The safe house

by Nicci French

  ‘What was necessary was for X to take the role of Finn for long enough to allow her to write a will leaving everything to Daley. The only skill that was required was the rudimentary one of reproducing Fiona Mackenzie’s signature. There was one hiccup. The family’s cleaner expressed a wish to see Fiona before she returned to Spain. This would have ruined everything.’

  ‘So Mrs Ferrer was murdered,’ I interjected. ‘Michael went there and suffocated her. Then returned with me. Any signs of struggle, and traces left by him, could be explained by his supposed attempt at reviving her.’

  Rupert shifted uncomfortably in his seat and continued.

  ‘Then, all that was necessary was to stage a suicide, using the corpse of the real Fiona Mackenzie. That was why it was so important for the car to be set on fire. Daley didn’t need an alibi for the Mackenzie killings because he wasn’t a suspect. But he arranged to be out of the country when X drove Danny’s car up the coast and set it on fire.’

  ‘It was perfect,’ I said, in admiration, despite myself. ‘The suicide of somebody who was already dead and an alibi created by somebody who nobody knew existed. If there had been any suspicions, they could test Finn’s body as much as they wanted. And poor Danny, Danny…’

  ‘Rees must have stumbled on the scene when she was pulling out the day you were out.’

  I looked down at my coffee. It was filmy, cold. I felt shame burning through my body.

  ‘I kept her in my house, with my child, with my lover. Danny was murdered. I’ve devoted my professional life to the analysis of psychological states and I’ve been made to dance like a puppet by this young girl. She mimicked trauma, she mimicked friendship, everything. The more I think about it the worse it gets. She didn’t want to go to the funeral. I see it as a symptom. She wants to destroy all of the real Finn’s clothes. I see it as therapeutic. She’s permanently vague about her past. I see it as a necessary stage. She confides in me that she feels no connection with her earlier, fat self and I see it as a sign of her capacity to recover.’

  Rupert finally looked up from his drawing.

  ‘Don’t feel bad about it, Sam,’ he said. ‘You’re a doctor, not a detective. Life goes on, such as it does, because most of us assume that the people we’re dealing with are not psychopaths or frauds.’ He glanced at Chris. ‘We’re the ones who are supposed to be detectives, unfortunately.’

  ‘But what would have happened?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘After the fake suicide of Finn.’

  ‘All very simple,’ said Chris. ‘Daley gets the money. Then, a year or two later, we would hear rumours which would say something like: poor Daley has checked in with Gamblers Anonymous. Gone off the rails, lost half his money or whatever at the racetrack. In fact, it will have gone in cash to pay off…’ Chris opened his hands, acknowledging defeat, ‘X.’

  ‘Have you any idea at all who this young lady might be ?’ I asked. ‘A patient? An old friend? A previous girlfriend?’

  Nobody answered.

  ‘She might have a criminal record,’ I ventured.

  ‘Who might?’ Rupert asked flatly. ‘We only have one link with her.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You knew her better than anybody.’

  ‘Are you mad? I didn’t know her at all.’

  ‘All we ask,’ said Chris, ‘is that you try to think. You don’t have to tell us now. Just try to remember anything, anything at all she might have said or done that could give a clue as to her real identity.’

  ‘I can answer you straight away. I’ve spent days going through every memory, everything she told me, any conversation I can recall. It was all fake. What can I say? She could cook. She could do simple magic tricks. But the more I think, the more she becomes like a nothing. All the things she said, all that she did, were just so much dust thrown in my eyes. When I get beyond it she’s not there. I’m afraid I’m not much help. So what are you going to do now?’

  Rupert got up and stretched, his hand touching the polystyrene tiles on the ceiling.

  ‘We’ll conduct an investigation.’

  ‘When are you announcing the reopening of the case?’

  Was it my imagination or did I see him take a deep breath, steeling himself for what he was about to say?

  ‘We’re not announcing it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Rupert cleared his throat.

  ‘After consultations at the highest level we have decided that we might improve our prospects if the murderer doesn’t know that we are after her. She has missed out on the money. She might make a mistake.’

