The safe house

slop of milk.

‘Fine, thanks.’ I took a sip. ‘I wanted to talk to someone who knew Finn.’

Laura looked flattered. She laid a strong, well-manicured hand on my denimed knees.

‘What you’ve been through is terrible; I mean, even for people like us, right on the sidelines, it’s been shocking, and…’

‘Tell me about Finn.’

She took a sip of coffee and sat back, visibly at a loss. She had wanted me to do the talking.

‘I didn’t know her that well. She was a very kind, gentle girl, who may have suffered at school, as girls do, because she was overweight.’ Laura raised her eyebrows at me. ‘And she became seriously ill and she went away from us, from everybody who knew her. It was terrible for Leo and Liz. But she got better. Liz told me that Finn was happier than she had ever been. Completely transformed, they said. I think that they saw her trip to South America as a new beginning, a sign that she had grown up.’

This was no good. I didn’t want Laura’s amateur diagnoses . I wanted information, facts I could make something of for myself.

‘You don’t have any photographs of her, do you? All the ones in her house were destroyed.’

‘I don’t think so. It was her parents we saw, really. Hang on a minute.’ She left the room, reappeared with a fat square red book and started rapidly turning over colour photos in their transparent pages, tutting and shaking her head. Unknown faces nicked past, unremarkable houses, hills and beaches and formal groups of people. ‘Here is a garden party we went to with Liz and Leo. Fiona may have been there. I can’t see her.’

The Mackenzie parents, whose out-of-focus faces had been on the front of every newspaper a few months ago, were standing on a smooth lawn, smiling for the camera. She was skinny under a wide-brimmed straw hat; he looked hot and uncomfortable in his suit and tie. On the left of the photo, sliding out of the shot, was a bare arm, a slither of a floral dress and a wave of dark hair.

I put my finger on the arm, as if I could press its flesh. ‘That’ll be Finn.’

I sat on a bench by the side of a square. A mother was pushing her child on the single swing that stood on the patch of green.

‘Dr Kale, please,’ I said into my telephone.

His voice came quickly down the line.

‘Hello, Dr Laschen. Yes, I’ve got it here, in front of me. Let’s see. Here it is: Fiona Mackenzie’s blood type was O, along with about half of the population of Western Europe and the United States. Is that all you wanted?’

At the hospital, Maggie sounded harassed.

‘Sorry, Sam, you’ll have to give me a bit more time to get the file. These bloody computers, somebody must have logged in wrong and snarled the system up. Would her casualty admission file be any good?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ring me back.’

‘Donald Helman? Hello, I hope this isn’t a bad time to ring. My name’s Sam Laschen and we met at a party of Laura and Gor… Yes, that’s right. Laura gave me your number. You said your daughter used to be a friend of Finn’s and I was wondering if I could speak to her about it. Oh, when will she back? Well, in that case, there was a friend of Finn’s from school who I met, her first name is Jenny, I think. You don’t happen to remember her last name? Glaister. Thank you very much for your help.’

Jenny Glaister was home from university for the Easter holidays. Her parents’ large house was about twenty miles from Stamford, standing in its own grounds, and she came on to the gravelled sweep of driveway as I arrived. It was a grey and rather chilly day, but she wore a tiny, brightly coloured silk skirt and a thin shirt. I remembered her articulate self-confidence from the funeral. She was puzzled, but she was interested in me. Everyone was interested enough in the woman they’d read about in the newspapers to let me into their houses for a few minutes. She made us a pot of tea, then sat down facing me, oval face in ringless hands.

‘To be honest,’ she said, ‘Finn wasn’t really one of our group. I mean, she was and she wasn’t.’ She bit her lower lip and then added, ‘She was self-conscious at school. A bit awkward. One of the difficult things when she… you know, became ill and went away, was that some of us felt a bit guilty about her. We thought we might not have included her enough. I mean, maybe she got anorexic because she wanted to be one of us, you know. I saw her briefly when she came back from South America and I hardly recognized her, none of us did: she was so slim and tanned and she had all these fabulous new clothes and she seemed so much more self- confident, less anxious for our approval. We were all a bit in awe of her, as if she were suddenly a stranger. She was quite different from the plump Finn who’d just tagged along.’

I tried to push her for something specific. She made an obvious effort.

‘A few weeks ago I would have said that she was intelligent, nice. That kind of thing. And loyal,’ she added. ‘I would have said Finn was loyal: you could trust her and depend on her. She’d always do her homework, and arrive places on time, and be, well, reliable. Eager. You spent all that time with her at the end. Does she make sense to you?’

‘Do you have any photographs?’

We rummaged through a case of photographs that mainly consisted of Jenny looking lovely on horseback, in the sea, with her family, playing her cello, receiving her school prize, going gracefully downhill on skis. No Finn.

‘You could try the school,’ she suggested. ‘There must be a school photo of her and term’s not finished there yet. The school secretary, Ruth Plomer, will help. She’s a darling.’

Now why hadn’t I thought of that?

So I drove to Grey Hall, which wasn’t grey but red and magnificent and set back across lovely green lawns from the road. On playing fields I could see a hoard of girls in grey shorts and white Aertex shirts wielding lacrosse sticks while a tall woman barked at them. Inside, the smell of French polish and green vegetables and linseed oil and femaleness met me. Behind closed doors I could hear lessons in progress. This wasn’t how I remembered Elmore Hill comprehensive. A woman in overalls directed me down a corridor to the secretary’s office.

Ruth Plomer sat, beady-eyed and beaky-nosed as a bird, amid a nest of files and wire baskets and piles of forms. She listened attentively to my request, then nodded.

‘To be honest, Dr Laschen, the press has come round here asking for photographs, comments, interviews, and our policy has been to refuse everyone.’ She paused and I remained silent. She yielded slightly. ‘You just want to see a photograph? You don’t want to take it away? You don’t want to talk to anybody?’

‘That’s right. I need to see what she looked like before she lived with me.’

She looked puzzled, apparently arguing with herself and finally losing.

‘I don’t suppose there can be any harm. There are no individual portraits but there is always the group photograph. When was her final year?’

‘I think she formally left in the summer of 95, but she was ill for almost all of the academic year. Maybe I could look at the previous year.’

‘Wait here; I’ll see what I can do.’

She left the room and I heard footsteps retreating and returning. Miss Plomer had a scrolled tube in her hand and unrolled it on her overcrowded desk. I leaned forward, scanning the rows of girls’ faces for sight of Finn. She put on her spectacles.

‘This is the 1994 line-up. There is a list of the girls’ names here. Let’s see, yes, she’s in the third row back. There she is.’ A well-trimmed fingernail touched a figure on the left-hand side of the photo. Dark hair, a slight blur on her features: she must have turned aside as the lens shuttered, just as she’d done with me. I picked up the scroll and held it to the light, staring intently, but it seemed to recede from my gaze. I wouldn’t have known it was Finn. I wouldn’t have known it was anybody.

‘Maggie. Hi, it’s Sam again. Have you found it yet?’