The safe house Read online

‘I’ll find the heater,’ he said.

  I walked into the kitchen, in which the music was echoing tinnily. I found the radio by the sink, pushed at buttons ineffectually and then pulled the plug out from the wall. There was a shout which I thought at first was a delayed throb from the radio, but then I realized it was my name: ‘Sam! Sam!’ I ran through to the other room and found a complicated and strange scene. Looking back on it even a few minutes later, I wasn’t able to recall how I had put it together in my mind. I could see a woman lying on the bed with all her clothes on, a grey skirt, a brightly coloured nylon sweater. No head. Yes, there was a head but it was obscured by something, and Michael was picking frantically at it, tearing it. It was plastic, a bag, like the bags you put fruit in at the supermarket. Michael was pushing his fingers into her mouth and then firmly pushing down on the woman’s chest and doing things with her arms. I looked around for a phone. There. I dialled.

  ‘Ambulance, please. What? Where are we? Michael, where are we?’

  ‘Quinnan Street.’

  ‘Quinnan Street. By Woolworths. Above Woolworths, I think. And police as well.’ What was his name? Rupert. Rupert. ‘Tell Inspector Baird at Stamford CID.’

  I put down the receiver and looked round. Michael was sitting still now, obscuring most of Mrs Ferrer’s body, though I could see her open eyes, disordered grey hair. He stood up and walked past me. I heard a tap running in the kitchen. I walked over and sat by the body. I touched her hair and tried to arrange it slightly, except that I couldn’t remember which way it was supposed to go. Who was left to know?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said aloud to myself, to her. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

  The ambulance arrived within five minutes, a man and a woman in green overalls ran in at high speed, then slowed down and stopped after a brief examination of the body. They looked around as if they had woken from a dream and had noticed us for the first time. As we were introducing ourselves, two young police constables came up the stairs. I asked about Baird, and one of them spoke into a radio. I whispered to Daley, feeling guilty and conspiratorial.

  ‘How did she die?’ I knew the answer.

  His faced looked dazed.

  ‘Suffocated.’

  I had an ache in my stomach that seemed to be rising in my oesophagus and becoming a throbbing headache. I was unable to think clearly except for a feeling that I wanted to leave but probably had to stay. I felt strangely grateful a few minutes later at the sight of Baird, who entered the room, apparently filling it, with a distracted-looking, rumpled man who was introduced to me as Dr Kale, the Home Office pathologist. With a nod Baird walked past me and stood over the body for a moment in silence. Then he turned to me.

  ‘What were you doing here?’ he asked in a subdued tone.

  ‘I was concerned about her. I met her once and she seemed to be crying out for help. But I was too late, it seems,’ I said.

  ‘You mustn’t reproach yourself. This wasn’t just a cry for help. She really meant to die… Has the body been moved?’

  ‘No. Michael tried to revive her.’

  ‘Was death recent?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. It’s hard to tell in this heat.’

  Baird shook his head.

  ‘Awful,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t need to stay. Either of you.’

  ‘I suppose we’d better tell Finn.’

  ‘I’d like to, if that’s all right.’ It was Michael. ‘I’m her doctor, after all.’

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  So we made our way to Elm House in a cumbersome fashion. Michael drove me back to his surgery, where I had left my car. Then the two of us drove in an absurd convoy out of Stamford, and all the way I thought of a woman coming on a murder scene, the blood and the suffering, and finding it all too much to bear and having nobody to help her and that I’d already known this and had been too late.

  We came on Finn in the kitchen tracing letters with Elsie. Without a word I took Finn and Elsie by the hand and walked outside where Michael was waiting. I held Elsie tight in my arms and prattled to her about her day at school, at the same time watching as Michael and Finn walked down in the direction of the sea. I saw their silhouettes, and behind them the reeds were tipped golden with the low sun, although it was barely four o’clock. They talked and talked and sometimes leaned one on the other. Finally they walked back towards us and I put Elsie down and, still without talking, Finn fell into my arms and grasped me close to her so that I felt her breath on my neck. I felt Elsie pulling at me from the side, and we all laughed and walked inside out of the wind.

