by Barbara Vine
It was mild, but it still got light late in the mornings and dark early in the evenings. Fay often came in on her way home from work, and once or twice it was warm enough to sit in the drawing-room with the French windows open onto a winter garden where the leaves were still on the trees but falling gently. On one of those evenings, after Fay had gone and I had bolted the front door, the doorbell rang. This happened seldom, just as the landline rang seldom. Callers (in both cases) used their mobile phones, either in preference to the landline or on the doorstep. The doorbell ringing was so unusual, especially since I was alone in the house, that at first I didn’t know what it was. Then I did and decided not to answer it.
Its ringing again, insistently this time, brought to mind Maud in The Child’s Child hearing the bell but not answering it when Bertie had walked all those miles on a cold, wet night. In the end she had because Hope made her. But I had no little girl yet to impel me. I wasn’t going to answer that door, not I, a lone woman in a big house at eight in the evening. Instead, I went into the study and looked out of the window. A man and a girl were walking away down the path, but they both turned round when I opened the window.
Their appearance registered strongly with me, and it was well it did. They were young, she several years younger than my graduate students, he nineteen or twenty. He wore those clothes that have become a uniform for men the tabloids call youths, black leather jacket, blue sweatshirt, jeans, while she wore a skirt that came halfway down plump, naked thighs that were red from the cold. It might be a mild night but it was November. Her hair was the colour of custard, too orange a blond to be natural, his invisible because he had shaved his head. In the light from the study window I could see the acne pits and scars on his face.
Of course I didn’t take all this in before I spoke to them and they spoke to me, but while they were speaking, while he was asking me if my brother was at home. Not if he lived at Dinmont House, but if he was in.
“Mr. Andrew Easton” was how he put it in that London street talk that is often quite hard to understand. “Is he like in now?”
The girl was nodding her head.
They were not threatening, they were not aggressive, but I felt I must be careful. I must be cautious and noncommittal. Tess moved, gently waving a hand or a foot. “He doesn’t live here anymore. He moved out a long while ago.”
“Where’s he gone to?” This was the girl murdering the English language, so that I had to ask her to repeat what she had said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I barely knew him.”
What could they want? I didn’t know. They seemed harmless, too young and ignorant and—well, too lost to be any sort of menace. And when I denied Andrew, I felt like St. Peter, though comparing myself to biblical characters isn’t my style. “Sorry I can’t help,” I said, and closed the window.
They looked back to watch me watching them go.
I WROTE to Toby Greenwell, telling him I had liked The Child’s Child and thought it publishable. No one now could possibly object to the clinical details and frank references to homosexual love. I attended to the improvements I had been told the thesis needed. But all the time half my mind was on the boy with the acne and the improbably blond girl who had come to the door. I couldn’t forget them. I wished I hadn’t thought of that phrase about murdering English. Murdering anything or anyone. Why did it bother me? I didn’t know, but I dreamt of seeing someone I didn’t know, someone I had never before seen, a Middle Eastern man lying dead on the pavement in his own blood, surrounded by fiendish, Breughel-like people.
All the time we had been apart I had never contacted James but always left it to him to get in touch with me, as he did quite regularly, but he and Andrew had gone away for a week’s holiday that would come to an end a few days before the trial. Their being away didn’t preclude James’s being in touch, he could have e-mailed or phoned or even texted, but he hadn’t done so during their last short break. What stopped my speaking to him was my certainty that any—well, communication James got that came from me, that came from anyone, Andrew would know about. Belatedly, I wished I had asked that boy and girl for their names. Then I could have given them to the police. But for what reason? They had done nothing, they had only asked where my brother lived. I still wondered why they should want to know where he lived.
JAMES CALLED me when he and Andrew came back. Just to know how I was. I told him about the boy and the girl, and James told me that it was nothing, nothing had happened. That nothingness was true for my encounter with them too. They had told me nothing and I had told them nothing except that Andrew no longer lived at Dinmont House, which was true. James almost dismissed it, but I knew he disliked anything about the coming trial’s being discussed, and this wasn’t even, as far as we knew, about the trial. Talking about Martin Greenwell’s book would be a distraction from that for him, and I wanted to discuss it with him. I wanted to talk to him about what he knew of his great-uncle, and if he had met a fate similar to John Goodwin’s. My mind’s going back to the boy and the girl, I thought that they might have had some entirely different reason for wanting to contact Andrew, though I was bound to say to myself that I couldn’t imagine what that would be.
Fay told me that the trial was due in a week’s time. After the incident with the shaven-headed boy and the blond girl, I would be glad when it was all over. I tried to put it out of my mind and more or less succeeded. Then I woke up in the middle of the night to ask myself if the shaven-headed man could be Gary Summers, the one who was with Kevin Drake at the time of the murder but of whom Andrew and James couldn’t be sure enough to identify. No photographs of him had been in the papers, and I knew his name only from Andrew.
