The safe house

by Nicci French

  ‘I’ve been a drag,’ she said.

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said.

  ‘Elsie gave me a present.’

  I couldn’t help laughing.

  ‘And what might that be?’

  ‘Look,’ Finn said and held her fist out. She slowly unfolded the fingers and there, neatly perched on her palm, was one of Danny’s paper birds.

  That night I rang Danny. I rang at ten, at eleven, then at twelve, when he answered in a thick voice, as if I’d woken him.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ I said.

  He grunted.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about you all the time,’ I continued. ‘And you were right. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Ah, Sammy, I’ve been missing you too,’ he said. ‘Can’t seem to get you out of my head.’

  ‘When will you come?’

  ‘I’m rebuilding a kitchen for a couple who seem to think that sleep’s a luxury and weekends don’t exist. Give me a week.’

  ‘Can I bear to wait for a week?’ I asked.

  ‘But then we need to talk, Sam.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I love you, you difficult woman.’

  I didn’t reply, and he said sombrely, ‘Is it such a hard word for you to say?’

  Eleven

  We stood side by side in front of the long mirror in my bedroom, looking like two witches in a coven. I had dressed in a black knee-length skirt, black coarse-silk shirt and black waistcoat, and then, taken aback by how red my hair looked topping such dark attire, I’d even pulled on a black cloche hat. Finn was wearing her black polo-necked sweater, and I’d lent her a shapeless charcoal-coloured shift to go over the top of it. It came down to her calves, but actually she looked rather touching and graceful standing in its inky folds. Her glossy head came barely to my shoulder; under its fringe her face was pale and her lips looked slightly swollen. Suddenly, never taking her eyes from her reflection, she did a small and disconcerting jiggle; one bony hip jutted out from the enveloping shift. If it had been in different circumstances I might have giggled and offered some ironic or self-mocking remark. As it was, I remained silent. What, after all, was there to say?

  Out of the picture except for one plump knee sat Elsie, off school with a cold which seemed to consist of a theatrical sniffle every twenty minutes. If I turned round – which I didn’t yet want to do for I felt that some subtle drama was going on for Finn in front of this mirror – I would have seen her sitting, legs tucked up under her bottom, draping herself in the cheap round beads which she was scooping from a lidded box. As it was, I heard her muttering to herself: ‘That looks nice, I’m so proud of you. A little princess.’

  Outside, it was raining. The countryside gets wetter when it rains than cities. It’s to do with the increased surface area from all those leaves and blades of grass. Much of it still seemed to be hanging in the air as well, as if the marshland and mud were so sodden already that it was incapable of absorbing any more moisture. This was my bit of England, undecided whether it was in the sea or on land. A loud revving and a splutter of pebbles signalled the arrival of a car.

  ‘Danny,’ I said. Elsie slithered off my unmade bed, pulling a mess of duvet behind her, loops of coloured glass bouncing round her neck, a crown of pink plastic falling out of her unruly hair as she made for the stairs.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ I asked Finn, again. She nodded.

  ‘And you’re sure you want me there too? I won’t be able to sit anywhere near you, you know.’

  ‘Yes. Sure.’

  I wasn’t sure. I know that funerals help us to realize that loved ones are dead and not returning; I know that we can say goodbye at a funeral and start to mourn. I’ve been to funerals – well, one funeral in particular – when this has been true, the start of the melting of the great ice-block of grief. The familiar words do touch you, and the faces around you, all wearing the same look of battened-down grief, make you part of a community, and the music and the sobs inside your chest and the sight of that long box and the knowledge of what’s inside it well up into a kind of sorrow that’s the beginning of a thaw.

  But at this funeral there would be police and journalists and photographers and busybodies peering eagerly at her. Finn would have to see all the people that she’d hidden from since the day she lost her parents. We’d be escorted there by plain-clothes policemen, and she’d be flanked by them throughout the ceremony, bodyguards for a girl still at risk. People talk too easily about facing up to loss, coming to terms with it. Finn seemed to me more in need of protection than self-knowledge. Avoidance is a common and ill-advised coping strategy for people suffering from post-traumatic-stress depression; Finn was certainly avoiding. But safe, soothing routines may be the best way for them to start the healing process.

