The safe house

by Nicci French

  ‘Or pleased to get your approval,’ Thelma said. She stood up, a dumpy and dishevelled creature covered in crumbs. ‘And now I must go. If you have any more thoughts about our problem, please phone me.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘You can post a reminder to yourself on the front door of Elsie’s imaginary house.’

  I felt I needed to say something.

  ‘You know, when I became a doctor I had an idea about making the world a saner, rational place. I sometimes think that when I began treating victims of trauma, I gave up on the world and just tried to help people deal with it.’

  ‘That’s not a small thing,’ Thelma said.

  I saw her to the door and watched her walk across to the car. I stayed in the doorway for several minutes after she’d gone. It was ridiculous, entirely out of the question. I sat down on the sofa and pondered it.

  Seven

  ‘This crackling’s a bit soft.’ Danny held up a bendy, pale-brown strip that looked as if it had been torn from the sole of a shoe rather than the back of a pig.

  ‘Blame Asda. Or the microwave. I just followed the instructions on the packet.’

  ‘I like it chewy. It’s like chewing gum.’

  ‘Thanks, Elsie, and take your feet off the table – just because you’ve got another INSET day off school doesn’t mean you can start copying Danny and slouching around. Pass the apple sauce, Danny. From a tin,’ I added.

  ‘Didn’t your mother ever teach you to cook?’

  ‘Help yourself to some spinach. Microwaved in the bag.’

  I slid two slabs of whitish meat on to my plate.

  ‘Do a bird,’ said Elsie.

  ‘Wait,’ said Danny.

  ‘Just a small bird.’

  ‘All right.’

  Danny ripped a corner of a page of a newspaper and made some surprisingly deft movements with his large chafed fingers and, in a few seconds, perkily standing on the table was a something with two legs and a neck that could plausibly be described as a bird. Elsie gave a shriek of approbation. I was impressed as ever.

  ‘Why is it that men can always do these things?’ I asked. ‘I could never do origami.’

  ‘This isn’t bloody origami. It’s just a nervous habit for when I’ve got nothing better to do.’

  That was certainly true. Already, tiny paper creatures were infesting the house like moths. Elsie was collecting mem.

  ‘Now I want a puppy,’ she said.

  ‘Wait,’ said Danny.

  ‘Can we paint after lunch? I’ve finished anyway. I don’t like it. Can I have ice-cream for pudding?’

  ‘Have two more mouthfuls. We’re all going for a walk after lunch and…’

  ‘I don’t want to go for a walk!’ Elsie’s voice climbed up the scales. ‘I’m tired of going for walks. My legs are tired. I’ve got a cough.’ She coughed unconvincingly.

  ‘Not a walk,’ said Danny quickly. ‘An adventure. We’ll find shells and make a…’ Inspiration failed. ‘Shell-box,’ he said without much conviction.

  ‘Can I go on your shoulders on the adventure?’

  ‘If you walk the first bit.’

  ‘Thanks, Danny,’ I said as Elsie marched out of the room to find a bag for the shells. He shrugged and shovelled a forkful of meat into his mouth. We’d had a good night, and now we were having a reasonable day; no bickerings. He’d said nothing at all about his next job or about having to get back to London – he always spoke about London as if it were an appointment, not a city – nor had I asked him. We were getting on better. We had to talk, but not just yet. I stretched, pushed away my plate; tired, languid and comfortable.

  ‘It’ll do me good to get out of the house.’

  I never went for the walk because, as I was pulling Elsie’s red elephant boots on to her outstretched feet and she was shouting that I was hurting her, we heard a car draw up outside. I straightened up and peered out of the window. A tall stout man with a ruddy face on which he was already preparing a smile got out of the driver’s seat. Out of the passenger seat came Thelma, wearing an extraordinarily unbecoming track suit. I turned to Danny.

  ‘Maybe it would be nice for you and Elsie if you went off on your adventure alone.’

  His expression didn’t change, and he took hold of her hand and led her, ignoring her single squeal of protest, through the kitchen and out of the back door.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Miss Laschen…’

  ‘Dr Laschen.’

