork scratchings.

‘I don’t drink,’ said Chris.

‘I don’t really, either, but I thought just this once…’

‘I mean I really don’t drink.’

‘What are you, a Muslim or something?’

‘An alcoholic.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really.’

‘Right. Can I get you a mineral water?’

‘This is my third.’

‘I’m extremely sorry, Chris. I know how busy you are. I got held up and tried to ring you but you were out. And now I’m babbling.’

Neither of us spoke for a moment and I tried to gauge how angry Chris was and whether this would do any good. He took a sip of his drink and attempted to give me a sympathetic smile.

‘You’re looking better, Sam,’ he said.

‘Better than what?’

‘We were worried about you. A bit guilty as well.’

‘There was nothing really to worry about. My ducking didn’t even give me a cold.’

He lit a cigarette.

‘Do you mind?’ I shook my head. ‘I wasn’t thinking of mat,’ he continued.

‘What were you thinking about?’

‘It was difficult for you, in different ways. We felt sorry for you.’

‘It was worse for other people.’

‘You mean the murder victims?’ Angeloglou laughed as if it required an effort. ‘Yeah. Well, it’s all in the past now. This new job must be good for you. We’re looking for that Kendall girl. You probably saw it on TV.’

I shook my head.

‘I don’t watch TV.’

‘You should. There are some good things on. American programmes mainly…’

Angeloglou tailed off and his eyes narrowed. He smiled inquiringly at me. This was the pause being left for me to explain why I had arranged this meeting.

‘Chris, what’s your version of what happened?’

The interest in his face slackened slightly, as if the dial had been turned down. He had a handsome face, dark, with prominent cheek-bones, a strong jaw-line, over which he sometimes ran his fingers as if he were surprised by its firmness. He was too neat for me. Too well groomed. He had been waiting for me to say that I had been wanting to get to know him better but had held back while the case was going on. But now, how about dinner some time and let’s see what may happen? After all, I was a professional woman and one of those feminists and had funny hair, all of which probably meant I was sexually adventurous. Instead I was still being neurotic about the case.

‘Sam, Sam, Sam,’ he said, as if soothing a child who had woken in the night. ‘You don’t have to do this, you know.’

‘I don’t have to do anything, Chris, that’s not the point.’

‘You had a terrible, terrible time. You were traumatized…’

‘Don’t tell me about trauma.’

‘And then you became a big heroine and we gave you lots of credit and were – still are of course – grateful to you. But it’s over. I know that you’re the expert and I shouldn’t be telling you this but you’ve got to let this go.’

‘Answer my question, Chris. Tell me what happened.’

He took a drag on his cigarette that was almost brutal.

‘I’m not interested in talking about this case any more, Sam. Everybody involved is dead. It didn’t go particularly well for anybody.’ I gave a sarcastic snort. ‘But we got away with it. I don’t want to think about it.’

I sipped deeply from one of the gin and tonics. Then I took a deep breath and said, more or less honestly, ‘Listen to me for five minutes and then if you’re not interested, I won’t mention it ever again.’

‘That’s the most promising suggestion you’ve made so far.’

I tried to put my thoughts in some sort of order.

‘You believe that Finn and Michael killed the Mackenzies, and then Michael cut Finn’s throat, even though it would have been easy for Finn to have been somewhere else with an alibi.’

Chris lit another cigarette.

‘For God’s sake, Sam, we’ve been through all this. I don’t have to justify these murderers’ behaviour to you. Maybe it needed two of them to do the murders. They’re sick, fucking psychos, who knows what they enjoy? Perhaps they got a sado-masochistic kick out of a fake murder.’

‘There’s the murder of Mrs Ferrer.’

‘Mrs Ferrer died from pulling a plastic bag over her head. It was a clear suicide.’

‘Perhaps. But that still leaves the murder of Danny and Finn. You were the ones who proved to me that Michael couldn’t have done it.’

‘I can’t believe I’m sitting here listening to this. Just concentrate for a moment, Sam. You made a statement to us saying that Michael Daley confessed to the murders. The forensic evidence from the boat-house clearly confirmed your statement. It is not reasonable to doubt that Daley and Fiona Mackenzie killed the Mackenzies and then that Daley, with or without Fiona Mackenzie, killed Danny Rees, and then Daley killed Fiona Mackenzie, disposing of any link with the crime. If he had managed the fake boating accident with you, then he would probably have got away with it.’

‘Can you think of any possible reason why Finn should have suddenly written a will leaving everything to Michael Daley?’

Chris was looking at me now with an expression close to contempt.

‘I don’t really give a fuck. Patients sometimes fall in love with their doctors, don’t they?’ He paused before resuming with cruel deliberation. ‘Women have been known to behave irrationally in times of great stress. Perhaps she was suffering from trauma, maybe her period was about to start. I’m afraid that this is the way that cases end up. If you’ve got the right people and not too many loose ends, then that’s good enough. Is this what you wanted to see me for?’

‘I thought you might be interested in hearing about a couple of funny things that happened to me in the last couple of days.’

‘Are you feeling all right, Sam?’

‘A couple of months ago I was out doing some shopping for clothes with Finn and I bumped into a woman I’d known at medical school.’

‘That’s fascinating. I think your five minutes are up…’

‘Wait. I met her again on Tuesday.’

‘Give her my regards if you happen to see her again,’ said Chris, raising himself from his seat.

‘Sit down,’ I said sharply.

Chris frowned, and I saw he was wondering whether to ignore me and walk out, but he gave a sigh and sat back down.

‘She had read about me in the papers. She told me it was a funny coincidence because she was a family friend of the Mackenzies. Yet when we had met before, she hadn’t recognized Finn.’

Chris’s face was impassive, still waiting for the punchline.

‘Is that supposed to mean anything?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Don’t you think it’s strange?’

He laughed harshly.

‘Had Fiona lost a lot of weight, Sam?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did she avoid meeting people face to face?’

‘Yes.’

‘So maybe your friend didn’t get a proper look, maybe she didn’t have her glasses on.’

‘And then, when I was reading through Finn’s guide to South America, I accidentally came across a passage, and it was the same – I mean exactly the same – as something she had said to me about her trip there. As if she’d learned it by heart.’

Now he was cracking his knuckles, a look of boredom and, almost, of contempt on his face. He didn’t bother to say anything.

‘And a funny thing happened to me yesterday. I was dashing out of the house and I grabbed a hat at random and it was laughably too small. It just bobbled on top of my head. It made Elsie laugh.’

‘I suppose you had to be there to appreciate the full humour of the situation.’

‘You see this trilby?’ I picked my hat off the table and put it on my head. ‘Fits nicely, doesn’t it? It was Finn’s.’

‘Shrank in the wash, did it? Well, I’m certainly glad that you shared that with me, Sam.’

‘You put your hats in the washing-machine, do you Chris? That explains one or two things. Did you do science at school?’

‘This is crucial to the inquiry as well, I assume. Yes, I did science at school, but I bet I wasn’t as good at it as you were.’

‘I bet you weren’t. Look, I know that reality is complicated, people act illogically, evidence is ambiguous. But…’ I drained my gin and tonic and slammed the glass so hard on the table that people looked around and Chris shifted uneasily.

‘I hope you’re not planning to drive home.’

‘But,’ I repeated. ‘This is not just messy. It’s impossible. Until the discoveries in Michael’s boat-house, it was possible that Finn and Danny ran away and then committed suicide. It may have been unlikely and uncharacteristic and deeply upsetting for me personally but it was possible. It may be likely and characteristic that Michael killed Finn and Danny and staged their suicide but it is totally impossible.’ I paused. Chris didn’t respond. ‘Well, isn’t it?’

He tapped his cigarette.

‘In the way that you’ve described it, maybe. But Michael is dead. Finn is dead. We don’t know what happened.’

I don’t know if it was the gin and tonic on an empty stomach or my anger but I felt as if the hum of the saloon bar had entered my head like tinnitus. Suddenly I felt in a rage.

‘For Chrissake, just pretend for a moment that you aren’t a policeman, just pretend for a moment to be an intelligent ordinary person who cares about what actually happened. I mean, don’t worry about it, there are no other policemen eavesdropping. You don’t have to seem big in front of the boys.’

‘You arrogant…’ With an obvious effort, Chris stopped himself. ‘All right, Sam. I’m listening. I’d really like to know. If we’re so stupid, tell us what we’ve missed. But before you start, I would like to add that you are in danger of becoming a serious embarrassment. To your employers, to us, to yourself, to your daughter. Is this what you want? To become famous as a crazy obsessed woman on the loose? But tell me, I’m listening.’

For a moment I seriously considered picking up the ashtray from the table and braining him with it. Then I cooled down and thought only of throwing the remains of the second gin and tonic over him. I counted to a large number.

‘I thought I was doing you a favour,’ I said.

‘So do me a favour.’

I felt as if I were going to burst.

‘I’m not going to do you a favour but maybe I can help you to think for yourself.’

‘I’ve got to go.’

‘One more minute. The burnt-out car was found on March the ninth. What was the original theory? They had killed themselves by setting fire to the car with a rag stuffed into the petrol tank, nozzle, whatever?

‘Yes.’

‘But since traces of both Finn and Danny’s bodies were found in the boat-house, it is clear that they were dead when the car was set on fire, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Michael couldn’t have done it. Right?’

‘Sam, as I told you, there are some loose ends, some inconsistencies. But try to understand this.’ He was speaking very slowly now, as if English was my second language. ‘We know as a matter of certainty that Michael Daley killed Danny Rees and Fiona Mackenzie. OK? We haven’t yet ascertained exactly how. OK ? He was a clever man. But we will find out, and when we do we will inform you. OK?’ His face was positively twitching with the effort to remain calm.

I spoke very slowly in response. ‘Michael was in Belfast at the time. Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what is the only other possibility?’

‘There are various other possibilities.’

‘Such as?’

Chris shrugged.

‘Lots. Some form of incendiary device, for example.’

‘Was any evidence of such a device found?’

‘No.’

‘The car would need to have stood there with the dead bodies for two whole days. That’s not possible either. And what would have been the point of doing it anyway? Why go to all that trouble to start a fire?’

‘He was a psychopathic killer.’

‘Humour me for a moment, Chris, and stop talking like a fool. I’m not going to hold you to anything you say, I’m not going to embarrass you again, but just tell me how the car must have been set on fire.’

Chris mumbled something.

‘Sorry, I didn’t hear what you said.’

He lit another cigarette, blowing out the match with absurd deliberation and placing it in the ashtray before replying.

‘It is possible,’ he said, ‘that Daley had some sort of collaborator.’

‘No, Chris, you’re wrong. It is impossible that he didn’t have a collaborator.’

Chris looked at his watch and stood up.

‘I’ve got to go.’

‘I’ll see you out,’ I said.

He was gloomily silent as we walked back towards the police station. Only when we reached the steps at the main entrance did he turn and face me.

‘So you think,’ he said quietly, ‘that we ought to reopen the investigation and try and identify this mysterious assistant?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Why not?’

‘Because I know who it was.’

‘Who?’

‘It was Finn,’ I said, enjoying his gasp of disbelief. ‘In a way.’

‘What do you mean, “in a way”? What the fuck are you talking about?’

‘You find out,’ I said. ‘That’s your job.’

He shook his head.

‘You…’ he said. ‘You’re…’

He seemed completely at a loss. I held out my hand.

‘Sorry about being late. I’ll be in touch.’

He took it as if he thought it might give him an electric shock.

‘You… Are you doing anything tonight?’

‘Yes,’ I said, and left him there on the steps.

Thirty-Four

I could hear steps coming towards the door, see a shadow through the frosted glass, so I stood up straighter in the intimidating porch and put a polite and hopeful expression on my face. I suddenly realized how shabby I was looking. The door was opened a few inches and a woman’s face peered round it. I could see she was still in her dressing gown and had applied only half of her make-up. One eye was lined and mascara’d and ready for the day; the vulnerable other one wasn’t.