  ‘It’s your choice,’ I said. ‘If you want to leave, just tell me. All right?’

  ‘I just need to…’

  She didn’t finish her sentence.

  ‘Let’s go and meet Danny then.’

  She looked at me imploringly.

  ‘He’s not going to bite you. At least, not in a horrible way.’

  I took Finn by the hand and pulled her out of the room. Later, Danny laughed about his first sight of Finn, she and I descending the stairs in melodramatic black, but then he looked up at us, hair over his shoulders, unsmiling. Finn didn’t smile either, but nor did she hesitate. She let go of my hand, and the two of us – me clip-clopping behind in my leather buckled shoes and she softly padding in front in her pumps – approached him. She stopped in front of him, looking tiny against his bulk, and lifted her eyes to his. Still no smile from either of them.

  ‘I’m Finn,’ she said in a murmury little voice from behind her silky curtain of hair.

  Danny nodded. He held out his hand and instead of shaking it, she laid her thin fingers against his palm, like a small child deciding to trust someone. Only then did Danny look past Finn at me.

  ‘Hi, Sammy,’ he said nonchalantly, as if he’d been away for an hour, not nearly two weeks. ‘Do you know what you look like?’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll tell me.’

  ‘Later I will.’

  Elsie came in from the kitchen.

  ‘There’s a man called Mike.’

  ‘It’s time for us to be off, Finn.’

  Danny bent his head down and kissed me on my lips. I put the flat of my hand against his cheek and he leaned into it briefly, and we smiled at each other. I smelled his skin. Then Finn and I went into the rain. Daley got out of his car. He was dressed in a crinkled navy-blue suit with wide lapels. He looked more like a slightly hungover jazz musician than a mourner. Finn stopped suddenly, one foot in the car.

  ‘No.’

  I laid my hand on her back.

  ‘Finn?’

  Daley stepped forward.

  ‘Come on, Finn,’ he urged. ‘It’ll be…’

  I interrupted him.

  ‘You don’t have to do this,’ I said.

  ‘You go,’ Finn said suddenly. ‘You and Michael go for me.’

  ‘Finn, you ought to go, don’t you think, Sam?’ Daley said. ‘You should see people.’

  ‘Please, Sam. Please will you go for me?’

  Daley looked at me.

  ‘Sam, don’t you think it would be good for her to go? She can’t go on not seeing people like this.’

  A look of panic came into her eyes. I was getting wet and wanted to move from the muddy gravel and pouring rain. We couldn’t force her.

  ‘She should make up her own mind,’ I said.

  I beckoned to the figures in the doorway, who ran out to hear the change of plans. The last glimpse I had of Finn was of her being led into the house, a small damp figure resting limply against Danny, while Elsie skipped behind them and the rain rained on.

  During the service I was silent and still, Daley was silent and fidgeting endlessly. He ran his fingers through his silky hair, rubbed his face as if he could wipe away the dark shadows under his eyes that
made him look so dissolute, shifted his weight from foot to foot. Finally, I put a calming hand on his arm.

  ‘You need a holiday,’ I whispered. An elderly woman sitting on the other side of me, a pork-pie hat jammed on her head, warbled. ‘Bread of Hea-a-a-a-aven,’ she sang, in a passionate vibrato. I mouthed the words and looked around. I was trying to get a feel of the world of Finn and her family. For me, Finn so far was pitifully isolated. This funeral felt unreal. I had no connection at all to the dead couple, except through their daughter. I hardly knew what they looked like, except from the photograph I had seen in all the papers – a blurred picture taken at a charity ball, him burly and her skinny, both smiling politely at a face out of the frame, while the fact of their terrible death cast them into history. ‘Fe-e-e-d me ti-ill I-I want no more.’