  ‘Sorry. Dr Laschen, I do assure you that I understand your reluctance, but this would be a very temporary arrangement. She needs to be in a safe place, anonymous and protected, with someone who understands her position, just for a short time.’

  Detective Inspector Baird gave a reassuring smile. He was so big that as he walked into my living room, ducking his head under the door-frame, leaning against the mantelpiece, he made the house seem frail, as if it were built of canvas flats like a stage set.

  ‘I have a daughter and a time-consuming job and…’

  ‘Dr Scott tells me your job at Stamford General is months away.’

  I shot a venomous glance at Thelma, who was sitting unconcernedly bang in the middle of the sofa, stroking Anatoly with great deliberation and apparently not listening to anything that was being said. She looked up.

  ‘Have you got anything to eat with this cup of tea apart from stale custard creams?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s not practical,’ I said.

  Detective Inspector Baird gulped tea. Thelma lifted her glasses away from the bridge of her nose, and I could see the deep red groove they’d made there. She rubbed her eyes. Neither of them said anything.

  ‘I’ve only just moved here. I wanted a few months off.’ My voice, too high with indignation, filled the quiet room. Shut up, I told myself; just keep your mouth closed. Why didn’t Danny and Elsie come home? ‘This time is important for me. I’m sorry about the girl but…’

  ‘Yes,’ said Thelma. ‘She needs help.’ She popped a whole custard cream into her mouth and chomped vigorously.

  ‘I was about to say that I’m sorry about her; however, I don’t think that it’s…’ The sentence trailed away and I couldn’t remember how I was going to end it. ‘How long did you say?’

  ‘I didn’t. And you must make your own mind up.’

  ‘Yeah yeah. Detective Inspector Baird, how long?’

  ‘It would not be more than six weeks, probably much less.’

  I stayed silent and thought furiously.

  ‘If I were to consider it, how would I know I wasn’t putting my daughter at risk? If I decide to have her.’

  ‘It would be discreet,’ Baird said. ‘Completely. Nobody would know she was here. How would they? It’s just a precaution.’

  ‘Thelma?’

  She peered up at me, a troll come in from the cold. ‘You’re in the right area of expertise, you live near by. You were the obvious choice.’

  ‘If she came,’ I said feebly, ‘when would she arrive?’

  His brow wrinkled as if he were recalling the departure time of a commuter train.

  ‘Oh,’ he said casually. ‘We thought tomorrow morning would be an appropriate time. Say, nine-thirty.’

  ‘Appropriate? Make it eleven-thirty.’

  ‘Good, and that means that her doctor will be able to accompany her,’ said Baird. ‘So that’s all settled.’

  Thelma took my hand as she left.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, but she wasn’t.

  ‘I’ll be gone before she arrives.’

  ‘Danny, you don’t need to go; I just think it would be a bad idea to be round when…’

  ‘Don’t talk shit, Sam. When you were deciding about this girl, did I come into the equation?’ He stared at me. ‘I didn’t, did I? You could at least have talked to me about it before saying yes, pretended that it mattered what I thought about it. Is this girl’s future more important to you than ours?’

  I could have said that he was right and I was
sorry, except I knew I wasn’t going to go back on my agreement to take the girl. I could have pleaded. I could have become angry in response. Instead I tried to reconcile our differences in the old familiar way. I put my arms around him, I pushed back his hair and stroked his stubbly cheek and kissed the corner of his furious mouth and started to undo the button on his shirt. But Danny pushed me away angrily.

  ‘Fuck me and I’ll forget, eh?’

  He pulled on his shoes and picked up the jacket which he’d slung over a chair.

  ‘Are you going?’

  ‘Looks like it, doesn’t it?’ He paused in the doorway. ‘Bye Sam, see you. Maybe.’

  Eight

  The most tiresome thing about having a guest – or in this case a pseudo-guest – coming to call is the apparent tradition that you are meant to clear up for them. Fiona Mackenzie was due mid morning. This gave me a couple of hours after taking Elsie to school to dither around the house. I had to be tactical about this. Clearing up the house in any meaningful sense was obviously impractical. Establishing order was an even more forlorn hope which needed to be explored in detail with Sally. But Sally was very slow and she had a complicated emotional life and any conversation with her got lost in its labyrinths. For the moment I had time to push a few things out of the way so that doors could be entered, hallways walked along, chairs sat on.

