The safe house

by Nicci French

  ‘Let’s not overstate it.’

  ‘I don’t want to be insensitive to what you’ve been through,’ said Rupert. ‘But in the circumstances this must be the best possible conclusion.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I need to think all this through. Do you know how the murders of the parents were committed?’

  ‘You really need to talk to Kale about that. It looks as if Daley and the girl tied up and killed the parents in the middle of the night. Fiona allowed herself to be tied up by Daley. When the cleaner arrived, Daley used a scalpel and made what was basically a shallow incision in her neck and then escaped down the back stairs that lead into the garden. We’d always thought that there was relatively little blood because she had gone into shock with a massive drop in blood pressure. In fact, it was because the wound had been inflicted only a few minutes before. Is everything all right? You don’t look happy.’

  ‘I keep going over it in my head, trying to disentangle it.’ I said. ‘It was all a fake. Finn helped to cut the throats of her own parents and then allowed her own throat to be cut. Is there anything in her past that was consistent with that?’

  Chris looked puzzled.

  ‘You mean, had she killed anyone before?’

  ‘No, I don’t mean that. Was there evidence of serious conflict with her parents? Or medical instability?’

  ‘There was £18,000,000. I’m afraid there are a lot of people out there who would cut their parents’ throats for a lot less than that. And we’ve ascertained from his bank that Dr Daley was living well beyond his means. He was seriously in debt.’

  ‘What about the stuff on the wall? The animal rights connection?’

  ‘Daley knew about that because he was involved with monitoring animal rights terrorists. It gave him the perfect opportunity to shift suspicion. It’s all perfectly simple.’

  I forced myself to think, the way I used to do mental arithmetic at school, when I would wrinkle my nose and my forehead and think so hard that it hurt.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ I said. ‘It may be true but it’s not perfectly simple. Why did Finn make a will in favour of Michael Daley? That was convenient for him, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe they were going to get married.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Rupert. And there’s one other thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You may remember that I raised the suspicion about Michael Daley before and you demonstrated to me that he couldn’t have any connection with the burning of the car. As far as I understand it, you have no evidence putting him at the murder scene of the Mackenzies and you told me that he was in Belfast when the car was burned.’

  The two men looked at each other sheepishly. Or were they winking at each other? Rupert opened his hands in an appeasing gesture.

  ‘Sam, Sam, you were right, we were wrong. What do you want us to do, get down on our knees? I admit, there are one or two loose ends, and we are going to do our best to tie them up, but in real life things are hardly ever neat. We know what was done and we know who did it. We probably will never know exactly how.’

  ‘Would you get a conviction if Michael Daley had got to the shore?’

  Baird held up a finger in sanctimonious admonishment.

  ‘Enough, Sam. This is going to be good for all of us. We’ve got a result. You’re going to be a famous heroine like Boudicca and… er… like…’ He looked helplessly at Angeloglou.

  ‘Edith Cavell,’ volunteered Angeloglou brightly.

  ‘She was executed.’

  ‘Florence Nightingale, then. What’s important is that this is over and that we can all get back to our lives. In a few months we’ll meet for a drink and laugh about all of this.’

  ‘The George Cross,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve always rather fancied the George Cross as a medal.’

  ‘You weren’t that brave. If you had drowned, you could have got the George Cross.’

  I got up to leave.

  ‘If I’d drowned, you wouldn’t have known what a wonderful heroine I was. See you on TV, Rupert.’

  Thirty

  I was doing lots of things at the same time. I was feeling lots of things at the same time. For once in my life, it felt good to be absorbed in all that boring stuff that is only noticed when it isn’t being done – keeping the house organized, getting things washed, paying some attention to what Elsie was wearing, standing over Sally to make sure she did something more than just wash the kitchen floor and straighten the piles of paper on the kitchen table and take out the rubbish. Once a week Elsie went out and was bullied by Kirsty and once a week Kirsty came to us and was bullied by Elsie. I found a second friend for her, Susie, a thin, anaemic-looking child with ribbons in her blonde hair and a scream like a road drill. For the afternoons when Elsie was alone I bought a big colourful book, and each late afternoon we sat and counted the bananas in each bunch and grouped animals according to legs and wings, or size, or whether they lived in water or on land. Despite all the biology, it was meant to teach her maths.

