by F. R. Tallis
‘Yes,’ Christopher replied. ‘Although it’s not my ladder – it belongs to a builder. He left it here last year and never came back to pick it up.’
‘Would you mind joining me, please? Your wife can stay where she is.’
Christopher followed the inspector round to the side entrance. The inspector pointed at the ladder.
‘Has it been moved?’
‘I don’t think so.’
The inspector rubbed his chin. ‘The side door was unlocked – did you know that?’
‘We often leave it open. The Vale’s usually very safe. It’s like a village here.’
‘If the abductor did use this ladder, it’s odd that he should have troubled to put it back where he found it.’ The inspector shook his head. ‘Although that’s not half as odd as reciting a poem.’
Christopher cleared his throat. ‘I’m not sure that my wife did hear an intruder.’
The inspector turned sharply. ‘Oh? Why do you say that?’
‘I think she may have heard some sort of interference, a radio broadcast that was picked up by the monitor.’
‘Is that possible?’
‘I believe so.’
‘How does it happen?’
‘I’m not sure about the technical details. But a baby monitor is basically a receiver, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, I suppose . . . that makes sense. There wasn’t enough time for an intruder to make an escape. Your wife heard a voice, woke you up, and a few seconds later you were both in the nursery. How could an intruder climb out of the window with a child and remove a ladder so quickly?’
‘But my wife said she heard my daughter.’
‘She heard something, I’m sure – more interference, perhaps?’ The inspector offered Christopher a cigarette. Christopher took one and the inspector lit it for him before lighting his own. ‘No,’ he continued. ‘By the time your wife woke up they were long gone.’
The two men stared down at the ladder as if prolonged scrutiny of its rotting rungs and rusted brackets might eventually yield some precious insight. Birds were singing, a frenzied chorus of tweets and chirps that suddenly became very loud. Shovels made contact with the earth.
‘Why are you digging?’ Christopher asked.
The inspector’s face was blank. It was as though Christopher hadn’t spoken. ‘If you don’t mind,’ said the inspector, ‘I’d like to ask you a personal question.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Are you a wealthy man?’
‘No. Far from it.’
‘But you write music for films.’
‘I did very well in the sixties, but recently things haven’t been great. I don’t get much work these days.’
‘Your wife is a famous model.’
‘She was a famous model, but not anymore. She gave it all up.’
‘Even so,’ the inspector grimaced, ‘some might think a film composer and a retired fashion model were very well off.’
‘There are richer people than us living in Hampstead.’
‘I’m sure. But it’s more a question of perception.’
Christopher blew out a cloud of cigarette smoke. All he could say was, ‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Perhaps you’d better get back inside,’ said the inspector. ‘Your wife . . .’
‘Yes,’ said Christopher, ‘Of course.’
Inspector Barnes made off in the direction of an officer who had started digging by a row of bushes. He was a young man and stood to attention as his superior approached. The inspector nodded and the officer relaxed.
‘Look at this, sir.’ The young man pulled a branch aside, revealing a statue of a cherub.
‘Is that all you’ve found?’
‘Yes.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘No, sir. Well, you can’t get very far – inside there, I mean. You’d get torn to pieces.’ He let go of the branch.
The inspector looked at the ground and kicked it with the toe of his shoe. ‘So what are you doing now?’
‘Digging, sir.’
‘Does the ground here look as though it’s been recently disturbed?’
‘The bushes have been cut back.’
‘Indeed,’ said Barnes. ‘But the ground?’ He stamped his foot on the baked earth.
The young man winced. ‘No, sir. The soil isn’t very loose.’
‘Not very loose? I’d say it was like fucking concrete.’ The inspector’s regional accent became more pronounced when he swore. ‘Now stop pissing about here and go and join Collins and Crane by the rockery.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the young man, balancing his shovel on his shoulder like a rifle. I’ll do that right away, sir.’
The inspector lit another cigarette and followed his subordinate.
Amanda and Simon were sitting in their customary positions at the kitchen table. Between them lay an open newspaper. They were both staring at a particular column of print with frozen, horrified expressions. The radio, sounding softly in the background, dignified their distress with a Chopin prelude of sublime majesty. When the final chord was struck Simon touched the newspaper and withdrew his hand quickly as if his fingers had been burnt. ‘It’s unbelievable,’ he said. Then, after a lengthy pause, he repeated the same sentence an octave higher.
‘What shall we do?’ asked Amanda.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘What shall we do?’
‘We can’t do anything.’ Simon threw his arms wide open. ‘Can we?’
‘Shouldn’t we call them?’
‘Call them? What would one say? I wouldn’t know where to begin.’ The radio announcer introduced another piece by Chopin – the Waltz in A minor. ‘And would it be the right thing to do? Now, I mean.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘But we’re their friends.’
‘Do you want to call them?’
‘No, I didn’t say that.’
Neither felt equal to the challenge. They talked for some time, exchanging brief, nervous sentences that gave shape and substance to their inadequacy. Together they demarcated their disappointingly small emotional boundaries and furnished themselves with the perfect justification for leaving the telephone in its cradle: ‘We could so easily do more harm than good.’
