Finders, Keepers: The mesmerising new thriller from the author of LIE WITH ME

by Sabine Durrant

  My voice broke. ‘I didn’t want them to take the body.’

  ‘I can’t believe what I thought.’ She was shaking her head. ‘When I saw the bones, that you . . . you’d be capable of that. But Max is so fond of you. I’m fond of you. You’re clever and sharp, and yet – this. I don’t know anyone else who could have just . . . I don’t know how you managed to carry on as if nothing had happened.’

  As if nothing had happened. I didn’t know how to tell her how the previous ten years had been an effort of engineering, how I had shored these fragments – this fucking house – against my ruin. ‘I put his little bed in Faith’s room,’ I said, ‘because he’d be safe there and no one ever went in. And I visited all the time at first, to make sure he was OK, but then I did have to stop.’

  There were things I couldn’t disclose. It had been a hot, dry summer. I’d done what I could to make it better, with the candles and the air fresheners, and I laid the rug along the bottom of the door. Mother kept saying she thought a rat had died under the floorboards. In the end it did go away, but I never went into the room again.

  I sat on the arm of the sofa. I wasn’t sure if she’d mind me being that close, but she didn’t move away. Her hands fluttered in the space between us. I clasped mine on my lap. ‘Is that when you began to collect things?’

  ‘Maybe. Yes. I mean it’s always been . . . but yes, it got much worse.’

  ‘And not taking care of yourself?’

  I looked up to the ceiling. ‘I’m not worth taking care of.’

  ‘Does Faith know?’

  I shook my head. ‘She was away.’

  She said, ‘I’m so sorry, Verity.’ It seemed to encapsulate other things she couldn’t say. ‘I’m glad you’ve told me. You should have told me before. If I’d known the damage of this, it would have made it easier to to help you.’

  I got off the arm of the sofa and kneeled on the floor in front of her.

  My voice cracked: ‘Can’t I just keep him?’

  Ailsa’s eyes had filled again with tears. ‘I think we should tell someone,’ she said. ‘You should get help.’

  ‘Do I need help?’

  She looked at me then. I could see she was considering. ‘Let me think what the best thing is,’ she said.

  ‘Please don’t tell Tom,’ I said.

  She sighed. ‘I won’t. But maybe we should get in touch with your sister.’

  I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. We sat there in silence for a bit longer. I was coughing a little.

  She breathed in deeply. ‘This house,’ she said. ‘It’s even worse than before. You can’t live here.’

  I tried to make it look as if I were breathing properly. ‘I’m going to have another clear-out. I promise.’

  She stood up. ‘Pack a bag and come home with me tonight. I want to keep an eye on you.’

  Chapter Twenty-two

  1 baby’s plastic dummy, white

  Contact, verb intrans. To come into, or be in, contact.

  Today’s appointment was at 2 p.m. but Ailsa was at the front door, waiting for me to unlock it, at noon. She was wearing her green silk – poignant that she chose that dress in particular, the dress Ricky Addison had so admired. It’s a little creased these days, and it’s a thin fabric; I made her wear tights with it, and the maroon puffer.

  It was a smooth journey, though neither of us had checked the destination before setting off; the contact centre purporting to be in Vauxhall was, when we checked Google Maps, closer to Oval Tube: an easy diversion, though it did nothing for Ailsa’s nerves.

  I hadn’t known what to expect. The centre has 3.4 stars on Google; though the staff seem to respond promptly to all complaints (‘We’re sorry to hear you found the experience “like going to prison”. We do our best to ensure . . .’). It was a low, unimpressive building, 1980s-built, squeezed between tower blocks. Two boys of about eleven were pulling wheelies on small bikes outside. A black and white cat perched on a big green bin. The online gallery of pictures makes much of a garden, but that must be at their outpost in Solihull, because there was no sign of any outside space.

  A social worker saw us coming through the doors and took us straight into a small room, made more mournful by the naked attempt to cheer it with a naïve mural: a tree, an owl, lots of pink and yellow birds. Nursery toys and books, a train set and a plastic miniature kitchen were placed along one side; on the other, a sofa covered in a red fabric like something you might stretch over a sports car. There was a low table, several mismatched chairs. The room smelt of boiled sweets and bad breath, and the carpet gave a scrunch as you walked across it. I hesitate to say it was sticky; it may have been underlay.

