by Alex Lake
‘An hour ago,’ Mike said. ‘I would have said you were crazy. But not now. Not after what Derek told me.’
‘Which was?’
‘I asked what happened at Edna’s house. His story was pretty much the same as yours. He expressed some regret that you were going to lose out, but he couldn’t help. It was your own fault for losing your temper.’
‘Sympathetic guy.’
‘He has a point, Julia. Anyway, I didn’t think I was going to get much, but then I mentioned that it must have been strange to be there at such a difficult time, but Edna was the kind of person who held to her engagements, especially those of long standing.’ He paused. ‘And then it happened. He looked at me funnily – sort of confused – and said that it wasn’t a long-standing engagement. Edna had invited him that morning. She said she wanted to keep things as normal as possible and could do with the moral support.’
‘What did you say?’ Julia said.
‘Not much. I just glossed over it. Pretended that it was nothing.’ He started the car and put his hand on the gear stick. ‘But it’s not nothing, Julia. It means she was planning something. It means she set you up. And if she was leaking stuff to the papers as well … ’ he looked at Julia and grinned, ‘then we have a case.’
They stopped at another pub, a mile down the road. This time it was Julia who needed a drink. She ordered a glass of Sauvignon blanc; Mike had a diet Coke.
‘So what do we do with this?’ she said. ‘Should I confront her?’
Mike shook his head. ‘Do nothing for now, and say nothing. She and Brian think they have the upper hand. The last thing we need to do is warn them that we know more than they think. We need to wait until we have everything in place before we do that. So, for now, act as though nothing’s changed: pick up Anna when you’re supposed to, return her at the appointed time.’
‘And in the meantime?’
‘In the meantime, we need to prove she leaked the story.’
‘How?’ asked Julia. ‘The paper will hide behind journalistic privilege. Sanctity of the source, that kind of thing.’
‘I know,’ Mike said. ‘Miserable hypocrites that they are. I’ve been wondering how we could compel them to reveal their source. But it’ll be difficult.’
‘Unless we do the same thing ourselves,’ Julia said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Fight fire with fire. If Edna can leak lies, then we can leak the truth. We can tell a rival newspaper what’s going on. If they print it, the Daily World will have to confirm it or deny it.’
‘Or they can do neither,’ Mike said. ‘But the absence of a denial will be enough. And I doubt they will deny it publicly. The fallout would be too great.’ He raised his diet Coke. ‘So, it seems we have a plan,’ he said. ‘Play dumb with Brian and Edna for now, while we arrange our chess pieces.’
Julia lifted her glass and clinked the rim against Mike’s.
‘Sounds good to me,’ she said.
14
Doll’s House
i.
You can relax now. The child is where you want her. You are surprised it happened so quickly, but that’s ok. You are not so foolish as to look a gift horse in the mouth. Vigilance is required, of course. You never know what will happen, what people will do when they are desperate. After all, you have been desperate yourself, and look what you did.
You still cannot believe you managed it. To take the child, hide her, and return her unhurt, with hardly a moment when you felt that you might be caught; it was something special, even for you, even for someone with your past, with your capabilities.
You can admit that luck has been on your side. You have to. Everything went perfectly. You would have succeeded anyway, you’re sure of that – good planning and intelligence would have seen to it – but the luck helped. What was it Napoleon said? Give me a lucky general over a good one?
Well, how about one who is both, Monsieur Bonaparte?
You admire Bonaparte. He was a great man, a bold man. He would have admired you too.
So, you’ve won the opening skirmishes and prevailed in the first battle. But like all good generals that it not enough for you. Not nearly enough.
The battle may be over, but the war is only just beginning.
ii.
Julia was going to be in and out of there as quickly as possible. Once they had a routine she would simply pull up outside the front door and Anna would skip out to the car, climb in, and they’d be away. This first time, though, she knew she’d have to get out, ring the doorbell and face Brian and Edna.