Simon shut the newspaper, made sure that the individual sheets were properly aligned, then folded it into a neat rectangle. It was like an act of containment.
‘God,’ said Amanda. ‘It must be so terrible for them.’
‘Unimaginable,’ Simon agreed.
‘And that poor child . . .’
‘Don’t.’
‘I wonder where she is.’
‘Don’t. It’s too awful to contemplate.’
Amanda found her cigarette lighter and waved the flame under a lump of cannabis. She broke a piece off and crumbled the scorched resin into a pile of tobacco. After constructing a makeshift filter out of a flap torn from a box of cornflakes, she rolled a joint, lit it, and inhaled deeply. Two jets of aromatic smoke poured from her nostrils and drifted across the tabletop. Simon, who only rarely indulged, held out his hand. He needed something. The first drag made him feel slightly sick, but the second began to unravel a knot of tension between his shoulder blades. He closed his eyes for a few moments and the Chopin seemed to become more prominent. The music invited him to enter its shady arbours and ornamented interior, to leave the world and its troubles behind. When he opened his eyes again he noticed that Amanda’s shoulders were shaking.
Crying did not come easily to Amanda. The effort required to conceal her distress made her face unusually volatile. She seemed to explore the entire spectrum of feelings before her features hardened into an ugly grimace and tears coated her cheeks with greenish mascara.
Simon balanced the smouldering joint on the outer rim of an ashtray, rose from his seat, and walked around to Amanda’s side of the table. In a hapless attempt to dispense comfort, he pulled her head against his crotch. Amanda remained there for a
few seconds, more out of politeness than anything else, before pulling away. ‘God,’ she sniffed. ‘I can’t imagine what they must be going through.’ Those were her words. But the causes of her distress were far more complex and confused.
Days passed, one blurring into another. Christopher and Laura waited for a ransom note to arrive in the post, but it never came. Inspector Barnes returned and his questions became increasingly oblique. He wanted to know more about Laura’s estrangement from her parents; he wanted to know more about their friends and associates; he wanted to see passports, bank statements and other private documents. Moreover, he seemed to take an almost prurient interest in their domestic arrangements, the minutiae of their marriage. Who did the shopping? Who did the cleaning? Did they have a babysitter? How often did they go out together as a couple? He asked to see their bedroom once more, and stood by the window staring at the disordered sheets and eiderdown. Christopher found his presence discomfiting and invasive. The harsh sunlight threw the inspector’s lumpy features into sharp relief, such that he looked (when viewed from the side) as if he were afflicted with a disfiguring disease. He carried too much of the world’s violence with him. His black shoes seemed indecently large and offensive on the delicate weave of the Persian rug. Why so many questions? And to what end? Christopher felt increasingly uneasy in the inspector’s presence and it took him a while to determine the cause. It seemed outrageous and ludicrously unfair, but, if he was not mistaken, the inspector had started to treat them as suspects. His eyes narrowed too easily and the frequency with which he exchanged complicit glances with his assistant had increased. He was more content to let unnerving silences extend indefinitely while he studied husband and wife with clinical detachment.
Laura retreated into herself and became incapable of speech. She lay on the bed from morning till night, crying softly, incapacitated by grief. A combination of heat and self-neglect caused her lips to crack and her skin to flake. She forgot to wash and began to exude a feral odour. Christopher thought that her decline was so pitiful it would be enough to persuade the inspector of their innocence. But the policeman still asked to see Laura and seemed unmoved when she hobbled into the drawing room, confused and blinking, the glimmer of fresh tears on her lashes. He still pressed her for more detail.
When Christopher tried to comfort his wife, she simply pushed the air and turned her back on him. She refused to eat and her excess pounds melted away. The process was more like decomposition than weight loss. Soon, she looked like a corpse – supine, hands by her sides, sunken cheeks, shadows collecting in the hollows of her eyes. Christopher wondered how long she could go on like this. If she didn’t get better, he would have to get her admitted to a hospital.
Historically, work had always been Christopher’s refuge. Early on in his life, he had discovered that personal suffering could be mitigated by industry. Total immersion in the task of composition was his panacea, a constant and reliable comfort in troubled times. Yet when he entered the studio and let his gaze travel across the banks of equipment – oscillators, tape machines, speakers and the mixing desk – he felt oddly repelled. A flicker of remorse made him turn on his heels.
After Faye’s disappearance had been reported in the press the telephone had started ringing. One of the callers was Sue, the gardener. Christopher explained that Laura wasn’t well enough to talk. The woman was quite persistent, so much so that Christopher had had to be firm: ‘No, I’m sorry. It really isn’t possible.’ She had responded, ‘But I think I might be able to help.’ He wasn’t sure what she had in mind. ‘It’s kind of you to offer, but my wife wants to be alone right now.’ He cut her off before she had an opportunity to say anything else. When Henry called, he struggled manfully to find the right words to express his condolences. In the end he was defeated by the magnitude of the tragedy. Accustomed only to superficialities, he accepted his shortcomings and brought their conversation to an abrupt close. ‘You know I’m here if you want me.’ It was the best he could do.