  Sometimes I wonder if people can smell suburbia on me, like a dog is supposed to be able to sniff out fear. I think I can smell wealth and respectability a mile off, and I smelled it here. Modest black skirts and neat black gloves, grey gaberdine suits with a dash of glamour at the neck, sheer black tights, low shoes (my buckles gleamed loudly in the dull air of the Victorian church), small ear-rings on a hundred lobes, make-up which you couldn’t detect but knew was there on the faces of all the middle-aged women, the low-key, well-bred grief, a discreet tear here and there, modest and expensive bouquets of early spring flowers laid on the two coffins that sat so baldly on the catafalque. I had had to arrange a funeral once and I had gone through the catalogues and learned the vocabulary. I glanced from face to face. In one pew ahead of me sat seven teenage girls; from the angle at which I sat their sweet profiles overlapped each other like angels on a gilt Christmas card. I noticed that they were all holding hands or nudging each other, and they tilted their heads occasionally to catch whispers from one side or the other. Finn’s schoolfriends, I decided, and made up my mind to try to bump into them later. Across from me a plump woman in shiny black with a large hat was sobbing into her copious handkerchief. I knew at once that she was the cleaner, the one who’d found the bodies. She was the only person I saw that day who displayed raw, noisy, undignified grief. What would happen to her?

  We knelt in silence to remember the dear departed, to the cracking of a dozen ageing knees. I wondered what all these people were remembering – what conversation, what row, what little incident bobbed above the implacable surface of death to remind them? Or were they remembering that they’d left the oven on, or planning what to wear to the concert that evening or wondering if any dandruff was falling on to their dark-fabricked shoulders? Which ones had been close to Finn – the old friends of the family who’d known her all through her childish years, had seen her suffer and seen her grow into a lovely young woman, the ugly duckling into the graceful swan? Which were the vague acquaintances who’d turned up because the couple had been slaughtered and there were police and journalists at the door of the church?

  ‘Our Father,’ intoned the vicar.

  ‘Who art in heaven,’ we followed obediently. ‘Hallowed be thy name…’ And the cleaner, whatever her name was, sobbed on.

  Ferrer, that was it. She hung behind as people started to make their way up the aisle, and I forced myself against the flow towards her. She was scarcely visible, bent over between two pews. I got closer and saw she was picking things up from the floor and putting them into her bag. She started to put on her coat and knocked her bag all over again.

  ‘Let me help you,’ I said and bent down and felt under the bench for keys and a purse and coins and folded pieces of paper that had fallen out of it. ‘Are you coming next door?’ I saw her face close up, the skin pale, the eyes swollen with crying. ‘Next door?’

  There was a prod in my back and I turned to see the detective, Baird. He nodded at me with a smile, then remembered himself and looked sombre.

  ‘You’ve met Mrs Ferrer,’ he said.

  ‘Has anybody done anything for this woman?’ I asked.

  Baird shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know, I think she’s going back to Spain in a few days.’

  ‘How are you?’ I asked her. She didn’t respond.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Baird said, in the loud slow voice English people use when speaking to foreigners. ‘This is Dr Laschen. She is a doctor.’ Mrs Ferrer looked anxious and distracted. ‘Um… doctoray, medico.’

  Mrs Ferrer ignored me and began talking quickly and incoherently to Baird. She had things for the ‘little girl’. Where was she? She was going home and wanted to get things to Miss Mackenzie. Say goodbye to her. She must say goodbye, couldn’t go before she had seen her. She started crying again, hopelessly. I noticed that her hands were trembling. In my professional judgement, she was a total mess. Baird looked nervously across at me.

  ‘Well, Mrs Ferrer, if you pass anything on to me, then in due course…’ He looked over at me and nodded me away. ‘Don’t worry, doctor, I’ll take her across.’

  ‘You look like a bridge player. Help us out here.’

  Two women – one woman with coarse brown hair and a strong nose, the other smaller with perfect white hair under a tiny black hat – beckoned me into their conversation. When I was about thirteen, my mother had forced me into the school bridge club as part of my upwardly mobile social education. I’d lasted about two weeks, enough to learn the point counts of the court cards and not much more.

  ‘If I open two no trumps, what does that mean to you, eh?’

