The safe house

I had an ache in my stomach that seemed to be rising in my oesophagus and becoming a throbbing headache. I was unable to think clearly except for a feeling that I wanted to leave but probably had to stay. I felt strangely grateful a few minutes later at the sight of Baird, who entered the room, apparently filling it, with a distracted-looking, rumpled man who was introduced to me as Dr Kale, the Home Office pathologist. With a nod Baird walked past me and stood over the body for a moment in silence. Then he turned to me.

‘What were you doing here?’ he asked in a subdued tone.

‘I was concerned about her. I met her once and she seemed to be crying out for help. But I was too late, it seems,’ I said.

‘You mustn’t reproach yourself. This wasn’t just a cry for help. She really meant to die… Has the body been moved?’

‘No. Michael tried to revive her.’

‘Was death recent?’

‘I’ve no idea. It’s hard to tell in this heat.’

Baird shook his head.

‘Awful,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You don’t need to stay. Either of you.’

‘I suppose we’d better tell Finn.’

‘I’d like to, if that’s all right.’ It was Michael. ‘I’m her doctor, after all.’

‘Yes, you are.’

So we made our way to Elm House in a cumbersome fashion. Michael drove me back to his surgery, where I had left my car. Then the two of us drove in an absurd convoy out of Stamford, and all the way I thought of a woman coming on a murder scene, the blood and the suffering, and finding it all too much to bear and having nobody to help her and that I’d already known this and had been too late.

We came on Finn in the kitchen tracing letters with Elsie. Without a word I took Finn and Elsie by the hand and walked outside where Michael was waiting. I held Elsie tight in my arms and prattled to her about her day at school, at the same time watching as Michael and Finn walked down in the direction of the sea. I saw their silhouettes, and behind them the reeds were tipped golden with the low sun, although it was barely four o’clock. They talked and talked and sometimes leaned one on the other. Finally they walked back towards us and I put Elsie down and, still without talking, Finn fell into my arms and grasped me close to her so that I felt her breath on my neck. I felt Elsie pulling at me from the side, and we all laughed and walked inside out of the wind.

Fourteen

‘Am I your patient?’

I felt like a mother being asked where babies come from, having already considered the different answers I could give when the question was posed. I felt torn for a moment between the desire to reassure and the responsibility to be clear.

‘No. You’re Dr Daley’s patient, if you’re anybody’s. But you shouldn’t think of yourself as a patient.’

‘I’m not talking about me, I’m talking about you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know what I’m doing in your house. Am I in hiding? On the run? Am I a lodger? A friend? A sick person?’

We were sitting in a sort of pseudo-bistro establishment near the old harbour in Goldswan Green, half an hour up the coast and almost empty on this cold Monday in February. I was eating a bowl of pasta and Finn was pushing her fork into a side salad served as a main course. She stabbed a leaf of some kind of bitter lettuce that I found inedible and rotated it.

‘You’re a bit of all of them, I suppose,’ I said. ‘Except for the sick person.’

‘I feel sick. I feel sick all the time.’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re the expert, Sam,’ Finn said, pushing the salad around her plate. ‘What should I be feeling?’

‘Finn, in my professional capacity, I usually make a point of not telling people what they should do or feel. But in this case I’m going to make an exception.’

Finn’s expression hardened in alarm.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Speaking as an authority in the field of post-traumatic stress disorder, I would strongly advise you to stop playing with your salad and scraping the fork on the plate, because it’s getting on my nerves.’

Finn looked down with a start and then relaxed into a half-smile.

‘On the other hand,’ I continued, ‘you could move some of it from your plate into your mouth.’

Finn shrugged and pushed the whole large leaf into her mouth and crunched at it. There was a sardonic sense of triumph.

‘There we are,’ I said. ‘That wasn’t so difficult.’

‘I’m hungry,’ Finn said, as if she were examining the behaviour of an exotic creature.

‘Excellent.’

‘Perhaps I could order some of the pasta you’ve got.’

‘Take mine.’

I pushed the dish across and she dipped into it, almost excited by the novelty of what she was attempting. For several minutes neither of us spoke. It was enough for me to see her eat.

‘Maybe I’ve had too much, all at once,’ Finn said, when the two plates were clean.

‘It wasn’t all that much. What I forgot to eat, mostly. Do you want some coffee?’

‘Yes. White.’

‘Good, Finn. Some more protein and calcium. We can start building you up.’

She started to laugh, then stopped herself.

‘Why did she do it?’

‘Who? Mrs Ferrer?’ I shrugged, then took a chance. ‘She wanted to come out to see you, you know. She was going back to Spain, but she wanted to see you first.’ I remembered her frantic desire to visit the ‘little girl’ – then I remembered her lying dead on the bed in her cheerful jumper.

Finn’s face darkened. She seemed to be looking through me at something far away.

‘I wish, I think I wish, that she had. I’d liked to have seen her. It was the horror of what she’d seen, I suppose.’

‘It must have been something,’ I said absently.

‘You sound suspicious.’

‘I didn’t mean to.’

‘Do you think I was stupid? With the bonfire?’

On that shambolic Saturday afternoon, Danny had left shortly after Rupert and Bobbie – he’d picked up his holdall and shoulder-bag, ignored Michael and Finn, and given me a curt nod. When I’d tried to detain him (‘I know this isn’t ideal, but let’s talk about it later’) he’d said wearily that he’d been waiting for three days to talk to me, and I’d just been spiky and hostile, and didn’t I know by now that my ‘later’ never arrived and anyway he had things to do in London? To which I hissed, babyishly, that he was behaving just like a baby. Then, he’d left. This was becoming a habit. Neither Finn nor Michael said anything about it, and Elsie scarcely seemed to notice that he was no longer with us. As for me, Mrs Ferrer’s death, my concentration on Finn, had pushed him to the edge of my