  Fourteen

  ‘Am I your patient?’

  I felt like a mother being asked where babies come from, having already considered the different answers I could give when the question was posed. I felt torn for a moment between the desire to reassure and the responsibility to be clear.

  ‘No. You’re Dr Daley’s patient, if you’re anybody’s. But you shouldn’t think of yourself as a patient.’

  ‘I’m not talking about me, I’m talking about you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know what I’m doing in your house. Am I in hiding? On the run? Am I a lodger? A friend? A sick person?’

  We were sitting in a sort of pseudo-bistro establishment near the old harbour in Goldswan Green, half an hour up the coast and almost empty on this cold Monday in February. I was eating a bowl of pasta and Finn was pushing her fork into a side salad served as a main course. She stabbed a leaf of some kind of bitter lettuce that I found inedible and rotated it.

  ‘You’re a bit of all of them, I suppose,’ I said. ‘Except for the sick person.’

  ‘I feel sick. I feel sick all the time.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re the expert, Sam,’ Finn said, pushing the salad around her plate. ‘What should I be feeling?’

  ‘Finn, in my professional capacity, I usually make a point of not telling people what they should do or feel. But in this case I’m going to make an exception.’

  Finn’s expression hardened in alarm.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Speaking as an authority in the field of post-traumatic stress disorder, I would strongly advise you to stop playing with your salad and scraping the fork on the plate, because it’s getting on my nerves.’

  Finn looked down with a start and then relaxed into a half-smile.

  ‘On the other hand,’ I continued, ‘you could move some of it from your plate into your mouth.’

  Finn shrugged and pushed the whole large leaf into her mouth and crunched at it. There was a sardonic sense of triumph.

  ‘There we are,’ I said. ‘That wasn’t so difficult.’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Finn said, as if she were examining the behaviour of an exotic creature.

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘Perhaps I could order some of the pasta you’ve got.’

  ‘Take mine.’

  I pushed the dish across and she dipped into it, almost excited by the novelty of what she was attempting. For several minutes neither of us spoke. It was enough for me to see her eat.

  ‘Maybe I’ve had too much, all at once,’ Finn said, when the two plates were clean.

  ‘It wasn’t all that much. What I forgot to eat, mostly. Do you want some coffee?’

  ‘Yes. White.’

  ‘Good, Finn. Some more protein and calcium. We can start building you up.’

  She started to laugh, then stopped herself.

  ‘Why did she do it?’

  ‘Who? Mrs Ferrer?’ I shrugged, then took a chance. ‘She wanted to come out to see you, you know. She was going back to Spain, but she wanted to see you first.’ I remembered her frantic desire to visit the ‘little girl’ – then I remembered her lying dead on the bed in her cheerful jumper.

  Finn’s face darkened. She seemed to be looking through me at something far away.

  ‘I wish, I think I wish, that she had. I’d liked to h
ave seen her. It was the horror of what she’d seen, I suppose.’

  ‘It must have been something,’ I said absently.

  ‘You sound suspicious.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘Do you think I was stupid? With the bonfire?’

  On that shambolic Saturday afternoon, Danny had left shortly after Rupert and Bobbie – he’d picked up his holdall and shoulder-bag, ignored Michael and Finn, and given me a curt nod. When I’d tried to detain him (‘I know this isn’t ideal, but let’s talk about it later’) he’d said wearily that he’d been waiting for three days to talk to me, and I’d just been spiky and hostile, and didn’t I know by now that my ‘later’ never arrived and anyway he had things to do in London? To which I hissed, babyishly, that he was behaving just like a baby. Then, he’d left. This was becoming a habit. Neither Finn nor Michael said anything about it, and Elsie scarcely seemed to notice that he was no longer with us. As for me, Mrs Ferrer’s death, my concentration on Finn, had pushed him to the edge of my mind.