‘Laura?’ I said through the gap. ‘I’m so sorry if this is a bad time. I was wondering if I could have a few minutes with you.’ On her face, the expression of irritated politeness towards a stranger who’s called at the wrong time was giving way to surprised and, I thought, slightly appalled recognition. ‘I’m Sam Laschen,’ I added. The door opened wider, on to the wide hall with its polished wooden floor, the restrained sense of money and taste and a daily cleaner.

‘My dear, of course, you came to a party, didn’t you, with…’ Alarm and interest pursued each other across her features.

‘With Michael Daley. Yes. I’m sorry just to turn up like this. I need to find out something and I was wondering if you could help. I can come back later if that’s more convenient.’ She looked at me with narrowed eyes. Was I the gossip item of the year or a dangerous madwoman? The gossip item prevailed.

‘No, that is, I don’t have to get to the hospital till later today, I was just saying to Gordon yesterday… Do come through.’ I followed her solid chenilled shape into the room where a few months ago I’d eaten asparagus spears and drunk white wine. ‘I’ll just go and get some clothes on. Would you like some coffee? Or tea?’

‘Coffee.’

‘I won’t be more than five minutes,’ she said, and as she went up the stairs I could hear her calling urgently, ‘Gordon. Gordon!’

While she was out of the room, I pulled out the mobile phone which the hospital had supplied me with and which I still felt self-conscious using, and dialled.

‘Hello, yes, could you give me Philip Kale? No, I’ll hold.’

I gave my name and after a few seconds he came on to the line.

‘Dr Laschen ?’ He was obviously puzzled and, as before, in a hurry.

‘Yes, well, it’s just that I was wondering if you could tell me Finn’s – Fiona Mackenzie’s – blood type. From your autopsy report.’

‘Her blood type? Yes, of course. I’ll call you back.’

The prospect of a mobile phone bleeping in my pocket was too much.

‘No. I’m all over the place today,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you. In about an hour, say? Thanks so much.’

I could hear the sound of coffee being ground from the kitchen, china clinking. I dialled a second number.

‘Hello, is that the hospital? Yes, can you put me through to Margaret Lessing in the personnel office. Maggie? Hello, this is Sam.’

‘Sam!’ Her voice tinkled down the line. ‘Hi, what are you up to?’

‘This and that. Can you do something for me? I wanted to have a quick look at Fiona Mackenzie’s file from when she was in hospital after the attack. Could you get hold of it for me?’

There was a moment of hesitation.

‘I don’t see why not.’

‘Thanks, Maggie. Shall I pop round later today?’

‘Give me a call first.’

‘Fine. Speak to you soon.’

Laura felt better, I could tell. Her face was less tentative under her glossy grey curls. She’d put on a greeny-grey knee-length suit, the other eye and a lipsticked smile. She placed a tray down on the table between us – an upright pot, two china cups with little silver spoons on their saucers, a dainty jug half-filled with milk, and lumps of sugar in both pale brown and dense white. I thought of the milk bottle and jam jar standing on my kitchen table, the boxes still unpacked on the uncarpeted floor of my study. I’d never have this kind of style. Thank God.

‘How are you? We’ve all been so admiring.’ Laura poured me a deft cup of steaming coffee, and I added a slop of milk.

‘Fine, thanks.’ I took a sip. ‘I wanted to talk to someone who knew Finn.’

Laura looked flattered. She laid a strong, well-manicured hand on my denimed knees.

‘What you’ve been through is terrible; I mean, even for people like us, right on the sidelines, it’s been shocking, and…’

‘Tell me about Finn.’

She took a sip of coffee and sat back, visibly at a loss. She had wanted me to do the talking.

‘I didn’t know her that well. She was a very kind, gentle girl, who may have suffered at school, as girls do, because she was overweight.’ Laura raised her eyebrows at me. ‘And she became seriously ill and she went away from us, from everybody who knew her. It was terrible for Leo and Liz. But she got better. Liz told me that Finn was happier than she had ever been. Completely transformed, they said. I think that they saw her trip to South America as a new beginning, a sign that she had grown up.’

This was no good. I didn’t want Laura’s amateur diagnoses . I wanted information, facts I could make something of for myself.

‘You don’t have any photographs of her, do you? All the ones in her house were destroyed.’

‘I don’t think so. It was her parents we saw, really. Hang on a minute.’ She left the room, reappeared with a fat square red book and started rapidly turning over colour photos in their transparent pages, tutting and shaking her head. Unknown faces nicked past, unremarkable houses, hills and beaches and formal groups of people. ‘Here is a garden party we went to with Liz and Leo. Fiona may have been there. I can’t see her.’

The Mackenzie parents, whose out-of-focus faces had been on the front of every newspaper a few months ago, were standing on a smooth lawn, smiling for the camera. She was skinny under a wide-brimmed straw hat; he looked hot and uncomfortable in his suit and tie. On the left of the photo, sliding out of the shot, was a bare arm, a slither of a floral dress and a wave of dark hair.

I put my finger on the arm, as if I could press its flesh. ‘That’ll be Finn.’

I sat on a bench by the side of a square. A mother was pushing her child on the single swing that stood on the patch of green.

‘Dr Kale, please,’ I said into my telephone.

His voice came quickly down the line.

‘Hello, Dr Laschen. Yes, I’ve got it here, in front of me. Let’s see. Here it is: Fiona Mackenzie’s blood type was O, along with about half of the population of Western Europe and the United States. Is that all you wanted?’

At the hospital, Maggie sounded harassed.

‘Sorry, Sam, you’ll have to give me a bit more time to get the file. These bloody computers, somebody must have logged in wrong and snarled the system up. Would her casualty admission file be any good?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ring me back.’

‘Donald Helman? Hello, I hope this isn’t a bad time to ring. My name’s Sam Laschen and we met at a party of Laura and Gor… Yes, that’s right. Laura gave me your number. You said your daughter used to be a friend of Finn’s and I was wondering if I could speak to her about it. Oh, when will she back? Well, in that case, there was a friend of Finn’s from school who I met, her first name is Jenny, I think. You don’t happen to remember her last name? Glaister. Thank you very much for your help.’

Jenny Glaister was home from university for the Easter holidays. Her parents’ large house was about twenty miles from Stamford, standing in its own grounds, and she came on to the gravelled sweep of driveway as I arrived. It was a grey and rather chilly day, but she wore a tiny, brightly coloured silk skirt and a thin shirt. I remembered her articulate self-confidence from the funeral. She was puzzled, but she was interested in me. Everyone was interested enough in the woman they’d read about in the newspapers to let me into their houses for a few minutes. She made us a pot of tea, then sat down facing me, oval face in ringless hands.

‘To be honest,’ she said, ‘Finn wasn’t really one of our group. I mean, she was and she wasn’t.’ She bit her lower lip and then added, ‘She was self-conscious at school. A bit awkward. One of the difficult things when she… you know, became ill and went away, was that some of us felt a bit guilty about her. We thought we might not have included her enough. I mean, maybe she got anorexic because she wanted to be one of us, you know. I saw her briefly when she came back from South America and I hardly recognized her, none of us did: she was so slim and tanned and she had all these fabulous new clothes and she seemed so much more self-confident, less anxious for our approval. We were all a bit in awe of her, as if she were suddenly a stranger. She was quite different from the plump Finn who’d just tagged along.’

I tried to push her for something specific. She made an obvious effort.

‘A few weeks ago I would have said that she was intelligent, nice. That kind of thing. And loyal,’ she added. ‘I would have said Finn was loyal: you could trust her and depend on her. She’d always do her homework, and arrive places on time, and be, well, reliable. Eager. You spent all that time with her at the end. Does she make sense to you?’

‘Do you have any photographs?’

We rummaged through a case of photographs that mainly consisted of Jenny looking lovely on horseback, in the sea, with her family, playing her cello, receiving her school prize, going gracefully downhill on skis. No Finn.

‘You could try the school,’ she suggested. ‘There must be a school photo of her and term’s not finished there yet. The school secretary, Ruth Plomer, will help. She’s a darling.’

Now why hadn’t I thought of that?

So I drove to Grey Hall, which wasn’t grey but red and magnificent and set back across lovely green lawns from the road. On playing fields I could see a hoard of girls in grey shorts and white Aertex shirts wielding lacrosse sticks while a tall woman barked at them. Inside, the smell of French polish and green vegetables and linseed oil and femaleness met me. Behind closed doors I could hear lessons in progress. This wasn’t how I remembered Elmore Hill comprehensive. A woman in overalls directed me down a corridor to the secretary’s office.

Ruth Plomer sat, beady-eyed and beaky-nosed as a bird, amid a nest of files and wire baskets and piles of forms. She listened attentively to my request, then nodded.

‘To be honest, Dr Laschen, the press has come round here asking for photographs, comments, interviews, and our policy has been to refuse everyone.’ She paused and I remained silent. She yielded slightly. ‘You just want to see a photograph? You don’t want to take it away? You don’t want to talk to anybody?’

‘That’s right. I need to see what she looked like before she lived with me.’

She looked puzzled, apparently arguing with herself and finally losing.

‘I don’t suppose there can be any harm. There are no individual portraits but there is always the group photograph. When was her final year?’

‘I think she formally left in the summer of 95, but she was ill for almost all of the academic year. Maybe I could look at the previous year.’

‘Wait here; I’ll see what I can do.’

She left the room and I heard footsteps retreating and returning. Miss Plomer had a scrolled tube in her hand and unrolled it on her overcrowded desk. I leaned forward, scanning the rows of girls’ faces for sight of Finn. She put on her spectacles.

‘This is the 1994 line-up. There is a list of the girls’ names here. Let’s see, yes, she’s in the third row back. There she is.’ A well-trimmed fingernail touched a figure on the left-hand side of the photo. Dark hair, a slight blur on her features: she must have turned aside as the lens shuttered, just as she’d done with me. I picked up the scroll and held it to the light, staring intently, but it seemed to recede from my gaze. I wouldn’t have known it was Finn. I wouldn’t have known it was anybody.

‘Maggie. Hi, it’s Sam again. Have you found it yet?’

‘No, there’s a hold-up with the casualty file. Somebody must have taken it out and I’m trying to track down who it was. Get back to me.’ She was harassed and irritated and eager to get off the line.

Everything was gone. Now what?

∗

Where was it, oh, where was it? I flung open the trunk. Elsie’s paintings, dozens and dozens of them, lay there in piles. Some were glued together by their paint. Some still had masking tape on their corners, where they’d been stuck to the walls. Three-legged monsters in green and red, yellow daisies with their straight stalks and two looped leaves, violent purple daubs, faces with wonky eyes, indeterminate animals, lots of seascapes, wavy blue lines traversing the thick white paper. Rainbows with the colours running into each other; the moon and stars bleeding yellow into rough black nights. I lifted each picture, looked at it, turned it over. Surely it would be here. Traces of Finn’s presence in the house could be seen: occasional titles, neatly written in with their dates, an adult representation of a dog alongside a child’s one, several times whole hasty pictures of horses and trees and sailing boats obviously done by Finn. But I couldn’t find what I needed. I’d come to a dead end.

I went into Elsie’s room and pulled open drawers. Dolls with pink limbs and gaudy dresses stared at me, knitted animals, little boxes with nothing in them, beads in satisfying primary colours, satiny ribbons, whole armies of those tiny plastic things which are always put into party bags. In her drawing pad there were several paintings, but not the one I wanted. Under the bed was one slipper and three separate socks and Anatoly, asleep. I climbed on to a chair and pulled down from the top of the wardrobe an untidy pile of used paper folded up. On the top, in pencil, was Elsie’s name written over and over, in large wonky letters. Underneath was the treasure map. I’d found it.

