The safe house

by Nicci French

  ‘No. I’m all over the place today,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you. In about an hour, say? Thanks so much.’

  I could hear the sound of coffee being ground from the kitchen, china clinking. I dialled a second number.

  ‘Hello, is that the hospital? Yes, can you put me through to Margaret Lessing in the personnel office. Maggie? Hello, this is Sam.’

  ‘Sam!’ Her voice tinkled down the line. ‘Hi, what are you up to?’

  ‘This and that. Can you do something for me? I wanted to have a quick look at Fiona Mackenzie’s file from when she was in hospital after the attack. Could you get hold of it for me?’

  There was a moment of hesitation.

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  ‘Thanks, Maggie. Shall I pop round later today?’

  ‘Give me a call first.’

  ‘Fine. Speak to you soon.’

  Laura felt better, I could tell. Her face was less tentative under her glossy grey curls. She’d put on a greeny-grey knee-length suit, the other eye and a lipsticked smile. She placed a tray down on the table between us – an upright pot, two china cups with little silver spoons on their saucers, a dainty jug half-filled with milk, and lumps of sugar in both pale brown and dense white. I thought of the milk bottle and jam jar standing on my kitchen table, the boxes still unpacked on the uncarpeted floor of my study. I’d never have this kind of style. Thank God.

  ‘How are you? We’ve all been so admiring.’ Laura poured me a deft cup of steaming coffee, and I added a slop of milk.

  ‘Fine, thanks.’ I took a sip. ‘I wanted to talk to someone who knew Finn.’

  Laura looked flattered. She laid a strong, well-manicured hand on my denimed knees.

  ‘What you’ve been through is terrible; I mean, even for people like us, right on the sidelines, it’s been shocking, and…’

  ‘Tell me about Finn.’

  She took a sip of coffee and sat back, visibly at a loss. She had wanted me to do the talking.

  ‘I didn’t know her that well. She was a very kind, gentle girl, who may have suffered at school, as girls do, because she was overweight.’ Laura raised her eyebrows at me. ‘And she became seriously ill and she went away from us, from everybody who knew her. It was terrible for Leo and Liz. But she got better. Liz told me that Finn was happier than she had ever been. Completely transformed, they said. I think that they saw her trip to South America as a new beginning, a sign that she had grown up.’

  This was no good. I didn’t want Laura’s amateur diagnoses . I wanted information, facts I could make something of for myself.

  ‘You don’t have any photographs of her, do you? All the ones in her house were destroyed.’

  ‘I don’t think so. It was her parents we saw, really. Hang on a minute.’ She left the room, reappeared with a fat square red book and started rapidly turning over colour photos in their transparent pages, tutting and shaking her head. Unknown faces nicked past, unremarkable houses, hills and beaches and formal groups of people. ‘Here is a garden party we went to with Liz and Leo. Fiona may have been there. I can’t see her.’

  The Mackenzie parents, whose out-of-focus faces had been on the front of every newspaper a few months ago, were standing on a smooth lawn, smiling for the camera. She was skinny under a wide-brimmed straw hat; he looked hot and uncomfortable in his suit and tie. On the left of the photo, sliding out of the shot, was a bare arm, a slither of a floral dress and a wave of dark hair.

  I put my finger on the arm, as if I could press its flesh. ‘That’ll be Finn.’

  I sat on a bench by the side of a square. A mother was pushing her child on the single swing that stood on the patch of green.

  ‘Dr Kale, please,’ I said into my telephone.

  His voice came quickly down the line.

  ‘Hello, Dr Laschen. Yes, I’ve got it here, in front of me. Let’s see. Here it is: Fiona Mackenzie’s blood type was O, along with about half of the population of Western Europe and the United States. Is that all you wanted?’

  At the hospital, Maggie sounded harassed.

  ‘Sorry, Sam, you’ll have to give me a bit more time to get the file. These bloody computers, somebody must have logged in wrong and snarled the system up. Would her casualty admission file be any good?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ring me back.’