  I sat on the red sofa and made weather-based conversation with the social worker, a friendly faced, grey-haired woman in a polka-dot dress and a man’s black cardigan. Her person was rather cluttered: pins in her hair, and glasses on a string and an official lanyard around her neck which she kept flicking and rearranging. A book bag, overstuffed with papers and evidence of a half-eaten packed lunch, slumped at her feet. I experienced a welling of fellow feeling. Ailsa, hunched at the table, looking closely at her poor, raw hands, ignored us both.

  We seemed to wait ages, though it was probably only ten minutes, until at last there were voices and movement in the corridor outside. Ailsa leapt to her feet and took a run at the door as Melissa and Bea came in, followed by another younger social worker. Seconds before, Ailsa had been dull, enervated; now she looked suddenly quite deranged. Her hair has become a bit of a bird’s nest and her gestures were big, her expression contorted by eagerness. Both children instinctively recoiled, and Bea, rearing back, scraped her arm on the metal bit of latch. Ailsa threw herself at her, letting out a high keen, a sympathetic ‘Oh oh oh’, trying to kiss the scratch, to rub it better, until the new social worker, who was suited and ponytailed, pulled her off and encouraged her to sit down.

  ‘Where’s Max?’ Ailsa said, standing up again.

  ‘He didn’t want to come.’ Melissa’s voice was clear and defensive. ‘He—’

  ‘It’s best not to push initial contact,’ the young suited social worker interrupted quickly. She was looking intently at Ailsa, nodding. ‘Next time.’

  Ailsa stared and then slowly sat down, matching her nod. ‘Next time.’

  It’s only a handful of weeks since I’ve seen the children, but they both looked different. Melissa’s hair is white-blonde now, with dark roots, and she was wearing an A-line skirt and a blouse with a Peter Pan collar. Bea’s hair was in bunches and her oyster pink frock was almost bridesmaid in its laciness and flounce. Clearly Cecily Tilson had had her terrible way with both of them. Their faces looked different, too. I was about to write older, but actually younger: bruised and vulnerable, with a strain around the eyes, but a looseness to the mouth as if emotion was close to the surface – which I suppose it was.

  It was awkward, awful at first. I greeted the children warmly but then returned to the sofa and sat quietly, feeling it was best to stay out of the way. Both social workers perched on chairs near the door, writing notes, while Ailsa battled through a series of questions, trying to sound upbeat – bless her – like it was any ordinary day. How had they got here? So Granny was waiting outside in the car, was she? How was the school? Oh dear, why did Max hate it? Had they been riding? Or shopping? I averted my eyes, trying not to look as if I were listening, and my gaze settled on a white baby’s dummy, abandoned in the corner, behind the plastic kitchen sink. I thought of all the other meetings that had happened here, fathers and mothers and babies – so many families broken by alcohol or drugs, or abuse or crime or acrimonious divorce.

  Ailsa’s voice, higher, more strained now: ‘Any plans for Halloween?’

  ‘Max and I are going trick or treating with Auntie Jane,’ Bea said. ‘It’s going to be super fun.’

  ‘That’s nice.’ The agony in Ailsa’s response was palpable.

  Melissa looked down at her phone. ‘Auntie Jane thinks we s
hould move in with her when it’s all over. Lizzie’s off to university and Charlotte will be on her gap year next year, so she’s got space. Grandma’s not so keen. She wants us to herself.’

  When it’s all over. Is that the way even they think it’s going?

  Ailsa didn’t speak at first. She stared at Melissa. The older social worker looked up from her notebook. Someone’s lanyard clattered. Outside, a large dog started barking. An aeroplane snarled. If you listened carefully, you could hear the traffic on the main road, the shudder of a bus. In the room, the silence yawned.

  ‘What about Max?’ Ailsa said.

  ‘Oh, Max,’ Melissa said. ‘He says Auntie Jane doesn’t like him.’