  ‘Who might? How would you notice?’

  Rupert mumbled something.

  ‘Rupert,’ I said sharply. ‘Is this a way of burying the case?’

  He looked shocked.

  ‘Absolutely not, that accusation is unworthy of you, but I know you’ve been under stress. It’s just the most effective way to proceed and I’m confident it will produce results. Now, I think we’ve explored everything useful. When are you going to London?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘You’ll leave your address with us, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. If anything occurs to you, if anything happens, just get in touch.’ He held out his hand. ‘We’re very grateful to you. Sam, for the way in which you have enabled the truth of these tragic events to be arrived at.’

  I took his hand.

  ‘I’m glad you’re grateful, Rupert. And if I ever suspect this case is being hushed up…’

  ‘Trust us,’ said Rupert. ‘Trust us.’

  I emerged, blinking, into the pedestrian precinct on the edge of the market square and bumped into an old woman and tipped her wheeled shopping basket over. As I retrieved onions and carrots from the pavement, I felt like a child who had woken from a dream and was surprised to find the world carrying on unaffected. Yet I felt that I was still in my hermetic dream. I still had places to go.

  Thirty-Seven

  There followed a weekend of boxes, an interested child, a disturbed cat, a large van, flirtatious removal men, mugs of tea, arrangements, bunches of keys, and my own rented storage space, reserving about 5 per cent of my possessions for the temporary flat.

  Amid the bustle of obligations there were two things I really needed to do. First of all, I had a sheaf of requests for interviews and I browsed through them and rang a couple of friends who read newspapers and asked their advice, and then on the Monday morning I rang Sally Yates at the Participant. Within an hour she was sitting with a mug of coffee, a notebook and a poised pen in the kitchen of a man working in America for a year. Yates was plump, rumpled, sympathetic, very likeable and left long silences which I was presumably meant to fill with confidences about my private life. Don’t try to kid a ladder. I was experienced enough in the interviewing of vulnerable people to be able to create a reasonable facsimile of the nobly suffering woman. I wasn’t as impressive as Finn, as X, but I was all right. I had decided precisely the unguarded intimacies I would offer – about the pain of losing a lover, about crime and physical fear, about anguish and the irony of a trauma specialist suffering from trauma herself: ‘There’s a medical maxim that you always get the condition that you specialize in,’ I said, but with a sad smile and a sniff, as if I was about to shed a tear.

  Then, at the end, came the statement for which I had set up the entire interview.

  ‘So now you’ve escaped it all…’ said Sally Yates, sympathetically, her sentence fizzling out so that I could pick up its thread.

  ‘But, Sally,’ I said, ‘both as a doctor and as a woman, I wonder whether we ever can escape experiences just by running away from them.’ I left a long pause, apparently too upset to trust myself to speak without losing control. Sally reached across the kitchen table and put her hand on mine. As if with a great effort, I began to speak again: ‘This has been a persona
l tragedy and – with the new post-traumatic stress unit, a professional falling-out – and at the heart of it are people who were not what they seemed.’

  ‘You mean Dr Michael Daley?’ Sally asked, her brow furrowed in deep concern.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I said and when she looked quizzical gestured that I could say no more.

  As we stood on the landing, saying goodbye, I hugged her.

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘You got me to say things I never intended.’

  Her cheeks flushed with pleasure, quickly suppressed.

  ‘It was very special to meet you,’ she said, holding me even tighter than I was holding her.

  The newspaper was clearly eager because less than two hours later a photographer arrived. The young man was disappointed that my daughter was out but placed me next to a vase of flowers instead. I gazed soulfully at them, wondering what sort they were. I was rewarded the next day with a large photograph and a headline: ‘Sam Laschen: female heroism and the mystery that will not die.’ Not particularly snappy, but it would send a shot across the bows of DI Baird and his merry crew. Next time I would be less mysterious.

