In the Still of the Night

by Charlotte Lamb

  ‘I didn’t feel she should come alone,’ Sean said curtly. His eyes narrowed. ‘Haven’t we met before somewhere?’

  ‘You’re a policeman, aren’t you? I met you a couple of times when you visited patients,’ said the sister drily. ‘In a professional capacity. And once when you came in to have stitches in that cut on your face – a bottle, wasn’t it?’

  He grinned suddenly. ‘Of course – I remember you now, you weren’t a sister then. Staff Nurse Collins, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What a memory! Typical policeman. Policemen and elephants never forget.’ Sister Collins was laughing, flattered.

  ‘Was my mother badly injured?’ Annie asked, and the sister sobered.

  ‘Broken hip, I’m afraid; very painful and it will be a long time before she can get about again. She is sedated at the moment, but you can see her. She isn’t making much sense, though – shock, of course. At her age any trauma can be serious. She doesn’t have the reserves needed to recover quickly from an accident like that.’

  ‘What exactly happened?’

  ‘Apparently she was running away from a policeman,’ the sister said, giving Sean a sideways look.

  ‘A policeman?’ His brows shot up.

  ‘Was it you?’

  ‘Running away?’ Annie was bewildered. ‘I don’t understand. Why was she running away? Where did all this happen?’

  ‘In Albert Park, just ten minutes from here. And your mother was in her nightie and dressing-gown!’

  ‘What? But how could she have got out of the house like that? There should have been someone with her.’

  ‘Well, she was alone.’ The sister glanced at Sean. ‘I’m sorry, you can’t go in – just Miss Lang. This way, Miss Lang.’

  She led Annie into the long, cream-painted ward closely packed with beds from which old, worried faces stared. Trudie was in a bed near the door. She looked frail, face lined with pain and age, bluish stains under her eyes, around her bloodless mouth. Annie picked up her clawlike hand and held it, her mother’s skin like thin, crinkly tissue over the protruding bones.

  Tenderness moved inside her chest. She stroked the workworn roughness of her mother’s palms, the bony knuckles, and thought of Trudie working in the greengrocer’s shop all those years, up at first light, getting to bed late every day, looking after her when she was small, doing the shopping and cooking, running a home as well as running the shop. Trudie had had a hard life. It was ten minutes before Trudie sighed and opened her eyes, looked at her and pulled her hand free.

  ‘Who’re you?’

  ‘It’s me, it’s Annie, Mum.’ Annie wanted to burst into tears.

  ‘Annie? You’re not my little Annie.’ Trudie looked around the ward wildly. ‘Who are you? What do you want?’

  Annie tried to take her hand again and Trudie slapped her away.

  ‘No, let go of me! What are you after?’

  ‘Mum. Oh, Mum. Don’t. Look at me. It’s Annie.’

  The sob in her voice got through to her mother. Trudie peered at her, uncertainty clouding her eyes, then something leapt in her face and she reached out a trembling hand, clutched at her daughter. ‘Annie?’

  Wrenched with a sigh of relief, Annie smiled, holding the thin old hand between both her own. ‘Yes, it’s me, Mum. How do you feel?’

  Her voice tremulous, Trudie whispered, ‘What’s wrong with me? I keep forgetting … all confused, I forgot you’d grown up.’

  ‘It’s the drugs they’re giving you,’ lied Annie, holding back the tears.

  ‘I won’t take drugs,’ Trudie flared up, getting angry. ‘Tell them not to give me drugs!’

  ‘I will, Mum.’

  The old woman sighed deeply and closed her eyes, but still held on to Annie’s hand tightly.

  Sean came through the swing doors and walked over to the bed to look down at her. ‘How is she?’ he asked Annie in a whisper.

  ‘She’s going to be OK,’ Annie said, more because it was what she wanted to believe than because it was the truth. ‘Didn’t the sister say you shouldn’t come in?’

  ‘She’s gone for a meal break and the nurse left on duty is busy in the kitchen,’ Sean coolly said.

  He leaned on the wall, half-hidden by the shabby green curtains that could be drawn around the bed when privacy was required. Around them old people coughed and shifted, sighed and snored. This was a geriatric ward; there were no young people here and there was an atmosphere of defeat in the air. Sean stared around at the other beds, the other old, tired, faces, absorbing the scene and memorising it for future use.

