The safe house

by Nicci French

  I picked it up and was about to put it in the box too when I saw what was written on it and stopped. In large childish capital letters it said: MY WILL. Finn, so scared, so preoccupied with death, had written a will.

  I had a sudden tremulous conviction that she had impulsively left everything to me and that this would be a further public disaster. I slowly turned the envelope over. It wasn’t sealed. The flap had simply been tucked inside without being stuck down, the way one does with greetings cards. I knew that what I was doing was wrong, possibly illegal, but I opened it and unfolded the paper inside. It was a blue form, headed ‘Make Your Own Will’ at the top, and it had been filled out very simply. Under the box marked ‘Will of’ there was written: Fiona Mackenzie, 3 Wilkinson Crescent, Stamford, Essex. In the box marked ‘I appoint as my executor’ there was written: Michael Daley, 14 Alice Road, Cumberton, Essex. In the box marked ‘I leave everything I own to’ there was written: Michael Daley, 14 Alice Road, Cumberton, Essex. It was signed and dated Monday 4 March 1996. She ticked that she wished to be cremated.

  At the bottom were two boxes marked ‘Signed by the person making this will in our presence, in whose presence we then signed’. In these, in different hands, were written: Linda Parris, 22 Lam Road, Lymne. Sally Cole, 3b Primrose Villas, Lymne.

  Finn had gone completely mad. Finn had gone mad and then my fucking child-minder and my fucking cleaner had joined in a mad conspiracy under my own roof. My head was spinning and I had to sit on the bed for a moment. And what conspiracy, anyway? A conspiracy to leave your wealth in a mad way after your death? Old ladies left millions to their cats; why shouldn’t Finn leave everything to Michael Daley? But as I thought of his ineffectual role in all of this as Finn’s doctor, as Mrs Ferrer’s doctor, I became angry. Who knew about this will? The idea of the wealth of the Mackenzie family being handed over to Michael Daley suddenly seemed unbearable. Why shouldn’t I destroy the will, so that some sort of justice could be done? Anyway, if the person who was the executor also got all the money, it could hardly be legal, so it might as well be destroyed anyway. As I pondered this I saw there was another slip of paper in the envelope. It was hardly larger than a business card. On it was Finn’s unmistakable handwriting: ‘There is another copy of this will in the possession of the executor, Michael Daley. Signed, Fiona Mackenzie.’ I gave a shiver and felt as if Finn had come into the room and caught me rummaging through her things. I blushed until I felt my cheeks sting.

  I carefully replaced both pieces of paper in the envelope and placed it into the cardboard box. Then I spoke aloud, even though I was alone.

  ‘What a bloody mess.’

  Twenty-Six

  I don’t believe in God, I don’t think that I ever have, although I have a dim and suspiciously hackneyed memory of kneeling by my bed like Christopher Robin and rattling off Our-Father-who-art-in-heaven-hallowed-be-thy-name. And I do recall being terrified when very young of that prayer that goes: ‘If I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take.’ I would lie in my knee-length nightie with the frills round the wrists and the shell-white buttons closed up to the demure neckline, blinking worriedly in the darkness, Bobbie’s breath rising and falling from the bed across the room, and try to keep off the great wall of sleep. And I have always hated the idea of the capricious deity who answers some people’s calls for help and not others’.

  But when I woke in the grey light of the March morning, on the narrow hem of a bed almost entirely occupied by an out-flung Elsie, I found myself to my shame muttering, ‘Please God, dear God, let it not be true.’ Morning, though, is harsh. Not as bad as night, of course, when time is like a great river spilling over its banks, losing all onrushing momentum, lying in shallow stagnant pools. My patients often talk to me about night terrors. And they talk too about the terror of waking up from dreams into an undeceived day.

  I lay for a few minutes until the first panic had subsided and my breathing grew steady. Elsie shifted abruptly beside me, yanked the duvet cover off me and wrapped herself in it like some hibernating creature. Only the top of her head showed. I stroked it, and it too disappeared. Outside I could hear the sounds of the day: a dog barking, cock crowing, cars changing gear at the sharp corner. The journalists had gone from my door, the newspapers were no longer full of the story, the phone did not ring every few minutes with solicitous or curious inquiry. This was my life.

  So I jumped out of bed and, quietly so as not to wake Elsie, got dressed in a short woollen dress, some ribbed tights and a pair of ankle boots, methodically threading the laces into little eyelets and noticing while I did so that my hands were no longer shaking. I looped dangly earrings into my lobes and brushed my hair. I wasn’t going anywhere, but I knew if I shuffled round in leggings that had lost their stretch I’d add to my despondency. Thelma had once said to me that feelings often follow behaviour, rather than the other way round: behave with courage and you give yourself courage; behave with generosity and you start to lose your mean-spirited envy. So now I was going to face the world as if it didn’t make me sick with panic, and maybe my nausea would begin to fade.

  I fed Anatoly, drank a scalding cup of coffee and made a shopping list before Elsie woke and staggered into the kitchen. She had a bowl of Honey Nut Loops, which I finished for her, and then a bowl of muesli, picking out the raisins with her spoon and handing the soggy beige remainder to me.

