‘Make me a copy of all this.’
‘Right.’ He pressed a key and as they watched the paper slide out, he muttered. ‘You’re the most distrustful person, I know, Holland. You could almost be Isabel’s sister.’
Leo took a step backwards and met his eyes. ‘Isabel doesn’t have a sister.’
‘You know what I mean. Now scat. Out of here. I’ve got to work.’
She hesitated. ‘I need a favour, Norfolk. Can I use your machine to send an e-mail? My daughter… She’s in California. And the time difference makes her almost as hard to reach as Sydney. I…’ The tears pricked at her eyes. She could feel his on her and she moved away. ‘Maybe when you’re finished.’
‘Get on with it, Holland,’ he growled. ‘I’ll make some more coffee.’
Leo sat at the long glass table and looked up from the perplexing family tree she had been studying. Outside, hazy sunshine had returned. It fell on the window rails of the old factory building which dominated the far side of the car park. Standing at the window, she could just make out a shadowy figure. Light glinted on his face and for a moment, she had an odd notion that he was directing a pair of binoculars straight on her. She walked to the window and peered into the distance. The figure moved away. She shook off the uncomfortable sense of being watched and concentrated on the small voice which emerged from the tape recorder. It was a child’s wavering voice talking about the picture she was drawing. ‘This is my dog, Woofie. My Daddy took him away when he went. I miss Woofie.’ Silence, and then Isabel’s voice, very soft. ‘And what’s that?’
Leo had listened to two of the pile of tapes she had taken from Isabel’s office. Both had contained interviews with children and Leo was now almost certain that all the tapes would be research materials Isabel had collected for her book on childhood. Still she listened. There was a pleasure in hearing Isabel’s voice - as if they might really still be on the road together, heading west now under open skies.
But it came to her that this wasn’t the voice she was used to. This voice was calm, solicitous, serious. It contained none of Isabel’s laughing ironies or hard-edged assessments. Again she was forced to the realization that there were vast territories of even one’s nearest and dearest that one hardly knew. An image of Jeff with Isabel leapt into her mind. She prodded it away. Maybe familiarity was a mere illusion, a flimsy, necessary comfort to fence oneself in against cold, unknown expanses which threatened to blow apart the warmth of friendly continuity.
She reached for a piece of paper and started to draw. Isabel’s face leapt from her pen. A mournful Isabel with lowered lids and down-turned lips. Floating next to her, was Jeff, his eyes very dark, flashing, beneath a frizz of tangled curls. She edged some shadows beneath the eyes and the face turned malevolent.
That was one of the things that was wrong with her, Leo thought. She hadn’t been drawing, hadn’t been working. The quasi trance of pen moving across paper, the emptying out of mind, was one of the ways she put herself together. What all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t manage for Humpty Dumpty, drawing did for her. The lines induced containment. It didn’t work with colour. Colour spread across the page, eating away definition, splodging and sprawling, vibrating with its own greedy life. Sometimes there was an adventure to that. But today she needed definition. She worked.
When the phone rang, she jumped, as if she had travelled a long distance from such everyday sounds. For a moment she didn’t know which way to turn, then she switched off the tape recorder and rushed to pick up the phone extension next to the sofa.
Norfolk had got there before her. She heard his voice and another, stammering one. She listened despite herself.
‘I may have something for you,’ the unknown voice mumbled. ‘Better said in person, I think.’
‘Four o’clock, then. I’ll come to you.’ Norfolk replied.
‘Right.’
Leo hung up. Too late. Norfolk was marching out of Isabel’s office.
‘Don’t eavesdrop on my calls, Holland. We’re not married, remember?’
She bristled. ‘I wasn’t listening, I just…’
The phone rang again and she scrambled to it ahead of him.
‘Leonora Holland. Inspector Faraday here. We’ve come up with something.’
‘Yes?’ Leo felt the blood draining out of her in apprehension.
‘A Visa card trace. On the fifteenth of April Isabel Morgan spent two nights at the Sturridge Hotel in Dorset. Booked a double room. Does that ring any bells for you?’
