The safe house

by Nicci French

  ‘Three. A left ear, a right ear and a wild ear. I don’t understand that joke.’

  ‘Well, it’s a wild front ear. Who told it to you?’

  ‘Danny. Danny sang it one day, and then he laughed a lot.’

  ‘Look,’ I said brightly. ‘Here’s Kirsty’s house.’

  Kirsty came to the door, white socks pulled firmly up to her plump knees, smocked blue dress with a crisp white collar, red coat trailing behind, shiny hair-slide in her shiny brown hair.

  ‘Isn’t Fing coming with us?’ she asked when she saw me and Elsie. Behind her, Mrs Langley was mouthing widely: ‘I-haven’t-told-her-yet.’

  ‘Fing’s…’ began Elsie importantly.

  ‘Not-today-Kirsty-but-we’re-going-to-have-a-lovely-time-and-where-are-your-swimming-things-and-jump-in-the-car-and-don’t-you-look-smart-and-up-you-go,’ I rattled out, as if I could push the question away if I spoke fast enough and long enough, replace it by thoughts of chloriney water and crisps afterwards, and an afternoon spent in the hot dark of the old cinema, where balding velvety seats flipped back and popcorn rolled along the floor, where cartoon characters could be bashed and squashed and dropped in boiling oil and still come back to life.

  Mrs Langley leaned in through my window, looking avidly sympathetic, and placed a smooth hand over my callused one, which was clenching the steering-wheel. She files her nails, I thought.

  ‘If there’s anything I…’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll bring Kirsty back this afternoon.’ I grabbed away my hand and turned the key in the ignition. ‘Are you both belted in, girls?’

  ‘Yes,’ they chorused, sitting neatly side by side, two pairs of feet dangling in their patent-leather shoes, two eager faces.

  ‘OK, let’s go.’

  Kirsty and Elsie floated decorously in their rubber rings and armbands, so buoyed up their torsos hardly got wet. Their white legs scampered in the water, their faces were pink with the sense of their own courage.

  ‘Look at me,’ said Kirsty. She slapped her nose and chin into the water for a nanosecond and came up triumphant with one lock of hair dripping. ‘I can go underwater. I bet you can’t do that.’

  Elsie looked at me for a moment, my anxious little landlubber. I thought she would cry. Then she ducked her head down into the pool, struggling clumsily amid her bright orange floats.

  ‘I did it,’ she said. ‘I did it, Mummy, did you see?’

  I wanted to pick her up and hold her.

  ‘My two little fish, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘Shall I be a shark?’

  Under the water, I was weightless and half blind; my eyes squinted through the thick green water and the luminous legs swirled like seaweed; my hands held out for flickering ankles. The tiles were reassuringly only a few inches away from my submerged body. I heard the girls squeal and giggle as I floundered beneath them. I’m not a fish, not me. I only like solid ground.

  In the changing room a teenage girl nudged her friend as I tugged vests over wet heads, forced stubborn feet into recalcitrant shoes and buckled stiff straps. She pointed at me with her eyes.

  Chicken nuggets and chips and bright pink ice-lollies for lunch. Popcorn, savoury and sweet mixed, and fizzy orange in a huge cardboard cup with two stripy straws poking from the top. The girls watched a cartoon and I let the screen slip into a blur as I looked beyond it and they both held my hands, one sitting on either side of me. Their fingers were sticky, their heads were tilted towards my shoulders. The air all around us felt second-hand, overused. I tried to match my breath to theirs, but couldn’t. It came in ragged unsymmetrical tearings out of lungs that hurt. I put my dark glasses on as soon as we came out into the foyer.

  ‘Mummy.’

  ‘Yes, my love.’ Kirsty was safely returned to her mother and we were driving through a milky mist towards home.

  ‘You know in the video,’ except Elsie pronounced it ‘vidjo’, a surviving trace of baby-talk, the last frail brown leaf left hanging on the tree, ‘of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When he’s killed by the wicked witch and he lies with the mouses?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then he comes back to life, he does. Well…’

  ‘No. Danny and Finn won’t come back like that. We’ll miss them and we’ll remember them, and we’ll talk about them to each other, you must talk to me whenever you want to, and they won’t be dead here.’ I put one hand against my thundering heart. ‘But we won’t see them again.’

