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  The safe house

  Nicci French

  You open your home and your heart to a victim. But your house is anything but safe...Samantha Laschen is a doctor specialising in post-traumatic stress disorder. She's moved to the coast to escape her problems and to be alone with her young daughter. But now the police want her to take in Fiona Mackenzie, a girl whose parents have been savagely murdered. Yet by allowing Fiona in, Sam is exposing herself - and her daughter - to risks she couldn't possibly have imagined...

  THE SAFE HOUSE

  ‘A craftily plotted book in which the mystery unfolds layer by layer… right up until the surprise ending’ Sunday Telegraph‘A narrative of striking complexity, with sleights of hand, malevolence and cupidity in abundance’ Times Literary Supplement‘[French] sustains the pervasive mood of terror and suspense before the final surprise. The result is a superior psychological thriller’ The Times‘A potent, emotionally acute psychological thriller’ Mail on Sunday

  ‘A winner’ Independent

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Nicci French is the pseudonym for the writing partnership of journalists Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. The couple are married and live in Suffolk.

  There are now ten bestselling novels by Nicci French: The Memory Game, The Safe House, Killing Me Softly, Beneath the Skin, The Red Room, Land of the Living, Secret Smile, Catch Me When I Fall, Losing You and Until It’s Over (the new hardback, published in May 2008).

  The Safe House

  Nicci French

  To Pat and John

  One

  The door was the first thing. The door was open. The front door was never open, even in the wonderful heat of the previous summer that had been so like home, but there it was, teetering inwards, on a morning so cold that the moisture hanging in the air stung Mrs Ferrer’s pocked cheeks. She pushed her gloved hand against the white painted surface, testing the evidence of her eyes.

  ‘Mrs Mackenzie?’

  Silence. Mrs Ferrer raised her voice and called for her employer once more and felt embarrassed as the words echoed, high and wavering, in the large hallway. She stepped inside and wiped her feet on the mat too many times, as she always did. She removed her gloves and clutched them in her left hand. There was a smell, now. It was heavy and sweet. It reminded her of something. The smell of a barnyard. No, inside. A barn maybe.

  Each morning at eight-thirty precisely Mrs Ferrer would nod a good-morning at Mrs Mackenzie, click past her across the polished wood of the Mackenzies’ hallway, turn right down the stairs into the basement, remove her coat, collect her vacuum cleaner from the utility room and spend an hour in an anaesthetized fog of noise. Up the large staircase at the front of the house, along the passageways on the first floor, the passageways on the second floor, then down the small back staircase. But where was Mrs Mackenzie? Mrs Ferrer stood uncertainly by the door in her tightly buttoned porridge-meal-tweed coat, shifting her weight from one foot to another. She could hear a television. The television was never on. She carefully rubbed the sole of each shoe on the mat. She looked down. She had already done that, hadn’t she?

  ‘Mrs Mackenzie?’

  She stepped off the mat on to the hard wood – beeswax, vinegar and paraffin. She walked across to the front room, which was never used for anything and hardly ever needed vacuuming, though she did it anyway. There was nobody, of course. The curtains were all closed, the light on. She walked across to the foot of the staircase to the other front room. She rested her hand on the newel, which was topped by an ornate carving like a beaked pineapple of dark wood. Afrormosia – linseed oil, it needed, boiled, not raw. There was nobody. She knew that the television was in the sitting room. She took a step forward, her hand brushing the wall as if for safety. A bookcase. Leather bindings, which required lanolin and neat’s-foot in equal quantities. It was possible, she reflected, that whoever was watching television had not heard her call. And as for the door, perhaps something was being delivered, or the window cleaner may have left it open on his way in. Thus fortified she walked to the rear of the house and into the main sitting room. Very quickly, within a few seconds of entering the room, she had vomited profusely on to the carpet that she had vacuumed every weekday for eighteen months.

  She leaned towards the ground, bent double, gasping. She felt in her coat pocket, found a tissue and wiped her mouth. She was surprised at herself, embarrassed almost. When she was a child, her uncle had led her through a slaughterhouse outside Fuenteobejuna and had smiled down at her as she refused to faint in the face of the blood and dismemberment and above all the steam rising from the cold stone floor. That was the smell she had remembered. It wasn’t a barn at all.