  Ailsa’s skin was so pale it was almost translucent. She looked at the social workers. ‘Jane’s not used to boys,’ she said. Her tone was heartbreaking.

  I decided to speak then, and I launched in, rather as one might plunge headlong into cold water. One of the contestants on Love Island, I’d read in the tabloids, was joining something called TOWIE. What did this mean, for the state of human civilisation?

  Melissa and Bea looked across at me and Bea muttered something which Ailsa grabbed on to, managing to keep the subject going for a while. It was too awful to bear but at some point, Bea got up and slid over to sit on her mother’s knee. It was self-conscious and fey; she was too big for it. I thought of that lunch in the pub when she’d sat with her arms around Tom’s neck. But it was better, much better, than nothing.

  When the younger social worker closed her notebook and got to her feet, Ailsa didn’t groan or cry out as I’d feared. She tipped Bea off her lap and stood too, her head doing the same controlled, neat nodding as at the beginning. She hugged Bea to her tightly and then put her arms out for Melissa. I’d worried Melissa would shun her – she looked sullen again, her face closed – but she came round the table, jostling past the chairs, and the two of them stood, holding each other until the social worker gently peeled them apart.

  ‘I’m never going to see them again,’ Ailsa said as we left the building.

  ‘Don’t be over-dramatic. Of course you will.’

  ‘Why didn’t Max come?’

  I wanted to say I didn’t know, but I felt a tug at the back of my throat, as if my own disappointment was a solid weight, pulling the words down. Behind my eyes, I could see his face, his earnest expression, his habit of screwing up his lower lip when he was concentrating, his hair stuck up at the back. I could hear his voice in my head, the gruffness that undercut his laugh. Until that point, I don’t think I’d realised how much I’d been looking forward to seeing him myself.

  ‘Doesn’t he want to see me?’ Ailsa said. ‘I wanted to see him. How do I know he’s OK otherwise?’

  I forced myself to sound easy. ‘Maybe he had another commitment, a rugby match or something.’ As I said it, I realised it was Tom who had piled on the pressure to play rugby and that Max no longer had that pressure. It’s awful to admit it but, with an eruption in my chest, for the first time I was glad he was dead.

  We were getting close to the main road, and it was noisy, or we’d have heard the car door. Thinking back, maybe I did hear it – a distant clunk above the rattle of a lorry. But it was the sound of rapidly advancing footsteps that made me spin my head.

  Behind was the contact centre; people standing in a gaggle, and a car with its door open onto the pavement. The black and white cat was still there, down from the bin now, washing itself on the ground. The sun was out and had caught the windows on one side of the tower block. But none of that mattered, because running towards us, tripping over his feet slightly, gaining on us with every second, was Max. Darling Max.

  ‘Mum!’ he shouted. ‘Verity! Wait.’

  Chapter Twenty-three

  3 pale-grey cushion covers

  Abreaction, noun. Discharge of the emotional energy

  associated with a psychic trauma that has been

  forgotten or repressed; the process of bringing such a

  trauma back to consciousness.

  Later, we learnt how he had struggled to get out of Cecily’s car; that the child locks were on in the back, and he had banged on the window, scratched to get out. Not that she was trying to stop him. It was Max who hadn’t wanted to see his mother; Max who, when he saw me, had changed his mind. Moments like that give me added purpose.

  It’s time now to go back to the morning Tom died. I need to think it through.

  That scene in Lionel Bart’s Oliver! (Faith’s favourite) when he wakes up in Mr Brownlow’s house and the light is pouring in, and flower girls are singing outside his window and you think everything is going to be OK: that was me, the morning of Tom’s death. I woke in Ailsa’s spare room, between something called a topper and the bounciest of duvets, finding the whiteness not actually sterile, but blissfully clean and sharp. It had rained again in the night; the crack of window between the curtains glistened with drops.

  Maudie was sprawled on a sheepskin rug and I reached down to stroke her. Max had washed her; she was as white and fluffy as the dead lamb on which she lay. She licked my hand. The oatmeal carpet around the rug, if you looked closely, was made of little flecks of different-coloured wool: cream and ivory and taupe. It was actually quite attractive. I thought of the Herberts’ beige carpet piled up in the skip like sheets of tripe, and I remembered how much I had hated the waste. Maybe I’d been wrong. Change could be good.