  ‘But where are they? Are they in heaven now?’

  Charred lumps of flesh, hilariously grinning skulls with burnt-out eyes, features pouring in a ghastly river down their ruined faces, melted limbs, on a metal tray in a fridge a few miles from where we were driving.

  ‘I don’t know, my sweetheart. But they are peaceful now.’

  ‘Mummy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was I brave to put my head in the water?’

  ‘You were very brave; I was proud.’

  ‘Brave as a lion?’

  ‘Braver.’

  As we drove towards the house, it looked as if a party was going on, looming out of the fog. A flock of white lights; a herd of cars. We pulled to a halt and I softly touched the tip of Elsie’s nose with my forefinger.

  ‘Beep,’ I said. ‘We’re going to run through these rude men with their cameras and their tape recorders. Put your head on my shoulder and let’s see if I can get to the door before you count to a hundred.’

  ‘One, two, skip a few…’

  ‘Your father and I think you ought to come and stay with us for a few days. Until all the fuss has died down.’

  ‘Mum, that’s…’ I paused, searching for what I ought to say. ‘Kind of you, but I’m all right. We have to stay here.’

  My parents had arrived just after us. They marched into the house like two guards, left-right, chins up, eyes ahead. I was grateful for their resilience. I knew how much they must be hating all of this. They brought a fruit cake in a large maroon tin, a bunch of flowers wrapped in Cellophane and some Smarties and a colouring book for Elsie, who hates colouring books but loves Smarties. She took them off to the kitchen to eat meticulously, colour by colour, leaving the orange ones till last. My father made a fire. He stacked twigs in a neat pyre over half a firelighter and then arranged four logs on top. My mother made tea with a bustling air and thumped a hunk of fruit cake in front of me.

  ‘At least let us stay here then.’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘You can’t do everything by yourself.’

  Something in the tone of my mother’s voice made me look at her. Beneath her glasses, her eyes swam; her lips were tautened against emotion. When had I last seen her cry? I leaned forward in my seat and touched her knee, under her thick wool skirt, awkwardly. When had I last touched her, apart from those stiff pecks on the cheek?

  ‘Let it be, Joan. Can’t you see Samantha’s upset?’

  ‘No! No, I can’t see she’s upset. That’s my point, Bill. She should be upset; she should be – be – prostrated. Her friend, I always did think she was sly that one and I told you so that day we met her, and her boyfriend run off together and kill themselves in a car and it’s all over the newspapers. And everything.’ She gestured vaguely at the window, at the world beyond. ‘And Samantha sits there as cool as anything, when all I want, all I want, is to help.’ She paused, and perhaps I would have leaned forward and hugged her then, but I saw her give a twitch and she said the final thing, the thing she must have promised herself not to say: ‘It’s not as if it’s the first time this has happened to Samantha.’

  ‘Joan…’

  ‘That’s all right, Dad,’ I said and I meant it. The pain of that being said to me by my mother was so intense that it almost became an astringent twisted pleasure.

  ‘Elsie shouldn’t be here at all,’ my mother said. ‘She should come away with us.’

  She half-rose, as if she were going to make off with my
daughter at once.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Elsie is with me.’ As if on cue, Elsie appeared in the living room, crunching on her last Smarties. I pulled her on to my lap and put my chin on her head.

  There was a knock at the door.

  ‘Who is it?’ I called.

  ‘Me. Michael.’

  I let him in, closing the door quickly behind him. He took off his coat and I saw he was wearing old jeans and a faded blue cotton shirt, but otherwise he looked relaxed, steady.

  ‘I’ve brought smoked salmon and brown bread and a bottle of Sancerre, I thought we might… oh, hello, Mrs Laschen, Mr Laschen.’

  ‘They’re just going, Michael,’ I said.

  ‘But Samantha, we’ve only just…’

  My father nodded insistently at my mother and took her arm. I helped them on with their coats in silence and steered them to the door. My mother looked back at Michael and me. I don’t know which disquieted me more, her puzzlement or her approval.

  Elsie was waiting for me in my bed that night. As I slipped under the cover, she shifted, wrapped a tentacle arm around my neck, butted her face into my shoulder, sighed. Then, with the miraculous ease that children have, she closed her eyes again and sank into sleep. I lay awake for a long time. Outside it was moonless and dark. Everyone had gone home; I could hear nothing but the wind in the trees, once or twice the faint shriek of a bird out at sea. If I put my hand to Elsie’s chest I could feel her heartbeat. Her breath blew warmly against my neck. Every so often she would murmur something indistinguishable.