‘No. I’m afraid it doesn’t.’ Her voice sounded faint in her own ears and she repeated the ‘no’ more distinctly.
She arrived in a car, hired in London on the morning of the fifteenth. The car still hasn’t been returned. We’ve got a trace on it. I’ll be in touch again soon. Everything all right at your end?’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
Leo put the phone down with a shaky hand.
‘What is it, Holland?’ Norfolk was bent over the table. He had been examining her sketches as she spoke and now twisted his head towards her. ‘You’re looking green around the gills again.’
She told him.
‘Dorset eh?’ He straightened up, his brow furrowing. ‘So I wasn’t very far away. Look, I’ll do some more checking round later today. Right now, I gotta get my butt out of here. If I manage to finish up at a reasonable time, I’ll take you out for dinner. How about it? Meet you back here eightish. Or I’ll leave a message. Got it?’
She nodded as he disappeared back into the office.
He was back a moment later. ‘Sorry I can’t leave this for you, Holland.’ He patted his laptop as if it were a household pet. ‘Never can be quite sure what you might decide to peruse, apart from your e-mail.’
Leo bristled but kept silent. She had indeed, when sitting at his machine earlier, contemplated reading through his more recent correspondence, but had decided the timing was risky.
‘By the way, Holland, these sketches are bloody good. Who’s the bloke?’ He pointed at Jeff. ‘Got it in for him, judging from these lashing strokes here.’ He gave her a curious look. ‘Don’t think I’d relish being in his shoes. You do this kind of thing for a living?’
She nodded, then shook her head. ‘Not quite this kind of thing.’
He waited for her to say more. When she didn’t, he shrugged. ‘Later then.’
He was out the door before she could ask him where he was going.
Leo glanced at her watch. There was only an hour left before she would have to set off for her appointment with Daniel Lukas. She wasn’t looking forward to it. But this time she would be better prepared. A strategy had come to her while she was working. On the couch she would replicate Isabel as best she could in order to see what kind of poison Daniel Lukas had poured into her ear.
She hurried into Isabel’s office, took down the file marked ‘Dreams’ and rifled through its contents. There was one particular sheet she remembered vividly from the last time she had sifted through the box. It had surfaced as much because of its look on the page as for the troubling nature of the dream it described. The paper was thick and a childlike script covered every square inch of it, as if paper were precious and an injunction to use all of it were in place.
Now, as she searched, the sheet was nowhere in sight. Irritation gnawed at her and with it came a sudden disquiet. The dream could easily have been misfiled when she was clearing up after the burglary. But it could just as easily have been stolen, along with other papers and letters that she hadn’t noticed. She remembered prodding open the door of the apartment that night and seeing a scattering of letters on the floor. Had these gone, too? She could no longer recall.
Perturbed, she paced and found herself standing by the ceiling to floor bookcase. Daniel Lukas’s name leapt out at her. She hadn’t noticed this volume before. She pulled it out. On Wishing, Dreaming and Deceiving. She looked down the table of contents and quickly turned to the section on dreams.
‘Bizarre as it may seem,’ she read, ‘individual’s lives have been changed by dreams. The naturalist Sir Arthur Tansley, recounts how he transformed his existence because of what, to an outsider, might seem a run-of-the mill dream. … He was not on the road to Damascus, but cycling from Grantchester to Cambridge and considering the dream, when it became clear to him that he had to give up his work and travel to Vienna to visit Freud.’
Leo skimmed and flicked pages. There wasn’t time to read this properly now. She would do so tonight. She paused however to look at a highlighted passage. Isabel must have singled this out. The gleaming yellow-backed lines jumped out at her:
‘Impostors often feel most authentic, most alive, when they are in role. These are not the ingratiating impostors who wish to appease others in order to ward off their imagined attacks. Here there is a sadistic wish in the deception. If you won’t love (or respect) me as me, I’ll make sure you love me as the not-me I’ve invented.’
The doorbell rang and stopped her reading. Cautiously Leo looked into the videophone. A face leered at her from the tiny screen. A face with a livid scar.
‘Yes,’ she said faintly.
