The safe house

I would like to have taken a scalpel and made a thousand incisions into Danny’s body, slowly, one by one. I couldn’t believe he had done this to me. I wanted to track him down wherever he was and just ask him did he realize what he had done to Elsie, who depended on him so much? Did he realize what he had done to me? I wanted him back, I desperately wanted him back. I wanted to find him to explain that if he returned we could make things all right. We would work things out. I could move back to London, we could get married, anything, just so that we could go back to the way things had been.

And Finn. I would like to take her pretty little face and punch it over and over again. No. Stamp on it. Mash it. I had let her into my house, into the most intimate recesses of my life, revealed secrets I had never let anyone else see, trusted her with Elsie. I had been closer to her than I had been to my own sister, and she had huffed and puffed and blown my house down. Then I remembered the details of Dr Kale’s autopsy on her parents and the bandage across Finn’s neck when I had first seen her, fearful and silent on my sofa. She had been porcelain that I thought might topple and shatter. I had watched her turn soft and human again, and this was what she had done. Or was this just another symptom? Was this a cry for help from a sad, lonely girl? And wasn’t Danny absconding nothing more than the characteristic behaviour of a weak man? Isn’t it just what men do when flattered by the attention of a beautiful young girl? Tears were running down the sides of my face. Even my ears were wet.

After an hour of heaving sobs I descended into cool stillness. I could look at my responses with objectivity, or so I thought. I felt the pain in layers. The core of it was the betrayal of trust by Finn, the abandonment of me and Elsie by Danny. I felt scalded by this, as if nothing else could ever matter, but the sensation grew numb and I thought of other things. There was the sense of professional failure. I had said over and over again that Finn was not my patient, I had resisted the whole stupid arrangement. But even with all that taken into account, it was a total disaster. A traumatized victim of a murderous assault had been in my care and the episode had ended not in cure but in horrible farce. She had run off with my lover. I prided myself as a person who hunted alone and didn’t care what other people thought of me, but I couldn’t help caring now. The faces of professional rivals and foes came into my mind. I thought of Chris Madison up at Newcastle and Paul Mastronarde at the London, finding it funny and telling people that of course it was awful but to be honest it served me right, always so arrogant. I thought of Thelma, whose idea this had been. I thought of Baird, who had seemed dubious enough about me from the first and all the rugby-club gang at the police station. They must all be having a good laugh.

Then – oh, God – I thought of my parents and of Bobbie. I don’t know which seemed worse: the mingled shock, shame and disapproval which would be the first response of the family or the sympathy that would follow in its wake, the outstretched arms offered to Samantha, the prodigal daughter. There was just the hint of a moment where I felt that I would rather go back to sleep and never wake up again than face the ghastliness of what the daylight held for me. It was going to be so horrible and so boring and I didn’t have the strength.

Low blood sugar, of course. The subdued metabolic function characteristic of the early morning, dispersed by activity and nourishment. The curtains were grey now and Elsie was stirring on my arm. Her eyes opened and she sat up as if she were on a spring. My arm had gone to sleep. I rubbed it fiercely and life trickled back into it. Fuck the world. I would survive this and I wouldn’t bother what anybody thought. Nobody was going to catch me showing weakness. I took Elsie under her armpits, threw her upwards and released her. She fell on the blanket with a shrick of terrified pleasure.

‘Do it again, Mummy. Do it again.’

The following day I made an adventure of our girls’ breakfast. Bacon and eggs and toast and jam and a grapefruit, and Elsie ate her half and deliriously purloined segments of mine. I had coffee. At half-past eight I drove Elsie to school.

‘What’s that tree like?’

‘A man with green hair and a green beard. What’s that tree like?’

‘I said tree already.’

‘No, I said, I said.’

‘All right, Elsie. It looks… In this wind it looks like a green cloud.’

‘No, it doesn’t.’

‘Does.’

‘Doesn’t.’

‘Does.’

‘Doesn’t.’

The game finished in a crescendo of laughing contradiction.

On the drive back, the clouds had come into focus, the buildings were standing out more clearly against the sky. I had a sense of resolve. I would look after Elsie and I would work. All the rest was waste. I made myself more coffee and went into my study. On the computer I disposed of everything I had written so far. It was dross, the useless product of half-hearted activity. I looked through a file to remind myself of some figures and then I closed it and began to write. It was all in my head anyway. I could check the references later. I wrote for almost two hours without looking away from the screen. The sentences ran off my fingers, and I knew they were good. Like God creating the world. Just before eleven I heard the front door open. Sally. Time to refill my coffee mug anyway. As the kettle boiled, I gave her a brief, sanitized account of what had happened. My voice was level, my hands didn’t tremble, I didn’t blush. She didn’t care much and I didn’t care what she thought about it. Sam Laschen was in control once more. Sally began to clean and I returned to my study. At lunch-time I had a five-minute break. There was half a carton of pre-cooked lasagne in the fridge. I ate it cold. The era of proper food was past. After another hour I had finished a chapter. I clicked a couple of times with the mouse. Four and a half thousand words. At this rate the book would be finished in a couple of weeks. I reached into my filing cabinet and pulled out two folders of processed data. I worked my way through them very quickly, again to remind myself. It took only a few minutes before they were back in the cabinet. I opened a new file: Chapter Two. Definitions of Recovery.

A movement caught my eye. It was outside. A car. Baird and Angeloglou got out. For a moment a part of me assumed that this must be a sort of memory or a hallucination. This had happened yesterday. Was I replaying a horrible dream I had in my mind? It couldn’t be happening again. There was a knock at the door. It was just some routine matter, a form that needed signing or something.

When I opened the door, they were looking at each other shiftily.

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘We thought you might have heard something,’ said Baird.

‘Danny hasn’t rung, and if he bloody does…’

The two officers looked at each other again. What was up?

‘That’s not what we meant. Inside?’ said Baird in a dismal attempt at a casual tone. There were none of the usual smiles and winks. Baird looked like a man imitating professional police behaviour. Beads of sweat shone on his brow although it was cold and damp.

‘What’s this about?’

‘Please, Sam.’

I led them through and they sat side by side on my sofa like Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Baird was stroking the hairy back of his left hand with the fingers of his right. A man about to make a speech. Angeloglou was still, not catching my eye. His cheek-bones were accentuated by the tightness with which he held his face, his jaw.

‘Please sit down, Sam,’ Baird said. ‘I’ve got some bad news for you.’ He was still fingering his hand. The hairs were a startling red even more so than those on his head. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. ‘Yesterday evening we were called to a burnt-out car just outside Bayle Street, twenty miles or so along the coast. We quickly established that it was the Renault van registered to Daniel Rees.’

‘Christ,’ I said, ‘Did he crash…?’

‘There were two badly burned human bodies in the car. Dead bodies. The effects of the fire were extremely severe and there are some identification tests still to be carried out. But I should prepare yourself for the near- certainty that these are the bodies of Mr Rees and Miss Mackenzie.’

I tried to hold on to the moment, grasp the shock and confusion as if it were a precious state of mind. It could never get worse than this.

‘Did you hear what I said, Dr Laschen?’