Campbell had contacted a welfare worker and arranged that she pick up Sharna first thing in the morning. ‘It seemed like the right thing to do,’ he said.
When he had gone, she considered how easy it was, if you were just a little important, to pull strings in the system. How much easier it was for those who were very important. And how totally impossible if you were Minna or Larissa, or indeed, if you were Katrina. Perhaps Katrina was a true heroine. Stunningly, she had done something. For the moment it hardly mattered whether or not it was right. She couldn’t tell.
The house was clean, if dusty, and barer since the break-in. Broken items had been tidied up and taken away. She turned on heaters, shivering in the cool spring night. Outside a frog squawked near the swimming pool. She tried the door on to the patio; it was fastened. After that, she checked each window on the ground floor again, although she had watched Jeffrey Campbell do that once already. When the hire firm delivered her car she signed for it and parked it in the garage, noting that the mechanism for the automatic door was missing. It would turn up she supposed. Then she checked the doors again. Afterwards she rang Olivia.
‘I’m sorry I went away at holiday time,’ Rose said.
‘I was happy here, after all,’ Olivia said. It sounded slightly quaint, a little reproving.
‘I’m glad. What did you do?’
There was a pause.
‘Met a man and lived with him.’
‘Oh. Um, that’s nice dear. Where is he now?’
‘It wasn’t long-term, mother.’
‘Well. I hope he was a nice boy.’
‘He was fifty. His wife came back from sabbatical.’
‘That’s nice,’ said Rose again.
‘Yes.’
‘Greece was nice too.’
‘Oh Greece, yes.’
Taking a plunge to break this impasse, Rose told her daughter about Katrina and Basil and Larissa and Sharna, rattling on into the silence. In the end she said, ‘I’m going to pick up Sharna in the morning.’
‘That’s your decision,’ said Olivia, and hung up.
When at last she went upstairs and climbed into bed, Rose lay awake for a few minutes. I’ll manage, she thought. Then she fell into a dreamless sleep.
Towards two the phone rang.
‘Hullo. Hullo. Hullo,’ she cried into the silence. The familiar click greeted her at the other end.
As she reached to phone the police it rang a second time.
She screamed, ‘You’re being watched!’
There was a click, a button pushed, coins falling through a slot. The voice at the other end was muffled. ‘I’m coming to burn your house down.’ The line went dead.
So, there was a voice. At last. How he must have missed her, her secret caller.
The policeman in the watch house was business-like. No, Sergeant Campbell was not there, he had finished hours before. So had Constable O’Meara. His voice was courteous but brisk. ‘Is there a problem, Mrs Kendall?’ he enquired, clearly alerted to the possibility of her call.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Maybe I just heard a noise. It was probably nothing.’
It would be fatal to crack now. They would never let her take Sharna.
‘A patrol car cruised past less than half an hour ago, would you like someone to come round again?’
‘It’s all right,’ she heard herself say. ‘I’ll call you if I’m really worried.’
She sat by the heater, dozing a little, pulling herself awake from time to time. Between naps, she thought that her head was quite clear, as if the short sleep had restored all her senses. Only once when she dozed she was back in Delphi, and another time she was dancing on a marble tabletop which turned into the flat tray of a truck.
The phone pinged. On her feet in an instant, she picked the receiver up and slammed it down again before the rings began.
She sat with her hand quivering above it. It pinged again. She took the receiver off its cradle and lay it beside the instrument. I can live with that, she told herself. It would be daylight soon.
Perhaps twenty minutes passed while she sat rigid and upright.
The house creaked. Or so she thought. She heard her heart beating, a steady bang of terror.
The next creak was more definite. At first she did not recognise the noise for what it was. It was a slow soft slipstream of sound. But then she picked it, the garage door rolling upwards.
She willed herself to stand up, walk to the window, look out, but she could not. Any minute she expected to hear the rental car being jump-started. But instead, all she heard was the door roll downwards again.
Now she did not know if there was someone in the house or not. It could be entered through the garage.
Shakily she picked up the phone’s receiver. Almost immediately, as she reached for the dial, it began to ring.
‘I’ve been trying to get you, Mrs Kendall,’ said the muffled voice. ‘What a long time you talk.’
She slammed the phone down.
The house was very still now, more still than she could ever remember it. But then, in the distance, a dog began to yap. It sounded like Roach. She could have sworn it was him.
‘Roach,’ she called. The constriction in her throat was painful as if something was breaking. If she could touch the dog now it would make so much difference. Instead, an image of his slit throat flashed past her. Outside something splashed in the pool. A hedgehog drowning, perhaps.
More splashes followed, as if something heavy was being thrown in. This was no hedgehog.
But at least the noise was outside. If there was only one of them, that was where he was now. It occurred to Rose that there was more than one. There had to be. One here, and one somewhere in a phone box.
The phone rang again.
‘Yes,’ she said dully.
‘Rose.’ The voice was intimate beneath its filtered sound. ‘You shouldn’t have done it.’
‘Please, don’t … do this to me.’ She was ashamed of the whining in her voice, and dropped the phone this time.