  The surface of the kitchen table was almost invisible, but it only took the transfer of Elsie’s bowl and cup into the sink, the stowing of her cereal packets into a cupboard, the disposal of a few days’ worth of opened envelopes in the bin, and almost half of it was available for use once more. I pushed the window above the kitchen sink slightly up and opened the door to the garden. The house would at least smell a bit cleaner. I wandered up and down looking for anything else that I could tidy up. One of the radiators was leaking rusty liquid on to the floor so I put a cup under it. I looked into the lavatory and thought about cleaning it. I needed bleach or one of those liquids with nozzles designed for squirting under the rim. I made do with flushing it. That was enough for one day.

  Looking from a first-floor window, I could see sunlight streaking the lawn and I could hear a bird singing in a twittery sort of way. Things like this were presumably among the benefits of living in this godforsaken bit of countryside. One was supposed to find bird-song beautiful. Was it a skylark? A nightingale? Or did they only sing at night? A robin? A pigeon? Except that I knew that pigeons cooed instead of singing. I was running out of birds. I ought to get a book about bird-song. Or a CD or something.

  This was all wrong. I was curious, but most of all I was irritated at having committed myself to an arrangement which was out of my control. I felt bad about Danny; worse than bad – uneasy. I knew I ought to ring and admit I was wrong, but I kept putting it off. I find it hard to be in the wrong. I made myself some instant coffee and compiled a cross list inside my head: it was a distraction for me; a waste of my time; it was an unprofessional way to deal with a person who needed help; it might even be dangerous; it would do no good for Elsie; I didn’t like the idea of somebody else in my space; and I didn’t like the idea of indistinct, open-ended commitments. I felt exploited and sulky. I retrieved one of the old envelopes from the bin and made a real list.

  As eleven-thirty approached, I hovered near the window which looked out at the approach to the house. Another morning entirely wasted. I tried to tell myself that I should be savouring these entirely useless bits of filler time. After years without a spare moment I was wandering around from room to room without even being able to form a coherent impulse. Finally I heard a car pulling up near the front door. I looked out of the window, keeping myself far enough back so that I would be invisible to anybody looking up at the house. It was an entirely anonymous four-door thing, wedge-shaped like a supermarket cheddar. There were no blue lights or orange lines. Three of the doors opened at once. Baird and another man in a suit got out of the front seats. From the rear door stepped a man in a long charcoal-grey overcoat. He straightened up with obvious relief, for he was tall. He looked around briefly, and I glimpsed a swing of lank dark-blond hair, a thin and aquiline face. He bent down and looked back inside the car and I thought of the way, only a year ago, I had cursed the straps on Elsie’s baby-seat, the awkward angles at which I had had to extract her from the old Fiat. I saw a jeaned leg emerge and then a young woman stepped out. She was blurred by the coarse grain of the old window. I saw jeans, a navy-blue jacket, dark hair, pale skin, nothing else. I heard a knock at the door and walked down the stairs.

  Baird stepped into my house with an avuncular, possessive air that repelled me. I suspected that all of this wasn’t his idea, or at least that I wasn’t his idea, but that he was going to make a show of seeing it through. He stepped to one side to allow the others to pass. The man in the long coat was leading the girl by the arm, gently.

  ‘This is DC Angeloglou,’ Baird said. ‘And this is Dr Daley.’ The man gave me a curt nod. He was unshaven but looked none the worse for that. He looked around him with narrowed eyes. He seemed suspicious, as well he might. ‘And here is Miss Fiona Mackenzie. Finn Mackenzie.’

  I held my hand out to her, but she wasn’t looking at me and didn’t see it. I turned the action into a meaningless fluttery gesture. I invited them through to where there was a sofa and we all sat down awkwardly. I offered them tea. Baird said that Angeloglou would make it. Angeloglou stood up looking irritated. I went with him, leaving silence behind us in the sitting room.