I jumped off the chair and spread the paper out on the floor tenderly, looking at the daubs of colour and the rusty red letters. An ‘S’ and an ‘E’. And there, an ‘F’: signed in her blood.

I lifted the paper up very carefully, as if it were like a dream that fades when you try and grasp it. In my study downstairs was a stack of large brown envelopes and I slid the map and its signature of blood inside one and sealed it up. Then I picked up the car keys and ran outside. I had it now.

‘You again.’

I had taken a seat but Chris remained standing, hands on hips, looking down at me.

‘I’ve found her. It.’

‘What?’

I took the envelope, still sealed, and put it on his desk. ‘In here,’ I said, speaking very slowly, as if he were demented, or as if I were, ‘in here is a picture.’

‘A picture. How nice.’

‘A picture,’ I continued, ‘drawn by Elsie.’

‘Look, Sam,’ Chris bent towards me and I noticed that his face had become ramer red, ‘I wish you well, honesdy I do, but go home, see your daughter, leave me alone.’

‘This is a relic from a children’s game. Finn and I signed our initials, each in our own blood.’ He opened his mourn and I thought he was going to roar at me, but no sound came out. ‘Give it to Kale. Have it tested.’

He sat down heavily. ‘You’re mad. You’ve gone completely insane.’

‘And I want a receipt for this. I don’t want it disappearing.’

Angeloglou gave me a fixed stare for a long time.

‘You mean you want a record kept of your behaviour? Right,’ he shouted and began rummaging feverishly on his desk. He didn’t find what he was looking for and he stormed across the room returning with a form. He banged it down on the table and picked up a pen with deliberation.

‘Name?’ he barked.

Thirty-Five

‘I’ll have’ – I ran a finger down the handwritten menu – ‘smoked mackerel and salad. What about you two?’

‘Chicken nuggets and chips,’ Elsie said firmly. ‘And fizzy orange drink. Then chocolate ice-cream for pudding.’

‘OK,’ I said easily. Elsie looked taken aback. ‘Sarah?’

‘Ploughman’s, thanks.’

‘What about drinks? Do you want a shandy or something?’

‘Lovely.’

I gave the orders to a barmaid who appeared to be ten months pregnant, took our ticket and our drinks, and we went outside into the gorgeous spring day and sat down, coats still buttoned up, at an unstable wooden table.

‘Can I play on the swings?’ asked Elsie, and charged off without waiting for a reply. Sarah and I watched her struggle on to the seat of a swing and rock it violently to and fro, as if that would give her momentum.

‘She seems well,’ commented Sarah.

‘I know.’ A little boy in a stripy jersey climbed on to the swing next to Elsie’s and the two of them stared suspiciously at each other. ‘Funny, isn’t it?’

‘Kids are resilient.’

We sipped our shandy with the sun on the napes of our necks, and didn’t speak for a bit.

‘Come on, Sarah, don’t keep me on tenterhooks. What did you think of the book, then? Plain speaking, mind. Aren’t you saying anything because it’s so bad?’

‘You must know it’s good, Sam.’ She put an arm around my shoulders and I almost burst into tears; it had been a long time since anyone except Elsie had hugged me. ‘Congratulations. I really mean it.’ She grinned. ‘And wildly controversial of course. I’m amazed you could write something like that in such a short time, and with all that happened. Maybe that’s why. It’s very good.’

‘But?’

‘There are a few tiny little things that I wrote in the margin.’

‘I mean really but.’

‘There’s no really but. There’s a question.’

‘Ask away.’

‘Not even a question, just a comment.’ She paused, picked up her glass and ran a thumb around its rim. ‘It feels like a summing-up of a career, not just the beginning of one.’

‘I’ve got a habit of burning my bridges.’

Sarah laughed.

‘Yes, but this time you’re burning your bridges in front of you. All those attacks on hospital managers and jaded consultants, and the stuff about designer trauma.’

The little boy was pushing Elsie on her swing now. Every time she went swooping up, sturdy legs pointing to the sky and head thrown exaggeratedly back, my heart banged anxiously.

Our lunch arrived. My mackerel lay among a few shreds of tired lettuce, looking orange and enormous. Elsie’s meal was entirely beige. ‘You made the best choice,’ I said to Sarah, and called to Elsie, who came running.

∗

After lunch, after Elsie had eaten every last chip and scooped up every last drop of ice-cream, we went for a short walk, to the old church I had visited once before, and talked about South America and Elsie’s father.

‘Do you love it here ?’ asked Sarah as we walked beneath the enormous sky, beside the sea that was blue and friendly today, the ground spongy under our feet, birds curling overhead.

I looked around. Near here, Danny had made love to me while I kept an anxious eye out for tractors. Near here, Finn had walked her thin body back into health and had made me confide in her. Out there, I had nearly died.

I shivered. We seemed to be making no progress; however far we walked the landscape remained unchanged. We could walk all day and the horizon would just roll away from us.

I had always thought that when people were described as being purple with rage it was a metaphor or hyperbole, but Geoff Marsh really was purple. The arterial pulsation in the neck was clearly visible and I asked him if he was all right, but he waved me into the chair in front of his desk and then sat across from me. When he spoke it was with a forced calmness.

‘How is it going?’

‘You mean the unit?’

‘Yes.’

‘The painters are just applying the final coat. And those carpets. Our reception area is looking very corporate.’

‘You make that sound a bad thing.’

‘I suppose I’m primarily interested in it as a therapeutic setting.’

‘That’s as may be. But the existence of the unit and its role in our internal economy depend on its success as a generator of funds and that depends on the input of health schemes and insurance companies who believe that a programme of trauma treatment for certain categories of their customers will provide them with legal protection. Battered toddlers and firemen who’re frightened of fires aren’t going to pay for your precious therapeutic environment.’

I counted to ten and then I counted to ten again. When I spoke it was also with an exaggerated calm.

‘Geoff, if I didn’t know and love you as I do, I might think you were trying to insult me. Did you summon me here to give you a lecture about first principles in post-traumatic stress disorder?’

Geoff stood up and walked round his desk and sat on the corner in a posture that had probably been taught to him on a management training course.

‘I’ve just given Margaret Lessing an official warning. She’s lucky I didn’t terminate her.’

‘What do you mean, “terminate her”? What are you talking about?’

‘This trust has a strict policy on personal privacy which Margaret Lessing violated. I understand that she did so on your instructions.’

‘What is this personal privacy stuff? You’d sell copies of our records to Colonel Gaddafi if he offered money for them. What are you playing at?’

‘Dr Laschen, as you yourself insisted to me, Fiona Mackenzie was not your patient. It was quite improper of you to ask for her file.’

‘I am a doctor in this hospital and I have a right to ask for any file I want.’

‘If you read your contract and our own contract of operation, Dr Laschen, you will see that your so-called rights are based on strictly defined terms of employment.’

‘I’m a doctor, Geoff, and I will do what I think is right as a doctor. And incidentally, as a matter of curiosity, when did you start monitoring routine applications for medical files?’ I saw a hint of indecision in Geoffs expression and I realized the truth. ‘This has nothing to do with ethics, you’ve been spying on me, haven’t you?’

‘Was this file on a dead girl required as part of a course of treatment?’

I took a deep breath.

‘No.’

‘Was it in your capacity as a doctor?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Indirectly.’

‘Indirectly,’ Geoff repeated, sarcastically. ‘Can it be, is it conceivably possible, that despite my warnings, you are, on your own initiative, conducting some sort of private investigation into this case? A case, I should add, that has been closed.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And?’

‘What’s this “and”? I don’t have to answer to you.’

‘Yes, you do have to answer to me. I can’t believe this. More by luck than anything, we seem to have escaped bad publicity, and this tragic case has been closed. When I heard that you were still meddling in it, my first thought was that you had suffered a breakdown. To be frank, Dr Laschen, I’m not sure whether you require medical treatment or disciplinary action.’

I almost leaped from my chair, and stared at him, so close that I could feel his breath on my face.

‘What did you say, Geoff?’

‘You heard me.’

I reached forward and clenched the knot of his tie, firmly so that my fist pressed up against his throat. He squealed something.

‘You pompous bastard,’ I said, and let him go. I stepped back and thought for a second. There was no doubt in my mind, and I felt an immediate sense of release. ‘You’re trying to goad me to resign.’ Geoff said nothing and looked at the floor. ‘I will, anyway.’ He looked sharply, almost eagerly. This was what he had planned for, but I didn’t care. ‘Professional differences. That’s the phrase, isn’t it?’

Geoff’s eyes darted warily. Was I trapping him in some way?

‘I’ll issue a statement to that effect,’ he said.

‘You’ve probably got it in your drawer already.’

I turned to go, then remembered something.

‘Could you do me a favour?’

He looked surprised. He might have anticipated tears or a punch in the face, but not this.

‘What?’

‘Withdraw the warning against Maggie Lessing. I can look after myself, it’ll hurt her.’

‘I’ll consider it.’

‘It’s served its purpose, after all.’

‘Don’t be bitter, Sam. If you had been me, I don’t think you would have been able to deal with you any better than I did.’

‘I’ll leave straight away.’

‘That’s probably best.’

‘Has Fiona Mackenzie’s file turned up yet?’

Geoff frowned.

‘Apparently it’s lost,’ he said. ‘We’ll find it.’

I shook my head.

‘I don’t think so. I think it will stay lost.’ I thought of something and smiled. ‘But it doesn’t matter. I’ve got a drawing by my five-year-old daughter instead.’

As I shut the door, the last I saw was Geoff standing there with his mouth gaping open like a landed fish.

Thirty-Six

The estate agent looked about fourteen years old.

‘Lovely,’ he said. ‘Just lovely.’

Those were his first words as he stepped across the threshold.

‘Very saleable. Very saleable.’

I showed him around upstairs and it was all lovely and saleable in the extreme.

‘I haven’t really tackled the garden,’ I said.

He shook his head.

‘A challenge for the adventurous gardener,’ he said.

‘That sounds a bit off-putting.’

‘Joke,’ he said. ‘Estate-agent speak.’

‘As you can see, we’re only a short walk from the sea.’

‘Good point,’ he said. ‘Very attractive. Buyers like that. Sea views.’

‘Well, not exactly.’

‘Joke. Estate-agent speak again.’

‘Right. I don’t know what else I should tell you. There’s a loft and a shed. But you handled the sale last year, so you probably have the details on file.’

‘Yes, we do. But I wanted to come for a look. Sniff the air, get a feel for the property.’

‘You were going to give me a valuation.’

‘Yes, Dr Laschen. Do you remember what you paid for the property?’

‘Ninety-five.’ His eyebrows rose. ‘I was in a hurry.’

‘That’s an interesting figure,’ he said.

‘You mean it was too high. I wish you had mentioned that a year ago when you showed me round.’

‘The east Essex market is soft at the moment. Very soft.’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘An opportunity,’ he said and held out his hand. ‘Good to meet you, Dr Laschen. I’ll ring you this afternoon with the valuation. We need to price this aggressively. I’m sure that we’ll have some people to take round by next week.’

‘I won’t be here. My daughter and I are going back to London on Saturday.’

‘Just so long as we have a set of keys and a phone number. In a hurry to get away? What’s the matter? Don’t you like the countryside?’

‘Too much crime.’

He gave an uncertain laugh.

‘Joke, right?’

‘Yes. Joke.’

That week consisted of nothing but things that needed doing. I sat down with Elsie and asked her if she would like to go back to London and see her old friends.

‘No,’ she said cheerfully.

I left it at that. The rest was just a process of working my way down a list: telling Linda and Sally, who seemed inured to any more shocks, and paying them in lieu of notice; making arrangements with utility companies; getting boxes out of the attic and putting things into them that, it seemed, I had only just removed from them.