  ‘Donald Helman? Hello, I hope this isn’t a bad time to ring. My name’s Sam Laschen and we met at a party of Laura and Gor… Yes, that’s right. Laura gave me your number. You said your daughter used to be a friend of Finn’s and I was wondering if I could speak to her about it. Oh, when will she back? Well, in that case, there was a friend of Finn’s from school who I met, her first name is Jenny, I think. You don’t happen to remember her last name? Glaister. Thank you very much for your help.’

  Jenny Glaister was home from university for the Easter holidays. Her parents’ large house was about twenty miles from Stamford, standing in its own grounds, and she came on to the gravelled sweep of driveway as I arrived. It was a grey and rather chilly day, but she wore a tiny, brightly coloured silk skirt and a thin shirt. I remembered her articulate self-confidence from the funeral. She was puzzled, but she was interested in me. Everyone was interested enough in the woman they’d read about in the newspapers to let me into their houses for a few minutes. She made us a pot of tea, then sat down facing me, oval face in ringless hands.

  ‘To be honest,’ she said, ‘Finn wasn’t really one of our group. I mean, she was and she wasn’t.’ She bit her lower lip and then added, ‘She was self-conscious at school. A bit awkward. One of the difficult things when she… you know, became ill and went away, was that some of us felt a bit guilty about her. We thought we might not have included her enough. I mean, maybe she got anorexic because she wanted to be one of us, you know. I saw her briefly when she came back from South America and I hardly recognized her, none of us did: she was so slim and tanned and she had all these fabulous new clothes and she seemed so much more self-confident, less anxious for our approval. We were all a bit in awe of her, as if she were suddenly a stranger. She was quite different from the plump Finn who’d just tagged along.’

  I tried to push her for something specific. She made an obvious effort.

  ‘A few weeks ago I would have said that she was intelligent, nice. That kind of thing. And loyal,’ she added. ‘I would have said Finn was loyal: you could trust her and depend on her. She’d always do her homework, and arrive places on time, and be, well, reliable. Eager. You spent all that time with her at the end. Does she make sense to you?’

  ‘Do you have any photographs?’

  We rummaged through a case of photographs that mainly consisted of Jenny looking lovely on horseback, in the sea, with her family, playing her cello, receiving her school prize, going gracefully downhill on skis. No Finn.

  ‘You could try the school,’ she suggested. ‘There must be a school photo of her and term’s not finished there yet. The school secretary, Ruth Plomer, will help. She’s a darling.’

  Now why hadn’t I thought of that?

  So I drove to Grey Hall, which wasn’t grey but red and magnificent and set back across lovely green lawns from the road. On playing fields I could see a hoard of girls in grey shorts and white Aertex shirts wielding lacrosse sticks while a tall woman barked at them. Inside, the smell of French polish and green vegetables and linseed oil and femaleness met me. Behind closed doors I could hear lessons in progress. This wasn’t how I remembered Elmore Hill comprehensive. A woman in overalls directed me down a corridor to the secretary’s office.

  Ruth Plomer sat, beady-eyed and beaky-nosed as a bird, amid a nest of files and wire baskets and piles of forms. She listened attentively to my request, then nodded.

  ‘To be honest, Dr Laschen, the press has come round here asking for photographs, comments, interviews, and our policy has been to refuse everyone.’ She paused and I remained silent. She yielded slightly. ‘You just want to see a photograph? You don’t want
to take it away? You don’t want to talk to anybody?’

  ‘That’s right. I need to see what she looked like before she lived with me.’

  She looked puzzled, apparently arguing with herself and finally losing.

  ‘I don’t suppose there can be any harm. There are no individual portraits but there is always the group photograph. When was her final year?’

  ‘I think she formally left in the summer of 95, but she was ill for almost all of the academic year. Maybe I could look at the previous year.’

  ‘Wait here; I’ll see what I can do.’

  She left the room and I heard footsteps retreating and returning. Miss Plomer had a scrolled tube in her hand and unrolled it on her overcrowded desk. I leaned forward, scanning the rows of girls’ faces for sight of Finn. She put on her spectacles.