Four days before the trial was due to begin I was out, meeting Louise for lunch in Hampstead High Street. It was a fine, bright day, but rather cold, and baby William was almost invisible inside his furry, brown, all-in-one garment that made him look like a plump puppy. Next time we met, I would have baby Tess with me, similarly wrapped up, for it would still be winter and probably much colder. She too, my daughter, would be related to James’s great-uncle, a great-great-niece, something I had never thought of before. Louise’s news was that she and Damian were getting married, and I thought to myself that this marriage would legitimise William, though I doubted if anyone cared much about that or even noticed it. It was just that I tended to think along these lines since the thesis.
Louise came back with me to Dinmont House for an hour or so. We had tea, I saw her into the tube station, and I began the fairly long walk back up the hill. It gets dark so early at this time of the year and the sun having long gone behind the gathering clouds, it was dusk before I came within sight of Dinmont House. Our street, which is rather more like a country lane, is always quiet and apparently deserted. The people who live in its few houses come and go in their cars, which are parked inside garages. If there is on-street parking, no one uses it. So I was surprised to see a man standing by our front gate and, when he saw me, move a little down the road. The street is full of big trees with leopard-skin trunks, planes I suppose, and he stood under one of them, his head turned away, until I had opened our gate and walked halfway up the path towards the front door.
He must have moved fast and silently. I had reached the porch, glazed in and with a kind of glass hood over it, when I turned my head and saw him closing on me. It’s an unpleasant sensation to turn and, expecting to see someone in the distance, find instead within inches of your face another unknown face, especially perhaps one with a scarf tied round it under the hood. I cried out, “What do you want?”—a useless manoeuvre as no one was within two or three hundred yards.
“You know what I want.” He clamped his hand over my mouth. I tried to duck, but the pressure of that hand on my face was too great. “If you do what I tell you, I won’t hurt you.”
I suppose they all say that. At any rate they all say it in films and on TV. I thought of Tess, and as I did, I felt her move gently. I looked at m
y attacker. He was a big man, not the shaven-headed boy.
“Give me your bag.”
A pregnant woman is the most vulnerable of human beings. Anything I could do—kicking him, kneeing him, stamping on his foot—would ultimately result in injury to me and therefore to her. I gave him my bag, he took the keys out of it, opened the door, and pushed me inside ahead of him.
“Christ. A hundred people could live in here and you’d still have space.”
He couldn’t have got an answer from me and maybe he didn’t expect one. His voice was educated, more or less, rather like that of my students, who had spoken like the blond girl when they were small but whose diction had got some polish in their teenage years. I thought of them and momentarily of Maud, asking myself why I had never wondered what kind of accent she had had.
He took away his hand and pushed me away from him. I had to catch hold of Verity’s sofa to stop myself falling.
“You know what I want to know.”
“Do I?” I said, ashamed of my suddenly squeaky voice
He looked at me from the top of my head down to where my waist had been and a bit lower. “You’d better.” In those two words were somehow the worst kind of threat to Tess. Death to her if not to me.
I made a little sound, a tiny noise of fear and protest.
“Tell me where Andrew Easton lives. That poof, that queen.”
My reaction was strange. My face burned and I felt myself blush as I muttered that I didn’t know.
“Of course you know. He’s your brother.” He was holding my bag. He put the keys back in it, took out my mobile, and pressed the contact icon. I knew he was doing this because he told me so. He began a sort of running commentary on his actions. “I’m looking for your brother’s address.”
“It’s not there.”
Some people add a home address to where there’s space for it, but I never did. Come to that, there was no space there for Andrew, whom I’d always thought of as living here. The man didn’t seem to know James’s name. He told me to sit down and, when I moved to the sofa, shouted at me not to sit there but on the only upright chair in the study. When he felt in the pockets of the padded jacket he wore and brought out a coil of rope, it should have been obvious to me what he wanted it for, but it wasn’t. To torture me, I thought, to whip me. But it was to tie me up. But not in the study.
“Get up, and bring the chair.” I hesitated, flinching a little, but I did get up. “Do it. Do as I say.”
He was carrying the rope, leaving me to carry the chair. He took a cigarette from a packet, and for some reason this frightened me more than anything else that had happened so far. As he raised the scarf to free his mouth, I thought of the cigarettes used to torture people, in the thrillers I’d read on holiday or on flights, stubbed on the palms of hands or worse.
“Sit on the chair,” he said when we’d reached the dining room, the farthest room from the front door, but I didn’t. I stepped backwards, holding it like a shield. The next thing I knew, he had struck me hard across the face. The way Maud had slapped her daughter but as no one had ever slapped me before. I gasped and sat on the chair. It was all I could do not to appeal to him to not hurt me. I could resist struggling, and that was easy, my eyes on that glowing cigarette tip.
Someone says of Maud in The Child’s Child that she had led a sheltered life. But haven’t most of us done that in the Western world? More now than in Maud’s day? I had never been hit nor had I ever had any physical violence done to me. To withstand it, you need practice, you need to have got to some extent accustomed to it. I tried hard to stay rigid and not to tremble, but I failed. My whole body was shaking as he tied my legs to the chair legs and my hands behind me to the chair back. My dome of a stomach was raised up now and vulnerable, but in a way the discomfort helped with the fear.