She knocked on the door. It could be a while before Edna opened it. It was quite a way from the back of her house to the front, and the layout meant there was not a direct route. That was what happened when houses grew from a sixteenth-century seed.
It was over four-hundred-years-old, that house. It had seen so much. Births, deaths, marriages, funerals, celebrations, devastations, even, probably, murders. And it was still there, adding to its stories, quietly witnessing the antics of the latest occupants. Brian had once said that, when they first moved in, he had felt it was haunted, felt the presence of the ghosts who had played out their earthly existences at Toad Hall, as she had always called it. They’d moved from a 1930s suburban semi after the death of Edna’s father, who had left her a substantial inheritance, and the switch to an old house had spooked him. The feeling hadn’t lasted. He’d got used to it, he said.
Grew up, I guess, he said. Stopped believing in ghosts.
Julia wasn’t so sure that was the explanation. She suspected that, if there were ghosts, if there were spectral presences left by prior inhabitants, they had been silenced by the presence of Edna. It was not Brian growing up, but Edna’s ferocious remodelling of the house. It had been a bit ramshackle, in need of some repair, and Edna had seen to it that the repairs were done. Walls were shored up, roofs replaced, chimneys repointed. She’d had the place more or less gutted and rebuilt, rewired and re-plumbed. The ancient shell remained; what lay beneath it was brand new.
And that left no place for ghosts, for those denizens of leaky plumbing and draughty attics, to dwell. How were they supposed to make their presence felt when the creaky floorboards and ill-fitted doors had all been refashioned into neat, straight lines?
And so, if they were ever there, they no doubt gave up in the face of Edna’s onslaught. They could afford to. After all, she’d be gone soon enough, and they had all eternity to wait. They’d probably packed up and left, gone to haunt somewhere else until such time as Toad Hall was freed from Edna’s grip.
And with them had gone the warmth and character of the house. It was cold and echoey and lonely, and Julia hated the thought of Anna growing up there. And she wasn’t going to let her. She’d find a way to get custody. Maybe in a year from now when things had settled down.
At least, that was what she told herself. At the back of her mind a little voice laughed at her, sneering that she was a fool if she thought Edna would let it happen. There was no point even trying. But she would try. And she would win. She had to. If the universe was just, then she had to.
It was, she knew, a very big if.
Edna opened the front door. She was dressed in dark trousers and a blue blouse, a Hermes scarf around her neck, and looked down her nose at Julia, unsmiling.
‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘Anna is playing in the back garden.’
‘She should be ready,’ Julia said. ‘Nine a.m. She’s mine from nine.’
‘I wasn’t sure you were coming,’ Edna said. ‘Brian didn’t mention it.’
Of course, he’d mentioned it. Edna was just being difficult. Well, let her. She didn’t know what was coming her way.
‘Is he here? I’d rather deal with him. He’s Anna’s father. The custody arrangement is with him, not you.’
Edna shook her head. ‘He’s gone out. He didn’t say as much, but if he thought you were coming, he probably didn’t want to see you.’
She was lying, J
ulia knew. Brian had told her to expect Julia, and told her that he didn’t want to be there when she came. But Edna wouldn’t admit it. Even now, she wanted to play her little games.
‘I’ll wait here,’ Julia said. ‘You can go and fetch Anna.’
They spent the day in the places that single parents took their kids in an attempt to make life fun. They saw the lions and monkeys and lizards at Chester Zoo, then ate comfort food in a pub. Back home, Julia sat on the floor, her back to Anna’s bedroom wall. Her daughter slept in the bed she’d slept in since the day she moved out of the Moses basket. They’d bought it from a specialist children’s furniture shop; it was a crib but could, when the time came, be reassembled into a starter bed. She remembered the day they had taken off the bars and converted it. Anna had taken advantage of her new freedom and got out of bed about twenty times. Downstairs, Julia or Brian heard her footsteps then one of them went upstairs and carried her back to her bed. It had taken about two weeks until they could put her in bed and have some degree of confidence she might stay there.