‘I’ve brought you a present. Think you’d better come down and fetch it.’ Hamish Macgregor’s voice carried a hint of menace.
‘What is it?’ Leo asked, but the man was already gone, the screen a blank.
She stared into the emptiness, her skin prickling uncomfortably. What kind of present would a man like Hamish Macgregor leave? In a swoop of panic, she thought of severed limbs, of an ear lavishly wrapped in gilded paper, or a lock of golden hair. She forced herself into reasonableness. It was broad daylight in a civilized city in a civilized country. She took her keys from her bag and walked resolutely down the stairs to the front door.
On the top step stood a medium sized cane hamper, like the kind one might take out to the Heath for a picnic on a warm summer’s day. Leo looked round to see whether Hamish Macgregor was still visible, but the only sign of activity on the street was a motorbike revving round the corner.
She bent to the hamper. An acrid pong attacked her nostrils. She straightened up with a tremor. Had her initial fearful imaginings been the right ones? Swiftly, she raised one of the hamper’s lids. Before she could stand away, a furry form streaked between her legs and up the stairs. She lurched backwards, almost tripping over her feet, then picked up the hamper and raced up the stairs.
The cat was waiting for her by the door, a taut bundle of mustard and soot. Its head cocked, it examined her, as if it was weighing up the chances of mistreatment against its desire for entry. ‘Hello Beast,’ Leo murmured in wonder. She stroked his fur, ruffled his ears, then opened the door. He bounded through it, raced into the large room and from there, to the study. ‘No Isabel, I’m afraid,’ Leo heard herself calling after him. ‘Poor Beast.’
She took the hamper into the kitchen and cleaned out its insides, scrubbing the bowl she found there, tossing the wet pillow into the washing machine.
When she went out to look for him, she found him sitting on the window ledge in Isabel’s bedroom and looking wistfully out the window.
So the police had been right, Leo reflected. She unlocked the window and pushed it up until the bolts would let it go no further. With a miaow of pleasure, the animal leapt out onto the fire-escape. Leo watched its antics and wondered what on earth had led Isabel to leave her beloved Beast with a man like Hamish Macgregor, if that was indeed what had happened. The thought leapt into her mind that perhaps, for Isabel, the animal was a replacement for herself.
She banished the notion and told herself that if Beast was back home, Isabel might not be far behind, though the part of her that lived in dread sensed simultaneously that this was mere wishful thinking.
9
As the murmured ‘come in’ released the door and she slowly climbed the steep staircase, Leo had an acute sense of repetition, as if she had already spent months trudging up these stairs to the long narrow room at their peak where that lean man sat like some hungry spider waiting to trap her in his elaborate web. She reminded herself that she was doing this for Isabel and then corrected the thought. She was doing this because anything was better than doing nothing at all.
Despite her foreboding, the room looked pleasant today. Sunlight streaked in through the far window. The heaped books glowed. Motes of dust danced in the air. Two worn leather arm chairs, curved in comfortable Edwardian elegance, had appeared where she didn’t remember noticing them before. Their age made them seem steeped in accumulated memory, as if they were carrying on a conversation with each other across the other objects in the room, even though their sitters were nowhere present.
Daniel Lukas sat in the sofa between them exactly as he had on Monday. This time he didn’t get up to greet her. His lips arched into what was not quite a smile as he gestured her towards the couch opposite. He looked tired, she thought. There were sooty rings beneath his eyes.
As she realized that he wasn’t going to speak, she cleared her throat. ‘I thought I’d try to be good today. Follow the conventions, I mean.’ She met his eyes and he nodded.
She took off her shoes and stretched out on the sofa, facing the window today, to mark the difference. ‘Trouble is, lying here makes me feel I’m about to undergo surgery,’ she muttered.
‘Why surgery?’ he asked in a low voice. ‘Why not sex, or giving birth, or simply sleep?’
‘You know perfectly well why,’ Leo snapped. ‘You lot want to cut us open.’
His short, sharp laugh astonished her. ‘The cutting might hurt. But the openness can’t be all bad.’