  Then, on the following Sunday morning, Michael Daley had suddenly turned up. I was in the garden piling planks, canes, old branches on to a bonfire when his Audi pulled into the drive. He didn’t come over but removed a dozen or so stuffed Waitrose bags from the back. Was he buying food for us now? No such luck. He had brought some of Finn’s clothes which the police had released from the house.

  ‘Where am I supposed to put all of this?’ I asked as we ferried bags up the path into the hallway.

  ‘I thought it might be a step back into normality,’ Daley said.

  ‘I wondered how long Finn could keep padding around in my rolled-up jeans.’

  ‘Sorry I can’t stay,’ said Daley. ‘Give her my regards.’

  ‘Regards,’ I said. ‘I never know what they are.’

  ‘You can think of something.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ve lost another patient.’

  ‘Is that a joke?’ he asked and said nothing more. He left without seeing Finn. I called her down.

  ‘Look what the doctor brought you,’ I said.

  She was visibly startled. She pulled a maroon crushed-velvet blouse from one of the bags and held it up.

  ‘I’ve got some work to do outside,’ I said. ‘I’m burning almost everything that’s movable in the garden. I’ll leave you to go through it, if you want.’

  She nodded but said nothing. I left her, and when I looked back, before closing the front door, I saw her kneeling on my hall floor holding the velvet to her cheek, as if she were a tiny lost child.

  Gardening would always be a mystery to me, but I loved making fires. There had been rain and it was a tricky business but that only increased the ultimate satisfaction. I had screwed newspaper into balls at various points on the windward side of my pile of rubbish. I lit them and they crackled, glowed and went out. I looked in the shed and found an almost empty box of firelighters and a washing-up-liquid bottle that didn’t smell of washing-up liquid any more. I wrapped up the entire box in newspapers and pushed it deep into the recesses of the rubbish pile. I sprayed all that was left of the petrolly liquid over it. I had created a small incendiary device and wasn’t sure whether it would ignite my pile of rubbish or simply blow it up. I lit a match and tossed it at the heap. There was a low thud, as if a punch-bag had been dropped on to a concrete floor. I saw a yellow glow, heard crackling, then flames escaped from the pile, and I was pushed back by a soft invisible pillow of heat against my cheeks and forehead.

  I felt the usual thrill at the transition from the stage when the fire couldn’t be started to the stage when it couldn’t be stopped. I began to feed the flames with scraps from all over the garden. There were old grey wooden lattices, a pile of ancient planks by the back wall of the house, all of them soon cracking in the core of heat, sending sparks flying high. I felt a presence at my side. It was Finn, the reflection of the flames dancing in her eyes.

  ‘Good fire, eh?’ I said. ‘I should have been a pyromaniac. I am a pyromaniac. I can’t imagine robbing a bank or killing somebody, but I can understand the pleasure of setting fire to something big and watching it burn down. But this will have to do.’

  Finn leaned close to me, placing a hand on my shoulder. I could feel the brush of her lips as she whispered into my ear. She finished and moved back, but she was still close. I could see the golden down on her cheeks.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to drop it into an Oxfam shop or something?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I don’t want anybody else to wear it.’

  ‘Whatever you think is right.’

  So she went back into the house and a minute later she emerged with an armful of skirts, dresses and shirts. She came past me and heaved them on to the pyre. The bright fabrics ballooned, bubbled and burst. She made trip after trip. There were some beautiful things among them, the things she must have bought after she’d lost weight, and Finn must have detected a wistful expression on my face, because she broke off from one of her journeys to push a trilby hat on my head and wind a damson cashmere scarf around my neck. The hat fitted me perfectly.

  ‘Rent,’ she said with a smile.

  She kept nothing for herself at all. When it was all over we contemplated the fire together, watching the fragments of braid and ribbon being consumed, and I felt a little sick, like a champion eater who has been out-gourmandized.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ Finn asked finally.