  Trudie’s eyes opened suddenly; she looked up with fear in her face. ‘Annie … Annie, he tried to kill me.’

  Sean stiffened, his eyes flicking back to her at once.

  ‘Who did? What are you talking about, Mum?’ Annie didn’t take it seriously, her voice was soothing, placatory. Her mother never made much sense these days.

  ‘I recognised him the minute I saw him, even after all these years. He’d changed, but I knew him all right and he knew me, he gave me such a look! Then he tried to push me under a bus.’

  Annie inhaled sharply, convinced by the fear in her mother’s voice. ‘What? Where was this?’

  ‘The bus almost hit me, it had to brake so hard it almost crashed. I ran into a park to get away – I was so scared. That’s how I fell. I was in such a state I didn’t know what I was doing.’ Trudie’s voice shook with terror, Annie tightened her hold on the cold hand she held.

  ‘Ssh … Mum, it’s OK, you’re safe. Don’t look so scared, I won’t let anything hurt you.’

  Sean moved and Trudie looked towards him, gasped, her pale mouth quivering. ‘Who’s that? Get him away … who is he?’

  The ward sister appeared, frowning. ‘I thought I told you to wait outside?’ she crossly snapped at Sean. ‘Please go out. Miss Lang, your mother seems upset. I’m sorry, I think you had better leave now.’

  ‘Don’t leave me, Annie,’ pleaded Trudie. ‘Don’t let them give me drugs, I’m afraid of forgetting again. He might get in here while I’m asleep. He hates me … he blames us!’

  Annie’s eyes met Sean’s. He read the fear and distress in her face and his brows jerked together.

  The sister said, ‘We’ll make sure nobody gets in here, Mrs Lang, don’t you worry. You mustn’t get excited, it’s bad for you. Say goodbye, Miss Lang.’

  Annie obediently bent to kiss her mother, whispered soothingly, ‘I’ll talk to them, Mum. You have to have some drugs, to help you get better, but I’ll tell them not to give you the ones that make you forget. Is there anything I can bring you? Your knitting? Some magazines?’

  ‘Take me home, Annie. I want to go home.’ Trudie tried to move and fell back with a cry of agony; the cloudy bewilderment came into her face again. ‘What’s wrong with me? I can’t move. What am I doing here? Where is this place?’

  ‘You’d really better go, we’ll take care of her,’ the ward sister said, steering Annie away from the bed. Looking back at her mother, Annie saw a young nurse bending over her, talking calmly to her, giving her a drink of water.

  ‘She told me someone tried to kill her,’ Annie said uneasily. ‘A man tried to push her under a bus, she said.’

  The sister frowned. ‘We were told by the police that she was sitting in a park and when she saw a policeman she started to run and fell over. There was no mention of anyone trying to kill her.’

  ‘You think she imagined it?’ Sean asked curtly.

  The sister shrugged. ‘Well, at her age, with her mental condition … that has to be a possibility, you know. They get these fantasies, I’m afraid; all sorts of ideas get jumbled up. When the mind is losing its grip on reality, people no longer always know the difference between real life and something they’ve seen on TV or read – they get confused, start imagining all sorts of things.’

  ‘It happens even when they aren’t suffering from senility,’ Sean wryly said. ‘A lot of our audience can’t tell the difference between TV and rea
l life at all.’ He looked at Annie’s white, troubled face. ‘Come on, I’ll take you home.’

  ‘And don’t worry too much,’ said Sister Collins. ‘We’ll take good care of your mother.’ She smiled suddenly. ‘We’re all big fans of your programme, Miss Lang. I shall watch it with even more interest now I’ve met you. It will make it more like real life.’

  Annie went through the motions of responding, smiling, saying, ‘Thank you, that’s very kind,’ before she began to move away, still smiling tightly, her jaw aching and her cheekbones locked in that mimicry of a smile.

  Sean insisted on driving Annie back home. ‘You’re in no state to go alone,’ he said, putting her into his Porsche. ‘You’ve had a bad shock.’

  Annie didn’t argue; she was too abstracted. Had Trudie imagined an attack on her? It had been horribly convincing, in spite of what Sean and the ward sister had said. But why on earth would anyone want to harm Trudie?

