mashed sardines on top and the remains of a cheesecake that had been sitting shrink-wrapped in the fridge for days and two chocolate biscuits and a rather pulpy slice of melon.
I went back to the melancholy green on the computer screen and typed firmly: ‘Samantha Laschen was born in 1961 and grew up in London. She is a consultant psychiatrist who heads the new Referral Centre for Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder based in Stamford. She lives in the Essex countryside with her five-year-old daughter and her cat, and in her spare time plays chess.’ I crossed out the bit about the cat (too fey). And the bit about chess. I erased my age (too young to be authoritative, too old to be prodigious) and the bit about growing up in London and now living in Essex (boring). I erased Elsie – I wasn’t going to wear my daughter like an accessory. I looked at what was left; maybe we doctors were too hung up on status. There, I liked it: ‘Samantha Laschen is a consultant psychiatrist.’ Or what about just ‘Samantha Laschen is…’ Minimalism has always been my style. I lay back in my chair and shut my eyes.
‘Don’t move,’ said a voice, and two warm and callused hands were put over my closed eyes.
‘Mmmm,’ I said, and tilted back my head. ‘Blindfolded by a strange man.’
I felt lips at the pulse of my throat. My body slipped in the chair, and I felt its tensions uncurl.
‘Samantha Laschen is…’ Well, I can’t argue with that. But maybe there are better ways for you to spend your days than writing three words, eh?’
‘Like what?’ I asked, still blind, still limp where I sat with my face in the fold of his rough hands.
He swivelled the chair around and when I opened my eyes his face was a few inches from mine: eyes so brown under their straight dark eyebrows that they were nearly black, hair an unwashed tangle over a battered leather jacket, stubbly cleft chin, smell of oil, wood shavings, soap. We didn’t touch each other. He looked at my face and I looked at his hands.
‘I didn’t hear you arrive. I thought you were building a roof.’
‘Built. Installed. Paid for. How long have we got before you have to collect Elsie?’
I looked at my watch.
‘About twenty minutes.’
‘Then twenty minutes will have to be enough. Come here.’
‘Mummy.’
‘Yes.’
‘Lucy said your hair has died.’
‘She didn’t mean it’s dead, she probably meant that I dye it. Colour it.’
‘Her mummy’s hair is brown.’
‘Yes, well–’
‘And Mia’s mummy’s hair is brown too.’
‘Would you like my hair to be brown as well?’
‘It’s a very bright red, Mummy.’
‘Yes, you’re right, it is.’ Sometimes I still got a shock myself when I met my face in the speckled bathroom mirror on a groggy morning: white face, fine lines beginning to grow and spread around the eyes and a flaming crop of hair on a nobbly neck.
‘It looks like’ – she stared out of the window, her stolid body leaning out from her safety straps – ‘like that red light.’
Then there was quiet, and when I next glanced round she was fast asleep, thumb babyishly in her mouth, head tilted to one side.
I sat on one side of Elsie’s narrow bed and read her a book, occasionally pointing to a word which she would falteringly spell out or madly, inaccurately, guess at. Danny sat on the other and twisted small scraps of paper into the shape of an angular flower, a nimble man, a clever dog. Elsie sat between us, straight-backed, eyes bright and cheeks flushed, self-consciously sweet and serious. This was like a proper family. Her glance darted between us, tethering us. My body glowed with the memory of my brief encounter with Danny on my dusty study floor and in anticipation of the evening ahead. As I read, I could feel Danny’s gaze on me. The air felt thick between us. And when Elsie’s speech slipped, stopped, and her eyelids closed, we went into my bedroom without a word and took off each other’s clothes and touched each other, and the only sound was the drip of rain outside or sometimes a breath that was louder than normal, like a gasp of pain. It felt as if we hadn’t seen each other for weeks.
Later, I took a pizza out of the freezer and put it in the oven, and while we ate it in front of the fire which Danny had lit, I told him about progress with the trauma unit, and Elsie’s first days at school, about trying to start the book and my encounter with the farmer. Danny talked about what friends he’d seen in London and perching on damp crumbling rafters in the bitter cold, and then he laughed and said that as I rose up through my profession, so he fell: from acting, to resting, to carpentry, now to doing odd jobs, building a roof for a cantankerous old woman.
‘Don’t,’ he said, when I started hastily to say something about success being about more than work, ‘don’t bluster. You don’t need to worry so. You like what you do and I like what I do.’
When the fire died away, we went up the creaking stairs once more, looked in at Elsie sleeping in a nest of duvet and soft toys, made our way to the double bed and lay facing each other, sleepy and uncomplicated.
‘Maybe we could,’ he said.
‘Could what?’
‘Live together. Even’ – his hand rubbed my back, his voice became very light and casual – ‘even think of having a child.’
‘Maybe,’ I muttered sleepily. ‘Maybe.’
It was one of our better days.
Five
‘Everything all right, sir?’
‘No.’
‘Let me cheer you up. Fancy something to read?’
Detective Angeloglou tossed a pamphlet on to Rupert Baird’s desk. Baird picked it up and grunted at the faded print.
‘
‘You’re not a subscriber? We’ve got the full run of issues downstairs. It’s the house magazine of ARK.’
‘ARK?’
‘It stands for the Animal Rights Knights.’
Baird groaned. He gently patted the hair on top of his head which covered but did not conceal the bald scalp underneath.
‘Really?’
‘Oh, yes. They’re the ones who broke into the mink farm over at Ness in ’92. They set the mink free.’ Angeloglou consulted the file he was carrying. ‘They fire-bombed the supermarket in Goldswan Green in ’93. Then nothing much till the university explosion last year. They’ve also been involved in some of the more extreme veal protests, the direct actions against farmers and transport companies.’
‘So?’
‘Look at this.’
Angeloglou opened the magazine to its central pages, a section under the headline in red ink: ‘Butchers shopped.’
‘Is this relevant?’
‘This is one of the services they provide to readers. They print the names and addresses of people they