  ‘This is the 1994 line-up. There is a list of the girls’ names here. Let’s see, yes, she’s in the third row back. There she is.’ A well-trimmed fingernail touched a figure on the left-hand side of the photo. Dark hair, a slight blur on her features: she must have turned aside as the lens shuttered, just as she’d done with me. I picked up the scroll and held it to the light, staring intently, but it seemed to recede from my gaze. I wouldn’t have known it was Finn. I wouldn’t have known it was anybody.

  ‘Maggie. Hi, it’s Sam again. Have you found it yet?’

  ‘No, there’s a hold-up with the casualty file. Somebody must have taken it out and I’m trying to track down who it was. Get back to me.’ She was harassed and irritated and eager to get off the line.

  Everything was gone. Now what?

  ∗

  Where was it, oh, where was it? I flung open the trunk. Elsie’s paintings, dozens and dozens of them, lay there in piles. Some were glued together by their paint. Some still had masking tape on their corners, where they’d been stuck to the walls. Three-legged monsters in green and red, yellow daisies with their straight stalks and two looped leaves, violent purple daubs, faces with wonky eyes, indeterminate animals, lots of seascapes, wavy blue lines traversing the thick white paper. Rainbows with the colours running into each other; the moon and stars bleeding yellow into rough black nights. I lifted each picture, looked at it, turned it over. Surely it would be here. Traces of Finn’s presence in the house could be seen: occasional titles, neatly written in with their dates, an adult representation of a dog alongside a child’s one, several times whole hasty pictures of horses and trees and sailing boats obviously done by Finn. But I couldn’t find what I needed. I’d come to a dead end.

  I went into Elsie’s room and pulled open drawers. Dolls with pink limbs and gaudy dresses stared at me, knitted animals, little boxes with nothing in them, beads in satisfying primary colours, satiny ribbons, whole armies of those tiny plastic things which are always put into party bags. In her drawing pad there were several paintings, but not the one I wanted. Under the bed was one slipper and three separate socks and Anatoly, asleep. I climbed on to a chair and pulled down from the top of the wardrobe an untidy pile of used paper folded up. On the top, in pencil, was Elsie’s name written over and over, in large wonky letters. Underneath was the treasure map. I’d found it.

  I jumped off the chair and spread the paper out on the floor tenderly, looking at the daubs of colour and the rusty red letters. An ‘S’ and an ‘E’. And there, an ‘F’: signed in her blood.

  I lifted the paper up very carefully, as if it were like a dream that fades when you try and grasp it. In my study downstairs was a stack of large brown envelopes and I slid the map and its signature of blood inside one and sealed it up. Then I picked up the car keys and ran outside. I had it now.

  ‘You again.’

  I had taken a seat but Chris remained standing, hands on hips, looking down at me.

  ‘I’ve found her. It.’

  ‘What?’

  I took the envelope, still sealed, and put it on his desk. ‘In here,’ I said, speaking very slowly, as if he were demented, or as if I were, ‘in here is a picture.’

  ‘A picture. How nice.’

  ‘A picture,’ I continued, ‘drawn by Elsie.’

  ‘Look, Sam,’ Chris bent towards me and I noticed that his face had become ramer red, ‘I wish you well, honesdy I do, but go home, see your daughter, leave me alone.’

  ‘This is a relic from a children’s game. Finn and I signed our initials, each in our own blood.’ He opened his mourn and I thought he was going to roar at me, but no sound came out. ‘Give it to Kale. Have it tested.’

  He sat down heavily. ‘You’re mad. You’ve gone completely insane.’

  ‘And I want a receipt for this. I don’t want it disappearing.’

  Angeloglou gave me a fixed stare for a long time.

  ‘You mean you want a record kept of your behaviour? Right,’ he shouted and began rummaging feverishly on his desk. He didn’t find what he was looking for and he stormed across the room returning with a form. He banged it down on the table and picked up a pen with deliberation.

  ‘Name?’ he barked.

  Thirty-Five

  ‘I’ll have’ – I ran a finger down the handwritten menu – ‘smoked mackerel and salad. What about you two?’

  ‘Chicken nuggets and chips,’ Elsie said firmly. ‘And fizzy orange drink. Then chocolate ice-cream for pudding.’

