The safe house Read online

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

  ‘I’m off. What are you watching?’

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

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

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

  ‘He’s gorgeous.’

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

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

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

  ‘What are you thinking, Sam?’

  I spoke before my brain intercepted me.

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

  He frowned.

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

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

  ‘How many people are going to be there?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Can’t you smell it?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

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

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

  ‘You’ve spoiled my image,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘You mean like forcing beagles to smoke cigarettes?’

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

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

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

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

  ‘We were just talking about Leo and Liz.’

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

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

  ‘I read about it,’ I said.

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

  ‘Awful,’ I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I tried to prod something specific out of him.

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

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

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

  ‘Clockwork Orange?’

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

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

  ‘Never seen it.’

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

  I surveyed the room.

  ‘You think this lot need shaking up?’

  He laughed.

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

  ‘You wear spectacles yourself.’

  ‘Not all the time.’

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

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

  ‘We’re not exactly friends.’

  ‘The hunting doctor.’

  ‘What?’

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

  ‘What do you mean?’

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

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

  ‘I’m Frank, by the way.’

  ‘I’m…’

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

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

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

  ‘Sounds a bit abstract to me.’

  ‘How is the unit going?’

  ‘I’m starting in the summer.’

  ‘So what are you doing now?’

  ‘A book and things.’

  ‘Things?’

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

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

  ‘Hello, professor.’

  Frank turned.

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

  ‘Have you told her about your own hobbies?’

  ‘I have no hobbies.’

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

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

  Frank gave an ironic bow of the head.

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

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Frank winked at me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Yes, I know about that.’

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

  ‘Yes, I know.’

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

  ‘Yes, but…’

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

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

  ‘It wasn’t my decision.’

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

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