  I had a second task, a larger and more painful one. A friend had vaguely offered the services of her childminder in an emergency. This was an emergency. I took Elsie round the corner to a chaotic terraced house containing a Spanish teenager and a beetle-browed five-year-old. Elsie stomped in and didn’t even turn to say goodbye. I got into my car and headed west. I would be going against the traffic in both directions.

  I found Saint Anne’s Church, on the Avonmouth side of Bristol, easily, and walked through its gate and into the green quiet of the graveyard holding my bunch of spring flowers. It was easy to tell which grave was Danny’s: among all the mossy grey headstones, whose names were scarcely decipherable, his mottled pink slab was starkly new. Someone had put flowers there. I looked at the black lettering: Daniel Rees, Beloved Son and Brother. I grimaced. That shut me out effectively enough. 1956-1996: he’d not made it to the birthday party we’d talked of throwing. I’d grow old, my face would change and wrinkle, my body would develop the aches and pains and fragilities of age, would bend and suffer, and he would be always young, always strong and beautiful in my memory.

  I looked down at the six feet of ugly pink marble and shuddered. Under there, his gorgeous body, which I’d held so close when it was warm and full of desire, was charred and now rotting. His face, the lips that had explored me and the mouth that had smiled at me and the eyes that had gazed, was mouldering away. I sat down beside the headstone, put one hand on the grave as if it were a warm flank, stroked it.

  ‘I know you can’t hear me, Danny,’ I said into the windless silence. Even speaking his name out loud made my chest ache. ‘I know you’re not there, or anywhere else either. But I needed to come here.’

  I looked around. There was no one in the churchyard at all. I couldn’t even hear the sound of a bird. Only the cars on the main road a few hundred yards away disturbed the hush. So I took off my jacket, laid aside my bag, took the flowers off the slab and lay down on it myself, cheek to the cold stone. I stretched my length out on top of Danny as I sometimes still did in my dreams.

  I cried messily, self-pityingly, in a flood of easy grief, as I lay upon the grave; salt tears puddled on the stone. I cried for my dear life. I allowed myself to remember our first meeting, the first time we went to bed together, outings with Elsie – just the blessed three of us, not knowing how lucky we were. I thought about his death. I knew that I was going to be all right; one day I would probably meet someone else and the whole process of falling in love would begin again, but just now I felt cold and lonely to my bones. The wind sighed through the graveyard; all those dead bones lying under their inscriptions.

  So I pulled myself stiffly to my feet. When I spoke I felt absurdly self-conscious, as if I were acting the part of a grieving widow in some stilted amateur dramatic production: ‘So this is it. This is my goodbye.’ Yet I couldn’t stop saying it, melodramatic as it was. I just couldn’t bring myself to say it for the very last time. ‘Goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye.’

  And then I put on my jacket, picked up my bag, placed the two bunches of flowers back on the stone, just so, walked out of the graveyard and never once looked back through the latch gate at the place where he lay. And if I drove fast enough, I’d be back in time to put Elsie to bed, sing her a song before she slept.

  Thirty-Eight

  The telephone was ringing as I ran up the stairs, files under one arm and holding two bags full of supper for that evening. I tripped over Anatoly, cursed, dropped the bags and scooped up the phone just as the answering machine clicked on.

  ‘Hold on,’ I said breathlessly over my courteous, recorded voice, ‘this’ll switch off in a bit.’

  ‘Sam, it’s Miriam. I’m just checking on tonight. Are you still on?’

  ‘Of course. The film begins at 8.30 and I’ve told the others to meet at 8.20 outside. I’ve bought some ready-meals to eat back here afterwards. It’ll be lovely to see you again.’

  I unpacked the food into the fridge. Elsie and Sophie would probably be back from the park in an hour or so. They’d be surprised to see me here before them. I went through to my bedroom (though personally I thought ‘box room’ would have been a more precise description of a space in which I had to squeeze past a small chest to get to my single bed) and picked up the pile of dirty clothes in the corner, shoved them into the washing machine.

