The safe house Page 29

  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 i
s 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.’