  Michael hadn’t stayed long that evening. He had opened the wine and poured me a glass, which I’d knocked back without tasting, as if it were schnapps. He had spread the butter he’d brought with him on to slices of the bread and covered them with smoked salmon, which reminded me horribly of raw human flesh, so I nibbled a bit of the crust and left it at that. We didn’t talk much. He mentioned a couple of details from the Belfast conference he thought might interest me. I said nothing but stared at the dying embers of the fire my father had made. Anatoly wrapped his black length around our legs and purred loudly.

  ‘It seems unreal, impossible, doesn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’ve known Finn for years,’ he said. ‘Years.’

  I said nothing. I felt unable even to nod.

  ‘Well.’ He stood up and pulled on his coat. ‘I’m going to go, Sam. Will you be able to sleep? I could give you something.’

  I waved him away. When he had gone, I went upstairs. I held Elsie against me and stared, wide-eyed, dry-eyed, at the silent dark.

  Twenty-Five

  ‘It’s a bad business, these suicides.’

  ‘I’m coping.’

  ‘Bad for us, I mean.’

  ‘No, I don’t know what you mean.’

  Geoff Marsh fingered the knot of his tie as if attempting to establish by touch alone whether it was in the centre of his neck. This meeting had been arranged a fortnight earlier to discuss some possible new sources of funding that had arisen. These we had disposed of over a cup of coffee. I had stood up to go, but he had gestured me back into my chair and started to look worried.

  ‘This couldn’t have come at a worse time,’ he said.

  I bit back a retort and said nothing.

  ‘You should have told us, Sam.’

  ‘What should I have told you, Geoff?’

  Geoff reached for a pad and looked at some jottings in a display of bureaucratic efficiency.

  ‘You were technically in our employment, Sam,’ he said after a pause. He gave that shrug of helplessness that I had come to know well. It was an acknowledgement of the implacability of the political and economic climate which cruelly constrained him. He continued, ‘The last thing I want to do is make anything of that, of course, but you should have told us that you were doing sensitive work that would impact on our project.’

  I was going to have to work with this man for a long time, so it was difficult for me to think of what I could decently say. I took a deep breath.

  ‘I thought I was being a good citizen. The police asked me for help. They insisted on secrecy. I didn’t even tell my own family.’

  Geoff placed his two hands delicately on the edge of his grossly oversized desk. I felt like a schoolgirl in the headmaster’s office.

  ‘It’s going to be in the papers,’ he said, with a frown.

  ‘It’s already in the bloody papers,’ I said. ‘My front lawn is like Greenham Common.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but so far there has been no mention of, well…’ Geoff gestured around him vaguely. ‘Us, all this, the unit.’

  ‘Why should they mention that?’

  Geoff stood up and walked over to the window and stared out. I tried to think of a way of bringing this tiresome meeting to an end. After a couple of minutes’ silence, I couldn’t bear it any longer.

  ‘Geoff, if there’s nothing more, I’ve got things to do.’

  Geoff turned suddenly as if he had forgotten I was in the room.

  ‘Sam, do you mind if I am entirely frank?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ I said drily. ‘Don’t spare my feelings.’

  He joined his hands in a pose of statuesque gravity.

  ‘The whole subject of post-traumatic stress disorder is still controversial. You’ve told me that enough times. We’re creating a new centre for it here and at the same time I don’t want to tell you how many wards I’ve been closing over the past couple of months. And the Linden Report – you know, into that photogenic six-year-old girl who died in Birmingham after we’d turned her away – that’s coming out in a couple of weeks. And I’m just waiting for some bright medical correspondent to put all that together with your thing…’

  ‘What do you mean, my thing?’

  Geoff’s face had become pinker and harder.