I spent too much time on the phone. When I wasn’t trying to track down somebody at the council I was being phoned once more by journalists and doctors. I said no to all the journalists and maybe to most of the doctors. I gradually thinned down the maybes into probablys and by the end of the week I had a temporary-contract consultant post in the Department of Psychology at St Clementine’s in Shoreditch. I had phone calls from Thelma asking me what the hell was going on and Sarah telling me that I’d done the right thing and that a friend of hers had gone to America for a year and did I want to borrow his flat in Stoke Newington which was just a couple of streets from the park. I did. The only problem was that it was near Arsenal’s football ground and was overrun on alternate Saturdays and occasional weekends and did I mind? I didn’t.

In the gaps I kept phoning Chris Angeloglou. They were waiting for the laboratory results. Chris was out and yes, so was DI Baird. They couldn’t be reached. They were in a meeting. They were in court. They’d gone home. On Friday morning, the day before I was to move out, I rang Stamford police station once more and was put through to an assistant. Unfortunately DC Angeloglou and DI Baird were unavailable. That was all right, I said, I just wanted to leave a message. Did she have a piece of paper? Good. I wanted to warn Angeloglou and Baird that I was about to offer an interview to a national newspaper in which I would give the full story of the Mackenzie murder case as I saw it, together with my indictment of the police role in failing to reopen the case. Thank you.

I replaced the receiver and began to count. One, two, three… On twenty-seven, the phone rang.

‘Sam?’

‘Rupert, how are you?’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want to know what you’re doing.’

‘Do you think it’s constructive to make wild threats?’

‘Yes, and I’ll tell you what I really want. I want a meeting at Stamford police station.’ There was a long pause. ‘Rupert, are you there?’

‘Of course. We’d be happy to see you. I was about to ring you anyway.’

‘Apart from you and Chris, I want Philip Kale there.’

‘All right.’

‘And whoever was in charge of the case.’

‘I was.’

‘I want to talk to the organ-grinder, not his monkey.’

‘I’m not sure that the organ-grinder is available.’

‘He’d better be.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Ask Kale to bring his autopsy reports on the Mackenzie couple.’

‘I’ll see what I can do, Sam, and ring you back.’

‘Don’t bother. I’ll be with you at twelve.’

‘That’s too little time.’

‘You’ve had lots of time, Rupert.’

As soon as I identified myself at the front desk, a young WPC hustled me through the building and into an empty interview room. When she returned with coffee, Angeloglou and Baird were with her. They nodded at me and sat down. It felt as if it were my office, not theirs.

‘Where are the others?’

Baird looked questioningly at Angeloglou.

‘Kale’s on the phone,’ Chris said. ‘He’ll be along in a minute. Val just popped up for the Super.’

Baird turned to me.

‘Satisfied?’ he asked with not too much of a hint of sarcasm.

‘This isn’t some kind of game, Rupert.’

There was a knock at the door, then it opened and a man peered in. He was middle-aged, balding, obviously in charge. He held his hand out to me.

‘Dr Laschen,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. I’m Bill Day. I’m the head of the Stamford CID. I think we owe you an apology.’

I shook his hand.

‘As I was just explaining to Rupert here,’ I said, ‘I’m not conducting some personal campaign here and I’m not interested in claiming credit. It’s just about catching a murderer.’

‘Well, that’s meant to be our job,’ Day said with a laugh that turned into a sort of cough.

‘Which is why I’m here.’

‘Good, good,’ said Day. ‘Rupert said you wanted me to be here and that’s quite understandable. Unfortunately I’ve just popped out of a very important meeting and I must pop back. But I can assure you of our full cooperation. If you are dissatisfied in any way, I want you to contact me personally. Here’s my… er…’ He rummaged in his pockets and produced a slightly dog-eared business card and handed it to me. ‘I’ll leave you in Rupert’s capable hands. Good to meet you, Dr Laschen.’ We shook hands once more and he drifted out, almost bumping into Philip Kale as he did so. The four of us sat down.

‘Well?’ said Rupert. ‘Who is going to start?’

‘I was tempted to bring a lawyer with me,’ I said.

‘Why? Are you planning to confess?’ Rupert asked cheerfully.

‘No, I thought it might be prudent to make sure that there was some independent record of this meeting.’

‘That will be quite unnecessary. We’re all on the same side. Now, what was it you wanted to see us about?’

‘Jesus, Rupert, what is this charade? All right, if you insist.’ I took out my wallet and rummaged in it until I found the blue form. ‘Last week I handed in some evidence that in my view justified reopening the Mackenzie murder case. Receipt number SD4071/A. I suggested that the blood type be established. Has that been done?’

‘It has,’ said Dr Kale.

‘What was it?’

Kale didn’t even look down at his notes.

‘The blood sample derived from the Finn initial on the drawing was type A rhesus D positive.’

‘And you have no doubt about the identity of the body in the burning car?’

Kale shook his head.

‘The dental records were unambiguous. But just to dispel any doubt, DC Angeloglou has established that over the last couple of years, Fiona Mackenzie was a blood donor.’ Kale allowed himself a thin smile. ‘A group O blood donor.’

‘Just out of interest,’ I asked, ‘what were the blood groups of the parents?’

Kale rummaged through his file.

‘Leopold Mackenzie was B.’ He rummaged somemore. ‘And his wife was A. Nice.’

I gave what must have sounded close to a witch’s cackle.

Angeloglou looked puzzled.

‘So if we’d only checked, it would have been clear that she couldn’t have been their daughter,’ he said.

I couldn’t help giving a cross sigh.

‘No, Chris,’ said Kale. ‘If one parent is A and the other B, then the children can be any of the four basic blood groups. Which Michael Daley would have known.’

There was a very long silence. I was trembling with excitement and I had to force myself to maintain my composure. I didn’t want to speak because I couldn’t trust myself not to say ‘I told you so’ in some form of words. Philip Kale ostentatiously began to put papers in order. Angeloglou and Baird looked uneasy. Finally Baird muttered something.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Why didn’t we get a sample of her blood at the scene?’

‘The only traces at the scene were those of the parents,’ said Kale. ‘It didn’t occur to me that her blood group was an issue.’

‘I had her in my bloody car,’ said Baird. ‘I had both of them in my bloody car. They’ll probably demolish this police station and plough the land. Turn it into a ceremonial park, with Chris and me as park keepers. With all his scientific skills,’ these last words were stressed viciously, ‘Phil there could operate one of those pointy things for picking up litter.’

Angeloglou mouthed an obscenity that I could lip-read from across the room. He was taking immense pains to avoid my gaze. My arms were crossed and I carefully pushed my right hand under the upper left arm and pinched the soft flesh hard, so that there was no chance of a triumphant smile.

‘What’s your version of events now?’ I asked in a studiously sombre tone, trying not to stress the word ‘now’ too much.

Rupert was drawing an interlocking grid of squares and triangles on a sheet of white paper on the table. These were then filled in with a series of shadings and cross-hatchings. As he spoke, he never once raised his eyes.

‘Michael Daley faced a double challenge,’ he said. ‘He had to murder the entire Mackenzie family and he had to obtain the money. The first was no good without the second. The second was impractical without the first. So he hit on something so simple, so out in the open, that nobody spotted it. He had a collaborator who looked a bit like Finn – only the roughest resemblance was necessary, since she would never meet anybody who had met the real Finn. And, as her doctor, he knew better than anybody that Finn’s appearance had changed drastically. Any photograph that was published at the time of the murders would be old and of Finn before her anorexia. The collaborator – I’ll call her X – had dark hair and was about the same size, perhaps a little smaller, but that was all to the good. Michael was monitoring the actions of animal rights terrorists, so he knew about the threat to Mackenzie. It’s impossible now to establish exactly, but it is to be assumed that the real Finn was abducted and killed and stowed in the boat-house on the day or evening of the seventeenth. Her parents were of course murdered early in the morning of the following day. Fiona Mackenzie was a reasonably gregarious young woman, used to travelling. The Mackenzies wouldn’t have been surprised if she was out late. The keys obtained were used to gain entry. The couple were killed and Finn, I mean X, dressed herself in Finn’s nightie and Michael made an incision in her throat when the maid was due to arrive. Her face was gagged so the difference in appearance of the similar-looking girl in Finn’s clothes, in Finn’s bedroom, went unnoticed. That was the situation that we encountered.’

‘How could they plan something so risky?’ Angeloglou asked, shaking his head. ‘How could they possibly assume that they could get away with it?’

‘Some people would be willing to run quite a risk for, what was it, eighteen million or so? Anyway, if you have the nerve to try it, was it all that risky? The girl is under a perceived threat, so she is kept secure. Of course, she had to refuse to see anybody who knew Fiona Mackenzie, but there are no immediate family and anyway, it’s an understandable reaction from a traumatized young girl, wouldn’t you say, Dr Laschen?’

‘I believe that was the professional opinion I expressed at the time,’ I said in a hollow tone.

‘And the matter of identity is never in question because the trusty family doctor is on hand to talk to her and to offer medical details such as her blood group from a faked version of Finn’s medical file.’

‘And Finn’s, that is, X’s hospital file has gone missing,’ I added.

‘Would it have been possible for Daley to have gained access to the file?’ Baird asked.

‘I did, or would have done, if Daley hadn’t got there first.’

‘What was necessary was for X to take the role of Finn for long enough to allow her to write a will leaving everything to Daley. The only skill that was required was the rudimentary one of reproducing Fiona Mackenzie’s signature. There was one hiccup. The family’s cleaner expressed a wish to see Fiona before she returned to Spain. This would have ruined everything.’

‘So Mrs Ferrer was murdered,’ I interjected. ‘Michael went there and suffocated her. Then returned with me. Any signs of struggle, and traces left by him, could be explained by his supposed attempt at reviving her.’

Rupert shifted uncomfortably in his seat and continued.

‘Then, all that was necessary was to stage a suicide, using the corpse of the real Fiona Mackenzie. That was why it was so important for the car to be set on fire. Daley didn’t need an alibi for the Mackenzie killings because he wasn’t a suspect. But he arranged to be out of the country when X drove Danny’s car up the coast and set it on fire.’

‘It was perfect,’ I said, in admiration, despite myself. ‘The suicide of somebody who was already dead and an alibi created by somebody who nobody knew existed. If there had been any suspicions, they could test Finn’s body as much as they wanted. And poor Danny, Danny…’

‘Rees must have stumbled on the scene when she was pulling out the day you were out.’

I looked down at my coffee. It was filmy, cold. I felt shame burning through my body.

‘I kept her in my house, with my child, with my lover. Danny was murdered. I’ve devoted my professional life to the analysis of psychological states and I’ve been made to dance like a puppet by this young girl. She mimicked trauma, she mimicked friendship, everything. The more I think about it the worse it gets. She didn’t want to go to the funeral. I see it as a symptom. She wants to destroy all of the real Finn’s clothes. I see it as therapeutic. She’s permanently vague about her past. I see it as a necessary stage. She confides in me that she feels no connection with her earlier, fat self and I see it as a sign of her capacity to recover.’

Rupert finally looked up from his drawing.

‘Don’t feel bad about it, Sam,’ he said. ‘You’re a doctor, not a detective. Life goes on, such as it does, because most of us assume that the people we’re dealing with are not psychopaths or frauds.’ He glanced at Chris. ‘We’re the ones who are supposed to be detectives, unfortunately.’

‘But what would have happened?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘After the fake suicide of Finn.’

‘All very simple,’ said Chris. ‘Daley gets the money. Then, a year or two later, we would hear rumours which would say something like: poor Daley has checked in with Gamblers Anonymous. Gone off the rails, lost half his money or whatever at the racetrack. In fact, it will have gone in cash to pay off…’ Chris opened his hands, acknowledging defeat, ‘X.’

‘Have you any idea at all who this young lady might be ?’ I asked. ‘A patient? An old friend? A previous girlfriend?’

Nobody answered.

‘She might have a criminal record,’ I ventured.

‘Who might?’ Rupert asked flatly. ‘We only have one link with her.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You knew her better than anybody.’