  ‘Trumps,’ I said gravely. ‘Are they the black cards or the red ones?’

  Their faces fell and I backed away, teacup in hand, an apologetic smile on my lips. Over the other side of the hall I saw Michael deep in conversation with a balding man. I wondered who’d arranged all of this – booked the hall, made the sandwiches, hired the tea urn. My attention was snagged suddenly.

  ‘I was hoping to see Fiona, poor girl. Has anyone spoken to her?’

  I stood still and sipped my empty cup.

  ‘No,’ came the answer. ‘I don’t think so. I heard she’d been taken abroad to recover. I think they have some relatives in Canada or somewhere.’

  ‘I heard she was still in hospital, or a nursing home. She nearly died, you know. Poor darling. Such a gentle, trusting girl. How will she ever get over this?’

  ‘Monica says’ – the voice behind me sank to a stage whisper so that I could hear it more clearly than ever – ‘that she was, you know, raped.’

  ‘No, how terrible.’

  I moved away, grateful that Finn had been spared this. The mourning process could wait. Baird had been standing dutifully with Mrs Ferrer in a corner, and I saw them making their way towards the door. I caught Mrs Ferrer’s eye and she came across to me, seized my hand and mumbled what seemed to be thanks. I tried to say to her that if there was anything I could do I would do it, and that I would find out her address from Baird and come to see her. She nodded at me but I wasn’t sure if she had taken it in and she released my hand and turned away.

  ‘How’s the cleaner?’ a voice said behind me. Michael Daley.

  ‘Aren’t you her doctor?’

  ‘She’s registered with me. I took her on as a favour to the Mackenzies.’ Daley turned and followed her progress out of the room with a frown, before turning back to me. ‘Does she know who you are?’

  ‘Baird introduced us; I don’t think she understands the connection between me and Finn,’ I said.

  ‘What did she want?’

  ‘Help, I should say, and urgent help at that. And she wants to give Finn some of her things. And to see her, before she goes back to Spain.’

  Daley sipped reflectively at his sherry.

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ he said. ‘I suppose it would be good for Finn to see someone she knows.’

  ‘I don’t know if it’s safe, but on the other hand she might be an unthreatening kind of presence,’ I said.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said.

  There was a pause. He gave a half-smile. ‘There are one or two people I should make a pr
etence of talking to. I’ll pick you up on the way out.’

  Standing in a huddle in the corner of the room were the girls I’d noticed in the church. I made my way over to them and when I caught the eye of one, I moved into their circle.

  ‘You must be friends of Finn’s?’

  A tall girl with dark shoulder-length hair and freckles over the bridge of her pert nose held out her hand, looked suspiciously at me, and then back at her friends. Who was I?

  ‘Just from school,’ she said. ‘I’m Jenny.’

  I’d wanted to find out about Finn from people who knew her, but now I couldn’t think what to say.

  ‘I knew her father. Professionally.’

  They all nodded at me, incurious. They were waiting for me to move on.

  ‘What’s she like, Finn?’ I asked.

  ‘Like?’ This from a blonde girl with cropped hair and a sharp nose. ‘She’s nice.’ She looked around for confirmation. The girls nodded.

  ‘Was nice,’ another girl said. ‘I went to visit her at the hospital. They wouldn’t let me anywhere near her. Seems pretty stupid.’

  ‘I suppose…’

  ‘Are you ready to go?’

  I turned with a start to see Michael’s face. He hooked an arm under my elbow and nodded at the girls. They smiled back at him in a way they hadn’t smiled at me.

  The car park of the little parish church at Monkeness was right by the sea wall, and we sat there for a few minutes. I nibbled at a walnut cake that I’d scooped up from a tray on the way out, and Michael lit a cigarette. It took several matches, and finally he had to crouch down in the shelter of the wall.

  ‘Did Finn get on with her parents?’

  He gave a shrug.

  ‘Were they close? Did they argue? Help me out here, Michael, I’m living with this girl.’

  He took a deep drag from his cigarette and gave a gesture of helplessness.