  There were splashes of blood across such a wide area, even on the ceiling, on the far wall, that Mr Mackenzie might have exploded. Mostly, though, it was in dark pools on his lap and on the sofa. There was so much of it. Could it be from just one man? What had made her sick, perhaps, was the ordinariness of his pyjamas, so English, even the top button done up. Mr Mackenzie’s head now lolled back stupidly at an impossible angle. His neck was cut almost through and there was nothing to hold it up except the back of the sofa. She saw bone and sinew and the improbable spectacles, still uselessly over his eyes. The face was very white. And a horrible unexpected blue as well.

  Mrs Ferrer knew where the phone was but had forgotten and had to look for it. She found it on a small table, on the other side of the room away from all the blood. She knew the number from a television programme. Nine nine nine. A female voice answered.

  ‘Hello. There has been a terrible murder.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘There has been a murder.’

  ‘It’s all right. Calm down, don’t cry. Can you speak English?’

  ‘Yes, yes. I am sorry. Mr Mackenzie is dead. Killed.’

  It was only when she had replaced the receiver that she thought of Mrs Mackenzie and walked upstairs. It took only a second for Mrs Ferrer to see what she had feared. Her employer was tied to her own bed. She seemed almost submerged in her blood, her nightie glossy with it against her gaunt body. Too thin, Mrs Ferrer had always thought privately. And the girl? She felt a weight in her chest as she walked up another flight of stairs. She pushed open the door of the one room in the house she wasn’t allowed to clean. She could hardly see anything of the person tied to the bedstead. What had they done to her? Brown shiny tape around the face. Arms outstretched, wrists tied to the corners of the metal grille, thin streaks of red across the front of the nightgown.

  Mrs Ferrer looked around Finn Mackenzie’s bedroom. Bottles were scattered across the dresser and the floor. Photographs were torn and mutilated, faces gouged out. On one wall, a word she didn’t understand was written in a smeary dark pink: piggies. She turned suddenly. There had been a sound from the bed. A gurgle. She ran forward. She touched the forehead, above the neat obscuring tape. It was warm. She heard a car outside and heavy footsteps in the hall. She ran down the stairs and saw men in uniform. One of them looked up at her.

  ‘Alive,’ Mrs Ferrer gasped. ‘Alive.’

  Two

  I looked around me. This wasn’t countryside. It was a wasteland into which bits of countryside had been dropped and then abandoned, a tree or a bush here and there, a hedgerow stripped bare for winter, a sudden field, stranded in the mud and marsh. I wanted a geographical feature – a hill, a river – and I couldn’t find one. I tugged off a glove with my teeth to look at the map and let it fall on to the slimy grass. The large sheet flapped wildly in the wind until I concertinaed it into a wad and stared at the pale brown contours and dotted red footpaths and dashed red bridleways. I had followed the dotted red line for miles but had failed to reach the sea wall that would lead me back to the place where I had begun. I
peered into the distance. It was miles away, a thin twist of grey against sky and water.

  I looked at the map again, which seemed to disintegrate under my gaze, an unbroken code of crosses and lines, dots and dashes. I was going to be late for Elsie. I hate being late. I’m never late. I’m always early, the one who’s kept waiting – standing crossly under the clock, sitting in a cafe with a cooling cup of tea and a tie of impatience under my right eye. I am never, not ever, late for Elsie. This walk was meant to take exactly three and a half hours.

  I twisted the map: I must have failed to see the fork in the path. If I cut across to the left, along that thin black line, I could cut off the headland of marsh and meet the sea wall just before it reached the hamlet where my car was parked. I shoved the map, now splitting at its folds, into my anorak pocket and picked up the glove. Its cold muddy fingers closed around my numbing ones. I started to walk. My calf muscles ached and my nose ran, snotty little dribbles down my stinging cheeks. The huge sky threatened rain.