She was getting big for the bed now. In the glow of her pig nightlight Julia could see that her feet were nearly at the end. She’d have to buy a full-sized bed soon.
It wouldn’t get slept in much. Just Wednesday nights and every other weekend. God, she’d heard that phrase so often, but she’d never thought it would apply to her. It had always seemed like a reasonable allocation of custody but now she realized that it was nothing. It passed so quickly.
It felt like it was minutes since she had picked Anna up from Edna’s house. Tomorrow would be just as quick. A quick breakfast, some TV, lunch, then back to Edna’s. Julia leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. It was so unfair. She should have had custody of Anna. She was her mother, for God’s sake.
But Brian – backed by his witch of a mother – had played dirty. She didn’t blame him – well, she did, she blamed and hated him – but among the blame she recognized that she would more than likely have done the same thing, if it had meant that Anna could stay with her. Custody battles were the closest thing to a fight for survival that Julia had ever witnessed; it was as though people were trapped and the only way to save themselves involved doing things which most people had never imagined they were even capable of. It turned out that a lot of people did whatever it took. Normal morality was suspended. It was kill or be killed.
And Edna was not going to hold back. She had spotted her opportunity and taken it, leaked information to the press, ruined Julia’s reputation. She wondered whether it was a good idea to take her on. Perhaps there was another way, perhaps she could carry Anna down to the car, settle her in the back seat, pack a bag, and disappear. It was nine p.m.; no one would know they were gone for fifteen hours. How far could she get in fifteen hours? She didn’t have Anna’s passport, so she’d have to stay in Britain, but she could get to Cornwall, or the Highlands of Scotland.
She entertained a fantasy of her and Anna, hidden away in a tiny crofter’s cottage, living off the land, foraging for mushroom and edible plants, trapping animals and pulling glistening, silver fish from streams and lakes.
Yeah, right. She wouldn’t have the first idea how to trap an animal, and they’d probably die from fungus poisoning within the first few days. And they’d be seen. If Anna disappeared again there would be another nationwide hunt. They’d be caught in no time, and Julia would never get to see her daughter again.
And they might be vulnerable. Whoever had taken Anna was out there. Julia still had no idea who had taken her, and why they had brought her back. It made her uneasy to think about it. Someone had gone to the trouble of abducting a little girl, and then they had returned her, unharmed. Why? What had they got from it? Had they abused her? Taken photos of her and posted them on the internet? Was it some sick game, which wasn’t over? Maybe they were out there right now, watching, waiting for another chance to grab Anna. Or maybe they had planned to kill her and lost their nerve and right now were contemplating another little girl, another target.
And what about Jim Crowne and Miss Wilkinson, whose first name she still did not know. Where were they? She doubted she would ever find out. The police were probably not spending too much time looking for them now. She doubted that Jim had anything to do with Anna’s abduction, but she couldn’t help wondering whether he had, whether it was a way to get back at Edna.
But if that was what he wanted, why wait until now? It didn’t make sense. Like so much of this, it didn’t make sense.
No, whatever the story was with Jim it was not linked to Anna. There was a story there, she was sure of that, but she was equally sure she would never find out what it was. Edna was hardly going to confide in her.
And Julia had other things to worry about. Brian, the custody battle, and that nagging fear that there was more of this yet to come. God, she hated thinking about it, hated that it forced her to acknowledge how twisted the world could be.
Most of all, she hated thinking that it might not be over.
iii.
They were a few hundred yards from Edna’s house. Julia had just explained that Anna was going back to her grandmother’s.
‘I think I want to stay with you, Mummy.’
‘I want you to as well, darling,’ Julia said. ‘But for the moment you need to stay with Dad.’
‘But it isn’t my house. It’s Grandma’s. I like my house.’