  A pile of bills lay on the kitchen table, a pile of dishes teetered in the small sink, books and CDs were standing in crooked towers along all the skirting boards. The rubbish bin was overflowing. Elsie’s bedroom door opened on to a scene of extraordinary chaos. The plants which numerous friends had given to me when I moved here were wilting in their pots. I sloshed water over them recklessly, humming one of Elsie’s absurd little ditties as I did so, making lists in my head. Ring the travel agent. Ring the bank. Remember to speak to Elsie’s teacher tomorrow. Ring estate agent in the morning. Buy present for Olivia’s fortieth birthday. Go through the report on the Harrogate train disaster. Write that promised paper for the Lancet. Get someone to come round and fit a cat flap for Anatoly.

  The key turned in the lock and Sophie staggered in, laden with Elsie’s picnic box and skipping rope.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, as I searched through the letters scattered over the table for the note from the ferry company. ‘You’re back early. But where’s Elsie?’

  ‘The most extraordinary thing happened!’ She dumped her load on the table and sat down, plump and glossy in her fake-leopard-skin leggings and her tight and shiny T-shirt. ‘We met your sister just as we were going into Clissold park. Elsie seemd really pleased to see her, rushed into her arms. She said she’d bring her back in a bit. I last saw them going hand in hand into the park. Bobbie, that’s her name, isn’t it, was going to buy her an ice-cream.’

  ‘I didn’t know she was going to be here,’ I said, surprised. ‘Did she say what she was doing?’

  ‘Yeah. She said her husband had dropped her off on the way to some meeting or other and she’d been choosing curtains in that really swanky fabric shop along Church Street. Anyway, she can tell you herself later. Do you want me to make you a cup of tea?’

  ‘Coming all the way to London to buy curtains. That’s my sister. And then, now that we’ve got time and no child, we could make a start on sorting the books and CDs. I want everything in alphabetical order.’

  We’d got as far as G, and I was covered in dust and sweat, when the phone rang. It was my sister.

  ‘Bobbie, this is a lovely surprise. Where are you? When will you be here?’

  ‘What?’ Bobbie sounded quite bewildered.

  ‘Shall I come and meet you in the park?’

  ‘What park? What are you going on about Sam? I rang up to see if Mum had rung you, she…’

  ‘Hang on.’ My mouth had gone strangely dry. ‘Where are you speaking from, Bobbie?’


  ‘Well, from home of course.’

  ‘You’re not with Elsie?’

  ‘Of course I’m not with Elsie, I have no idea what…’

  But I was gone, slamming down the phone on her bewilderment, yelling to Sophie to call the police immediately and tell them that Elsie had been kidnapped, pounding down the narrow stairs, two at a time, heart bumping in my chest, please let her be all right, please let her be all right. I fell through the front door and sprinted, feet hurting on the hot pavement. Up the street, pushing past old ladies and women with buggies and young men with large dogs. Through the slow trudge of people coming home from work. Across the road as horns blared and drivers wound down their windows to curse.

  Through the iron gates of Clissold park, past the little-bridge and the overfed ducks, the deer who nosed at the high fencing with their velvet muzzles, along the avenue of chestnut trees. I ran and I looked, my eyes scattering from small shape to small shape. So many children and none of them mine. I tore into the playground. Boys and girls in bright anoraks were swinging, sliding, jumping, climbing. I stood between the see-saw and the sand-pit, where last month the park warden had found used syringes scattered, and stared wildly around.

  ‘Elsie!’ I yelled. ‘Elsie!’

  She wasn’t there, although I saw her in every child and heard her in every scream. I looked over to where the paddling pond lay turquoise and deserted, then ran on, to the café, to the large ponds at the bottom of the park where we always fed bread to the ducks and the quarrelsome Canada geese. I peered over the fence to where crumbs and bits of litter drifted, as if I would see her little body drifting under the oily water. Then I started to run up the other side of the park. ‘Elsie!’ I called at intervals, ‘Elsie darling, where are you?’ but I never expected a reply and I received none. I started to stop people, a woman with a child about her age, a group of teenagers on skateboards, an elderly couple holding hands.

  ‘Have you seen a little girl?’ I asked. ‘A little girl in a dark blue coat, with blonde hair? With a woman?’