  ‘I think that tomorrow I’ll take you shopping.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sam,’ Finn said, swallowing the last of her coffee. ‘Oh, it’s bitter. Nice. I know it was melodramatic, burning them all like that. It felt like something that I had to do.’

  ‘You don’t have to explain it to me.’

  ‘Yes, I do. This is hard for me to put into words, but what I feel is something like this. In a way I feel contaminated by those people who tried to… you know. My life has been ripped apart and completely changed by them. Do you see what I mean? You like to feel that your life has been directed in a good way. But I felt, feel, that my life has been put in a certain direction by people who hated us. I had to cut all that away and be reborn. Remake myself. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘I understand completely,’ I said with deliberate bland acceptance. ‘But you’re used to doing that, aren’t you?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You suffered from anorexia, it was life-threatening. But you moved on. You know how to recover, and that’s a wonderful thing.’ I paused for a moment, wondering how far I could take this. ‘You know, it’s funny. The first sight I had of you was in some old photo of you, plump, jolly-looking. And here you are, a different person, secure, alive.’

  I looked at Finn. Her hand was trembling so much she had to put her knife down.

  ‘I hated that girl. Fat Fiona Mackenzie. I feel no connection to her. I made myself a new life, or thought I had. But now it’s hard for me to accept the good things. Meeting you and Elsie and all of this. I sometimes think that I’ve met you and Elsie because of, you know, them. I’m not sure if I should be talking about this. Should I be talking about this?’

  I kept feeling different things and I was rather afraid that I was saying different things at different times. If I was discussing her case with a colleague we could have considered the different therapeutic options and the varying, much-disputed rates of success for each one. With one or two of my most trusted friends, I might have remarked that in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder we were still stuck in medieval times, in the age of superstition, of humours and agues and bleedings. Finn was looking to me for the sort of authority people expect from doctors. And I knew so much about the subject that I was less certain about it than somebody who knew less man I did might have been. Most of what people thought they knew about trauma and its treatment was wrong. The tru
th seems to be that talking about the experience makes some people better, some people worse and leaves other people about the same. That isn’t what people like to hear from doctors.

  I took a deep breath and aimed for as much of the truth as we could both manage.

  ‘I don’t know, Finn. I wish I could give you an easy answer and make you feel better, but I can’t. I want you to feel that you can tell me anything. On the other hand, I’m not the police. I’m not after you for evidence. And I can’t say this too often: I’m not your doctor. There isn’t some schedule of treatment involved here. But if I can be disloyal to my great and noble profession for a moment, that may not be entirely a bad thing.’ I reached across the table and took Finn by the hand. ‘I sometimes think that doctors find it particularly difficult to accept suffering. You had a most terrible, unspeakable thing happen to you. All I can say is that the pain will diminish over time. It will probably be better when the bastards who did it are caught. On the other hand, if you have specific physical symptoms, you must mention them to me or to Dr Daley and he’ll deal with them. All right?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Good enough.’

  ‘Sam?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m in the way, aren’t I?’

  ‘Everything in my life has always been in the way of everything else. But I’ve decided that you are one of the nice things and that’s all that matters.’

  ‘Don’t feel you have to be nice, Sam. I’m stopping you writing your book, for a start.’

  ‘I was doing a good enough job of not writing it before you arrived.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘Oh, you know, trauma, what I do, all that stuff.’

  ‘No, really, what’s it about?’

  I narrowed my eyes in mock disbelief. I summoned the waitress and ordered two more coffees.

  ‘All right, Finn, you asked for it. The basis for the book is the status of post-traumatic stress as an illness. There is always a question of whether a pathology, I mean, a particular illness, actually exists before it has been identified and given a Latin name. Bobbie, of all people, once asked me a good question. She asked if Stone Age men suffered from traumatic stress after fighting a dinosaur. First I explained to her that there were no dinosaurs during the Stone Age, but her question stayed with me. We know that Neanderthals suffered bone fractures, but after terrible events did they have bad dreams, did they have triggered responses, did they show avoidance?’