  ‘OK,’ I said easily. Elsie looked taken aback. ‘Sarah?’

  ‘Ploughman’s, thanks.’

  ‘What about drinks? Do you want a shandy or something?’

  ‘Lovely.’

  I gave the orders to a barmaid who appeared to be ten months pregnant, took our ticket and our drinks, and we went outside into the gorgeous spring day and sat down, coats still buttoned up, at an unstable wooden table.

  ‘Can I play on the swings?’ asked Elsie, and charged off without waiting for a reply. Sarah and I watched her struggle on to the seat of a swing and rock it violently to and fro, as if that would give her momentum.

  ‘She seems well,’ commented Sarah.

  ‘I know.’ A little boy in a stripy jersey climbed on to the swing next to Elsie’s and the two of them stared suspiciously at each other. ‘Funny, isn’t it?’

  ‘Kids are resilient.’

  We sipped our shandy with the sun on the napes of our necks, and didn’t speak for a bit.

  ‘Come on, Sarah, don’t keep me on tenterhooks. What did you think of the book, then? Plain speaking, mind. Aren’t you saying anything because it’s so bad?’

  ‘You must know it’s good, Sam.’ She put an arm around my shoulders and I almost burst into tears; it had been a long time since anyone except Elsie had hugged me. ‘Congratulations. I really mean it.’ She grinned. ‘And wildly controversial of course. I’m amazed you could write something like that in such a short time, and with all that happened. Maybe that’s why. It’s very good.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘There are a few tiny little things that I wrote in the margin.’

  ‘I mean really but.’

  ‘There’s no really but. There’s a question.’

  ‘Ask away.’

  ‘Not even a question, just a comment.’ She paused, picked up her glass and ran a thumb around its rim. ‘It feels like a summing-up of a career, not just the beginning of one.’

  ‘I’ve got a habit of burning my bridges.’

  Sarah laughed.

  ‘Yes, but this time you’re burning your bridges in front of you. All those attacks on hospital managers and jaded consultants, and the stuff about designer trauma.’

  The little boy was pushing Elsie on her swing now. Every time she went swooping up, sturdy legs pointing to the sky and head thrown exaggeratedly back, my heart banged anxiously.

  Our lunch arrived. My mackerel lay among a few shreds of tired lettuce, looking orange and enormous. Elsie’s meal was entirely beige. ‘You made the best choice,’ I said to Sarah, and called to Elsie, who came running.

  ∗

  After lunch, after Elsie had eaten every last chip
and scooped up every last drop of ice-cream, we went for a short walk, to the old church I had visited once before, and talked about South America and Elsie’s father.

  ‘Do you love it here ?’ asked Sarah as we walked beneath the enormous sky, beside the sea that was blue and friendly today, the ground spongy under our feet, birds curling overhead.

  I looked around. Near here, Danny had made love to me while I kept an anxious eye out for tractors. Near here, Finn had walked her thin body back into health and had made me confide in her. Out there, I had nearly died.

  I shivered. We seemed to be making no progress; however far we walked the landscape remained unchanged. We could walk all day and the horizon would just roll away from us.

  I had always thought that when people were described as being purple with rage it was a metaphor or hyperbole, but Geoff Marsh really was purple. The arterial pulsation in the neck was clearly visible and I asked him if he was all right, but he waved me into the chair in front of his desk and then sat across from me. When he spoke it was with a forced calmness.

  ‘How is it going?’

  ‘You mean the unit?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The painters are just applying the final coat. And those carpets. Our reception area is looking very corporate.’

  ‘You make that sound a bad thing.’

  ‘I suppose I’m primarily interested in it as a therapeutic setting.’

  ‘That’s as may be. But the existence of the unit and its role in our internal economy depend on its success as a generator of funds and that depends on the input of health schemes and insurance companies who believe that a programme of trauma treatment for certain categories of their customers will provide them with legal protection. Battered toddlers and firemen who’re frightened of fires aren’t going to pay for your precious therapeutic environment.’

  I counted to ten and then I counted to ten again. When I spoke it was also with an exaggerated calm.