The safe house

improbable spectacles, still uselessly over his eyes. The face was very white. And a horrible unexpected blue as well.

Mrs Ferrer knew where the phone was but had forgotten and had to look for it. She found it on a small table, on the other side of the room away from all the blood. She knew the number from a television programme. Nine nine nine. A female voice answered.

‘Hello. There has been a terrible murder.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘There has been a murder.’

‘It’s all right. Calm down, don’t cry. Can you speak English?’

‘Yes, yes. I am sorry. Mr Mackenzie is dead. Killed.’

It was only when she had replaced the receiver that she thought of Mrs Mackenzie and walked upstairs. It took only a second for Mrs Ferrer to see what she had feared. Her employer was tied to her own bed. She seemed almost submerged in her blood, her nightie glossy with it against her gaunt body. Too thin, Mrs Ferrer had always thought privately. And the girl? She felt a weight in her chest as she walked up another flight of stairs. She pushed open the door of the one room in the house she wasn’t allowed to clean. She could hardly see anything of the person tied to the bedstead. What had they done to her? Brown shiny tape around the face. Arms outstretched, wrists tied to the corners of the metal grille, thin streaks of red across the front of the nightgown.

Mrs Ferrer looked around Finn Mackenzie’s bedroom. Bottles were scattered across the dresser and the floor. Photographs were torn and mutilated, faces gouged out. On one wall, a word she didn’t understand was written in a smeary dark pink: piggies. She turned suddenly. There had been a sound from the bed. A gurgle. She ran forward. She touched the forehead, above the neat obscuring tape. It was warm. She heard a car outside and heavy footsteps in the hall. She ran down the stairs and saw men in uniform. One of them looked up at her.

‘Alive,’ Mrs Ferrer gasped. ‘Alive.’

Two

I looked around me. This wasn’t countryside. It was a wasteland into which bits of countryside had been dropped and then abandoned, a tree or a bush here and there, a hedgerow stripped bare for winter, a sudden field, stranded in the mud and marsh. I wanted a geographical feature – a hill, a river – and I couldn’t find one. I tugged off a glove with my teeth to look at the map and let it fall on to the slimy grass. The large sheet flapped wildly in the wind until I concertinaed it into a wad and stared at the pale brown contours and dotted red footpaths and dashed red bridleways. I had followed the dotted red line for miles but had failed to reach the sea wall that would lead me back to the place where I had begun. I peered into the distance. It was miles away, a thin twist of grey against sky and water.

I looked at the map again, which seemed to disintegrate under my gaze, an unbroken code of crosses and lines, dots and dashes. I was going to be late for Elsie. I hate being late. I’m never late. I’m always early, the one who’s kept waiting – standing crossly under the clock, sitting in a cafe with a cooling cup of tea and a tie of impatience under my right eye. I am never, not ever, late for Elsie. This walk was meant to take exactly three and a half hours.

I twisted the map: I must have failed to see the fork in the path. If I cut across to the left, along that thin black line, I could cut off the headland of marsh and meet the sea wall just before it reached the hamlet where my car was parked. I shoved the map, now splitting at its folds, into my anorak pocket and picked up the glove. Its cold muddy fingers closed around my numbing ones. I started to walk. My calf muscles ached and my nose ran, snotty little dribbles down my stinging cheeks. The huge sky threatened rain.

Once, a dark-coloured bird, its long neck outstretched and its wings heavily batting the air, flew low past me, but otherwise I was quite alone in a landscape of grey-green marsh and grey-blue sea. Probably something rare and interesting, but I don’t know the names of birds. Nor of trees, except obvious ones like weeping willows, and the plane trees that stand on every London street, sending out roots to undermine the houses. Nor of flowers, except obvious ones like buttercups and daisies, and the ones you buy from a florist on a Friday evening and stick in a vase for when friends come round: still-life roses, irises, chrysanthemums, carnations. But not the feeble plants that were scratching at my boots as I walked towards a small copse that didn’t seem to be getting any nearer. Sometimes when I lived in London I would feel oppressed by all the billboards, shop signs, house numbers, street names, area codes, vans bearing legends ‘Fresh Fish’ or ‘Friendly Movers’, neon letters flashing on-off-on in the orange sky. Now I didn’t have the words for anything at all.

I came to a barbed-wire fence which separated the marsh from what looked like something farmed. I held the wire firmly down with the ball of my thumb and swung one leg over.

‘May I help you?’ The voice sounded friendly. I turned towards it, and a barbed prong embedded itself in the crotch of my jeans.

‘Thanks, but I’m fine.’ I managed to get my other leg over. He was a middle-aged bearded man, in a brown quilted jacket and green boots. He was smaller than me.

‘I’m the farmer.’

‘If I go straight across here, will I arrive at the road?’

‘I own this field.’

‘Well…’

‘This is not a public right of way. You are trespassing. On my land.’

‘Oh.’

‘You have to go that way.’ He pointed gravely. ‘Then you’ll come to a footpath.’

‘Can’t I just…?’

‘No.’

He smiled at me, not unpleasantly. His shirt was wrongly buttoned at the neck.

‘I thought of the countryside as something you were free to walk around in.’

‘Do you see my wood over there?’ he asked grimly. ‘Boys from Lymne’ – he pronounced it Lumney – ‘started riding their pushbikes down the track through the wood. Then it was motorbikes. It terrified the cows and made the track impassable. Last spring, some people wandered across my neighbour’s field with their dog and killed three of his lambs. And that’s not with all the gates being left open.’

‘I’m sorry about that but…’

‘And Rod Wilson, just over there, he used to send calves over to Ostend. They started with the picketing of the port at Goldswan Green. Couple of months ago, Rod’s barn was burned down. It’ll be somebody’s house next. Then there’s the Winterton and Thell Hunt.’

‘All right, all right. You know what I’ll do? I’ll climb back over this gate and head in a huge circle around your land.’

‘Do you come from London?’

‘I did. I’ve bought Elm House on the other side of Lymne. Lumney. You know, the one without any elms.’

‘They’ve finally managed to sell that, have they?’

‘I came to the country to get away from stress.’

‘Did you now. We always like visitors from London. I hope you’ll come again.’

Friends had thought I was joking when I said I was going to work at the hospital in Stamford and live in the countryside. I’ve only ever lived in London – I grew up there, or at least in its trailing suburbs, went to university there, did my pre-med there, worked there. What about take-aways?, one had said. And, what about late-night films, twenty-four-hours shops, babysitters, M&S meals, chess partners?

Danny, though, when I’d summoned up the courage to tell him, had looked at me with eyes full of rage and hurt.