Crying now, she pressed herself against the wall, edging to the window. Below her the garage door rolled up again. Down in the kitchen she heard something land heavily, as if thrown. She crouched down, waiting for the explosion, the smell of burning, or for the stranger to emerge from the top of the stairs.
But there was nothing, not even running feet.
Dawn was streaking the sky. She willed herself to move again and looked down on to the path below. As she moved, as if the person was moving when she did, the garage door rolled down again. Then it happened several more times, down and up, as if whoever it was was simply having fun. She couldn’t see anyone and cursed the way the bushes had been allowed to run riot.
Firmly she picked up the phone, determined this time to ring Campbell at his home. Too bad if Lola objected.
The line was dead.
The noise below stopped. She walked back to the window. In the shadows a figure made its way unhurriedly along the driveway, sloping off towards the gate that led to Cedarwood Grove.
When the light filled the sky she could see where bricks had been thrown around the pool and into it. There was one in the kitchen too, but nothing was broken, no sign left of the intruder’s entry.
Katrina was in Mt Eden jail. Ellis Hannen had offered to put up bail for her but it was refused. They thought she might try to kill Mungo again. It was a possibility, she admitted. She would still like to. More than that, she would like to crawl around hedgerows on the edge of fields, sniffing clean air and earth and rubbing tangy leaves between her fingers, the way she had when she followed him. This place was full of the smell of shit and Lysol and food so badly cooked it made you dry-retch before it reached your mouth.
It was nearly breakfast time. She would have to face it or die, she supposed.
The night before they had asked her if she objected to her sister uplifting Sharna. At first she was inclined to say yes. Rose had never done Larissa much good as far a
s she could see, though there were signs that Larissa was improving. In the end she said she didn’t mind. ‘I’d like her to take her to Minna,’ she added. Fat chance, but it was worth a try.
At 7.45 Rose knocked on the door at the address she had been given, No. 10 Power Street.
For awhile there was no answer. A woman over the fence at No. 12 was pegging up a row of black regulation socks on a clothesline. She looked across at Rose.
‘You needn’t bother coming here,’ she called. ‘I could never stomach your lot.’
‘It’s all right, Mrs Marment,’ said a young woman appearing round the side of the house, ‘it’s just a visitor for me.’ Her arms were full of unfolded napkins. ‘I didn’t expect you so soon,’ she said, leading the way inside.
Other children, preparing for school, stared at Rose. The air was thick with the smell of hot milk and burnt toast.
‘I’ll help you fold,’ said Rose, speaking in what she hoped was an unhurried way.
‘It’s all right, I’ll get Sharna for you. Come in. Why don’t you sit down and give her a cuddle while I finish fixing her things?’ She shooed her children away. ‘They’ve been playing with her, they don’t want her to go,’ she explained.
‘I can help you, really,’ Rose said. She half-snatched the napkins.
The woman shrugged, turned away.
‘I’ll get her.’ It was clear she thought Sharna was in for a bad run.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Rose, trying to sound calm. ‘I’ve got a rental car that I have to return. I hired it especially to fetch her things.’ It was a thin excuse but she could think of no other. ‘I didn’t mean to hurry you.’
‘She’s a good kid,’ said the woman when she returned with Sharna. She appeared to be a little mollified.
Sharna seemed to smile for a moment, and Rose thought She knows me, but then the child was distracted, turning her one good eye to follow the movement of a cat in the room.
After what felt like a long time the woman had all her things gathered together and Rose was able to leave. She drove carefully and slowly down Power Street. There was no harness for Sharna.
At the corner of the street she saw a telephone box. It was an ordinary battered phone box covered with the usual graffiti and scarred paint. Slowing down still further she glanced over her shoulder, seeing down the whole length of the street. It was the only phone box.
But it was like a living presence. This was where, just once, a call had been traced. Whoever the caller was, it might well have been here that he had stood in the last few hours and spoken to her.
A police car cruised along in her direction from the far end of the street. She wondered if it might be Campbell, come to supervise her uplifting of Sharna, or perhaps wanting to see if she needed help. He would think of something like that. In a panic, she accelerated away, one hand holding the child in place. She had no wish to see Campbell this morning. The time for that was past. With a surge of relief, she realised that he would not know what the car she was driving looked like. She risked another swift glimpse behind her as she turned out of Power Street. It appeared that the car had stopped near where she had just been. She thought she recognised the driver. She thought it was O’Meara. Maybe Campbell had sent him instead.
The car showed no signs of following her.
This time the plane was nearly empty. Sharna lay sleeping in Rose’s lap where she had collapsed as soon as they sat down. The child showed no signs of noticing the journey, or her change of company. The plane’s engines seemed very loud to Rose, as if she was hearing them for the first time, as Sharna would. She didn’t budge. It was as though she didn’t notice what was happening. Or if she did, as if it no longer mattered. Rose wondered how early a child’s sense of wonder could be abandoned.