  I got through chapter after chapter of my book, like a burrowing mole. My routine barely altered. Take Elsie to school. Write. Eat sandwich made with what was to hand and didn’t have anything growing on it that wasn’t easily removable. Go for brisk walk down to the sea to catch the tide at its highest. Look at it and think complicated things. Go back home. Write.

  Thoughts rotated in my mind as I went over and over them, constructing more or less plausible structures out of the flotsam and jetsam that I could gather. There were simple bits and complicated bits. The motive for the murders was Finn’s inheritance of a great deal of money and perhaps also some sense of grievance. The crime was conceived and committed by Michael Daley with a child who had always been pampered and had, so far as reports showed, never shown any signs of the smallest adolescent rebellion. But of course we psychologists always have a simple response to that. Evidence of rebellion? QED. No evidence at all of rebellion? Worse still, it must have been bottled up, unexpressed, until it all came out at once. QED likewise.

  The act itself was simple enough. The murder was presumably being planned anyway when Michael, through his work on the committee monitoring animal terrorism, learned of the threat against Leo Mackenzie. It would be an obvious opportunity. The only requirement was to commit the murders in such a way that it might seem like the work of particularly crazed animal rights activists, hence the trussing up and throat-cutting and wall-daubing. I felt that I had known Leo and Liz Mackenzie only through a couple of blurred photographs in the newspapers and – I felt with a heave in my chest – from a few bland things Finn had said about them. But they didn’t seem real to me. What did seem real, a huge stain in the lattices of my logical thought, was the image of Danny with a gun barrel against his temple. Did he cry and plead, or was he brave and silent? What had I been doing at the moment when he knew there was no hope, that he wouldn’t be able to bargain himself out of being killed? Feeling angry or sorry for myself, probably.

  And he’d killed Finn, his accomplice, too. I thought of the garrulous letter she had written to me, and I just could not understand how she could have produced such a gush of words with a gun to her head. Yet how little I knew her, after all. I kept worrying at all the little memories of Finn in my house, as if I were probing a broken tooth with my tongue. Each touch would provoke waves of pain and nausea, yet I couldn’t resist it. Finn sitting numbly on my sofa. Finn in her room. My own brilliant coaxing of her back into life with the use of my own little daughter. Finn destroying her clothes. Conversations in the garden. Sitting drinking wine and giggling together. Telling Finn about chess. Letting Finn look after me. It was a form of self-torture. Confiding in Michael Daley. Michael Daley complimenting me on how well I had handled Finn. Oh God oh God oh God oh God. I was the gull in an extended confidence trick that had begun in blood in a Stamford suburb, continued as a charade enacted in my house and finished in a fire on a lonely stretch of Essex coa
stline.

  Then there was Mrs Ferrer. What was that about? Had Michael really said that he had killed her, or had I misunderstood at a moment when I feared for my own life? I tried to go over anything that Mrs Ferrer might have found out. Perhaps as a cleaner she had come across a piece of damning evidence in the house and mentioned it to a man she trusted – her doctor. But what could it have been?

  Suddenly, on one rainy spring afternoon, as I stood in grey rain watching the sailing boats in sunshine a mile away, in the middle of the estuary, I asked myself the question that I tried to cure my own patients of asking: ‘Why me?’ I thought of how I had become part of the murderous deception, and how effectively I had played that part, me with my unmatched expertise, my acuteness of perception, my skill in diagnosis.

  ‘But she wasn’t my patient,’ I muttered to myself, as if I would be embarrassed for my whining to be overheard by a gull or by the reeds. How I wished that the plan could have been carried out without me or that somebody else could have been chosen, somebody else’s life ruined, someone else’s lover killed.

