Land of the Living

by Nicci French

I opened my mouth to reply, and then the doorbell rang, one long, steady peal. I gasped. "Got to go," I said, and jumped to my feet. I could hear my father's tiny voice through the phone's mouthpiece. I raced from the sitting room into Jo's bedroom, grabbing my bag and keys as I ran. The bell rang again; two short bursts.

  I fumbled with the catch then pulled up the window and leant out. It was only about an eight- or nine-foot drop into Peter's narrow, overgrown garden, but it still looked horribly far and I'd land on concrete. I thought about going back into the living room and dialling the police, but everything in me was telling me to flee.

  I clambered out on to the window-sill then turned so I was facing backwards. I took a deep breath and pushed off.

  I hit the ground hard and felt the shock jarring up my body. I half fell, hands outstretched and scraping along the cold concrete. Then I straightened up and ran. I thought I could hear a sound from the flat. I pounded across the garden's overgrown and sodden lawn. My legs felt like lead as I dragged them over the rotted mulch of leaves; I could barely make them move and it was as if I was running in a dream. A nightmare, where you run and run and never get anywhere.

  There was a high wall at the back of the garden. It was full of cracks and in some places the bricks had crumbled and come away. There were brambles with purple stems as wide as hose pipes climbing up it. I found a handhold, a foothold, pulled myself up. I slipped, felt rough brick grazing my cheek; tried again. I could hear myself panting, or sobbing; I couldn't tell which. My hands were on top of the wall, and then I was there, one leg over, the next. I let go and fell into an adjacent garden, landing painfully and twisting my ankles. I saw a woman's face peering out of the downstairs window as I staggered to my feet and limped to the side passage that led out on to the road.

  I didn't know which direction to go in. It didn't really matter, so long as I went somewhere. I jogged along the road, each step throbbing in my ankle. I could feel blood trickling down my cheek. A bus drew up at a stop a few yards away and I hobbled towards it and jumped on board as it was drawing away. I went and sat by a middle-aged woman with a shopping basket, even though there were spare seats, and looked back. There was no one there.

  The bus went all the way to Vauxhall. I got off at Russell Square and went into the British Museum. I hadn't been there since I was a child and it was all different. There was a great glass roof covering the courtyard and light flooded down on me. I made my way through rooms lined with ancient pottery, and rooms full of great stone sculptures and I saw nothing. I came to a room lined with vast, leather bound books; some were on stands, opened at illuminated pages. It was softly lit and quiet. People, when they talked,

  talked in whispers. I sat there for an hour, gazing at the rows of books and seeing nothing. I left when it was closing time; I knew I couldn't go home.

  Twenty-one

  As I came out on to the steps of the museum I realized that I was freezing. I had escaped from the flat in only a light sweater. So I walked to Oxford Street and went into almost the first clothes shop I came to. I spent fifty pounds on a jacket. It was red and quilted and made me look as if I should be standing on a railway platform taking down train numbers, but it was warm. I took the tube north and walked to Ben's house. He bloody wasn't there. I walked over to a Haverstock Hill cafe, ordered an expensive frothy coffee and allowed myself to think.

  Jo's flat was now out of bounds to me. He'd found me again, and now he'd lost me again, for the time being. I tried to think of another possibility but there was none. A person had obtained my address from Carol by pretending to be my father. I made a feeble attempt to imitate a sceptical policeman. I tried to imagine an angry client or someone I'd hired being so desperate to contact me personally that they would attempt this complicated subterfuge. It was nonsense. It was him. So what would he do? He had found where I was staying. He didn't know I knew that or maybe he didn't. He might think that I was out and he simply had to wait there for me. If that was so, then I could call the police and they could go and arrest him and it would all be over.

  This idea was so tempting that I could hardly stop myself. The snag was that I knew I was about one millimetre away from Jack Cross losing patience with me altogether. If I tried to call out the police because of some suspicion I had, they might simply not come. Or if they did come, they might just find that he wasn't there. And what was I asking them to do? Go up to any man, any man at all, and accost him on suspicion of being my kidnapper?