  Once, a dark-coloured bird, its long neck outstretched and its wings heavily batting the air, flew low past me, but otherwise I was quite alone in a landscape of grey-green marsh and grey-blue sea. Probably something rare and interesting, but I don’t know the names of birds. Nor of trees, except obvious ones like weeping willows, and the plane trees that stand on every London street, sending out roots to undermine the houses. Nor of flowers, except obvious ones like buttercups and daisies, and the ones you buy from a florist on a Friday evening and stick in a vase for when friends come round: still-life roses, irises, chrysanthemums, carnations. But not the feeble plants that were scratching at my boots as I walked towards a small copse that didn’t seem to be getting any nearer. Sometimes when I lived in London I would feel oppressed by all the billboards, shop signs, house numbers, street names, area codes, vans bearing legends ‘Fresh Fish’ or ‘Friendly Movers’, neon letters flashing on-off-on in the orange sky. Now I didn’t have the words for anything at all.

  I came to a barbed-wire fence which separated the marsh from what looked like something farmed. I held the wire firmly down with the ball of my thumb and swung one leg over.

  ‘May I help you?’ The voice sounded friendly. I turned towards it, and a barbed prong embedded itself in the crotch of my jeans.

  ‘Thanks, but I’m fine.’ I managed to get my other leg over. He was a middle-aged bearded man, in a brown quilted jacket and green boots. He was smaller than me.

  ‘I’m the farmer.’

  ‘If I go straight across here, will I arrive at the road?’

  ‘I own this field.’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘This is not a public right of way. You are trespassing. On my land.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You have to go that way.’ He pointed gravely. ‘Then you’ll come to a footpath.’

  ‘Can’t I just…?’

  ‘No.’

  He smiled at me, not unpleasantly. His shirt was wrongly buttoned at the neck.

  ‘I thought of the countryside as something you were free to walk around in.’

  ‘Do you see my wood over there?’ he asked grimly. ‘Boys from Lymne’ – he pronounced it Lumney – ‘started riding their pushbikes down the track through the wood. Then it was motorbikes. It terrified the cows and made the track impassable. Last spring, some people wandered across my neighbour’s field with their dog and killed three of his lambs. And that’s not with all the gates being left open.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that but…’

  ‘And Rod Wilson, just over there, he used to send calves over to Ostend. They started with the picketing of the port at Goldswan Green. Couple of months ago, Rod’s barn was burned down. It’ll be somebody’s house next. Then there’s the Winterton and Thell Hunt.’

  ‘All right, all right. You know what I’ll do? I’ll climb back over this gate and head in a huge circle around your land.’

  ‘Do you come from London?’

  ‘I did. I’ve bought Elm House on the other side of Lymne. Lumney. You know, the one without any elms.’

  ‘They’ve finally managed to sell that, have they?’

  ‘I came to the country to get away from stress.’

  ‘Did you now. We always like visitors from London. I hope you’ll come again.’

  Friends had thought I was joking when I said I was going to work at the hospital in Stamford and live in the countryside. I’ve only ever lived in London – I grew up there, or at least in its trailing suburbs, went to university there, did my pre-med there, worked there. What about take-aways?, one had said. And, what about late-night films, twenty-four-hours shops, babysitters, M&S meals, chess partners?

  Danny, though, when I’d summoned up the courage to tell him, had looked at me with eyes full of rage and hurt.

  ‘What is it, Sam? Want to spend quality time with your kid on some fucking village green? Sunday lunch and planting bulbs?’ Actually, I had imagined a few bulbs.

  ‘Or,’ Danny had continued, ‘are you finally leaving me? Is that what this is all about, and is that why you never even bothered to tell me you were applying for a job in the sticks?’

  I’d shrugged, cold and hostile in the knowledge that I was behaving badly.

  ‘I didn’t apply for it. They applied to me. And we don’t live together, Danny, remember. You wanted your freedom.’

  He’d given a kind of groan and said, ‘Look, Sam, maybe the time has come…’

  But I’d interrupted. I didn’t want to hear him say we should live together at last and I didn’t want to hear him say we should leave each other at last, although I knew that soon we would have to decide. I’d put one hand on his resistant shoulder. ‘It’s only an hour and a half away. You can come and visit me.’