Tell them that, Julia thought, but refrained from saying so. It would only lead to accusations that she was trying to unsettle Anna.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But Grandma’s house is fun.’ God, it was painful to have to say those words, even if it was best for Anna that she did not sense the conflict. ‘And I’ll be back on Wednesday to pick you up.’
‘When’s Wednesday?’ asked Anna. ‘Is it tomorrow?’
‘Two days after tomorrow,’ Julia said. ‘It’ll be here before you know it.’
They turned into the lane that led to the back of Edna’s house. The police car was not there, probably gone for the day while Anna was not there. They’d be back later. There was a parking area there that she shared with the neighbours, their garages forming the perimeter of the square of tarmac. When they pulled into the parking area, Brian was waiting by the back gate. Edna was standing behind him.
‘Hi,’ he said, his arms outstretched. ‘How’s my little princess?’
‘Good,’ Anna said. ‘We went to the zoo. I saw a rhinocetus.’
‘Wow,’ Brian said. ‘Is that like a rhinoceros?’
‘That’s what I said. A rhinocetus.’
‘Cool,’ Brian said. ‘Hey – I have to go to the supermarket. We need something for dinner. What would you like? You choose.’
‘A hippopotanus,’ Anna said.
‘For dinner?’
‘Amus,’ Edna said. ‘Hippopotamus. Not anus.’
‘No,’ Julia said. ‘I think it was a hippopatanus.’
Anna nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We saw a hippopotanus. For dinner could I have fish fingers and ice cream?’
‘Fish fingers and ice cream?’ Brian said. ‘Done.’ He took his car key from his pocket. ‘I’ll be back soon.’
He opened his car and climbed in.
Julia watched him drive away. He hadn’t looked at or acknowledged her. She didn’t care for herself – the sight of him provoked in her a mixture of disgust and fury, and she would happily never have spoken to or seen him again – but she did not want their relationship to be an open sore of bitterness and recrimination. She had seen plenty of marriages go that way, and she had seen plenty of children suffer as a result. Without even knowing it the children would start trying to smooth things over, to placate their warring parents. That was not part of the childhood she wanted for Anna, and she was determined not to let it happen. She’d tell Brian to stop; apart from anything else, it would make her feel superior.
‘Mummy,’ Anna said. ‘Can I really have fish fingers and ice cream?’
Julia s
hrugged. ‘If Daddy says so. But maybe just today. Not every day.’
‘I’d like it every day.’
‘We’ll see.’ She turned to Edna. ‘Maybe you could see that she gets something a bit more nutritious as well.’
‘She’s in good hands,’ Edna said. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘I do worry,’ Julia said. ‘That’s what mothers do.’
‘Yes,’ Edna said. ‘I suppose they do.’ She smiled a thin, warmth-less smile that Julia had seen her do hundreds of times before. It was, truth be told, barely a smile at all, just a drawing back of the corners of her mouth. It was what Edna did when she wanted to dismiss someone just politely enough not to be rude. She saved it for people she thought were beneath her, who did not deserve the full beam of her attention. It was a throwaway gesture: Look, it said, here’s a smile. It’s not much of one, but it’s all you’re getting. Now sod off and don’t take up more of my time.
It had always angered Julia to see her mother-in-law display such casual arrogance. It reminded her that Edna really believed she was superior – by reason of birth or education or class – to whole swathes of the population, including, for that matter, Julia and most of her friends and family. It was so archaic, so Victorian, to assume that some people were simply better because they happened to be upper middle class. Never mind their character, never mind what they actually did; they deserved to be thought of and treated in a certain way simply because they were born to a particular family.
Edna’s attitude brought out the class warrior in Julia, but she had managed to bite her tongue over the years. Now, however, she was the target of it, and she felt the resentment and anger swell like a winter storm.
‘You know,’ she said. ‘You think you have all the answers, don’t you?’
Edna looked at her, blinking, as though she had not been listening and was trying to recall Julia’s words from her short-term memory. Then she smiled her thin-lipped smile again.