  ‘Is this really a good idea?’ I whispered as I rinsed out some mugs.

  He shrugged.

  ‘It might do some good,’ he said. ‘We’ve got sod all else, but don’t tell anyone I said so.’

  When we returned, it was to a silent room. Baird had picked up an old magazine from the floor and was looking at it absently. Dr Daley had removed his coat and, wearing a rather startling yellow shirt which might have come from an expensive Italian designer or from an Oxfam shop, was sitting beside Finn on the sofa. I held out two mugs of tea and Daley took them both and placed them on the table. He felt in his trouser pockets as if he’d lost something and didn’t know what it was.

  ‘Can I smoke?’ His voice was almost unnaturally deep, with a certain languid drawl. I remembered the type from med school. Socially assured in a way I never felt myself to be.

  ‘I’ll get an ashtray,’ I said. ‘Or an equivalent.’

  I immediately felt more at home with him than with Baird or Angeloglou. He was well over six foot; the cigarette packet looked slightly too small in his long-fingered hands. He lit a cigarette immediately and was soon tapping the ash into the saucer I gave him. He must have been in his mid forties, but he was hard to assess because he looked tired and distracted. He had dark smudges under his grey eyes and his straight sheet of hair was a bit greasy. It was a curiously crowded face, with fierce eyebrows, high cheek-bones and a wide, sardonic mouth. Finn looked small and frail and rather bland beside him. The paleness of her face was only accentuated by her thick dark hair and her sombre clothes. She had evidently not eaten for days; she was gaunt, her cheek-bones prominent. She was unnaturally still, except that her eyes flickered, never settling on anything. Her neck was bandaged and the fingers of her right hand constantly strayed to the edge of it, picking at it.

  I ought to be saying that my heart went out to this cruelly abused creature, but I felt too compromised and confused for that. This was an absurd setting for meeting a new patient, but then she wasn’t my patient, was she? But exactly what was she? What was I meant to be? Her doctor? Older sister? Best friend? A stool-pigeon? Some kind of amateur police forensic psychologist sniffing for clues?

  ‘Are you enjoying life in the country, Dr Laschen?’ asked Baird airily.

  I ignored him.

  ‘Dr Daley,’ I said, ‘I think it would be a good idea if you and Finn went upstairs to look at the room where Finn will be staying. It’s the room at the back on the left looking over the garden. You can have a
look round and tell me if I’ve forgotten anything.’

  Dr Daley looked quizzically at Baird.

  ‘Yes, now,’ I said.

  He led Finn out of the room and I heard them mounting the stairs slowly. I turned to Baird and Angeloglou.

  ‘Shall we step out into some of this countryside that I’m meant to be enjoying so much? You can take your tea with you.’

  Baird shook his head as he saw the state of my kitchen garden.

  ‘I know,’ I admitted, kicking a pink plastic object Elsie must have dropped out of the way. ‘I had this vision of being self-supporting.’

  ‘Not this year,’ said Angeloglou.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It seems as if I’ve got other things to do. Look, Inspector…’

  ‘Call me Rupert.’

  I laughed. I couldn’t help myself.

  ‘Are you serious? All right. Rupert. Before I start anything, there are some things we need to talk about.’

  I extracted the old envelope from the pocket of my jeans.

  ‘Is this official?’ he asked.

  I shook my head.

  ‘I don’t give a fuck whether it’s official or not. You got my name as an authority on trauma.’

  ‘An authority on trauma with an isolated house in the country near Stamford.’

  ‘Fine, well, I should start by saying, even if it’s only to you two that, in my professional capacity, I don’t consider this to be professional.’

  ‘It’s convenient.’

  ‘I don’t know whose convenience we’re talking about, but Finn ought to be in familiar surroundings with people she knows and trusts.’

  ‘The people she knows and trusts are dead. Apart from that, she has absolutely refused to see anybody she knows. Except for Dr Daley, of course.’

  ‘As I’m sure you’ve been told, Rupert, that is a standard response to what she’s been through, and it’s not in itself a justification for projecting her into an entirely new environment.’

  ‘And we have some reason to believe that her life could be in danger.’