  I finished my coffee and walked back to Ben's flat. The lights were still off. I didn't know what to do so I lurked outside, stamping my feet, rubbing my hands together. What if Ben was in a meeting? What if he had suddenly decided to meet someone for a drink or go out for dinner or a movie? I tried to think of somewhere else to go. I started to compile a list of friends I might drop in on. Abigail Devereaux, the Flying Dutch woman, wandering from house to house in search of food and a bed for the night. People would be hiding behind their sofas when I rang the bell. By the time Ben walked up the steps, I was feeling thoroughly sorry for myself.

  He looked startled as I stepped out of the shadows, and I immediately tried to apologize for being there, and then, in the middle of my apology, I began to cry and was immediately angry with myself for being so pathetic and tried to apologize for crying. So now Ben was standing on the steps outside his flat with a crying woman. Worse and worse. In the midst of it all Ben managed both to put his arm round me and get his keys out of his pocket and unlock the door. I started an explanation of what had happened at Jo's flat but, whether because I was shivering with cold or whether saying it out loud made me realize how frightened I had been, I was unable to speak coherently. Ben just murmured words into my ear and led me up to the bathroom. He turned on the bath taps. He started to pull down zips and unfasten buttons on my clothes.

  "I like the jacket," he said.

  "I was cold," I said.

  "No, really."

  He pulled my clothes over my head and eased my trousers down my legs and over my feet. I caught sight of myself in the mirror. Red-faced from the cold, red-eyed from crying. I looked raw, as if my skin had been peeled off with my clothes. The hot water of the bath stung at first, then felt wonderful. I wanted to live in that bath for ever, like a primeval swamp animal. Ben disappeared and came back with two mugs of tea. He placed them both on the side of the bath. He started to take his clothes off. This was nice. He got in with me, entangling his legs with mine, and he behaved like a complete gentleman: he sat at the end with the taps. He draped a flannel over them so that he was able to lie back without being in total discomfort. My mouth was working again and I managed to give him a fairly composed account of my escape, if that's what it had been.

  He looked genuinely startled. "Fuck," he said, which struck the right note. "You climbed out of the back window?"

  "I didn't open the door and ask him in for tea."

  "You're absolutely sure it was him?"

  "I've been desperately trying to think of any other explanation. If you can come up with one, I would be so grateful."

  "It's a pity you didn't get a look at him."

  "Jo's front door doesn't have a peephole. There was the additional problem that I was having a heart-attack from fear. I have to admit that there was a part of me that almost wanted to lie down and wait for him to come and get me so that it would all be over."

  Ben took another flannel and draped it over his face. I heard a sort of murmuring from under it.

  "I'm sorry," I said.

  He pulled the flannel away. "What?" he asked.

  "About all this. It's bad enough for me, but I can't do anything about that. I'm sorry that you've been landed with it as well. Maybe we met at the wrong time."

  "You shouldn't say sorry."

  "I should. And I'm also saying it in advance."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Because I'm about to ask you for a favour."

  "Go on, then."

  "I was going to ask you to
go to Jo's flat and get my stuff for me." Ben looked so unhappy at this that I immediately rushed into a desperate explanation. "Because I obviously can't go there myself. I can't go there ever again. He might be watching from outside. But you'll be fine. He's only looking for me. He might assume that he's got the wrong flat."

  "Right," said Ben, looking even less happy. "Yes, of course, I'll do it."

  The atmosphere had definitely changed. We didn't talk for a bit.

  "Are you all right?" I said, eager to break the silence.

  "This wasn't what I planned," he said.

  "I know, I know, it would have been easier for you if you'd met somebody who wasn't involved in something like this."

  "That's not what I meant. I was talking about here, in this bath, now. I was planning to help wash you. I would have rubbed you on your shoulders, and then down over your breasts. We would have gone to bed. But now, instead of that, I'm going to get dressed and go out and probably get murdered myself. Or he might torture me to find out where you are."