  ‘Why me? Why me?’ And then I found myself cutting the question short. ‘Why? Why?’

  I put it to myself as a chess match. If you are a clear bishop ahead, you don’t throw yourself into a speculative sacrifice. You simplify. Michael Daley and Finn Mackenzie’s motive was disgusting but it was simple. So why was their crime so complicated? I went over the event in my head yet again. I couldn’t understand why Finn had to be there for the crime, with all the added risk of Michael Daley being caught. She could have been somewhere else, with a perfect alibi, and there would have been no need for the cutting of her throat and the long, detailed, hazardous charade that ensnared me and Elsie and poor Danny and poor, sad Mrs Ferrer, if indeed she had been ensnared. And then why should Finn change her will so suddenly, leaving everything to the man who would murder her? Did she commit suicide after all? Did Michael kill her because he suddenly decided that half was not enough? Neither version seemed to make sense. I tried to construct a scenario in which Michael killed the parents and forced Finn into complicity by threatening her with murder, but none of it quite worked in my head.

  I did no more work that afternoon. I just walked into the wind and rain until I saw by my watch that I had to run to be home to meet Elsie. I was out of breath when I ran along the drive, a sour pain in my chest, and I saw the car was already back. I ran inside and picked up my little bundle and held her close against me, burying my face in her hair. She pushed herself back and reached for some incomprehensible picture she had drawn at school. We got out the paints and covered the kitchen table with newspaper and did more pictures. We did three puzzles. We played charades and hide-and-seek all over the house. Elsie had her bath and we read two whole books. Occasionally I would stop and point to a short word – ‘cow’, ‘ball’, ‘sun’ – and ask Elsie what it was, and she would look at the picture above the text for clues. If it was totally obvious – ‘The cow jumped over the… What comes next, Elsie?’ – she would make an elaborate pretence of spelling out the word – ‘Mer… oo… oo… moon!’ – that in its elaborate mendacity impressed me more than if she had simply been able to read.

  After her bath I held her plump, strong, naked body and rubbed my face in her sweet-smelling hair (‘Are you looking for nits?’ she asked) and I suddenly realized two things. I had spent almost three hours without brooding on horror and deceit and humiliation. And Elsie wasn’t asking after Finn or even Danny. In my darker moments I sometimes felt as if there were slime on the walls left by the people who had been inside them, but Elsie had moved on. I held her close and felt that she at least was unpolluted by the evil. I croaked a couple of songs to her and left her.

  Though it was barely after eight o’clock, I made myself a mug of some instant coffee or other that was nominally reserved for Linda’s use, topped it up with lots of milk and went up to bed. Elsie had survived this horror the way it seems that children are designed to do and I had a sudden impulse to take her away from all of this, go somewhere safe, away from fear and danger. I had never escaped. As a teenager I had kept my head down and worked and worked. I had worked even harder as a medical student and then harder still once I had qualified. There had never been a light at the end of the tunnel. Just the next examination or prize or scholarship or job that nobody thought I could get. Food and fun and sex and the other things that life is meant to consist of had been something to grab bite-sized pieces of along the way.

  A thought occurred to me and I gave a bitter smirk. I’d forgotten. Finn had got away from it all, backpacked her way around South America, or whatever the hell it was she’d done. She’d even polluted the idea of safety and purity. I remembered the one item of Finn’s that I had held back. I sprinted across the chilly room, grabbed the chunky paperback and sprinted back to bed, pulling the covers over me. I looked at the book properly for the first time. Practically Latin America: The Smart Guide. I grunted. The best guides in the world – five million copies sold. I grunted again. Getting away from it all, indeed. Nevertheless I began to have a fantasy of taking a year or two years off and heading around South America, just me and Elsie. There were some practical obstacles: my unit was about to open, I had no money, I couldn’t speak a word of Spanish. But children are good at languages. Elsie would soon pick it up and she could be my interpreter.