He lit another cigarette. I could hear my mobile ringing, but of course neither he nor I thought of answering it. I noticed he was wearing heavy boots, not trainers, and holding the cigarette a few inches from my chin, he raised one leg and placed his foot on a stool. Perhaps it wasn’t a threat, but it seemed like one.
“Where does he live?”
I was in such fear that, insane as it sounds, I had forgotten James’s address. I knew it perfectly well, though I had never been there. Something saved me then. I looked up and at shelves full of Verity’s books, the books that were everywhere, even in this room, and my eye caught the novels of Paul Scott. That was when I blessed Verity all over again for having so much reading matter.
“Paul. Paultons Square.” The number came to me without difficulty.
I was so enormously relieved at remembering, at the foot’s being withdrawn and the cigarette stubbed out (albeit on the arm of a chair), that I forgot for a moment what I had done. The enormity of what I had done.
“If you’ve told me a lie . . .”
“I haven’t, I haven’t.”
“I’m not taking any chances.”
Louise had left her scarf behind, draped over the back of a dining chair. He picked it off and gagged me with it. I knew how it was done. I’d seen it on TV. You have to bite the scarf so that it’s half in your mouth before it’s tightly tied. I submitted, I had no choice. The choice had been made before I said Paultons Square.
“If he doesn’t live there, I shall come back.”
THE GAG didn’t hurt and I could breathe all right, but I was uncomfortable. Tess was moving vigorously, as she always did at this time of the evening. If I was deprived of air, would she be? He was an expert tier-upper, I knew that each time I shifted and wriggled, but instead of loosening on my hands, the rope seemed to grow tighter. The phone rang again. How long before it rang again or how many times would it have to ring before someone got frightened for me and came over?
Some places I’d lived in I would only have had to get myself onto the floor, though still attached to the chair, and, pushing myself along up to the dividing wall between this flat and the next, drum as hard as I could with my feet, the chair as a means of making the noise greater, before someone would have heard and been aware something was wrong. But this house was large and isolated. Many yards separated it from its nearest neighbour. Besides, getting myself onto the floor would mean throwing myself and my baby onto a hard surface. Would that matter? Would it perhaps provoke labour, even though my due date was three months off?
I didn’t even know where the phone was, where he had left it. Not that it would have helped me if I had. The clock on the dining-room mantlepiece had said ten past six when I had first come in. It now said eight forty-five. When you’ve been gagged, one of the orifices through which you inhale air has been blocked. My mouth was useless for breathing, but my nostrils were still usable. But once I’d thought of that, I began to worry that something might block my nose. A sneeze could do that if I wasn’t able to blow my nose afterwards, and once I’d thought of it, I seemed to feel a tickle behind the septum and then a kind of stuffiness I was sure hadn’t been there before.
I am making myself sound a terrible solipsist for I had scarcely given a thought to Andrew’s fate, but I did then. His address had been needed so that they could kill him, I had no doubt of that. The clock told me it was nine fifteen. However the man had travelled to Paultons Square, he had had ample time to get there by now, to collect others or one other and go to find Andrew. I prayed that he and James might be out, but if they were, they must still come home sometime. The phone rang again at ten to ten. This time it must be James, calling to tell me they had found Andrew. My nose hadn’t blocked. My mouth ached and throbbed and the gag was wet with saliva, but all I could think of was that I had betrayed my brother for the second time.
2
IT WASN’T a time for crying. I remembered what Fay had said about our crying from emotion, not because we are unhappy, but still I cried. I think my tears were from fear. He might come back, he had said he would if I had given him the wrong address. I hadn’t, I hadn’t had the courage to do that. Had he
taken my keys? I could see my handbag on the table, miles away it seemed, far out of reach even if I had any reach. The keys might still be in it, but even if they were, they would have been of no use to me. It was ten o’clock and the phone was ringing again. It stopped and I was thinking of a Stephen King thriller I had read in which someone was far more horribly tied up than I but managed just the same with incredible ingenuity and over a long time to cut his bonds and free himself. I was thinking about that when suddenly the front doorbell rang.
Frightened as I was, I nevertheless realised it couldn’t be him. He almost certainly had my keys. It must be someone who expected me to answer the door. The bell rang again.
This time I leant over as far as I could and let myself fall onto my right side, shaking with fear for Tess. On the floor, which was uncarpeted, I managed to slide and so propel myself along out into the hall, and once there I made the only vocal sound I could, a kind of wordless, strangled bray through the gag. That front door is solid hardwood, but not apparently oak, which would have resisted more. Malcolm is a big man, and he and Fay had a policeman with them. I suppose the two men broke it down between them with their feet. The door fell, splintered, but nowhere near where I lay. That’s one of the advantages of a really big house, there’s room for a lot of manoeuvring even if you’re trussed up like a chicken.
When I was free with no harm done—Tess was lurching about like a little boat in a storm—I told them what had happened. The policeman wanted to know if I would be able to identify the man, but I said I didn’t think so and told him about the mask under his hood. “I’d know his voice again,” I said, and then I asked my mother why she and Malcolm had come, what had brought them to Dinmont House at that particular time, far too late for them to be paying a social call.