She shivered the remark away with its implied admonishment to be open and tried to collect herself. On the wall next to the window hung a large-faced clock. For a moment she had the impression that its hands were moving backwards, like the clock she had at home. She should send it to him. A perfect clock for a shrink. Time moving backwards. She lopped off the ensuing thought of Jeff and rattled out, ‘I thought I’d begin by telling you about a dream I had. I think it’s connected to childhood. That’s the right place to begin, isn’t it?’
She raised her head to look round at him, but he had moved out of easy view, so she lay back and closed her eyes to remember.
‘In the dream, I’m very small. At least no-one seems to see me, even when I open my mouth to call out. A strangled sound comes out, not my voice. Yet I know it’s me. I’m very close to the ground. It’s rough and very hot and there is a lot of it. Maybe I’m a beetle. My skin is hard and has edges like a carapace. No. Not an insect. I have toes and the earth gets caught in them as I walk. In the distance which is wavy with heat, there’s a large white creature. A sheep maybe. It has a white coat and a black face. I want to get to it, but something keeps tugging me back and I have to walk in the other direction. It takes a long time. I walk and walk. The sky is very blue. So blue it hurts my eyes. I trip. The earth gets into my mouth, all dry and gritty. I cry. No one comes.
‘On the ground there’s something thick and hairy. I follow it. Follow it to a big pole. And then I’m frightened and I run away towards the sheep which is there again. My head hurts. It’s grown big with explosion. I can’t breathe properly. The sheep will help me. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t get to it. My bracelet hurts. I look at it, rub it. It’s not a bracelet. It’s that thick and hairy thing. It’s wrapped round my arm like a snake. It won’t let me move. I scream. I wake up. My arm hurts.’
Leo waited for the sound of his voice. It didn’t come. Surely he would say something now. She wriggled on the sofa, opened her eyes. Outside in the distance smoke was billowing from some invisible fire. It gusted into the sky, first thick, dark, sworls and then lighter and lighter into evanescent tufts. She watched them and waited.
Daniel took his time. He was in a quandary. He had recognised the dream, seen its resemblance immediately to a dream or memory Isabel had recounted to him as a dream. It had formed a key moment in her analysis. The child tied
by its wrist to a pole outdoors in the hot sun, brutally tied or simply tied in a moment of unthinking practicality, a makeshift playpen. They had teased out its meanings, translated them. He had urged her to revise them in the light of present and adult understanding, as well as future significance. Had Isabel recounted the dream to her friend Leonora Gould? Had the woman so interiorised it that it had become her own or was she using it as yet another ploy to have him talk about Isabel?
He suspected the latter but his instincts and her nervous posture told him this wasn’t the moment to take her to task. Instead, when it became clear that she was going to say nothing more, he asked, with classic neutrality, ‘What does the dream make you think of?’
‘Vulnerability, defencelessness. Poor child,’ Leo answered without a pause, as if she were sitting an exam.
‘Is that how you feel here? Vulnerable, without defences?’
Leo was hardly listening. Her hearing was only attune now to the sound which had started up outside. The hideous whirring of rotating blades cutting the sky, chopping. They were coming closer, louder. She put her hands to her ears. She could see it now, like some giant dragon fly challenging the elements. Perspiration gathered in her armpits, her forehead. She leapt off the sofa, turned her face away from the window.
That man was watching her. ‘The helicopter disturbs you?’
‘What does it look like?’
‘It does look like that.’
‘Bravo. Great insight. Next you’ll tell me it’s a phobia, a result of some deeply buried and forgotten trauma which I’ve displaced onto…onto…’ She was sputtering, waving her arms. ‘Well, it’s not like that. I know precisely why I hate the damn machines.’
‘Why don’t you tell me too?
‘My father was killed in one, killed by one.’
‘I see.’ His voice was soft as he met her eyes. His were warm now. They seemed to hold her up and then direct her towards the couch. She lay down.
‘Tell me about it if you can.’
‘I don’t know about it.’ Leo’s throat felt tight. ‘I only saw the photograph. A lot of men traipsing through a dark jungle somewhere. Malaysia.’
Sanctuary Page 16