‘Are you mad? I didn’t know her at all.’

‘All we ask,’ said Chris, ‘is that you try to think. You don’t have to tell us now. Just try to remember anything, anything at all she might have said or done that could give a clue as to her real identity.’

‘I can answer you straight away. I’ve spent days going through every memory, everything she told me, any conversation I can recall. It was all fake. What can I say? She could cook. She could do simple magic tricks. But the more I think, the more she becomes like a nothing. All the things she said, all that she did, were just so much dust thrown in my eyes. When I get beyond it she’s not there. I’m afraid I’m not much help. So what are you going to do now?’

Rupert got up and stretched, his hand touching the polystyrene tiles on the ceiling.

‘We’ll conduct an investigation.’

‘When are you announcing the reopening of the case?’

Was it my imagination or did I see him take a deep breath, steeling himself for what he was about to say?

‘We’re not announcing it.’

‘Why not?’

Rupert cleared his throat.

‘After consultations at the highest level we have decided that we might improve our prospects if the murderer doesn’t know that we are after her. She has missed out on the money. She might make a mistake.’

‘Who might? How would you notice?’

Rupert mumbled something.

‘Rupert,’ I said sharply. ‘Is this a way of burying the case?’

He looked shocked.

‘Absolutely not, that accusation is unworthy of you, but I know you’ve been under stress. It’s just the most effective way to proceed and I’m confident it will produce results. Now, I think we’ve explored everything useful. When are you going to London?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘You’ll leave your address with us, won’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. If anything occurs to you, if anything happens, just get in touch.’ He held out his hand. ‘We’re very grateful to you. Sam, for the way in which you have enabled the truth of these tragic events to be arrived at.’

I took his hand.

‘I’m glad you’re grateful, Rupert. And if I ever suspect this case is being hushed up…’

‘Trust us,’ said Rupert. ‘Trust us.’

I emerged, blinking, into the pedestrian precinct on the edge of the market square and bumped into an old woman and tipped her wheeled shopping basket over. As I retrieved onions and carrots from the pavement, I felt like a child who had woken from a dream and was surprised to find the world carrying on unaffected. Yet I felt that I was still in my hermetic dream. I still had places to go.

Thirty-Seven

There followed a weekend of boxes, an interested child, a disturbed cat, a large van, flirtatious removal men, mugs of tea, arrangements, bunches of keys, and my own rented storage space, reserving about 5 per cent of my possessions for the temporary flat.

Amid the bustle of obligations there were two things I really needed to do. First of all, I had a sheaf of requests for interviews and I browsed through them and rang a couple of friends who read newspapers and asked their advice, and then on the Monday morning I rang Sally Yates at the Participant. Within an hour she was sitting with a mug of coffee, a notebook and a poised pen in the kitchen of a man working in America for a year. Yates was plump, rumpled, sympathetic, very likeable and left long silences which I was presumably meant to fill with confidences about my private life. Don’t try to kid a ladder. I was experienced enough in the interviewing of vulnerable people to be able to create a reasonable facsimile of the nobly suffering woman. I wasn’t as impressive as Finn, as X, but I was all right. I had decided precisely the unguarded intimacies I would offer – about the pain of losing a lover, about crime and physical fear, about anguish and the irony of a trauma specialist suffering from trauma herself: ‘There’s a medical maxim that you always get the condition that you specialize in,’ I said, but with a sad smile and a sniff, as if I was about to shed a tear.

Then, at the end, came the statement for which I had set up the entire interview.

‘So now you’ve escaped it all…’ said Sally Yates, sympathetically, her sentence fizzling out so that I could pick up its thread.

‘But, Sally,’ I said, ‘both as a doctor and as a woman, I wonder whether we ever can escape experiences just by running away from them.’ I left a long pause, apparently too upset to trust myself to speak without losing control. Sally reached across the kitchen table and put her hand on mine. As if with a great effort, I began to speak again: ‘This has been a personal tragedy and – with the new post-traumatic stress unit, a professional falling-out – and at the heart of it are people who were not what they seemed.’

‘You mean Dr Michael Daley?’ Sally asked, her brow furrowed in deep concern.

‘No, I don’t,’ I said and when she looked quizzical gestured that I could say no more.

As we stood on the landing, saying goodbye, I hugged her.

‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘You got me to say things I never intended.’

Her cheeks flushed with pleasure, quickly suppressed.

‘It was very special to meet you,’ she said, holding me even tighter than I was holding her.

The newspaper was clearly eager because less than two hours later a photographer arrived. The young man was disappointed that my daughter was out but placed me next to a vase of flowers instead. I gazed soulfully at them, wondering what sort they were. I was rewarded the next day with a large photograph and a headline: ‘Sam Laschen: female heroism and the mystery that will not die.’ Not particularly snappy, but it would send a shot across the bows of DI Baird and his merry crew. Next time I would be less mysterious.

I had a second task, a larger and more painful one. A friend had vaguely offered the services of her childminder in an emergency. This was an emergency. I took Elsie round the corner to a chaotic terraced house containing a Spanish teenager and a beetle-browed five-year-old. Elsie stomped in and didn’t even turn to say goodbye. I got into my car and headed west. I would be going against the traffic in both directions.

I found Saint Anne’s Church, on the Avonmouth side of Bristol, easily, and walked through its gate and into the green quiet of the graveyard holding my bunch of spring flowers. It was easy to tell which grave was Danny’s: among all the mossy grey headstones, whose names were scarcely decipherable, his mottled pink slab was starkly new. Someone had put flowers there. I looked at the black lettering: Daniel Rees, Beloved Son and Brother. I grimaced. That shut me out effectively enough. 1956-1996: he’d not made it to the birthday party we’d talked of throwing. I’d grow old, my face would change and wrinkle, my body would develop the aches and pains and fragilities of age, would bend and suffer, and he would be always young, always strong and beautiful in my memory.

I looked down at the six feet of ugly pink marble and shuddered. Under there, his gorgeous body, which I’d held so close when it was warm and full of desire, was charred and now rotting. His face, the lips that had explored me and the mouth that had smiled at me and the eyes that had gazed, was mouldering away. I sat down beside the headstone, put one hand on the grave as if it were a warm flank, stroked it.

‘I know you can’t hear me, Danny,’ I said into the windless silence. Even speaking his name out loud made my chest ache. ‘I know you’re not there, or anywhere else either. But I needed to come here.’

I looked around. There was no one in the churchyard at all. I couldn’t even hear the sound of a bird. Only the cars on the main road a few hundred yards away disturbed the hush. So I took off my jacket, laid aside my bag, took the flowers off the slab and lay down on it myself, cheek to the cold stone. I stretched my length out on top of Danny as I sometimes still did in my dreams.

I cried messily, self-pityingly, in a flood of easy grief, as I lay upon the grave; salt tears puddled on the stone. I cried for my dear life. I allowed myself to remember our first meeting, the first time we went to bed together, outings with Elsie – just the blessed three of us, not knowing how lucky we were. I thought about his death. I knew that I was going to be all right; one day I would probably meet someone else and the whole process of falling in love would begin again, but just now I felt cold and lonely to my bones. The wind sighed through the graveyard; all those dead bones lying under their inscriptions.

So I pulled myself stiffly to my feet. When I spoke I felt absurdly self-conscious, as if I were acting the part of a grieving widow in some stilted amateur dramatic production: ‘So this is it. This is my goodbye.’ Yet I couldn’t stop saying it, melodramatic as it was. I just couldn’t bring myself to say it for the very last time. ‘Goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye.’

And then I put on my jacket, picked up my bag, placed the two bunches of flowers back on the stone, just so, walked out of the graveyard and never once looked back through the latch gate at the place where he lay. And if I drove fast enough, I’d be back in time to put Elsie to bed, sing her a song before she slept.

Thirty-Eight

The telephone was ringing as I ran up the stairs, files under one arm and holding two bags full of supper for that evening. I tripped over Anatoly, cursed, dropped the bags and scooped up the phone just as the answering machine clicked on.

‘Hold on,’ I said breathlessly over my courteous, recorded voice, ‘this’ll switch off in a bit.’

‘Sam, it’s Miriam. I’m just checking on tonight. Are you still on?’

‘Of course. The film begins at 8.30 and I’ve told the others to meet at 8.20 outside. I’ve bought some ready-meals to eat back here afterwards. It’ll be lovely to see you again.’

I unpacked the food into the fridge. Elsie and Sophie would probably be back from the park in an hour or so. They’d be surprised to see me here before them. I went through to my bedroom (though personally I thought ‘box room’ would have been a more precise description of a space in which I had to squeeze past a small chest to get to my single bed) and picked up the pile of dirty clothes in the corner, shoved them into the washing machine.

A pile of bills lay on the kitchen table, a pile of dishes teetered in the small sink, books and CDs were standing in crooked towers along all the skirting boards. The rubbish bin was overflowing. Elsie’s bedroom door opened on to a scene of extraordinary chaos. The plants which numerous friends had given to me when I moved here were wilting in their pots. I sloshed water over them recklessly, humming one of Elsie’s absurd little ditties as I did so, making lists in my head. Ring the travel agent. Ring the bank. Remember to speak to Elsie’s teacher tomorrow. Ring estate agent in the morning. Buy present for Olivia’s fortieth birthday. Go through the report on the Harrogate train disaster. Write that promised paper for the Lancet. Get someone to come round and fit a cat flap for Anatoly.

The key turned in the lock and Sophie staggered in, laden with Elsie’s picnic box and skipping rope.

‘Hi,’ I said, as I searched through the letters scattered over the table for the note from the ferry company. ‘You’re back early. But where’s Elsie?’

‘The most extraordinary thing happened!’ She dumped her load on the table and sat down, plump and glossy in her fake-leopard-skin leggings and her tight and shiny T-shirt. ‘We met your sister just as we were going into Clissold park. Elsie seemd really pleased to see her, rushed into her arms. She said she’d bring her back in a bit. I last saw them going hand in hand into the park. Bobbie, that’s her name, isn’t it, was going to buy her an ice-cream.’

‘I didn’t know she was going to be here,’ I said, surprised. ‘Did she say what she was doing?’

‘Yeah. She said her husband had dropped her off on the way to some meeting or other and she’d been choosing curtains in that really swanky fabric shop along Church Street. Anyway, she can tell you herself later. Do you want me to make you a cup of tea?’

‘Coming all the way to London to buy curtains. That’s my sister. And then, now that we’ve got time and no child, we could make a start on sorting the books and CDs. I want everything in alphabetical order.’

We’d got as far as G, and I was covered in dust and sweat, when the phone rang. It was my sister.

‘Bobbie, this is a lovely surprise. Where are you? When will you be here?’

‘What?’ Bobbie sounded quite bewildered.

‘Shall I come and meet you in the park?’

‘What park? What are you going on about Sam? I rang up to see if Mum had rung you, she…’

‘Hang on.’ My mouth had gone strangely dry. ‘Where are you speaking from, Bobbie?’

‘Well, from home of course.’

‘You’re not with Elsie?’

‘Of course I’m not with Elsie, I have no idea what…’

But I was gone, slamming down the phone on her bewilderment, yelling to Sophie to call the police immediately and tell them that Elsie had been kidnapped, pounding down the narrow stairs, two at a time, heart bumping in my chest, please let her be all right, please let her be all right. I fell through the front door and sprinted, feet hurting on the hot pavement. Up the street, pushing past old ladies and women with buggies and young men with large dogs. Through the slow trudge of people coming home from work. Across the road as horns blared and drivers wound down their windows to curse.

Through the iron gates of Clissold park, past the little-bridge and the overfed ducks, the deer who nosed at the high fencing with their velvet muzzles, along the avenue of chestnut trees. I ran and I looked, my eyes scattering from small shape to small shape. So many children and none of them mine. I tore into the playground. Boys and girls in bright anoraks were swinging, sliding, jumping, climbing. I stood between the see-saw and the sand-pit, where last month the park warden had found used syringes scattered, and stared wildly around.

