The Night Ferry

10

“New Boy” Dave hears my voice on the intercom and pauses for a moment before pressing the buzzer to unlock the front door. When I reach his flat the door is propped open. He is in the kitchen stirring paint.

“So you’re definitely selling.”

“Yep.”

“Any offers?”

“Not yet.”

There are two cups in the drainer and two cold tea bags solidifying in the sink, alongside a paint roller and a couple of brushes. The ceilings are to be a stowe white. I helped him choose the color. The walls are a misty green, cut back by 50 percent and the skirting boards and frames are full strength.

I follow Dave into the living room. His few pieces of furniture have been pushed to the center and covered in old sheets.

“How is Samira?” he asks.

The question is unexpected. Dave has never met her, but he will have seen the TV bulletins and read the papers.

“I’m worried about her. I’m worried about the twins.”

He fills the roller from the tray.

“Will you help me?”

“It’s not our case.”

“I might have found them. Please help me.”

Climbing the ladder he runs the roller across the ceiling creating long ribbons of paint.

“What does it matter, Dave? You’ve resigned. You’re leaving. My career is finished. It doesn’t matter what toes we tread on or who we piss off. There’s something wrong with this case. People are tiptoeing around it, playing softly softly, while the real culprits are shredding files and covering their tracks.”

The roller is gliding across the ceiling. I know he’s listening.

“You’re acting like these kids belong to you.”

I have to catch myself before my head snaps up. He looks down at me from the top of the ladder. Why do people keep questioning my motives? Eduardo de Souza, Barnaby, now Dave. Is it me who can’t see the truth? No, they’re wrong. I don’t want the twins for myself.

“I’m doing this because a friend of mine—my best friend—entrusted to me what she loved most, the most precious thing she had. I couldn’t save Cate and I couldn’t save Zala, but I can save the twins.”

There is a long silence. Only one of us feels uncomfortable. “New Boy” has always been defined more by what he dislikes than by what he likes. He doesn’t like cats, for instance, or hypocrites. He also loathes reality TV shows, Welsh rugby fans and tattooed women who scream at their kids in supermarkets. I can live with a man like that. His silences are another matter. He seems comfortable with them but I want to know what he’s thinking. Is he angry that I didn’t leave Amsterdam with him? Is he upset at how we left things? We both have questions. I want to know who answered the intercom last night, fresh from his shower.

I turn toward his bedroom. The door is open. I notice a suitcase against the wall and a blouse hanging on the back of the open door. I don’t realize I’m staring and I don’t notice Dave climb down the ladder and take the roller to the kitchen. He wraps it carefully in cling film, leaving it on the sink. Peeling off his shirt, he tosses it in a corner.

“Give me five minutes. I need to shower.” He scratches his unshaven chin. “Better make it ten.”

Two addresses: one just across the river in Barnes and the other in Finsbury Park, North London. The first address belongs to a couple whose names also appear on a waiting list at the New Life Adoption Center. The Finsbury Park address doesn’t appear on the files.

Sunday week ago—just after ten o’clock—both addresses received a call from a public phone in the locker room of the Twin Bridges Country Club in Surrey. Shawcroft was there when those calls were made.

It’s a hunch. It’s too many things happening at the same time to be coincidental. It’s worth a look.

Dave is dressed in light cords, a shirt and a leather jacket. “What do you want to do?”

“Check them out.”

“What about Forbes?”

“He won’t make this sort of leap. He might get there in the end by ticking off the boxes, methodically, mechanically, but what if we don’t have time for that?”

I picture the smallest twin, struggling to breathe. My own throat closes. She should be in hospital. We should have found her by now.

“OK, so you have two addresses. I still don’t know what you expect to do,” says Dave.

“Maybe I’m just going to knock on the front door and say, ‘Do you have twins that don’t belong to you?’ I can tell you what I won’t do. I won’t sit back and wait for them to disappear.”

Brown leaves swirl from a park onto the pavement and back to the grass, as if unwilling to cross the road. The temperature hasn’t strayed above single figures and the wind is driving it lower.

We’re parked in a typical street in Barnes: flanked by tall, gabled houses and plane trees that have been so savagely pruned they look almost deformed.

This is a stockbroker suburb, full of affluent middle-class families who move here for the schools and the parks and the proximity to the city. Despite the cold, half a dozen mothers or nannies are in the playground, watching over preschoolers who are dressed in so many clothes they look like junior Michelin Men.

Dave watches the yummy mummies, while I watch the house, No. 85. Robert and Noelene Gallagher drive a Volvo Estate, pay their TV license fee on time and vote Liberal Democrat. I’m guessing, of course, but it strikes me as that sort of area, that sort of house.

Dave rakes his fingers through his lopsided bramble of hair. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Have you ever loved me?”

I didn’t see this coming.

“What makes you think I don’t love you now?”

“You’ve never said.”

“What do you mean?”

“You might have used the word, but not in a sentence with my name in it. You’ve never said, ‘I love you, Dave.’”

I think back, wanting to deny it, but he seems so sure. The nights we lay together with his arms around me, I felt so safe, so happy. Didn’t I ever tell him? I remember my philosophical debates and arguments about the nature of love and how debilitating it can be. Were they all internal? I was trying to talk myself out of loving him. I lost, but he had no way of knowing that.

I should tell him now. How? It’s going to sound contrived or forced. It’s too late. I can try to make excuses; I can blame my inability to have children but the truth is that I’m driving him away. There’s another woman living in his flat.

He’s doing it again—not saying anything. Waiting.

“You’re seeing someone,” I blurt out, making it sound like an accusation.

“What makes you say that?”

“I met her.”

He turns his whole body in the driver’s seat to face me, looking surprised rather than guilty.

“I came to see you yesterday. You weren’t home. She answered the intercom.”

“Jacquie?”

“I didn’t take down her name.” I sound so bloody jealous.

“My sister.”

“You don’t have a sister.”

“My sister-in-law. My brother’s wife, Jacquie.”

“They’re in San Diego.”