Looking down at the sleeping child she touched her cheek with her finger. It was the first moment she had had to reflect upon Sharna. The bizarre sequence of events which led to her sitting on a plane running away with her sister’s child had not fallen into place. Although she had known since five o’clock that morning, with seemingly steady logic, that she must leave Weyville by the first possible means, that logic was faltering. She doubted that it had ever existed. The Phantom had won again. It wasn’t logic that had possessed her, it was the same old madness. Only there was a difference; the terror had been so close she believed she had all but felt his breath on her cheek. And now he had multiplied like a poisonous plant breaking off and rerooting itself wherever it touched the ground. It had felt as if nothing would save her if she stayed.
But she could understand quite clearly now that she had no right to take Sharna with her, though for hours she had seen it as essential to protect them both.
At the airport she had written a note to Campbell and asked the reservations clerk to ring and tell him that it was there. She prayed that he would get it. It said: ‘I’ll be back in a few days. So will the baby. Please tell anyone who needs to know.’ Only she didn’t mean to go back, not ever. Welfare might intervene, though she doubted it, not immediately anyway. Then she would have sorted things out.
Or would she? She put her finger in the child’s hand, expecting the fingers to curl, as Larissa’s or her own children’s would have done. But nothing happened. She appeared almost to shrug Rose aside.
Of course, this was not Larissa. It was Sharna.
As the plane rose she saw a convoy of buses heading along the south road. There was a purposeful, organised look about them.
Wearily, Nick Newbone prepared to leave for Wellington again. He had missed Rose by inches everywhere. He wouldn’t have known where she was going now if his wife, Hortense, had not reported seeing her at the airport with a child. Rose had hurried on to the plane, almost as if she were running away from something, Hortense told him over lunch.
He was grateful, both for the time she had deigned to spend with him for once and for the information. But he didn’t trade with her.
12
‘It’s the least you can do,’ cried Kit.
‘Why?’ He hadn’t been home the night before and Rose hadn’t tried to find him. But she had left another message, this time advising of her return to the capital.
‘Because this party’s important. Don’t you understand? Gamble’s asked us to his house.’
‘Well you can go.’
‘He asked specially for you. I need you. Look, there’s a bloody great army of protesters on its way to Wellington, it’s going to be a rough day.’ He sounded almost tremulous on the end of the phone.
‘Mining rights in the reserve?’
‘Yep. I’ve got to weather this one, Rose.’
‘Who with? Gamble or the electorate? You can’t have both, Kit.’
‘Your chum Applebloom sees the sense in it.’
‘He would, there’s money in it. Instant cash. Is he coming down?’
‘I thought you’d know.’
‘You’ve got it wrong, Kit.’
He hesitated. ‘No, well he’s not.’
‘Staying clear today, is he? What about Harry? Matt?’
‘Yes, and I hear Nick Newbone’s on his way, although it was only yesterday he said he was keeping clear.’
‘Five busloads of protesters, eh? They must have stayed somewhere overnight. I saw them from the air,’ she added by way of explanation.
‘They’ll be here about two. What were you doing in Weyville, anyway?’
‘Collecting Sharna.’
‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this.’
‘You are.’
‘Where is she?’
‘Here. Asleep. She sleeps a lot. Or else she eats. She’s like Larissa. Remember?’
‘Rose, you’ve got children of your own.’
‘But Sharna hasn’t got parents of her own. She’s family, Kit.’
‘She can’t stay in the flat. Or if she does I’m moving out of it.’
‘Well maybe. I thought we could talk about that.’
He sighed. ‘Yes, I s
uppose we’ll have to. But I can’t now. Not today. I’ll tell Gamble to expect us this evening, all right?’
‘But I’ve got the baby.’
‘Well, you’ll have to get a sitter won’t you?’
As Kit hung up Nick Newbone banged on the door of the flat.
‘I’m the enemy, don’t you know?’ she said when the coffee was poured. ‘Depending whose side you’re on.’
‘I don’t know whose side I’m on. I don’t think anybody does. Whose are you?’
‘Buggered if I know, Charlie.’ She grinned, playing it dumb. She hoped he would not notice how much her hands shook. Until Nick told her why he was here she would not give much away. His crumpled appearance and awful clothes seemed more touching than she remembered. He was a bit overweight, always had been, and today he needed a shave. But he had the cleanest fingernails of any man she knew. They shone in rows along his clasped hands like rims of pale cheese. And his looks were deceptive; she knew he was extraordinarily competent at whatever he did and, as well, he was one of the people she had trusted. As Kit had. Perhaps Nick felt betrayed by Kit too — she supposed he must do, thinking back to the night when he had failed to appear at the Party meeting. It would be like him not to come, rather than stand as one of his accusers after what they had been through together. But she wasn’t going to ask about that.
‘I really didn’t come to talk politics,’ he said, as if reading her mind. ‘Look, Toni had some stuff she meant to give me but she died before I could get it from her. It was really for you.’
‘Toni’s stuff? What’re you talking about, Nick?’
Suddenly awkward, he said, ‘It’s all right. I know why you didn’t come to the funeral.’
‘Do you really?’
‘Of course.’
‘How many other people knew?’
‘Everybody that mattered.’
‘God, that’s just about as bad.’
‘It doesn’t make any difference now.’
‘I ran away, you know. It’s turning into a habit.’
True Stars Page 22