‘Elsie!’ I yelled. ‘Elsie!’

She wasn’t there, although I saw her in every child and heard her in every scream. I looked over to where the paddling pond lay turquoise and deserted, then ran on, to the café, to the large ponds at the bottom of the park where we always fed bread to the ducks and the quarrelsome Canada geese. I peered over the fence to where crumbs and bits of litter drifted, as if I would see her little body drifting under the oily water. Then I started to run up the other side of the park. ‘Elsie!’ I called at intervals, ‘Elsie darling, where are you?’ but I never expected a reply and I received none. I started to stop people, a woman with a child about her age, a group of teenagers on skateboards, an elderly couple holding hands.

‘Have you seen a little girl?’ I asked. ‘A little girl in a dark blue coat, with blonde hair? With a woman?’

One man thought he had. He waved his hand vaguely towards the circle of rosebushes behind us. A little boy whose mother I accosted said he’d seen a little girl in blue sitting on the bench, that bench, and he pointed towards the empty seat.

She was nowhere. I shut my eyes and played nightmares in my head: Elsie being dragged along, screaming; Elsie being pushed into a car and driven off; Elsie being hurt; Elsie calling and calling for me. This wasn’t helping. I ran back towards the park gates again, stumbling, my side hurting, fear burning into my stomach like acid. Every so often I called her name, and crowds parted to let me through, a mad woman.

I raced into the cemetery close by Clissold park, because if someone wanted to drag someone off and harm them, this would be the obvious place. Brambles tore at my clothes. I tripped over old gravestones, saw couples, teenagers in groups, no children. I called and I shouted and I knew that this was futile because the place was huge and full of hidden corners, and even if Elsie was here there was no way I would find her.

So I went home, hope that she’d be waiting for me turning my stomach to water. But she wasn’t there. Sophie met me, her face scared and baffled. Two police officers were there also. One of them, a woman, was on the phone. I gasped out what had happened – that it hadn’t been my sister in the park – but they’d already had a fragmentary account from Sophie.

‘It’s my fault,’ she was saying, and I could hear hysteria in her normally undemonstrative voice, ‘it’s all my fault.’

‘No’, I replied wearily, ‘how could you have known?’

‘Elsie seemed so happy to go off with her. I don’t understand. She doesn’t take easily to strangers.’

‘This was no stranger.’

No, I didn’t have a photograph of Elsie. At least not here. And as I embarked on a detailed description of my daughter, the doorbell rang. I ran down the stairs once more, opened the door. Then my eyes slid down from the smiling face of another uniformed policeman to a little girl in a blue coat who was licking the last of an orange ice-lolly. I sank to my knees on the pavement, and for a moment I thought I was going to throw up all over the policeman’s shiny shoes. I put my arms around her body, buried my face into her squashy stomach.

‘Careful of my lolly,’ she said, a note of concern at last.

I stood up and hoisted her into my arms. The policeman grinned at me.

‘A young lady found her wandering around in the park and handed her over to me,’ he said. ‘And this clever little girl remembered her address.’ He chucked Elsie under the chin. ‘Keep a better eye on her next time,’ he said. He looked round at the other two police officers who were coming down the stairs towards us. ‘Little girl wandered off.’ The officers nodded at each other. The woman walked past me and began to say something into her radio, cancelling something. The other raised a weary eyebrow at his colleague. Another mad mother.

‘Well, not exactly…’ I started to say and then gave up. ‘What did she look like, the woman who “found” her?’

The policeman shrugged.

‘Young woman. I said you might want to thank her personally but she said it was nothing.’

With an imitation of effusive thanks, I managed to close the front door and be alone with my daughter.

‘Elsie,’ I said. ‘Who’ve you been with?’

She looked up at me, her mouth smeared orange. ‘You lied,’ she said. ‘She came back to life. I knew she would.’

Thirty-Nine

My film excursion, all that was cancelled. It was just Elsie and me at home once more and I gave her exactly what she wanted. Tinned rice pudding with golden syrup dripped on to it in the shape of a baby horse.

‘It is a horse,’ I insisted. ‘Look, there’s the tail and there are the pointy ears.’

It was an overwhelming effort but I made myself be casual.

‘And how was Finn?’

‘Fine,’ said Elsie heedlessly, otherwise engaged in spiralling the golden-syrup pattern in the rice pudding with her spoon.

‘That looks lovely, Elsie. Are you going to eat some of it? Good. What did you and Finn do?’

‘We saw chickens.’

I manoeuvred Elsie into the bath and I blew bubbles with my fingers.

‘That’s a giant bubble, Mummy.’

‘Shall I try and do an even bigger one? What did you and Finn talk about?’

‘We talked and we talked and we talked.’

‘There’s two little baby bubbles. What did you talk about?’

‘We talked about our house.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘Can I sleep in your bed, Mummy?’

I carried her through to my bed and I gratefully felt her warm wetness through my shirt. She told me to take off my clothes and I took them off and we lay beneath the sheets together. I found a brush on the bedside table and we brushed each other’s hair. We sang some songs and I taught her to clip up, the game in which I turned my big fist and she turned her little fist into a stone, some paper or scissors. Stone blunts scissors, scissors cut paper and paper wraps stone. Each time we did it, she waited for me to show what I was going to do and then made her own decision so that she could win and I accused her of cheating and we both laughed. It was an intensely happy time and I had to stop myself at every moment from running out of the room and howling. I might have done it but I couldn’t bear the notion of letting Elsie out of my sight for a moment.

‘When can we see Fing again?’ she asked, out of nowhere.

I couldn’t think what to say.

‘It’s funny that you talked about our house with… with Finn,’ I said. ‘It must be because you played such lovely games there with her.’

‘No,’ said Elsie firmly.

I couldn’t help smiling at her.

‘Why not?’

‘It wasn’t that house, Mummy.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It was our safe house.’

‘How lovely, my darling.’ I held Elsie close against my body.

‘Ow, you’re hurting.’

‘Sorry, my love. And did she put things into the safe house?’

‘Yes,’ said Elsie, who had started to examine my eyebrow. ‘There’s a white hair there.’

I felt a vertiginous nausea as if I were staring into a black chasm.

‘Yes, I know. Funny, isn’t it?’ Without disturbing Elsie, I felt behind me for the pencil and pad of paper that I had seen next to the phone on the bedside table. ‘Shall we go into the safe house?’

‘What colour is your eye?’

‘Ow!’ I howled as an interested finger poked my left eye.

‘Sorry, Mummy.’

‘It’s blue.’

‘What’s mine?’

‘Blue. Elsie, shall we go into the safe house and have a look? Elsie?’

‘Oh, all right,’ she said like a truculent adolescent.

‘All right, my darling, close your eyes. That’s right. Let’s walk up the path. What’s on the door?’

‘There’s round leaves.’

‘Round leaves? That’s a funny thing. Let’s open the door and see what’s down on the doormat.’

‘There’s a glass of milk.’

I noted it down.

‘A glass of milk on a doormat?’ I said in my best nursery-school teacher’s tone. ‘How strange! Let’s walk carefully round the glass of milk, without spilling it, and into the kitchen. What’s in the kitchen?’

‘A drum.’

‘A drum in the kitchen? What a mad house! Let’s go and see what’s on TV, shall we ? What’s on the television ?’

‘A pear.’

‘That’s nice. You like pears, don’t you? But let’s not have a bite of the pear yet. Don’t touch it. I saw you touch it.’ Elsie giggled. ‘Let’s go upstairs. What’s on the stairs?’

‘A drum.’

‘Another drum. Are you sure?’

‘Ye-e-es, Mum,’ Elsie said impatiently.

‘All right. This is a lovely game, isn’t it? Now, I wonder what’s in the bath.’

‘A ring.’

‘That’s a funny thing to have in a bath. Maybe it fell off your finger when you were splashing in the bath?’

‘It did not!’ Elsie shouted.

‘Now we’ll get out of the bath and go into Elsie’s bed. What’s in the bed?’

Elsie laughed.

‘There’s a swan in the bed.’

‘A swan in a bed. How is Elsie going to get to sleep if there’s a swan in her bed?’ Elsie’s eyes were starting to nutter, her head wobbling. She would be asleep in a second. ‘Now let’s go into Mummy’s bedroom. Who’s in Mummy’s bed?’

Now Elsie’s voice sounded as if she was drifting away.

‘Mummy’s in Mummy’s bed,’ she said softly. ‘And Elsie’s in Mummy’s arms. And their eyes are closed.’

‘That’s beautiful,’ I said. But I saw that Elsie was already asleep. I leaned across and stroked some strands of hair away from her face. Paul, the mysterious absent proprietor of the flat, had a desk in the corner of his bedroom and I tiptoed over to it and sat down with the notebook. I brushed my neck gently with my fingertips and felt the pulse in my carotid artery. It must have been close to 120. Today the murderer of my lover had kidnapped my little daughter. Why hadn’t she killed her or done something with her? Suddenly I rushed to the bathroom. I didn’t vomit. I took a few deep slow breaths, but it was a close thing. I returned to the desk, switched on the small light and scrutinized my notes.

The murderer, X, had seized my daughter, risking capture, and all so that she could play one of the silly little mind games we used to play together at my house in the country with her. When Elsie told me what they had done, I expected something grisly, but instead there was this stupid collection of mundane objects: round leaves, a glass of milk, a drum, a pear, another drum, a ring, a swan and then Elsie and me in my bed with our eyes closed. What are round leaves? I drew little sketches of them. I took the first letter of each and played around with them uselessly. I tried to make some connection with where each object had been put. Was there something deliberately paradoxical about a swan in a bed, about a glass of milk on the doormat? Perhaps this nameless woman had put random objects into my child’s mind as a means of demonstrating her power.

I left the scrawled piece of paper and returned to bed and lay next to Elsie, listening for the sound of her breath, feeling the expansion and contraction of her chest. Just when I was feeling that I had gone a whole night without sleep and wondering how I could possibly get through a whole day, I was woken up by Elsie pulling my eyelids apart. I gave a groan.

‘What’s happening today, Elsie?’

‘Don’t know.’

It was the first day at her new school. On the phone my mother had been disapproving. Elsie is not a piece of furniture that can just be moved out of London and then back again whenever you want. She needs stability and a home. Yes, I knew what my mother was saying. That she needed a father and brothers and sisters and, preferably, a mother as unlike me as possible. I was brisk and cheerful with my mother on the phone and cried when she had rung off and got cross, depressed and then felt better. The primary school was obliged to take Elsie because the flat we were staying in virtually overlooked the playground.

I felt an ache in my stomach as Elsie, in a new yellow dress, with her hair combed flat and tied in a ribbon, walked across the road with me to her new school. I saw small children arriving and greeting each other. How could Elsie survive in this? We went to the office and a middle-aged woman smiled at Elsie and Elsie glared at the middle-aged woman. She led us along to the Reception class, held in an annexe. The teacher was a young woman, with dark hair, and a calm manner that I immediately envied. She came over immediately and hugged Elsie.

‘Hello, Elsie. Do you want Mummy to stay for a little bit?’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Elsie with a thunderous brow.

‘Well, give her a hug bye-bye, then.’

I held her and felt her small hands on the back of my neck.

‘All right?’ I asked.

She nodded.

‘Elsie, why are the leaves round?’

She smiled.

‘We had round leaves on our door.’

‘When?’

‘For Father Christmas.’