  ‘I want a stick insect in a jar,’ she said.

  ‘All right.’ I could cope with cleaning out a stick insect’s home.

  She looked at me in surprise. Maybe she’d started too low, a grave negotiating mistake.

  ‘I want a hamster.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘I want a hamster.’

  ‘The trouble with pets,’ I said, ‘is that they need cleaning out and feeding, and after the first few days you’ll get bored, and guess who’ll do it. And pets die.’ I regretted the words as soon as I spoke them, but Elsie didn’t blink.

  ‘I want two hamsters, so if one dies, I’ll still have the other.’

  ‘Elsie…’

  ‘Or one dog.’

  Letters abruptly slapped through the letter-box and on to the tiled floor.

  ‘I’ll get them.’

  Elsie slid from the table and retrieved a pile of envelopes, more than usual. The brown for bills I put to one side. The slim white ones, with my name formally typed and the stamp franked in the corner, I peered at suspiciously and put to the other side. They were almost certainly from newspapers or TV programmes. The handwritten ones I opened and quickly glanced at: ‘Darling Sam, if there’s anything we can do…’; ‘I was so surprised when I read…’; ‘Dear Sam, I know we’ve lost touch recently, but when I heard about…’

  And there was one envelope I didn’t know what to do with. It was addressed to Daniel Rees in neat blue-Biro capitals. I supposed I’d better send it on to his parents. I held up the envelope to the light, stared at it as if it held the key to a mystery. The gummed seal of the envelope was detached in one corner. I slid my finger under the flap and opened it a bit further. Then all the way.Dear Mr Rees,Thank you for your inquiries this morning concerning weekend breaks in Italy. This is to confirm that you have booked two nights, half board, in Rome, for the weekend of May 18/19. We will send you your flight details and tickets shortly. Can you confirm the names of the passengers are Mr D. Rees and Dr S. Laschen?Yours sincerely,Miss Sarah KellyGlobe Travel

  I folded the letter up and slid it back into its envelope. Rome with Danny. Hand in hand in T-shirts and in love. Under the starched sheets in a hotel bedroom, with a fan stirring the baked air. Pasta and red wine and huge and antique ruins. Cool churches and fountains. I’d never been to Rome.

  ‘Who’s the letter from, Mummy?’

  ‘Oh, nobody.’

  Why had he changed his mind so abruptly? What had I done, or not done, that he could forgo Rome with me for death in a burnt-out car with a fucked-up girl? I pulled out the letter again
. ‘Thank you for your inquiries this morning…’ It was dated 8 March 1996. That was the day that it happened, the day he went off with Finn. Pain gathered, ready to spring, above my eyes.

  ‘Will we be late for school again, Mummy?’

  ‘What? No! No of course we won’t be late for school, we’ll be early. Come on.’

  ‘I just signed where she told me to.’

  ‘But Sally, how could you not look? It was her will, and she was a distressed young girl.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Sally went on scrubbing the oven. That was it.

  ‘I wanted to speak to you about it, Linda, before Elsie comes back.’

  ‘She said it was nothing.’ Linda’s eyes filled with tears. ‘A formality.’

  ‘Didn’t you read it?’

  She just shrugged and shook her head. Why hadn’t they been nosy like me?

  Michael’s house was not large, but it was lovely in a cool and modish kind of way. The downstairs floor was entirely open-plan and the French windows in the uncluttered kitchen opened out on to a paved courtyard in which stood a small conical fountain. I looked around: well-stocked bookshelves, vivid rugs on austere floors, tortured black-and-white drawings writhing on serene white walls, pot plants that looked green and fleshy, full wine racks, photographs of boats and cliffs and not a single person in them. How could a GP afford such style? Well, at least he was living up to the status he would soon acquire. We sat at a long refectory table and drank real coffee out of mugs with delicate handles.

  ‘You were lucky to catch me. I’m on call,’ he said. Then he reached over and took my hand in both of his. I noticed his nails were long and clean.

  ‘Are you all right, Sam?’

  As if I were a patient. I pulled away.

  ‘Does that mean you aren’t?’ he asked. ‘Look, this is a horrible business, horrible for you, horrible for me too. We should try and help each other through it.’

  ‘I’ve read Finn’s will.’

  He raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Did she show it to you?’ I shook my head and he sighed. ‘So is that what this is about?’

  ‘Michael, do you know what’s in her will? You’ve got a copy.’

  He sighed.

  ‘I know I’m the executor, whatever that means. She asked me.’

  ‘Do you mean you’ve got no idea?’

  He looked at his watch.

  ‘Has she left everything to you?’ he asked with a smile.

  ‘No. She’s left everything to you.’

  The expression on his face froze. He stood up and walked to the French window with his back to me.

  ‘Well?’ I demanded.

  He looked round.

  ‘To me?’ He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Why should she do that?’

  ‘But it’s not on, right?’

  Michael’s face took on a quizzical expression.

  ‘I don’t know what to say. It’s all so…’

  ‘So unethical,’ I said. ‘Dubious.’