Laura was getting worse. On one occasion, Christopher found her sleeping in Faye’s cot. She was curled into a foetal ball, her bony knees tucked under her chin, her thumb in her mouth – a bizarre substitution for the absent child. She was asleep, but the repetitive contractions of her pouting lips were accompanied by an urgent sucking noise. It was as though she was trying to get Faye back by sympathetic magic. On another occasion, she shut herself in the nursery and surrounded herself with Faye’s dolls for an entire afternoon.
‘Where’s the monkey?’ Christopher had asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she had replied while adjusting a red bow in a mane of artificial tresses.
She had never liked the Victorian toy that he had rescued from the attic and he suspected that she had thrown it away, although he wasn’t sure whether she had done so before or after Faye’s disappearance. The possibility that his wife might be telling the truth was one that he dared not countenance.
One night, they were lying in bed together when the baby monitor began to crackle. Christopher switched on his lamp and got out of bed. He walked round to Laura’s side and removed the monitor plug from the wall socket.
‘No,’ said Laura, ‘don’t do that.’
‘It’s keeping me awake,’
‘Please. Plug it in again.’
‘Why?’
‘It was how I heard her . . . the last time.’
‘You heard something, Laura . . .’
‘I heard her.’
‘You know that can’t be right.’
‘What if—’
‘No. Don’t even think about it.’
‘Come, child. It is time – that’s what I heard him say.’
‘There was no one there.’
‘Exactly.’
‘People see things – hear things – when they wake up. Things that aren’t really there.’
‘Who says?’
‘Inspector Barnes.’
‘What does he know? He thinks we killed our own child.’ Her voice had become bellicose.
‘Laura—’
‘There’s no ransom note, Chris. Think about it.’
Christopher sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Laura, this isn’t helping. You’re thinking crazy thoughts. I know how upset you are about my tapes. I know you thought Faye was in danger, but—’
She had stopped listening to him. ‘Why us? It doesn’t make any sense.’
Christopher carried on talking, regardless of her inattention, more for his own benefit than for his wife’s. ‘And maybe you did have some kind of premonition. But ghosts don’t kidnap children. OK? It just doesn’t happen. It can’t happen. My tapes have got nothing to do with Faye’s abduction. OK? Nothing.’
Laura reached down and forced the plug back into the wall. Her eyes were wide and aglow with fiery defiance.
The telephone stopped ringing and the house became silent. Even Inspector Barnes failed to return.
Christopher detected a slight improvement in his wife’s condition. She no longer lay on the bed all day and very occasionally she picked up a book. At mealtimes she toyed with her food but usually managed to eat a little before rising from the table. Her hours became more regular. Sometimes, she would surprise Christopher by responding to a question and a short, stumbling conversation might follow. They were like actors reading lines at a rehearsal, familiarizing themselves with an obscure, intractable script. She remained, however, indifferent to her appearance. Her hair was uncombed and she dressed in the same grubby outfit every day until he confiscated her dirty clothes and put them in the laundry basket. Vitamin deficiency had caused the corners of her mouth to rupture and these lesions had developed into unsightly sores.
Laura was never entirely mute. Her silences always hummed with the potential for accusation. He lived in fear of a sudden discharge of words that would connect him directly with her anger. Consequently, in order to evade that possibility, he spent an increasing number of hours walking on the heath. Away from the house,
he found himself able to lower his defences and consider Laura’s position. Had anything happened that might support her belief in supernatural abduction? Anything at all that a rational individual would accept?
There had been the Come to me, Faye message, but he had originally interpreted it as Come Tommy. Fate! Then there had been the She is mine message. He had recorded many similar phrases and this one only became sinister (rather than, say, romantic) with hindsight. And as for Edward Stokes Maybury, Christopher supposed that many Victorian entertainers must have used children in their acts. The fact that Maybury made children disappear was actually quite predictable: children have flexible joints and are small enough to squeeze behind mirrors. Furthermore, the slum areas of London would have afforded Maybury a constant supply of cheap labour. All of these elements could be linked together in order to produce a narrative consistent with Laura’s standpoint, but the fact remained that what she believed was fundamentally impossible.
Christopher was glad that he had told her nothing about the She is mine message and hardly anything about Maybury. Such information would have produced even deeper entrenchment in the quagmire of her madness (although it was also true that Laura had been largely indifferent when he had first spoken to her about Maybury). Christopher didn’t doubt that she had heard voices coming through the baby monitor – genuine communications, radio interference or auditory hallucinations, it didn’t really matter which. Shock had amplified her pre-existing anxieties and the conclusion she had reached was absurd.
Christopher sat on a tree stump in a former grassy hollow that was now a dustbowl. The sun punished the back of his neck and the air was fragrant with hot sap. He recognized that he had been engaging in a form of self-deception. His willingness to consider Laura’s point of view wasn’t really an example of open-minded fairness, but rather a means of reassuring himself that he wasn’t to blame for his daughter’s disappearance.