Round leaves. She meant a garland. I was unable to speak. I kissed Elsie on her forehead and ran out of the classroom and down the corridor. Emergency, I shouted at a disapproving teacher. I sprinted across the road, up the stairs to the flat. There was a pain in my chest and a bad taste in my mouth. I was unfit. Almost everything was in storage but I had a couple of cardboard boxes full of Elsie’s books. I tipped one of them on to the floor and scrambled among them. It wasn’t there. I tipped the other one over. There. The Twelve Days of Christmas Picture Book. I took it into the bedroom and sat at the desk. That was it. The swans a-swimming. Five gold rings. The drummers drumming. And a par-tri-idge in a pear tree. But what about the glass of milk? I flicked through the book, wondering if I was on the wrong track somehow. No. I allowed myself a half-smile. Eight maids a-milking. So, a contorted reference to a Christmas song. What was the point of it?

I jotted them down in the order Elsie had visited them: eight maids a-milking, nine drummers drumming, a partridge in a pear tree, nine drummers drumming again, five gold rings, seven swans swimming. I stared at the list and then suddenly the objects seemed to recede and the numerals to float free. Eight, nine, one, nine, five, seven. Such a familiar number. I grabbed the phone and dialled. Nothing. Of course. I dialled directory inquiries and got the Otley area code, then dialled again. There was no ring, just a continuous tone. Had it been cut off when I moved out? In confusion I rang Rupert at Stamford CID.

‘I was about to call you,’ were his first words.

‘I wanted to tell you…’ I stopped myself. ‘Why?’

‘Nobody’s been hurt, there’s nothing to worry about, but I’m afraid there’s been a fire. Your house burned down last night.’ I couldn’t speak. ‘Are you there, Sam?’

‘Yes. How? What happened?’

‘I don’t know. But it’s been so dry and hot. There’s been a rash of fires. Could be some electrical fault. We’ll have a careful look. We’ll know soon.’

‘Yes.’

‘Funny thing you should ring just now. What did you want to say?’

I thought of Elsie’s words as she had fallen asleep last night.

‘Mummy’s in Mummy’s bed. And Elsie’s in Mummy’s arms. And their eyes are closed.’ Were we asleep and safe or were we dead and cold like the pairs of bodies that X had already looked down on? Leo and Liz Mackenzie. Danny and Finn, brought together in death.

‘Nothing really,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to see how things were going.’

‘It’s progressing,’ he said.

I didn’t believe him.

Forty

Mark, the young estate agent, rang me later in the afternoon.

‘I hope you’ve got an alibi,’ he said cheerily.

‘Now, look here…’

‘Joke, Dr Laschen. No harm was done.’

‘My house was burned down.’

‘Nobody was hurt, that’s the main thing. But the other thing, not that I’d put it that way myself, but the main thing with a silver lining is that you are insured and some people might at a time like this point out that you will do better by your house burning down than you would have done by selling it.’

‘How can that be?’

‘It’s not that I’d say it myself, but some properties have been slow to move off our books and the sales tend to go to properties that are competitively priced. Very competitively priced.’

‘But I thought my house was so extremely saleable.’

‘Theoretically speaking, it was.’

‘You sound very chipper about the whole thing. Were you insured as well?’

‘Inasmuch as we are required to take certain financial precautions.’

‘So we both seem to have done rather well out of this disaster.’

‘There may be one or two forms to sign on our behalf. Perhaps we could discuss them over a drink.’

‘Send them. Bye, Mark.’

I replaced the receiver wondering whether the fire had been a warning or a perverse gift from a woman who knew my pyromaniacal tendencies, or both.

‘She’s been fine,’ said Miss Olds when I went to collect Elsie. ‘A bit tired this afternoon, but she sat on my lap and we read a book together. Didn’t we, Elsie?’

Elsie, who had given me a casual wave when she saw me, had wandered over to the home corner, where she and another little girl were wordlessly arranging plastic food on plastic plates and pretending to eat it. She looked up at the teacher’s words, but only nodded.

‘Things have been very, ah, disruptive for her recently,’ I said. My heart was still racing in my chest, like a motor car revving up wildly before a race. I clenched my fists together and tried to breathe more slowly.

‘I know,’ said Miss Olds with a smile. She had read the papers too.

I looked over at my daughter again, stopped myself from running across and picking her up and holding her too tight.

‘Yes, so I’m anxious for her to feel safe.’

Miss Olds looked at me sympathetically. She had deep brown eyes and a subtle mole just above her top lip. ‘I think she’s settling in here.’

‘I’m glad,’ said. Then: ‘Strangers can’t easily just get in and wander around here, can they?’

Miss Olds put her hand lightly on my arm. ‘No,’ she said, ‘they can’t. Though there are limits to the security you can have at a school where two hundred children arrive every morning.’

I grimaced, nodded. Stinging tears fuzzed my vision.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘She’s fine.’

‘Thanks.’

I called to Elsie, held out my hand, and she plodded over in her buttercup-yellow dress, blue felt-tip in a scar down her flushed cheek.

‘Come on, my poppet.’

‘Are we going home?’

‘Yes, home.’

‘At the heart of it are people who were not what they seemed.’ That is what I had said, so slyly, to the journalist. It had been intended as a warning to Rupert Baird but it had been read and taken as a warning by X, whoever she was. She had demonstrated once more that nothing was safe. My house was burned down and she had penetrated the mind of my daughter.

When we got home I put Elsie in a bath, to wash everything off her. She was in there pottering and talking to herself while I sat on the stairs outside and stared at the wall, telling a story to myself. I knew nothing about the girl but I knew a bit about Michael Daley. It was possible that if I investigated his life, I might find the shadow from which the girl had emerged. And I thought of the final image in Elsie’s safe house. Mummy and Elsie lying asleep in each other’s arms. There were two possible ends to the story. Elsie and Mummy dead together. Or Elsie and Mummy living happy ever after. No, that was too much. Living. That was enough. My reverie was interrupted by the ringing of the phone. Baird, of course.

‘I hope you’ve got an alibi,’ he said jocularly, as the estate agent had done before him.

‘You’ll never catch me, copper,’ I replied, and he laughed. Then there was a pause. ‘Is that it?’ I asked.

‘We heard that there was an incident yesterday.’

So they were keeping track of me. This was the moment of decision, but I listened to the splashing and knew that I had already made up my mind.

‘It was a misunderstanding, Rupert. Elsie wandered off in the park. It was nothing.’

‘Are you sure, Sam?’

We were like two chess players testing each other’s defences before agreeing a draw and giving up and going home.

‘Yes, I’m sure, Rupert.’

I could sense the relief at the other end of the line and he said goodbye warmly, saying that he would be in touch, and I knew that this would be the last conversation we ever had.

I lifted Elsie out of the bath and sat her on the sofa in her dressing gown and put a plate of toast and Marmite on her lap.

‘Can I have a video?’

‘Later perhaps, after supper.’

‘Can you read me a book?’

‘Soon I will. First I thought we could play a game together.’

‘Can we play musical bumps?’

‘That’s hard when there’s just the two of us, and one of us has to be in charge of the music. I tell you what, it’s your birthday in a couple of weeks’ time, we’ll play that at your party.’

‘Party? Am I going to have a party? Can I really have a party?’ Her pale face shone under its smudgy freckles. The tip of her pink tongue licked a smear of Marmite from her lip.

‘Listen, that’s part of the game, Elsie. We’re going to plan your party and we’re going to put the most important party things into the safe house.’

‘So we don’t forget!’

‘That’s it, so we don’t forget. Where do we start?’

‘The front door.’ Elsie was wriggling happily on the sofa, one Marmite hand in mine.

‘Right! Let’s take off the garland of leaves. It’s way past Christmas. What should we put there instead, if you’re having a party?’

‘I know, balloons!’

‘Balloons: a red one and a green one and a yellow one and a blue one. Maybe they’ll have faces on them!’ In my mind, I had an image of a line of little girls in their pink and yellow party dresses, all there for Elsie. I remembered the parties I’d been to as a child: sticky chocolate cake and pink-iced biscuits, crisps and fizzy drinks; pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and pass-the-parcel so that everyone won something, dancing games, Simon Says, and at the end a party bag containing one small pack of Smarties, one plastic thing that would be adored for an hour and forgotten for ever, a whistle, a flat shiny balloon. Elsie should have them all, all those cheap and tacky things. ‘And what’s next?’

‘The doormat, the doormat where Fing put a glass of milk.’

‘Yes, well, I think we’ve knocked over that milk by now.’ Elsie giggled. ‘What shall we put there instead?’

‘Um, what can go on a doormat, Mummy?’

‘Well, there’s someone we are very fond of who’s creeping nearer to your Marmite all the time so mind out, and he likes to sleep on the doormat.’

‘Anatoly!’

‘He can be our watch-cat. What shall we put in the kitchen? How about something we’ve cooked?’

Elsie jumped up and down, so that the plate slithered and I caught the toast stickily on my palm. ‘My cake! My cake in the shape of a horse house.’

I remembered. The one at a friend’s birthday party with the walls made of chocolate flakes and plastic horses in the middle, and Elsie had been sick half-way through. I hugged her.

‘Horse cake. Now, what’s on the TV?’ She puckered her brow. ‘How about my birthday present to you ? Something you’ve wanted for a long time, maybe something that sings.’

Her body went still.

‘Really, Mummy, do you promise? Can I really?’

‘We’ll choose it together this weekend. A canary on top of the TV then, singing away.’

‘Can I call him Yellowy?’

‘No. Now, what shall we put on the stairs?’

She was firm here: ‘I want Thelma and Kirsty and Sarah and Granny and Grandpa, because they’re all coming to my party. And that girl I played with today at school. And the other one too, the one you saw me with. I want to send them invitations.’

‘All right, all your party guests on the stairs. What’s in the bath?’

‘That’s easy. My red boat with the propeller that never sinks, not even in big waves.’

‘Good.’ Another boat sailed into my mind, broken and tipping into the crested sea. ‘Where next?’

‘My bedroom.’

‘What shall we put in your bed then, Elsie?’

‘Can we put my teddy there? Can we get him out of the packing box so he doesn’t miss the party?’

‘Of course. I should never have put him there in the first place. And last of all, I know what’s in my bed.’

‘What?’

‘We are. You and me. We’re lying in bed together wide awake and the party’s over and all your guests have gone and we’re talking about all the birthdays you’re going to have.’

‘Are you very old, Mummy?’

‘No, just grown-up, not old.’

‘So you’re not going to die soon?’

‘No, I’m going to live for a long time.’

‘When I’m as old as you, will you be dead then?’

‘Maybe you will have children then, and I’ll be a granny.’

‘Can we always live together, Mummy?’

‘As long as you want to.’

‘And can I watch a video now?’

‘Yes.’

I shut the door on Mary Poppins and went into the kitchen, where I pulled the window wide open. The sound of London invaded the room: schoolchildren on their way home, giggling or quarrelling, syncopated music from a ghetto-blaster, the roar and impatient rev of car engines, a horn pumping into the stop-start queue, an ignored and insistent alarm, sirens in the distance, overhead a plane. I breathed in the smell of honeysuckle, exhaust fumes, frying garlic, urban heat, the smell of the city.

She was out there somewhere, in that wonderful ungraspable mess, out in the crowd. Perhaps she was close by or perhaps she was gone for ever. I wondered if I would ever see her again. Perhaps one day, across a street, or in a queue at an airport or across a square in a foreign town, I’d glimpse a smooth face tilted upwards in the way I knew so well and stop and shake my head and walk quickly on. I’d see her in my dreams, smiling sweetly at me still. Her freedom was a small price to pay for Elsie’s safety. And I’d look at the newspapers. She had escaped but she hadn’t escaped with the money, not any of it. What would she do now? I closed my eyes and breathed in, out, in, out, to the roar of London. Danny had died but we – me and Elsie – we had come through. That was something.

The sound of Mary Poppins singing brightly to the children and to my child drifted in from the living room. I pushed open the door. Elsie was sitting back on the sofa, legs tucked up under her knees, glaring at the screen. I knelt beside her and she patted me absent-mindedly on the head.

‘Can you watch this with me, Mummy, the way Fing used to?’ So I stayed and watched, until the very end.