  ‘Since I’m looking into the abyss,’ he said, ‘maybe I’ll tell you. We chose you to superintend the largest project of my reign… my tenure, whatever you like to call it. Sir Reginald Lennox on my committee says that post-traumatic stress disorder is an excuse for weaklings and nancy boys, to use his expression. But we’ve brought in the famous Dr Samantha Laschen to fight our corner. And about a month before taking up her post, she has shown the world what she can do by treating a traumatized woman in her own home. An irresponsible journalist might point out that the result of Dr Laschen’s personal brand of treatment was that the patient fell in love with Dr Laschen’s own boyfriend, they absconded and then both committed suicide.’ Geoff paused. ‘Any such summary would, of course, be most unfair. But if such an argument were to be made, it would in truth be difficult to argue that the treatment of Fiona Mackenzie was one of your great successes.’

  ‘I wasn’t treating Fiona Mackenzie. She wasn’t my patient. The point was to provide her with a safe and secure – and temporary – refuge. And as a matter of fact I was against the idea myself.’

  I was whining and making excuses and I despised myself for it. Geoff looked unimpressed.

  ‘It’s a subtle distinction,’ he said, dubiously.

  ‘What is all this, Geoff? If you’ve got anything to say, just say it.’

  ‘I’m trying to save you, Sam, and save the unit.’

  ‘Save me? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Sam, I’m not expressing a personal view, I’m just putting forward a few pertinent facts. If this trust becomes embroiled in a public scandal in the media, things will be awkward for everybody.’

  ‘I don’t want to be belligerent about this, but are you making some sort of threat? Do you want me to resign?’

  ‘No, absolutely not, not at present. This is your project, Sam, and you’re going to see it through, supported by us.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Perhaps we should consider a strategy of containment.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘That was what I had hoped we could discuss, but it occurred to me that one possibility might be a judicious interview with the right journalist, a sort of pre-emptive strike.’


  ‘No, absolutely not.’

  ‘Sam, think about it, don’t just say no.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Think about it.’

  ‘No. And I’ve got to go now, Geoff. I’ve got doctors to talk to. Lest we forget that the point of this project is to provide a medical service.’

  Geoff walked with me across his vast office to the door.

  ‘I envy you, Sam.’

  ‘That’s hard to believe.’

  ‘People come to you with their symptoms and you help them and that’s it. I argue with doctors and then I argue with politicians and then I argue with bureaucrats and then I argue with doctors again.’

  I turned back to the office and looked at the Mexican tapestry, the sofa, the desk that was about the size of Ayers Rock, the panoramic view across fens and marshes or whatever it was that lay between Stamford and the sea.

  ‘There are some compensations,’ I said.

  We shook hands.

  ‘I need to be able to look my board in the face without too much embarrassment. Please don’t do anything to embarrass me. And if you do, tell me first.’

  When I arrived home, it took me fifteen minutes to play through the messages on my answering machine. I lost count of the different newspapers whose representatives left their numbers and of the different euphemisms they employed, the offers of deals, sympathy, consultation fees. Buried among them were messages from my mother, baffled by the tirade of beeps caused by the preceding messages, and Michael Daley, and Linda, who was going to be late today, and from Rupert Baird, who asked if we could have a word about Finn’s effects.

  Her effects. The idea irritated me and then made me feel so sad. What was to be done with her few things? Presumably they now had no significance as part of an investigation. They weren’t evidence of anything except two wasted lives and a landscape of emotional damage. Our possessions were supposed to drift down from one generation to the next, but I couldn’t even think of anyone to give Finn’s pitiful few things to. I wondered what would happen to her untouched inheritance.

  Even so, if there was nothing to do, at least I would do it straight away. I took a cardboard box from the kitchen and ran up the stairs to the room from which I had deliberately excluded myself, Finn’s room. Even now there was a feeling of transgression as I pushed the door open and stepped inside. It was pathetically bare, as if it had been unoccupied for months. For the first time I realized that Finn had accumulated none of the burrs and barnacles that stick to most of us as we pass through life. Apart from some paperbacks piled on a shelf, there was not a single personal object in view, not even a pencil. The bed was carefully made, the rug straight, the surfaces were all bare. There was a musty smell and I hastily pushed the window open. There was nothing in the wardrobe but a rattle of metal clothes hangers. I looked at the books: some thrillers, Bleak House, The Woman in White, poetry by Anne Sexton, a battered guide to South America. I took that and tossed it out of the door on to the landing. I felt like escaping to South America. Escaping anywhere. The rest of the books I put in the box, and as I did so a white envelope fell from the pages of one of them on to the floor.