  "You don't have to, if you don't want to," I said.

  In the end, Ben phoned up a friend of his, Scud. "Not his real name," Ben said. Scud worked with computer graphics, but in his spare time, he played club rugby. "He's fifteen stone and a lunatic," Ben said. He managed to persuade Scud to come over straight away. "Yes, now," I heard him say on the phone. Scud arrived fifteen minutes later and he was, as advertised, massive. He looked amused to meet a new woman wearing Ben's dressing-gown and he was evidently puzzled by the pared-down version of my story that Ben gave him. But he shrugged and said it would be no problem.

  I gave a brief description of where my stuff was.

  "And when you leave, make sure you're not followed," I said.

  Scud looked at me, apparently alarmed. I'd forgotten that much of what I said made me sound insane to unprepared normal people. Ben pulled a face.

  "You said there'd be no problem."

  "Not for you. But he might think you're connected with me and follow you. Just keep an eye out."

  The two men exchanged glances.

  Ben was back in less than an hour, an hour in which I drank a tumbler of whisky and flicked through Ben's glossy magazines. He came in looking as if he had been Christmas shopping. He dumped the bulging carrier-bags on the floor. "I owe Scud one," he said.

  "What for? Did anything happen?"

  "I owe Scud one for dragging him away from his wife and children in order to rummage around the flat of someone he doesn't know. And then possibly involving him in criminal activity."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Jo's front door was open. It had been forced."

  "But there's a chain."

  "It must have been kicked in. The whole frame was broken."

  "Jesus."

  "Yes. We weren't sure what to do. It's probably not legal to go round a crime scene helping yourself to things that don't belong to you."

  "He broke in," I murmured, almost to myself.

  "I think I've got everything," Ben said. "Clothes, mainly. Some of the odds and ends you asked for. Your pieces of paper, stuff from the bathroom shelf. I can't guarantee that some of this isn't Jo's. In fact, the more I think about this the less legal it seems."

  "Great," I said, hardly listening.

  "And Jo's photograph, like you asked."

  He put it on the table and we both looked at it for a moment.

  "I did want to make one comment," he said. "In fact, more than one. I assume that you've got nowhere to stay, so I don't want to make a big deal of this or presume on anything but you're welcome to stay here. As long as you want to, basically."

  I couldn't stop myself. I gave him a hug. "Are you sure?" I said. "You don't have to, just because I'm in this helpless state. I'm sure I could find somewhere."

  "Don't be stupid."

  "I don't want to be like this dismal, needy woman forcing herself on a man who's too polite to kick her out."

  He put up his hand. "Stop," he said. "Shut up. We should find somewhere to put all this stuff."

  We started going through this odd assortment that I'd gathered over the past days.

  "The other thing I wanted to say," he said, while sorting through my underwear, 'at least I wanted to raise it as a possibility, is that this was just a normal break-in."

  "What about the person who rang work pretending to be my dad?"

  "I don't know. There might have been a misunderstanding.

  Perhaps what you heard at the door was someone breaking in. They rang the door bell, as they do, to check that no one's home. You didn't answer, in your normal style. The villain assumes nobody's home and breaks in. There's so much of that happening in the area. Just a few days ago, these friends of mine round the corner heard a huge crash in the middle of the night. They went downstairs and exactly the same thing had happened. Someone had kicked the door open and grabbed a bag and a camera. It might have been the same thing."

  "Was anything taken?"

  "I couldn't tell. A couple of drawers were open. The VCR was still there."

  "Hmmm," I said sceptic ally

  Ben looked thoughtful for a moment. He seemed to be thinking so hard that it hurt. "What do you want for supper?" he said.

  I liked that. I liked that so much. In the middle of all I was going through, that question as if we were a couple living together. Which we were, as it turned out.

  "Anything," I said. "Anything you've got that's left over. But, look, Jo's vanished, someone got my address from Carol under false pretences, there's a knock at the door. I scoot out of the back and he breaks in. It's too much."

  Ben stood like a statue, except it was a statue holding a pair of my knickers. I snatched them from him.