The following morning, the underground was more than usually crowded. I felt hot inside all my layers of clothing, and I tried to distract myself by thinking about other things as I swayed against the bodies and the train clattered through the darkness. I thought about how my hair needed cutting. I could book it for lunch-time. I tried to remember if there was enough food in the house for tonight, or maybe we could get a takeaway. Or go dancing. I remembered I hadn’t taken my pill this morning and must do it as soon as I got to work. The thought of the pill made me think of the IUD and yesterday’s meeting, the memory of which had left me more unwilling than usual to get out of bed this morning.

A skinny young woman with a large, red-faced baby squeezed her way down the train. No one stood up for her, and she stood with her child on her angular hip, held in place by the bodies all round her. Only the baby’s hot, cross face was exposed. Sure enough, it soon started yelling, hoarse, drawn-out wails that made its red cheeks purple, but the woman ignored it, as if she was beyond noticing. She had a glazed expression on her pallid face. Although her baby was dressed for an expedition to the South Pole, she wore just a thin dress and an unzipped anorak. I tested myself for maternal instinct. Negative. Then I looked round at all the men and women in suits. I leaned down to a man in a lovely cashmere coat, till I was near enough to see his spots, then said softly into his ear: ‘Excuse me. Can you make room for this woman?’ He looked puzzled, resistant. ‘She needs a seat.’

He stood up and the mother shuffled over and wedged herself between two Guardians. The baby continued to wail, and she continued to stare ahead of her. The man could feel virtuous now.

I was glad to get out at my station, though I wasn’t looking forward to the day ahead. When I thought about work, a lethargy settled over me, as if all my limbs were heavy and the chambers of my brain musty. It was icy on the streets, and my breath curled into the air. I wrapped my scarf more firmly around my neck. I should have worn a hat. Maybe I could nip out in a coffee-break and buy some boots. All around me people were hurrying to their different offices, heads down. Jake and I should go away somewhere in February, somewhere hot and deserted. Anywhere that wasn’t London. I imagined a white beach and a blue sky and me slim and tanned in a bikini. I’d been seeing too many advertisements. I always wore a one-piece. Oh, well. Jake had been on at me about saving money.

I stopped at the zebra crossing. A lorry roared by. A pigeon and I scuttled back in unison. I glimpsed the driver, high up in his cab and blind to all the people below him trudging to work. The next car squeaked to a halt and I stepped out into the road.

A man was crossing from the other side. I noticed he was wearing black jeans and a black leather jacket, and then I looked up at his face. I don’t know if he stopped first or I did. We both stood in the road staring at each other. I think I heard a horn blare. I couldn’t move. It felt like an age, but it was probably only a second. There was an empty, hungry feeling in my stomach and I couldn’t breathe in properly. A horn was sounded once more. Someone shouted something. His eyes were a startling blue. I started walking across the road again, and so did he, and we passed each other, inches away, our eyes locked. If he had reached out and touched me, I think I would have turned and followed him, but he didn’t and I reached the pavement alone.

I walked towards the building that contained the Drakon offices, then stopped and looked back. He was still there, watching me. He didn’t smile or make any gesture. It was an effort to turn away again, with his gaze on me as if it were pulling me back towards him. When I reached the revolving doors of the Drakon building and pushed through them, I took a last glance back. He was gone, the man with blue eyes. So that was that.

I went at once to the cloakroom, shut myself into a cubicle and leaned against the door. I felt dizzy, my knees trembled and there was a heavy feeling at the back of my eyes, like unshed tears. Maybe I was getting a cold. Maybe my period was about to start. I thought of the man and the way he had stared at me, and I closed my eyes as if that would somehow shut him out. Someone else came into the cloakroom, turned on a tap. I stood very still and quiet, and could hear my heart thudding beneath my blouse. I laid my hand against my burning cheek, put it on my breast.

After a few minutes I could breathe properly again. I splashed cold water on my face, combed my hair, and remembered to remove a tiny pill from its foil calendar and swallow it. The ache in my guts was fading, and now I just felt fragile, jittery. Thank God nobody had seen anything. I bought coffee from the machine on the second floor and a bar of chocolate, for I was suddenly ravenous, and made my way to my office. I picked the wrapper and then the gold foil off the chocolate with shaky, incompetent fingers and ate it in large bites. The working day began. I read through my mail and tossed most of it into the bin, wrote a memo to Mike, then phoned Jake at work.

‘How’s your day going?’ I asked.

‘It’s only just started.’

I felt as if hours had passed since leaving home. If I leaned back and closed my eyes, I could sleep for hours.

‘Last night was nice,’ he said, in a low voice. Maybe there were other people around at his end.

‘Mmm. I felt a bit odd this morning, though, Jake.’

‘Are you all right now?’ He sounded concerned. I’m never ill.

‘Yes. Fine. Completely fine. Are you all right?’

I’d run out of things to say but I was reluctant to put the phone down. Jake suddenly sounded preoccupied. I heard him say something I couldn’t make out to someone else.

‘Yes, love. Look, I’d better go. ’Bye.’

The morning passed. I went to another meeting, this time with the marketing department, managed to spill a jug of water over the table and say nothing at all. I read through the research document Giovanna had e-mailed to me. She was coming to see me at three thirty. I phoned up the hairdresser’s and made an appointment for one o’clock. I drank lots of bitter, tepid coffee out of polystyrene cups. I watered the plants in my office. I learned to say ‘Je voudrais quatre petits pains’ and ‘Ça fait combien?’

Just before one I picked up my coat, left a message for my assistant that I would be out for an hour or so, then clattered down the stairs and into the street. It was just beginning to drizzle, and I hadn’t got an umbrella. I looked up at the clouds, shrugged, and started to walk quickly along Cardamom Street where I could pick up a taxi to the hairdresser’s. I stopped dead in my tracks and the world blurred. My stomach gave a lurch. I felt as if I was about to double up.

He was there, a few feet from me. As if he hadn’t moved since this morning. Still in his black jacket and jeans; still not smiling. Just standing and looking at me. I felt then as if no one had ever looked at me properly before and was suddenly and acutely conscious of myself – of the pounding of my heart, the rise and fall of my breath; of the surface of my body, which was prickling with a kind of panic and excitement.

He was my sort of age, early thirties. I suppose he was beautiful, with his pale blue eyes and his tumbled brown hair and his high, flat cheekbones. But then all I knew was that he was so focused on me that I felt I couldn’t move out of his gaze. I heard my breath come in a little ragged gasp, but I didn’t move and I couldn’t turn away.

I don’t know who made the first step. Perhaps I stumbled towards him, or perhaps I just waited for him, and when we stood opposite each other, not touching, hands by our sides, he said, in a low voice, ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

I should have laughed out loud. This wasn’t me, this couldn’t be happening to me. I was just Alice Loudon, on her way to have her hair cut on a damp day in January. But I couldn’t laugh or smile. I could only go on looking at him into his wide-set blue eyes, at his mouth, which was slightly parted, the tender lips. He had white, even teeth, except that the front one was chipped. His chin was stubbly. There was a scratch on his neck. His hair was quite long, and unbrushed. Oh, yes, he was beautiful. I wanted to reach up and touch his mouth, ever so gently, with one thumb. I wanted to feel the scratch of his stubble in the hollow of my neck. I tried to say something, but all that came out of me was a strangled, prim ‘Oh.’

‘Please,’ he said then, still not taking his eyes off my face. ‘Will you come with me?’

He could have been a mugger, a rapist, a psychopath. I nodded dumbly at him and he stepped into the road, flagged down a taxi. He held open the door for me, but still didn’t touch me. Inside he gave an address to the driver then turned towards me. I saw that under his leather jacket he wore only a dark green T-shirt. There was a leather thong around his neck with a small silver spiral hung on it. His hands were bare. I looked at his long fingers, with their neat, clean nails. A white scar kinked down one thumb. They looked practical hands, strong, dangerous.

‘Tell me your name?’

‘Alice,’ I said. I didn’t recognize my own voice.

‘Alice,’ he repeated. ‘Alice.’ The word sounded unfamiliar when he said it like that. He lifted his hands and, very gently, careful not to make any contact with my skin, loosened my scarf. He smelt of soap and sweat.

The taxi stopped and, looking out, I saw that we were in Soho. There was a paper shop, a delicatessen, restaurants. I could smell coffee and garlic. He got out and once more held the door open for me. I could feel the blood pulsing in my body. He pushed at a shabby door by the side of a clothes shop and I followed him up a narrow flight of steps. He took a bunch of keys from his pocket and unlocked two locks. Inside, it wasn’t just a room but a small flat. I saw shelves, books, pictures, a rug. I hovered on the threshold. It was my last chance. The noise from the street outside filtered through the windows, the rise and fall of voices, the rumble of cars. He closed the door and bolted it from the inside.

I should have been scared, and I was, but not of him, this stranger. I was scared at myself. I didn’t know myself any longer. I was dissolving with my desire, as if all the outlines of my body were becoming insubstantial. I started to take off my coat, hands clumsy on the velvet buttons, but he stopped me.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Let me.’

First he removed my scarf and hung it carefully on the coat-stand. Next, my coat, taking his time. He knelt on the floor and slipped off my shoes. I put my hand on his shoulder to stop myself toppling. He stood again, and started to unbutton my cardigan, and I saw that his hands were trembling slightly. He undid my skirt and pulled it down over my hips; it rasped against my tights. He tugged off my tights, collecting them into a flimsy ball, which he put beside my shoes. Still, he had hardly made contact with my skin. He took off my camisole and slid down my knickers and I stood naked in that unfamiliar room, shivering slightly.

‘Alice,’ he said, in a kind of groan. Then, ‘Oh, God, you’re lovely, Alice.’

I took off his jacket. His arms were strong and brown, and there was another long, puckered scar running from the elbow to the wrist. I copied him and knelt at his feet to pull off his shoes and socks. On his right foot, he had only three toes, and I bent down and kissed the place where the other two had been. He sighed softly. I tugged his shirt free of his jeans and he raised his arms like a little boy while I pulled it over his head. He had a flat stomach with a line of hair running down it. I unzipped his jeans and eased them carefully down over his buttocks. His legs were knotty, quite tanned. I took off his underpants and dropped them on to the floor. Someone moaned, but I don’t know if it was him or me. He lifted one hand and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, then traced my lips with a forefinger, very slowly. I closed my eyes.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Look at me.’

‘Please,’ I said. ‘Please.’

He unhooked my earrings and let them fall. I heard them clink on the wooden boards.

‘Kiss me, Alice,’ he said.

Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. Sex had never been like this. There had been indifferent sex, embarrassing sex, nasty sex, good sex, great sex. This was more like obliterating sex. We crashed together, trying to get past the barrier of skin and flesh. We held each other as if we were drowning. We tasted each other as if we were starving. And all the time he looked at me. He looked at me as if I were the loveliest thing he had ever seen, and as I lay on the hard dusty floor I felt lovely, shameless, quite done for.

Afterwards, he lifted me to my feet and took me into the shower and washed me down. He soaped my breasts and between my legs. He washed my feet and thighs. He even washed my hair, expertly massaging shampoo into it, tilting my head back so soap wouldn’t run into my eyes. Then he dried me, making sure I was dry under my arms, between my toes, and as he dried me he examined me. I felt like a work of art, and like a prostitute.

‘I must go back to work,’ I said at last. He dressed me, picking up my clothes from the floor, threading my earrings through my lobes, brushing my wet hair back from my face.

‘When do you finish work?’ he asked. I thought of Jake waiting at home.

‘Six.’

‘I’ll be there,’ he said. I should have told him then that I had a partner, a home, a whole other life. Instead I pulled his face towards mine and kissed his bruised lips. I could hardly bring myself to pull my body away from his.

In the taxi, alone, I pictured him, remembered his touch, his taste, his smell. I didn’t know his name.