  ‘What?’ Michael looked up as if he had only just heard. ‘Why would she do that? What was she up to?’

  ‘Are you going to accept it?’

  ‘What? It’s all so sudden.’

  There was a sudden beeping sound and he put his hand in his jacket pocket.

  ‘Sorry, I’ve got to rush,’ he said. ‘I’m stunned, Sam.’ Then he smiled. ‘Saturday.’ I looked puzzled. ‘Sailing, remember? Might be good for us. Get things in perspective. And we should have a proper talk.’

  I’d forgotten about that arrangement: sailing was all I needed.

  ‘It’ll do me good,’ I said hollowly.

  I held Elsie like a precious jewel; I was scared that I would break her with the might of my love. I felt so strong, so alive, so euphoric with grief and rage. My blood was coursing around my body, my heart was beating loudly; I felt clean and supple and untired.

  ‘Did Danny,’ I asked carefully, casually, ‘ever say anything to you about Finn?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘What about Finn?’ I stroked Elsie’s silky hair and wondered what secrets were locked inside her neat skull. ‘Did she say anything about Danny?’

  ‘Nope.’ She shifted in my lap. ‘Danny used to ask me about Finn.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Elsie looked at me with curious wide eyes.

  ‘And Danny said that you’re the best mummy in the world.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘Are you?

  After Elsie was asleep. I prowled around the house, pulling curtains aside, forcing myself under beds, reaching into corners. At the end of it I had on the kitchen table in front of me a battered menagerie of six tiny paper animals, three little birds, two sort of dogs, something baffling. I looked at them and they looked back at me.

  Twenty-Seven

  She had his dark eyes and the heavy eyebrows that almost joined in the middle of the forehead. The hair itself was lighter in colour and finer, and her skin was different in texture and heavily freckled already, though it was only just spring. Danny’s skin was pale, but always clear. He always went a lovely smooth caramel-brown. I could remember the smell of it, and the slight dampness, when he had been in the sun.

  I had never met any of Danny’s family. He told me they lived in the West Country, his father owned a construction company, he had a brother and a sister, and that was all. I was typing away at the book – it was going really fast now, it would be finished in a matter of weeks – when the phone rang. I left the answering machine to deal with it.

  ‘Hello, Dr Laschen. This is… um… my name’s Isobel Hyde, we’ve never met, but I’m Danny’s sister and…’

  I gave a shiver and felt repulsed. What on earth could she want with me? I picked up the phone.

  ‘Hello, this is Sam Laschen, I was hiding behind the answering machine.’

  There were some awkward halting exchanges as she thought that I thought she just wanted to grab any of Danny’s possessions that had been left with me and I didn’t know what she wanted. I said there was nothing valuable but of course she could have it all and she said that wasn’t what she meant and she was down in London for a few days and wondered if she could pop out in the train to see me. I don’t know why, irrational instinct maybe, but I didn’t want her to come to the house. I had had enough of people seeing where I lived in any case, and I didn’t know what ghoulish motives might impel a woman to see the setting where her dead brother had been with a woman that he abandoned and all that. In fact I didn’t know what the hell was going on, so I said I would meet her off the train at Stamford on the following morning and we could go to a pub.

  ‘How will we recognize each other?’ she asked.

  ‘Maybe I’ll recognize you, but I’m tall and I’ve got very short red hair. Nobody who’s actually free to walk the streets looks remotely like me in this entire county.’

  I almost cried when she got off the train, and I couldn’t speak. I just shook her hand and led her off to a café opposite the station. We sat and played with our coffeecups.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘We’re living in Bristol at the moment.’

  ‘Which part?’

  ‘Do you know Bristol?’

  ‘Not really,’ I confessed.

  ‘Then there’s not much point in going into detail, is there?’

  I could see that Danny’s easygoing charm was a family trait.

  ‘I didn’t bring any of Danny’s things,’ I said. ‘There were a couple of shirts, some knickers, a toothbrush, a razor, that sort of thing. He never seemed to have much. I could send them if you like.’

  ‘No.’

  There was a silence which I had to break.

  ‘It’s interesting for me to meet you, Isobel. Eerie, too. You look so like him. But Danny never talked about his family. Maybe he didn’t think that I’m the sort of person you take home to Mum. He left in a horrible way. And I’m not sure what the point of all this is, although of course I am deeply sorry for all of you.’


  Once more there was a silence, and I began to feel a little alarmed. What was I going to do with this woman, staring at me with Danny’s gaze?

  ‘I’m not really sure myself,’ she said finally. ‘It may seem stupid, but I wanted to meet you, to look at you. I’d wanted to for ages and I thought that now we might never meet at all.’

  ‘That’s understandable, in the circumstances. I mean, that we might never meet.’

  ‘The family is in a terrible state.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  I hadn’t allowed myself to think about Danny’s parents. Isobel had been looking down into her coffee but now she raised her large heavy-lidded dark eyes and looked at me. I felt a ripple of lust flow through me and I clenched my teeth so that it hurt.

  ‘Are you coming to the funeral?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We thought not.’

  A horrible thought occurred to me.

  ‘You weren’t, by any chance, coming to ask me not to come?’