  Peru, everybody said that was beautiful. I flicked through the book until I came to a paragraph in the Peruvian section headed ‘Problems’:The urban centres of Peru should be treated with caution. Robbery of tourists is endemic – pockets are picked; bags snatched; the razoring of packs or pockets is a local speciality. Confidence tricksters and police corruption are rife.

  I grunted once more. Elsie and I could handle that. Where was it that Finn had gone? Mitch something. I looked in the index. Machu Picchu. That was it. I turned to the entry: ‘The most famous and sublime archaeological site in South America.’ I could take a year’s sabbatical and we could travel round and Elsie would have the advantage of being fluent in Spanish. My eye drifted down the page until it was stopped by some familiar words:If you are lucky enough to be in the area for the full moon, visit the Machu Picchu site at night. (US $7 for a boleto nocturne.) Look at the Intihuatana – the only stone calendar that wasn’t destroyed by the Spaniards – and contemplate the effects of light and the fates of empires. The Inca empire is gone. The Spanish empire is gone. All that remains are the ruins, the fragments. And the light.

  There it was, Finn’s great transcendent experience, pinched from a crappy little travel guide. I remembered Finn’s shining eyes, the tremble in her voice as she had described it to me. It felt like my final failure. There had been a little vain bit of me still left in a corner of my psyche which hoped that I had got somewhere with Finn. Despite the wickedness and the deception, she had liked me a bit, just as she had won Elsie’s love. Now I knew that even there, where it wouldn’t have mattered, she hadn’t taken the trouble to toss me something real. It was all fake, all of it.

  Thirty-One

  ‘Have you thought of seeing someone about what’s happened? I mean, you know…’

  Sarah was sitting at my kitchen table, making sandwiches. She’d brought cream cheese, ham, tomatoes, avocados – real food – and was now layering them between thick slices of white bread. She was one of the few people I could stand to have around me. She was straightforward and talked about emotions objectively, as if she were a mathematician puzzling over a problem. Now the sun was streaming in through the windows, and we had the afternoon to ourselves before Elsie came home from school and Sarah returned to London.

  ‘You mean,’ I took a swig of beer, ‘go and see a trauma counsellor?’

  ‘I mean,’ Sarah said calmly, ‘that it must be hard to get over what’s happened.’

  I stared at the crooked metal eye of the beer can.

  ‘The trouble is,’ I said at last, ‘there are so many bits to it. Anger. Guilt. Bafflement. Grief.’r />
  ‘Mmm, of course. Do you miss him a lot?’

  I often dreamed about Danny. Usually, the dreams were happy ones, not of losing him, but of finding him again. In one, I was standing by a bus stop and I saw him walking towards me; he held out his arms and I slid into their empty circle like coming home. It was so physical – his heartbeat against mine, the warm hollow of his neck – that when I woke I turned in the huge bed to hold him. In another I was talking to someone who didn’t know about his death, and crying, and suddenly the stranger’s face became Danny’s and he smiled at me. I woke and tears were streaming down my face.

  Every morning, I lost him all over again. My flesh ached for him, not so much with desire as with loneliness. My homesick body recalled him: the way he would cup the back of my head with a hand, the rasp of his roughened fingers on my nipples, his body folded against my folds in bed. Sometimes I would pick Elsie up and hug her until she cried out and struggled to get away. My love for her felt, suddenly, too big and too needy.

  Too often I would take out the letter he had written to his sister. I wouldn’t read it but would stare at the bold black script and let phrases come into focus. I only had a few photographs of him; he’d always been the one behind the camera, the way most men are. There was one of both of us in shorts and T-shirts; I was looking at the camera and he was looking at me. I couldn’t remember who’d taken the picture. There was another of him lying on his back and holding Elsie up on his lifted legs. His face was out of focus in the sunlight, a bleached-out blur where his eyes should be, but Elsie’s mouth was agape in panicky delight. Mostly, he was turned away from the camera lens, hidden. I wanted a photo of him that would stare directly at me, like a film star’s glossy publicity, for I was terribly scared of forgetting what he looked like. Only in my dreams did I see his face properly.