  "Tomorrow I'll call the police," he said. "Jo's parents should be back tonight. We'll speak to them and then, unless they've got good news, we've got to report her missing."

  I put my hand on his. "Thanks, Ben."

  "Is that whisky?" he asked, catching sight of my glass. Well, his glass, strictly speaking.

  "Yes, sorry," I said. "I was in urgent need of something."

  He picked up the glass and took a gulp from it. I saw his hand was shaking.

  "Are you all right?" I said.

  He shook his head. "You know you said that you thought we might have met at the wrong time? I hope that's wrong. Things feel right in all sorts of ways. But I'm afraid that I'm not really the person who's going to be able to fight anybody -off, take a bullet for you. I think I'm afraid, to be honest."

  I kissed him, and our hands felt for each other.

  "Most people wouldn't say that," I said. "They'd just find an excuse not to have me in the house. But at the moment I'm interested in your plan."

  "What plan?"

  "The one that began with you washing my shoulders. We can miss out the washing bit."

  "Oh, that plan," he said.

  Twenty-two

  "Listen. I woke up and I couldn't get back to sleep and I've been thinking. You know how it is when you just lie there in the dark and thoughts whirl round and round your head? Anyway, this is how it is. He's after me, but I'm after him too. I've got to get to him before he gets to me. Agreed?" I was sitting at Ben's kitchen table in one of his shirts, dipping brioche into coffee. Outside, there was frost on the grass. The kitchen smelt of fresh bread and hyacinths.

  "Maybe," he said.

  "So what does he know about me? He knows my name, what I look like, more or less, where I lived until a couple of weeks ago, where I stayed until yesterday, where I work. Or worked. Right, what do I know about him?" I paused for a moment to drink some coffee. "Nothing."

  "Nothing?"

  "Nothing at all. A blank. Except there's one thing in my favour. He doesn't know that I know he's after me. He thinks he can just creep up behind me, but actually we're like children in that game when you circle round the tree, each pursuing the other and fleeing from them at the same time. But he thinks I don't know he's coming to get me. If yo
u see what I mean."

  "Abbie ..."

  "There's something else too. I'm not just following him, or at least intending to follow him, once I know where to start. I'm following me the me I can't remember, I mean. Like Grandmother's Footsteps."

  "Hang on .. ."

  "Maybe Grandmother's Footsteps isn't quite right. But presumably the me that I can't remember may have tried to find out where Jo was. I would have done, wouldn't I? If I'm doing it now I would have done it then. Don't you think it's a possibility? That's what I

  was thinking."

  "What time did you wake this morning?"

  "About five, I think. My mind was racing. What I need is a piece of solid evidence I can take to Cross. Then they'll start the investigation and protect me and everything will be fine. So if I retrace my footsteps, which were retracing Jo's footsteps, then I may end up where I ended up before."

  "Which, if you remember what happened to you, doesn't sound like a good idea at all."

  "The problem, of course, is that I can't retrace my footsteps because I can't remember them."

  "Do you want some more coffee?"

  "Yes, please. And I don't know what Jo's footsteps were either. But, anyway, there was only a small amount of time between when she disappeared and when I was grabbed. I'm sure of that at least, because I know from Peter she was around on Wednesday morning, and I disappeared on Thursday evening."

  "Abbie." Ben took both of my hands and held them between his own. "Slow down a bit."

  "Am I gabbling?"

  "It's ten past seven and we went to sleep late. I'm not at my sharpest."

  "I've been thinking I need to follow up the cat."

  "Sorry?"

  "Jo was going to get a kitten. Her neighbour in the downstairs flat told me that. She'd bought everything for it, and I'm guessing she was just about to get it. If I could find out where she was going to get it from well, anyway, I can't think of anything else to do. I have to begin somewhere."

  "So now you're planning to track down a cat?"

  "I'll ask at the pet shop and the post office, where they pin up notices. The vet, too. They often have notices, don't they? It's probably pointless, but if you've any better ideas I'd love to hear them."