  ‘I recognised him,’ Trudie had said. ‘He hates me … he blames us.’

  Who on earth could she be talking about? Could it be Roger?

  She frowned; she would start getting paranoid if she wasn’t careful. Why on earth would he attack her mother? He had only met Trudie a couple of times, when she came to the school for public performances in which Annie had a part. He had spent some time talking to her after the first night of Hamlet, of course, and Trudie usually remembered faces – most shopkeepers had a good memory for faces. Trudie undoubtedly remembered Roger.

  Annie’s stomach turned, remembering his kiss on stage when they were taking their curtain calls; she could even remember the smell of his skin, the aftershave he must have used, the odour of his sweat, could feel his tongue sliding in and out of her mouth like a wriggling snake.

  Eight years and she hadn’t forgotten a second of it. He had made sure of that. Or would she have been haunted by him even if he hadn’t kept sending her Valentine’s cards? Some nightmares keep recurring however hard you try to forget.

  He had talked to her mother that night, during the stage party, while he had his arm around her waist, while his fingertips secretly fondled the underside of her breast, out of sight. Yes, he would remember her mother, and Trudie would certainly remember him because she had thought him charming, and because he had been important at the drama school.

  But it had been Annie who blew the whistle on him and lost him his job. Trudie had had no part in that. But she was her mother, and Roger Keats would guess that if anything happened to Trudie because of her she would go mad.

  When they got back to the white Edwardian house in South Park they found Jerri, her mother’s companion, sitting in the lounge with her bags packed beside her, watching television while she waited for Annie to come home.

  ‘What happened, Jerri?’ Annie asked.

  ‘I was cooking her breakfast and she got out, I didn’t hear a thing, I’d left her in front of the TV and when I went back with her breakfast she’d vanished. I’m just not up to the job; she’s a twenty-four-hour-a-day liability and I can’t cope with her. If you’ll just pay me what you owe me so far, I’ll go.’

  Annie didn’t argue; she wrote out a cheque then asked, ‘Nobody came to the house, did they? This morning?’

  Blankly, Jerri shook her head. ‘Were you expecting someone?’

  ‘No, but my mother said there was a man hanging around outside, someone she recognised.’

  ‘Well, nobody came to the house. It was probably one of the neighbours. After all, she knows nearly all of them. Look, Annie, she’s out of it, she doesn’t know tea from coffee any more. I don’t know what she was on about but I do know nobody came to the house this morning. Sometimes Mrs Adams from Number 3 comes over to have a chat with her, or that old woman with the blue-rinsed hair calls in, but nobody came today. If anyone had rung the bell or knocked, I would have heard them. Can I ring for a taxi?’

  Annie nodded. Sean wandered over to the window and was pushing aside the curtain to look out into the suburban street. It was dusk now, the street-lights had come on, making pools of yellow at intervals along the pavement, across which fell the shadows of the bare, pollarded plane trees which lined the street.

  There was a taxi rank outside South Park Underground station; Jerri’s taxi arrived five minutes later and Annie went to the front door with her while Sean wandered into the kitchen at the back of the house, made tea and carried the tea-tray through to the long, comfortably furnished sitting-room. The colours were faded, the furniture a muddle of periods. He suspected the room had looked this way for a long time; much of the furniture dated back to the nineteen-twenties but some of it was far more modern. Had Annie’s family lived in this house for many years?

  Annie shut the front door and came back, looking startled as she saw the tea.

  ‘Did you make that?’

  ‘I thought we could both do with some tea,’ he half apologised. ‘It’s a habit you pick up in the police force.’ He handed her a cup and she sat down, nursing it. Sean sat down too, his eyes intent. ‘You took what your mother said about being attacked very seriously, didn’t you? I think you knew what she was talking about. Are you and your mother in some sort of trouble?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just … oh, something happened, years ago, when I was at drama school.’ Annie hesitated, she had never talked about it before, but Sean’s steady eyes and air of never being surprised or shocked by anything somehow made it easy to talk to him. Was that, too, something he had picked up in the police force? Or had he been born with it?

  She needed to talk to someone so she told him about Roger Keats, her eyes not meeting his.

  ‘And ever since you’ve had a Valentine’s card from him every year? Have you kept any of them?’ Sean asked.