  ‘Visit you?’

  ‘Stay with me.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll come and stay with you, my darling.’ And he’d leaned forward, all dark hair and stubble and the smell of sawdust and sweat, and yanked me to him by the belt that was looped through my jeans. He’d unbuckled my belt and pulled me down on the lino of the kitchen, warm where a heating pipe ran underneath, his hands under my cropped head saving it from banging as we fell.

  If I ran I might be in time for Elsie. On the sea wall the wind screamed and the sky was swallowed up by the water. My breath came in bursts. There was a bit of grit in my left shoe, pressing up under the ball of my foot, but I didn’t want to stop. It was only her second day at school. The teacher will think I’m a bad mother. Houses: I see houses at last. Nineteen-thirties, red brick and square, a child’s drawing of a home. Smoke curling perfectly, one-two-three puffs, out of the neat row of chimneys. And there was the car. I might be on time after all.

  Elsie tipped from heel to toe, toe to heel. Her slick fair hair swung as she moved. She was wearing a brown donkey jacket and a checked red and orange dress, and on her stocky legs she had pink spotty tights, which were wrinkled around her steadily pivoting ankles (‘You told me I could choose my clothes and I want these,’ she’d said truculently at breakfast). Her nose was red and her eyes were vacant.

  ‘Am I late?’ I hugged her unyielding bulk.

  ‘Mungo was with me.’

  I looked around the deserted playground.

  ‘I can’t see anyone.’

  ‘Not now.’

  That evening, after Elsie had gone to sleep, I felt lonely in my house by the sea. The dark outside was so very dark, the silence so eerily complete. I sat by the unmade fire with Anatoly on my lap, and his purr as I scratched behind his ears seemed to fill the room. I poked aimlessly around in the fridge, eating a lump of hardened cheese, half an apple, a chunk of nut-and-raisin milk chocolate. I rang up Danny but only got his stiff answering-machine voice and didn’t leave a message.

  I turned on the television for the evening news. A wealthy local couple had been brutally murdered, their throats cut. A picture of their formally smiling faces, his florid and plump, hers pale and thin and self-effacing, was followed by a vie
w of their large red house from the end of a wide gravelled drive. Their teenage daughter was ‘comfortable’ in Stamford General. There was a blurry school photograph that must have been years old, a happy, roundly plump face, poor thing. A large police officer said something about unstinting efforts, a local politician expressed shock and outrage and called for measures.

  Briefly, I wondered about the girl in hospital, her savaged future. Then the news switched to an obstacle in a peace process somewhere, and very quickly I forgot all about her.

  Three

  ‘After you.’

  ‘No, after you.’

  ‘For God’s sake, pour it, you wally.’

  They were four deep around the coffee machine, uniforms and suits fighting over the sugar and the milk jug. They were in a hurry. Seating in the generally unused conference room was restricted, and nobody wanted to be late for this one.

  ‘It’s a bit soon for a case conference, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s what the Super wants.’

  ‘I’d say it’s a bit soon.’

  The conference room was in the new extension of Stamford Central police station, all Formica and strip lighting and the hum of the heating system. The head of the CID, Superintendent Bill Day, had called the meeting for 11.45 on the morning that the bodies had been discovered. Blinds were pulled up, revealing an office building opposite, whose mirrored windows reflected a bright winter sky. An overhead projector and a video recorder were pushed into the far corner. Plastic chairs were peeled from stacks against the wall and crammed around the long table.

  Detective Inspector Frank ‘Rupert’ Baird edged his way through the ruck of officers – he towered over most of them – and took his seat at the end. He dumped some files on the table in front of him and looked at his watch, fingering his moustache reflectively. Bill Day and a senior uniformed man came into the room, which at once became silent, attentive. Day went and sat near Rupert Baird, but the uniformed man pointedly remained standing, just to one side of the door, leaning lightly back against the wall. Bill Day spoke first.