  My body felt looser, from having rested, from breathing properly again, but also from something deeper and more fundamental. I thought about the birth, and the death; the tiny body; and I felt pain, but love too. Ailsa had called it a loss. A loss. I felt the enormity of what had happened, the relief of finally letting something go.

  My clothes were folded neatly on the chair and I dressed and opened the bedroom door. Noises rose from the kitchen; the suck of the fridge door, the whoosh of the boiling-water tap, a murmur of voices. Tom was still in the house. I’d managed to avoid him the previous evening; like a child, I’d been put to bed at seven. Maybe I should wait until he left for Paris before I went down. But Maudie stretched and nosed my knee, and I stepped out onto the landing.

  Ailsa’s voice was at the back end of the kitchen, but Tom was closer to the kitchen door. I caught the odd tense word – ‘disinfectant’; ‘Eurostar’. He came out of the kitchen, and his voice got louder. He was a few feet below on the other side of the bannisters. I held Maudie by the collar, and shrank back against the wall. The scrape of wood, the brush of fabric, as he opened the cupboard under the stairs. He said: ‘The dog stinks. Tell Max not to get any ideas.’

  I got myself back up the two steps and into the bedroom. I sunk onto the floor, the door behind me. Maudie pushed her muzzle into my hand, and I stroked her head, which felt uneven and bony. Tom came up the stairs, inches from my face on the other side of the door, and climbed the next flight, and then up one more. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he said under his breath, two sibilants, two hard ‘k’s: a double-headed snake and the aggression of the voiceless velar stop. On Maudie’s haunches I felt a couple of lumps. Fatty tissue – I’d Googled; idiopathic, age-related. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about at all.

  A door opened above my head, and his footsteps crossed the ceiling. A scuffle, the thump of feet, a heavy object falling with a clunk, Tom’s voice, stifled but still distinct through the lathe and the plaster. ‘Mud everywhere . . . Tidy up. Now.’ A door slammed, and his footsteps clonked back down the stairs – that heavy tread I could hear through the walls in my own house – past my door and onwards, his hand banging on top of the bannister, down the staircase to the hall. Ailsa’s voice, soothing. ‘Have you got everything? Passport? Tickets? Phone? Calm down. I’ll wash them.’ The front door opened. ‘See you tomorrow,’ she called. And finally the front door closed.

  Did she lean against it with her eyes shut, feeling the relief of his departure? The house had held its breath and let it go. The walls relaxed. The joists loosened. Up
stairs, in the room above, I felt vibrations of steps, the sash thrown open, the closed air freed, and out of the window a high-pitched shout – a release of tension.

  I splashed water on my face, took a puff from my inhaler and left the room.

  Ailsa was in the kitchen, her laptop open in front of her. She was wearing pale-blue cotton pyjamas, with navy piping on the collar. The sun was throwing small box-like flickering shapes across the wall behind her. Maudie ran out through the open doors and crouched to relieve herself in the middle of the grass. On the terrace sat three black bin bags, bulbous with soil, spikes of green emerging from their gathered tops. You could hear the growl of next door’s lawnmower. Andrew Dawson already preparing his betrayal.

  She looked up when she saw me standing in the doorway. ‘I’ve found a new website – Fat Flavours, Thin Thighs; this Indian guy was a serial dieter for years until he discovered an ancient Ayurvedic system which uses low-fat, high-protein superfoods – spices, which have natural anti-oxidising qualities, apparently also speed up your metabolism.’ She tapped her stomach twice and inhaled deeply, squeezing it in. ‘Chicken, with ginger, coriander and turmeric – my supper tonight. The kids won’t touch it, but I’ll make a big pot and batch it into portions and freeze them. I’m turning over a new leaf, starting today.’

  She closed the laptop and stood up. She looked tired, dark smudges under her eyes like bruises. There was tension in her face, something poised to break. ‘Did you sleep well?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Good. I’m so glad. You really needed it. Now what can I get you for breakfast?’