‘
After Elsie was asleep. I prowled around the house, pulling curtains aside, forcing myself under beds, reaching into corners. At the end of it I had on the kitchen table in front of me a battered menagerie of six tiny paper animals, three little birds, two sort of dogs, something baffling. I looked at them and they looked back at me.
Twenty-Seven
She had his dark eyes and the heavy eyebrows that almost joined in the middle of the forehead. The hair itself was lighter in colour and finer, and her skin was different in texture and heavily freckled already, though it was only just spring. Danny’s skin was pale, but always clear. He always went a lovely smooth caramel-brown. I could remember the smell of it, and the slight dampness, when he had been in the sun.
I had never met any of Danny’s family. He told me they lived in the West Country, his father owned a construction company, he had a brother and a sister, and that was all. I was typing away at the book – it was going really fast now, it would be finished in a matter of weeks – when the phone rang. I left the answering machine to deal with it.
‘Hello, Dr Laschen. This is… um… my name’s Isobel Hyde, we’ve never met, but I’m Danny’s sister and…’
I gave a shiver and felt repulsed. What on earth could she want with me? I picked up the phone.
‘Hello, this is Sam Laschen, I was hiding behind the answering machine.’
There were some awkward halting exchanges as she thought that I thought she just wanted to grab any of Danny’s possessions that had been left with me and I didn’t know what she wanted. I said there was nothing valuable but of course she could have it all and she said that wasn’t what she meant and she was down in London for a few days and wondered if she could pop out in the train to see me. I don’t know why, irrational instinct maybe, but I didn’t want her to come to the house. I had had enough of people seeing where I lived in any case, and I didn’t know what ghoulish motives might impel a woman to see the setting where her dead brother had been with a woman that he abandoned and all that. In fact I didn’t know what the hell was going on, so I said I would meet her off the train at Stamford on the following morning and we could go to a pub.
‘How will we recognize each other?’ she asked.
‘Maybe I’ll recognize you, but I’m tall and I’ve got very short red hair. Nobody who’s actually free to walk the streets looks remotely like me in this entire county.’
I almost cried when she got off the train, and I couldn’t speak. I just shook her hand and led her off to a cafe opposite the station. We sat and played with our coffeecups.
‘Where are you from?’
‘We’re living in Bristol at the moment.’
‘Which part?’
‘Do you know Bristol?’
‘Not really,’ I confessed.
‘Then there’s not much point in going into detail, is there?’
I could see that Danny’s easygoing charm was a family trait.
‘I didn’t bring any of Danny’s things,’ I said. ‘There were a couple of shirts, some knickers, a toothbrush, a razor, that sort of thing. He never seemed to have much. I could send them if you like.’
‘No.’
There was a silence which I had to break.
‘It’s interesting for me to meet you, Isobel. Eerie, too. You look so like him. But Danny never talked about his family. Maybe he didn’t think that I’m the sort of person you take home to Mum. He left in a horrible way. And I’m not sure what the point of all this is, although of course I am deeply sorry for all of you.’
Once more there was a silence, and I began to feel a little alarmed. What was I going to do with this woman, staring at me with Danny’s gaze?
‘I’m not really sure myself,’ she said finally. ‘It may seem stupid, but I wanted to meet you, to look at you. I’d wanted to for ages and I thought that now we might never meet at all.’
‘That’s understandable, in the circumstances. I mean, that we might never meet.’
‘The family is in a terrible state.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
I hadn’t allowed myself to think about Danny’s parents. Isobel had been looking down into her coffee but now she raised her large heavy-lidded dark eyes and looked at me. I felt a ripple of lust flow through me and I clenched my teeth so that it hurt.
‘Are you coming to the funeral?’
‘No.’
‘We thought not.’
A horrible thought occurred to me.
‘You weren’t, by any chance, coming to ask me not to come?’
‘No, of course not. You mustn’t think that.’
Isobel seemed to be trying to gather courage for some great leap.
‘Isobel,’ I said, ‘is there something you want to tell me, because if not…’
‘Yes, there is,’ she interrupted. ‘I’m not good at putting things but what I wanted to say is that you know that Danny had loads of affairs, loads and loads of women before you.’
‘Well, thank you, Isobel, for coming all the way here by train to tell me that.’
‘I don’t mean that. That’s the way he was, you know that, and women always fell for him. But what I wanted to say is that you were different. You were different for him.’
Suddenly I felt I was in danger of losing emotional control over myself.
‘That’s what I thought, Isobel. But that’s not how it turned out, is it? I ended up like the others, dumped and forgotten about.’
‘Yes, I know about that and I don’t know what to say except that I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t believe it. I don’t believe it.’
I pushed my coffee cup to one side. I wanted to draw the encounter to a close.
‘No, but you see it did happen, whatever your instinct tells you. It was a kind impulse to come and say that to me, and yet it does no good at all. What am I expected to do with what you say? To be honest, I’m just trying to put it all behind me and move on.’
Isobel looked dismayed.
‘Oh, well, I wanted to give you something, but maybe you won’t want it.’
She rummaged in her bag and produced a sheaf of photocopies. I could instantly see the bold handwriting was Danny’s.
‘What’s this?’
‘Danny used to write to me, about two letters a year. This is a copy of the last one he wrote to me. I knew that the break-up must have been terrible for you. And then the deaths. I suppose it must have been a public humiliation as well.’
‘Yes.’
‘I wasn’t being tactless, was I? I just thought this letter might be a sort of comfort.’
I expressed a hollow gratitude but I wasn’t really sure how to respond, although I did take the letter, gingerly, as if it might hurt me. She just got on the train and I gave a small wave at a woman I knew I would never see again. I was half-tempted to throw away the photocopied letter unread.
An hour later I was in the CID section of Stamford Central police station. A WPC brought me tea and sat me
