The safe house Read online

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

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

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

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

  ‘No, they printed my name and address.’

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

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘What are you doing about it?’

  Michael started the car and we moved off once more.

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

  ‘All that riding to hounds.’

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

  I mumbled something.

  ‘What are you doing on Saturday?’

  I mumbled something else.

  ‘I’ll pick you up after breakfast.’

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

  At dawn I fell asleep.

  Seventeen

  ‘A cash cow?’

  Geoff Marsh looked amused, almost nattered by the suggestion.

  ‘That’s what the man said to me.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Good for the firemen.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Geoff got up and wiped his lips with a napkin.

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

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

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

  I followed his gaze, aghast.

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

  Geoff looked confused.

  ‘What are you talking about, Sam?’

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

  ‘This is the real world, Sam.’

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

  ‘Walk?’ I suggested.

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

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

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

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

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

  She muttered something.

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

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

  ‘Look, Finn…’

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

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

  Finn looked up. Her face lost its mutiny.

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

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

  ‘Does she want you to marry Danny?’

  ‘God, no.’

  ‘Is Danny coming again soon?’

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

  ‘Sam? Who was Elsie’s father?’

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

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

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

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

  ‘Did you hear how I spent last year?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Can I do the lunch for you?’

  ‘Cook it?’

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

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

  ‘I’ll ring him.’

  ‘And Danny?’

  ‘Maybe not Danny this time.’

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

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

  ‘What treasure?’ she asked.

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

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

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

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

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

  ‘Is that Dr Laschen?’

  ‘Yes, who is this?’

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

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

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

  ‘And your wife?’

  ‘My wife’s away.’

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

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

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

  ‘Yeah,’ said Elsie.

  ‘Is it finished?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I laughed.

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

  Elsie’s eyes lit up.

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

  ‘So let’s find the red Magic Marker.’

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

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

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

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

  ‘No, I hate needles.’

  ‘You’re a doctor.’

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

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

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

  ‘“S” will do,’ laughed Finn.

  I formed my blood into an ‘S’.

  ‘Now, what about Elsie,’ said Finn.

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

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

  ‘It hurts,’ I said.

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

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

  Eighteen


  ‘Sam, Sam, wake up.’

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

  ‘Finn, it’s three in the morning.’

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

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

  ‘Hello, what service?’

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

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

  ‘Finn, come with me,’ I hissed.

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

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