  ‘All of them,’ she said huskily, and his eyes narrowed.

  ‘Although you hated him?’

  Her lips trembled. ‘Because I hated him,’ she whispered. ‘I was afraid to destroy them.’

  ‘Could I see them?’

  Annie shivered and knew she couldn’t bear to show them to him. ‘Not tonight. I’m so tired, would you mind going now? I’m very grateful, you’ve been very kind, but I’ve had enough for one day.’

  ‘Has it occurred to you that tomorrow is Valentine’s Day?’

  ‘You don’t really think I’ve forgotten that?’ she snapped, at the end of her tether.

  Sean gave her a quick look; it was rare for her to lose her temper, she was usually so quiet and cool. But then she was under a lot more pressure than he had realised when he went with her to the hospital. He had seen how upset she was, which was only natural, but now he knew Annie was disturbed about far more than her mother’s accident, and her problems went back a long, long way.

  ‘Alright, don’t blow your top,’ he said, pouring her some more tea. ‘I don’t imagine either you or your mother are in any danger. If he has been sending you threats once a year all that time he isn’t going to turn dangerous now.’

  She had told herself that over and over again. She sipped her tea, staring at the electric fire he had switched on to warm the room up. Dusk had fallen; the glow of the fire was a reassurance.

  ‘But if it was him … today … following my mother …’ she stammered, glancing sideways at him with unconscious appeal, her blue eyes very wide and dilated.

  ‘If it was,’ agreed Sean, staring down into those eyes, with their huge, glazed black pupils, and thinking that they reminded him of the dark blue of gentians in the Swiss mountains in spring. What lay behind them, though? What went on inside Annie’s head? ‘But she isn’t too strong on reality just now, is she? And why would he wait so long? It doesn’t add up. He gets a turn-on from sending you those cards, that’s all, getting his own back by making you jumpy. There’s a pattern there; he’s a type I’ve met before. They don’t generally come out of the woodwork, just go on sniping from the dark. The sort who sends poison-pen letters – that’s the category your old drama teacher fits in!’

 
She made a wryly amused face. ‘You still think like a policeman!’

  He shrugged. ‘Can’t help it. I did the job for too long – and it isn’t a bad training for a writer, either. You see human nature in the raw, that’s for sure.’

  She looked at him curiously. ‘Yes, your scripts are horribly realistic.’

  He laughed shortly. ‘Thanks – if it was a compliment! It didn’t sound as if it was.’

  Defensive, she insisted, ‘I like the realism in the series, it gives it a far sharper edge.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, a faint flush creeping along his angular cheekbones, and she watched the faint, pale scar stand out because the flush did not show in it. Sean added roughly, ‘Just don’t fret over this guy turning up and threatening you – I think he’s the wrong type to do that.’

  She bit her lip. ‘Maybe – it’s just that … well, his wife showed up today, out of the blue.’

  That shook Sean. ‘His wife?’ He almost spilt his own tea, put the cup down carefully. ‘What do you mean – showed up?’

  ‘She started working in wardrobe this week. While we were filming I saw her talking to Derek.’ Annie swallowed hard. ‘She … She looked at me as if she hated me.’

  Sean was frowning again. ‘Is she the woman who was wearing purple and bright red, and had orange hair?’

  Annie did a double-take. ‘You noticed her?’

  His mouth had a hard amusement. ‘She’s not easy to miss, and she’s the only newcomer in wardrobe, I knew all the other women. Policemen get used to watching faces all the time, even off duty. Look, why don’t I have a casual word with her – find out if her husband is back in London?’

  ‘Would you?’ She looked up at him, eyes wide and dark with a mixture of hope and weariness. ‘I’d be glad if you could.’ She bit her lip. ‘Be careful, though, he’s a nasty piece of work.’

  He touched her cheek with one long index finger. ‘I’ll be very careful.’ He smiled down at her. ‘Thanks for worrying.’

  The gesture was comforting, she closed her eyes, sighing. ‘He scares me rigid. He always did.’

  Sean put his arms around her and held her gently, without pressure, his cheek against her hair. She leaned on him gratefully, tempted to ask him to stay all night. She was nervous about being left alone. All her life her mother had been there, she had never been alone in the house before, and it scared her to think of Roger Keats out there in London somewhere.